A nurse and members of the Marin County Sheriff’s Department unsuccessfully attempted to revive him. The grandfatherly-looking musician with the gray beard and roly-poly frame was found dead yesterday at Serenity Knolls, a residential treatment center for drug addiction in San Rafael.
Garcia, who in the mid-1960s earned the nickname “Captain Trips,” had a history of drug abuse - including cocaine and heroin - and also suffered from diabetes.
“He played very naturally and very beautifully.”Ī salute to the Grateful Dead guitarist will be held tomorrow at dusk in Balboa Park. “He was one of the original American icons,” said pioneering jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman, who sat in with the band periodically and whose 1988 album, “Virgin Beauty,” featured Garcia. “It’s the end of an era,” said Sandy Troy, the San Diego author of last year’s “Captain Trips - A Biography of Jerry Garcia.” “Just as you can’t have The Beatles without John Lennon, you can’t have the Dead without Jerry.” It also robs scores of fans of a beloved leader who represented cultural freedom and a way of life that was a throwback to the peace-and-love era out of which the Dead rose to prominence. His death leaves the band’s future in doubt. With Garcia’s fluid guitar improvisations at the fore, the Dead drew from blues, rock, country, soul, jazz and more to create a uniquely American sound that at its best surpassed the sum of its parts. One of the biggest and most consistent concert attractions in rock, the Grateful Dead survived and thrived long after Big Brother & the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane and other fabled Bay Area bands of the ‘60s crashed or burned out. The band, which came out of the psychedelic era of the 1960s, transcended stylistic, sociological and generational barriers.
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