Jerry Garcia

A Long Strange Trip That Ended Too Soon

Yet, he was my bud and I was his guitar player so he accompanied me this evening to the Filmore. It was a raunchy setting outside. Street hustlers who would stab you over a nickel bag, garbage everywhere. Hippies begging for spare change, panhandling they called it then. There’s Freddie Belmont in his coiffed hair, straight off a styling and hit of European Natural Black at Nardi’s on Fordham Road sporting Beatle boots and manicured nails, polished clear, clean and bright. We took our seats in the mezzanine, a few feet from the sound man. Sha Na Na was playing and this piqued his interest. We had managed to organize our own “Grease Day” at school — Bronx Community College — and it gave a bunch of us the chance to comb our long hair back, put a dollop of Brylcreem in it and act tough. The Dean of Administration heard of our plan and decided that we’d be in big trouble if we went through with it. Remember, this is 1970 and John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John had not yet emerged on the scene. Grease was real, not some Fonzie comedic Happy Days bullshit affair. But our pleas eventually prevailed and we had our Grease Day, but not on campus. The big event was a football match between us greased-up hippies and the short-haired juicers. I was the quarterback and on the last play with the game on the line, I chucked Fast Eddie Kouzoujian a perfect spiral that cut through the dank drizzle of the Jerome Avenue park and led him perfectly. This was no “Hail Mary” pass. It was a diagrammed play. Eddie dove parallel to the ground, to exactly where the ball was thrown and slid about ten yards in the mud, holding on to the ball for the winning touch down.

Sha Na Na did their usual set. Bowzer concluded the show with his now famous line, “There’s one thing I want to tell you fuckin’ hippies: Rock and Roll is here to stay.” After he spat at the audience (for real) they broke into the great Danny and the Juniors song of the same name, ending their segment.

• 

While the crew was setting up for the headliner, Frank Zappa and the Mothers, a video played on the big screen. It was a clip of Dion singing Runaround Sue from an American Bandstand. Serendipitous, to say the least. Zappa came on and was leading his brilliant ensemble in a tour de force, featuring Flo and Eddie and a song about a mudshark. Highly entertaining. Smack dab in the middle of the set, a lithesome figure with long black hair, looking kind of like Elvira, slithered onto the stage. It was Grace Slick and Zappa stopped his show to let her speak. “Boys and girls,” she said, “I have some news. On Monday night we’re going to have a special concert. The New Riders of the Purple Sage, Hot Tuna, The Grateful Dead and The Jefferson Airplane. Tickets will be on sale tomorrow morning at 9:00. Thank you.” She walked off just like that and Zappa and the Mothers finished their set. The next morning I arose early and made the trip back down to the lower East Side. By 10:00 a.m. I had four third row tickets in my hand — total cost: $22. When we took our place Monday night while the crew set up the stage, they were the best seats in the house. I was on a direct line looking right at Garcia who was stationed behind the pedal steel guitar. He was looking directly at me as he played, he really had no choice. I was directly in his line of sight. Young, vibrant, he had the world at his disposal, yet he seemed genuinely meek and humble, happy to be there, yet empowered. He was generating sounds from the instrument that were seriously not meant to be. On Dirty Business he was otherworldly. That night I felt I gleaned something from Garcia, as I spent the entire New Riders show gazing directly at his countence. Later I learned what.

“Each note,” he said, “is a spirit.” When Garcia was at the top of his game, which was more often than not, those spirits cascaded from his soul to his fingers to his guitar as “light giving light to light, fire setting fire to fire,” as Stephen Spender described Shelley’s poetry in Brief Lives. Even the silences carried weight. The music took us all—players and listeners—to another realm, a realm of purity, bliss. “To forget yourself,” Garcia said, “is to see everything else. And to see everything else is to become an understanding molecule in evolution, a conscious tool of the universe. And I think every human being should be a conscious tool of the universe.”

