Jerry Garcia of the Jerry Garcia Band performs at the Eel River in Garberville, California on August 10th, 1991.f there’s such a thing as a recession-proof band, the Grateful Dead must be it. While the rest of the music industry has suffered through one of its worst years ever — record sales have plummeted, and the bottom has virtually fallen out of the concert business — the Dead have trouped along, oblivious as ever to any trends, either economic or musical.
Garcia admits that these solo jaunts are often more entertaining than his work with the Dead, and one gets the feeling that if he felt he could easily extricate himself from the Dead and his attendant responsibilities, he might just do it. Still, when pressed, Garcia claimed the Dead take precedence. “It’s still fun to do,” he said. “I mean, even at its very worst, there’s still something special about it.
Yeah. Absolutely. You see, the way we work, we don’t actually have managers and stuff like that. We really manage ourselves. The band is the board of directors, and we have regular meetings with our lawyers and our accountants. And we’ve got it down to where it only takes about three or four hours, about every three weeks.
Well, Robert Hunter [Garcia’s lyricist] and I were living together then, so that made it real easy. Sheer proximity. See, the way Hunter and I work now is that we get together for like a week or two, and it’s like the classic songwriting thing. I bang away on a piano or a guitar, and I scat phrasing to him or lyrics, and he writes down ideas. And we try stuff.Oh, jeez, I’d love to. But it has to do with writing the stuff, and like I said, I’m about ready now to write a whole bunch of new stuff.
They had a memorial service for him, where his friends took his ashes out on surfboards — he was a surfer, you know — and they dunked his ashes in the ocean. And they had leis and flowers and all this beautiful stuff. His folks were there, and it was very lovely, and they were very satisfied. I mean, for me at this point, I’m just happy if someone dies with a minimum of pain and horror, if they don’t have to experience too much fear or anything.
My life would be miserable if I didn’t have those little chunks of Dylan Thomas and T.S. Eliot. I can’t even imagine life without that stuff. Those are the payoffs: the finest moments in music, the finest moments in movies. Great moments are part of what support you as an artist and a human. They’re part of what make you a human. What’s been great about the human race gives you a sense of how great you might get, how far you can reach.
CordeiroRick Jerry the Junkie! Biggest Loser in Music History! 👎👎
Miss you Jerry. broke my brother's heart when you died.
I know a lot of people shit on the dead, but I love them! I can watch the 4 hour concerts, and songs like 'friend of the devil' and 'Casey Jones' are some of my absolute favorites.
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