LAMONT’S MUSIC NOTES-AUGUST 1, 2019…HEY DEADHEADS, TODAY JERRY GARCIA WOULD HAVE BEEN 77 YEARS OLD.
THE SINGER, SONGWRITER AND GUITARIST WAS BEST KNOWN AS THE LEAD GUITARIST AND AS A VOCALIST WITH THE GRATEFUL DEAD.
HERE ARE SOME THINGS YOU MIGHT OR MIGHT NOT KNOW ABOUT JERRY GARCIA:
-HIS FULL NAME IS JEROME JOHN GARCIA
-HE WAS NAMED AFTER BROADWAY COMPOSER JEROME KERN (WHO WROTE ‘THE WAY YOU LOOK TONIGHT’ AND ‘OLD MAN RIVER’)
-GARCIA WAS VIEWED BY MANY AS THE LEADER OF THE GRATEFUL DEAD ALTHOUGH HE DISAVOWED THE ROLE
– “ROLLING STONE” MAGAZINE RANKED HIM AS 13TH ON THEIR STORY OF THE “100 GREATEST GUITARISTS OF ALL TIME.”
-GARCIA DIED ON AUGUST 9,1995 FROM A “DRUG-RELATED HEART ATTACK.”
-JERRY’S FIRST LOVE WAS COUNTRY MUSIC
-HIS FIRST RECORD WAS THE HANK WILLIAMS 45 CALLED ‘THE LOVE BUG ITCH’
-HIS FIRST PAYING GIG PAID HIM 5 DOLLARS
-HE WAS GOING TO FRAME THE FIRST CHECK, BUT CASHED IT A FEW DAYS LATER TO BUY CIGARETTES.
-AFTER SEEING THE BEATLES MOVIE “A HARD DAY’S NIGHT” GARCIA, BOB WEIR, AND ROB MCKERNAN FORMED A BAND CALLED THE WARLOCKS.
– THEY CHANGED THE NAME OF THE BAND FROM THE WARLOCKS TO THE “GRATEFUL DEAD”
-GARCIA ONCE SHARED A STORY ON HOW THEY CAME UP WITH THE NAME
THE “GRATEFUL DEAD”:
“We’d abandoned the Warlocks; it didn’t work anymore. One day we were all over at Phil [Lesh]’s house smoking DMT. He had a big Oxford dictionary, I opened it, and there was ‘grateful dead,’ those words juxtaposed. It was one of those moments, you know, like everything else on the page went blank, diffuse, just sorta oozed away, and there was GRATEFUL DEAD, big black letters edged all around in gold, man, blasting out at me, such a stunning combination. So I said, ‘How about Grateful Dead?’ and that was it.”
–“TOUCH OF GREY” WAS THE BAND’S ONLY TOP 10 HIT.
-THERE’S A SPECIES OF COCKROACH NAMED AFTER HIM. A DEAD LOVING TAXONOMIST DISCOVERED A SPECIES OF COCKROACH AND NAMED IT “CRYPTOCERCUS GARCIAI”
-TWO ASTRONOMERS NAMED AN ASTEROID AFTER HIM IN 1995
HERE’S A FULL DEAD CONCERT FROM 1983. ENJOY
photo thanks-Joan Sorolla