ARTIST

Some twenty years after that evening at the Filmore East, Jerry Garcia was sitting in a small balcony loft at the Ambassador Gallery in Soho. His band was playing arenas, the biggest concert draw of the 1980s and into the ’90s. The train kept rolling and Garcia was at the helm. On this off night from another sold-out Madison Square Garden run, the line stretched down Spring Street and around the corner, on to Wooster. At an event like this—an art opening—his fans could get close to him, shake his hand, get an autograph on a lithograph or a painting. They were selling like hotcakes, as were his neckties and sunglasses. It was great to have a piece of Jerry in this way. We were the printers for that gallery, producing the invitations, catalogs, interviewing the artists who exhibited there—many of whom were celebrities—Tony Curtis, Miles Davis, Billy Dee Williams, John Entwistle, Tico Torres, Bob Guccione. We were at all the shows and can tell you that Jerry drew the biggest crowd, sold the most art out of all of them. It’s not hard to see why his publisher back then decided to restrike those lithos, essentially killing the value of the original prints.

Enter Robert C. Matthews. Or, shall we say “re-enter.” Robert was a boyhood friend of Jerry’s who grew to become his “sidekick.” That’s a term you don’t hear much today, but you know what it means. Robert knew Jerry way back when.

“My involvement with Jerry Garcia on a creative level goes back to 1961 when I was not quite 13 years-old. It really all started when I was in the middle of the seventh grade. I wanted to get into a more academically oriented school than the public school I was attending, so I applied to this progressive academy in Menlo Park (San Francisco) called Peninsula School. Seventh grade was full, but in the middle of the year one student left which allowed me to enter. One spring Sunday afternoon, the school held a benefit with wandering minstrels and there was a three-piece bluegrass band with a banjo, and it just knocked my socks off. I’d never really heard a banjo before. And of course, it was Jerry. My peers were all playing folk guitar like John Baez and Bob Dylan but when The Beverly Hillbillies television show came out with that Flatt and Scruggs theme song and backgrounds, I fell in love with that iconic music. Jerry was one of the few banjo teachers around Palo Alto and I began taking lessons from him at the music store where he worked.”

A few years earlier, Garcia had been a student at the The California School of Fine Arts, now known as the San Francisco Art Institute. “Jerry wanted to be a painter before he wanted to be a musician,” said Matthews. “Warm, interesting and energetic as an artist and man, he was different from other rock stars. He was a fabulous musician but his first love was graphic art.”

• 

SFAI, founded in 1871, is one of the oldest art schools in the United States. Ansel Adams and Mark Rothko were but two of the notable faculty members and alumni range from Annie Liebovitz to Courtney Love (who, incidentally, as a five year-old appeared in a photo on the back cover of a Grateful Dead album), among countless others. A teacher there, Wally Hedrick, was an artist who came to prominence during the 1960s. During the classes, he often encouraged the young Garcia in his drawing and painting skills.

He also was influenced by Elmer Bischoff (1916-1991), one of the masters of the Bay Area Figurative Art Period (1950-1964) and a leader among the post – WW II generation of artists in the San Francisco Bay Area, along with Richard Diebenkorn and David Park, who, after contributing to the local emergence of Abstract Expressionism during the 1940s and 1950s, shifted the terms of their spectacularly sensuous brushwork to recognizable imagery. Their influence on Garcia is obvious, especially with In Chair, where the paint is applied sumptuously, and the imagery, like pieces of a puzzle joining manifests the abstraction into reality. What Arthur Lazere writes about the master, can also be applied to the student. “He [Bischoff ] lays on the paint thickly, an often assertive impasto that lends vigorous energy and movement, even to a scene of relative stillness. The figures here are distinct, and the landscape is broadly defined, but with a sketchy, real / unreal quality. There’s a palpable tension between the representational and the abstract, between stillness and movement. And it is all in counterpoint to the sensuous colors and dappling light that fill the canvas.”

In 1958 or 1959, at the end of his time in art school, Jerry’s brother Clifford (Tiff ) Garcia was given the five oil paintings of this series — the only existing evidence of Jerry’s work in the medium— “if he wanted them.” They have been with him ever since. These paintings, and his teacher, offer a clue to the wellsprings of Garcia’s later computer graphic work, and to the tension between abstract and figurative expression present in his whole creative output. Three have been reproduced in the collected Art of Jerry Garcia, published in 2005; all are reproduced here. “These beautiful pieces of his early creativity validated who he was as a person, touching on what he thought was important,” noted Matthews in a recent interview with Fine Art. “I think he would really like that they are being seen today as there has been so much negative interpretation of who he was as a human being.” When Tiff, who re-discovered these paintings in his garage, reminded Matthews of their existence, Robert put together a team that included renown Art Director/Artist Stanley Mouse and chose the first image to reproduce and market.

