Synopsis
Tracing the life of a cultural icon and popular music legend, the biography of Jerry Garcia, founder of the Grateful Dead, is the story of his innovative music, battle with drug addiction, and triumphant return from a near-death experience. 35,000 first printing. IP.
Reviews
What brand was Jerry Garcia's first guitar? What went wrong with the Grateful Dead's set at Woodstock? These esoterica sustain Troy's (One More Saturday Night) biography of Garcia, the Grateful Dead's famed guitarist and leader. As a celebration of the Garcia legend, Troy's book is a total success-seemingly every detail of the musician's career is catalogued. Other elements of the 52-year-old Garcia's life-such as his three marriages and four children-are given shorter shrift, reflecting perhaps the reality of life in a band renowned for its ceaseless touring. Troy has a pedestrian narrative style and the pace is often slow. Not even Garcia's diabetic coma in 1986 earns dramatic urgency. In tracing the guitarist's life, Troy does little to explore beyond his myth, but his interviews and anecdotes supply fodder to expand on it. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Just in time for the enduring, canonical Grateful Dead's 30th anniversary next year, Troy has written the first complete biography of bandleader Garcia, the only rock guitarist to have an ice cream flavor named after him. The author examines Garcia's life and career up to and including his surprisingly staid wedding this past February. Included are Garcia's adventures with Ken Kesey during the mid-Sixties, his recurring health problems and revolving drug difficulties, and his creative pursuits, both within and without the Grateful Dead. Because Troy (author of the Dead biography One More Saturday Night, LJ 5/15/91) traces not only Garcia's own musical career but the development and evolution of the Dead through the past 30 years, his book can also be considered a worthy collective biography of the band. Given the Dead's continuing popularity, their importance in 20th-century popular music, and the growing recognition of Garcia as an individual artist, this should be seriously considered for academic as well as public library music collections. [See also the review of David Shenk and Steve Silberman's Skeleton Key on page 70-Ed.]-Bill Piekarski, Southwestern Coll. Lib., Chula Vista, Cal.
--Bill Piekarski, Southwestern Coll. Lib., Chula Vista, Cal.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
It has indeed been a long, strange trip, but the Grateful Dead has lately taken on the trappings of an institution. Jerry Garcia has often been referred to as the band's leader, and Troy has put together an exhaustive biography of Garcia the man, the musician, the cultural hero, the bon vivant. It's no breathless rock bio of the who-slept-with-whom-and-took-what-drug-next school, either, but rather a comprehensive life of a man whose musical taste and commitment have helped shape popular music history. Garcia's story is at once unique and common to a generation that went to college in the 1960s, discovered LSD and alternative lifestyles, and lived to see the wreckage of what some foolishly thought would be a new, radically different society. Troy's well-documented profile adds much to our background knowledge of an influential cultural figure--for instance, that Jerome John Garcia was named after Jerome Kern; heck, Troy even mentions Garcia's Boy Scout record--and fills a gaping void in the pop culture literature. Mike Tribby
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