The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (174 page)

See also
Paul Jeffreys (
December 1988). Nelson’s brother, Ian - who played saxophone with BeBop Deluxe, Red Noise and Fiat Lux - died in 2006.

Monday 24

Charlie Rich

(Colt, Arkansas, 14 December 1932)

An undisputed giant of popular country music, the distinctively side-burned Charlie Rich’s lesser-known prior career had included farm labouring and a stint with the US air force, before a slew of rockabilly-flavoured early recordings with the Judd label made him a radio staple by the early sixties. Nevertheless, it took ‘The Silver Fox’ (as Rich became affectionately known) a dozen more years to top the US hit parade. Rich is probably best remembered for the US platinum-selling ‘The Most Beautiful Girl’ (1973), a Billboard chart-topper that also rose to number two in the UK the following year, alongside a host of other sentimental standards such as the title cut from the
Behind Closed Doors
album (1973) and ‘A Very Special Love Song’ (1974). In 1973, Rich walked away with The CMA’s Male Vocalist and Album of the Year honours.

Coming from humble beginnings, Charlie Rich found fame difficult to accommodate, seeking relief from its pressures in alcohol. With fewer chart successes during the eighties and nineties, Rich withdrew from the spotlight, though his few live performances remained sellouts. The singer was en route to Florida on such a tour when a blood clot on his lung claimed his life; he died at a hospital in Hammond, Louisiana.

Respected country songwriter Margaret Ann Greene - Rich’s wife of over four decades -passed away in July 2010.

AUGUST

Wednesday 9

Jerry Garcia

(Jerome John Garcia - San Francisco, California, 1 August 1942)

The Grateful Dead

(Various acts)

Five-year-old Jerome John Garcia could only stand and watch as his father, jazz musician José Garcia, was swept to his death on a fishing trip. This and a number of other sobering early events proved a catalyst to the future Grateful Dead legend as he sought the spiritual. What he found was more a way of life than the mere vocation chosen by others.

Brought up by his grandmother, ‘godfather of freaked-out Americana’ Jerry Garcia was exposed early on to the music of the Grand Ole Opry, an acquired taste for country and folk enhanced by his older brother’s collection of Chuck Berry and T-Bone Walker recordings. His brother Clifford owed him that much: during an eventful childhood, he’d accidentally severed one of Garcia’s fingers while chopping wood in 1948. Despite what to some might seem an insurmountable setback, Garcia still learned guitar and banjo, forming jug bands until an unspecified misdemeanour in 1959 caused him to join the army rather than go to prison. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Garcia’s inconsistent disciplinary record brought him the discharge that he probably in any case desired. The following year, the musician claimed that a spiritual awakening, after he was thrown from a rolling car, ‘began his life in earnest’.

Returning to San Francisco, Garcia – who was otherwise spending time playing bluegrass and teaching acoustic guitar – teamed up with poet Bob Hunter (Robert Christie Burns). The pair played together in a series of coffeehouse groups, their collision significant in that, later on, Hunter contributed most of the lyrics to Garcia’s Grateful Dead guitar musings. The early sixties saw the murky beginnings of the folk counterculture, a scene that also attracted rhythm guitarist Bob Weir and his friend keyboardist/vocalist Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan; the latter became Garcia’s right-hand man through the first years of The Dead. Folk, blues and jug developed into a fertile scene that eventually gave the world proto-psychedelic rock acts like Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother & The Holding Company, Country Joe & The Fish and Quicksilver Messenger Service – but the daddies were undeniably The Dead. Garcia finally saw their first single ‘Stealin’’ appear on Scorpio in 1966, his band now fleshed out by Phil Lesh (bass), David Grisman (mandolin) and Bill Kreutzmann (percussion, augmented by Mickey Hart in 1967). For three years, Garcia and his Deadheads were hugely creative for a supposedly stoned-out bunch of hippies:
The Grateful Dead
(1967),
Anthem of the Sun
(1968) and
Aoxomoxoa
(1969) cemented a reputation for organic music that grew out of the plethora of Merry Pranksters ‘Acid Test’ parties at which the band and its improvising were generally centre stage. But, though it had been a necessary replacement for the already-taken Warlocks, the choice of name was also strangely prescient – the shadow of mortality followed Garcia throughout his career. The trauma of losing his father had made him withdrawn as a boy; the death of Garcia’s mother in a car crash would be emotionally reflected in arguably The Grateful Dead’s finest work, the album
American Beauty
(1970), a collection that contains some genuinely touching songs (such as ‘Box of Rain’) which shortly elevated The Dead to rock’s top table.

‘The lame part of the sixties was the political part, the social part. The
real
part was the spiritual part.’

Jerry Garcia

The deaths of close friends Janis Joplin (
October 1970)
and McKernan (
March 1973)
– the latter just a year after McKernan had left The Dead – would also hit Garcia hard, though the head Deadhead continued to lose himself in what had now become an ideology rather than a means of paying the bills (which he was scarcely doing anyway). But he was nothing if not prolific in his art: in addition to turning out a couple of albums a year, Garcia recorded and issued The Grateful Dead’s live shows obsessively, and also found time for a host of elaborate side projects – one of which spiralled into New Riders of the Purple Sage, for whom Garcia and Hart guested on their debut album. But with the juggernaut-like Dead becoming the biggest touring unit in the USA, a bewildering array of musicians came, rocked and tuned out. Somehow, Garcia ploughed on through setback after setback, despite his own narcotics dependency. Falling into a diabetic coma in 1986 was his own closest call at this stage, though even after this, the revitalized Grateful Dead enjoyed their biggest commercial success with the US Top Ten
In the Dark
(1987). The album’s accompanying single, ‘Touch Of Grey’, also became a major hit – finding an unlikely new market in the MTV generation. But perhaps this was to be expected: through adversity and a constantly changing musical environment, Garcia always seemed to rise from The Dead to take whoever was in his latest pack of stooges up to the next level.

But even Captain Trips – as he was often labelled – couldn’t go on indefinitely. Despite having embraced to some degree the US vogue for healthier living and diet, Jerry Garcia’s earlier lifestyle finally called time on him at the Serenity Knolls Chemical Dependency Center in California on 9 August 1995. Found unconscious on the floor of his room by a nurse, who attempted CPR, Garcia was pronounced dead by paramedics at 4.23 am, having suffered a heart attack in his sleep. Remaining members of The Dead saw fit – finally – to end the group after thirty years as a going concern in December 1995.

A legend within more conventional US popular culture for some time, the former figurehead of the underground has been commemorated in a number of ways (including the posting of his image on bottles of wine), though of the many tributes paid to the singer, the Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream flavour Cherry Garcia seems to be the most enduring, raking in over $400K a year profit for its makers and Garcia’s estate. For a month after Jerry Garcia’s death, the dessert was prepared with black cherries (instead of the usual Bings) as a token of respect for the legend that inspired it.

See also
Keith Godchaux (
July 1980); BrentMydland (
July 1990); John Kahn (
May 1996); Vince Welnick (
June 2006); Owsley Stanley (
Golden Oldies #130)