• 

He took the painting to Jack Solomon’s S2 atelier in Las Vegas and made an old-school lithograph using traditional processes on a rare 19th Century Marononi Viorin press which produced lithographs for the Parisienne and Montmartre artists of the period. More than 100 years old, the press continues to operate using all its original factory parts. The only modification being the conversion from steam-driven power to electricity. The result is a striking and sumptuous print created by hand from the original painting by actually breaking the colors down into individual plates (of which there are 14) and running them one color at a time to make the final product. Notes Solomon, whose experience in the art world spans five decades, “The colors and techniques that Jerry Garcia used reminds me of the work of the great and historic French artist Georges Rouault (1871-1958). Rouault painted in dark heavy colors. He then used wild, strong brush slashes, presenting his figures in somber but vividly glowing colors with darkly (blacked) outlined faces and figures. Garcia’s early works are similar to Rouault’s best artworks in important areas.”

Matthews never set out to be an publisher, but as the original bass player in the New Riders, he knew something of “Dirty Business down in Cold Creek,” which translated—quite to his chagrin and surprise—into the art realm. “I acquired a good collection of Jerry’s artwork about six months before he passed away including his most well-known prints, Wetlands I and Wetlands II which became very popular and about two years after his passing, were up to $10,000 a pop hand-signed. Later on, a matched pair of Wetlands I & II sold for $25,000

“I ended up with all of these great art pieces, paying huge premiums for insurance. Their relevance to me was that they were created by this good friend of mine But…the estate created a second edition—a major legal and ethical violation and a gross breach of that pledge which is inherent in limited editions and Garcia’s promise on signing the certificate of authenticity. Simply put, not only was this illegal but it violated Jerry Garcia’s personal integrity as well as Legal Code #1744 (11B) in the State of California in which Certificates of Authenticity are required for anything that sells for $100 or more, making an expressed warranty that no additional multiples of the same image, including proofs, have been produced in this or in any other limited edition.

When all 925 lithographs of the Edition are gone, there will be NO MORE! EVER! A second edition violates an implied and legal contract.”

In February, 1995, six months prior to his death from a heart attack on August 9, Matthews recalls a conversation with his friend in which Jerry was adamant that the integrity and quality of the art program be maintained. It was more than a shock to Matthews to discover that some pieces in the collection of prints he purchased for himself, and on which he maintained insurance policy based on their appraised value, had been re-struck. Which simply means they were put back on a printing press and printed again, diluting their collectibility.

Robert, who is exceptionally miffed at the way Jerry’s name and reputation were defiled through the re-striking of those lithographs, decided to right a wrong by creating a new limited edition, a true lithograph. “Jerry was always a very focused, artistic human being. We believe in the story and we are preserving the integrity of Jerry’s legacy, which has not been treated properly in other realms.”

As engineer, producer, confidante and even bass man on the first New Riders recordings which featured Garcia on pedal steel guitar, Matthews is uniquely qualified to make such a statement. His name is familiar like family to millions of fans of the iconic American musical aggregation known as the Grateful Dead. Some could say he was even responsible for the band’s very existence, as he was the one who introduced his schoolmate Bob Weir to Garcia. Matthews was also there when Garcia famously chose the name for the group, flipping over the pages of a dictionary and landing on those fateful words. “The first definition I saw after the item GRATEFUL DEAD,” recalls Matthews, “was an ethno-musicalogical term relating to ballads of unrequited love.”

Shortly thereafter at an early recording session, Robert was intrigued by the equipment and mechanisms involved in the process and expressed his interest to Weir, who basically told him to “manifest your desire.”

• 

“In 1968 we started learning how to make our own records,” said Matthews, who worked his way up from Assistant Engineer on the Dead’s second Warner Brothers album (Anthem of the Sun) to Executive Engineer on their third (Aoxoamoxoa) to Engineer/Producer (along with Betty Cantor) on two of their most important and best-known recordings, Live/Dead (released on Matthews’ 22nd birthday), and Workingman’s Dead. Those two records were revolutionary, pivotal and loved by millions on so many levels. The recording of Live/Dead in itself is a benchmark for every live album ever made. The innovations and inventions that went into that record changed forever the way live shows were recorded, mixed and produced. It is safe to say that Bob and Betty more than played their part in bringing the music to the world almost as exactly as the band envisioned it. As one-half of the well-respected recording team, he is responsible for making Jerry Garcia the world’s mostrecorded musician with thousands of hours of his solo and band work committed to tape.

In 1969 Jerry started learning pedal steel and John Dawson invited him and Mickey Hart into this new aggregation that became The New Riders of the Purple Sage. “In May 1969, prior to the first New Riders rehearsal, Jerry informed me of their existence, saying, ‘By the way, Matthews, you’re the bass player.’ On July 3, 2006 at Grateful Fest 7, I sat-in on Last Lonely Eagle, two months short of 37 years since I last played music on stage.

“As the group evolved, I saw first-hand the interaction between musicians in a momentby- moment agreement of a format with a capacity to spontaneously create. Often, it was incredible. I was fascinated watching it all. By making me the bass player, I was able to experience it and play music, answering my question, ‘Does that really happen the way I think it happens?’”

Matthews spent more time with Garcia one-on-one than all the other engineers combined. “It was very fortunate we worked well together and it was a lot of fun. For Garcia, playing music was all about connecting to the people who were watching him play, encouraging the audience to have a good time.”

I don’t want anyone to think it’s me being serious or anything like that,” noted Garcia in an interview at the time. “It’s really me goofing around…being completely self-indulgent musically. I have curiosity to see what I can do, and a desire to get into sixteen track and go on trips that are too weird for me to want to put anybody else I know through.” Except for a select few, including Matthews. This was another revolutionary record at the time in its sonic clarity, force and power, with just enough psychedelic tintinnabulations to let everybody, as Matthews said, be invited to put their own imagination in and create their own interpretation.

In 1972, Bob and Betty recorded Bob Weir’s solo album, Ace, which was mixed at Alembic Studios by Jerry Garcia and friends. Featuring what would become a collection of future staples, it was, in essence, a Grateful Dead album. Says Bob, “I pretty much knew in the back of my mind what would happen. One by one they start coming around. Lesh and Garcia, ‘Hey man, I hear you have some time booked… Need a bass player? A guitarist?’…Of course I ended up with the Grateful Dead on the record, which I figured up front…And we had a great time making it.”

That was also Jerry’s theory. Said Matthews, “His #1 rule was if it was a hassle—get out.”

• 

What worked for the music listener also holds true for the viewer of Garcia’s art. Matthews takes this one step further by adamantly defending the integrity of his friend, creating a true limited edition print of undeniable quality. It is a masterpiece of love. “I am guaranteeing I will adhere to the integrity that was so vital to Jerry.” Continues Matthews, “He was a rare artist in that he never talked about himself, never talked about his music. What other people were doing interested him. Unfortunately, fans kept putting him on a pedestal. He couldn’t dispel that so he just gave up. In the early 1970s, he gave interviews that let people know what they were perceiving was not exactly what was happening.

The creative process of Jerry Garcia was never-ending. He described himself famously as a “music junkie” an unfortunate term as it was his addictions that colored the later years of his life. But when it came to creativity, he was constantly in the process. During the last ten years of his life, even while the band toured incessantly, he managed to produce some 500 works of art in many media. “I was there when he received his first airbrush. He said, ‘C’mon Matthews. I want to show you how to use this.’ He talked me thru it and made many pieces with it.”

Garcia’s early work is presented here for the first time in Fine Art lithography, the gold standard for limited edition multiple fine art. As the preferred choice for the greatest modern and contemporary artists— Picasso, Chagall, Matisse, Calder, Bellows, and Norman Rockwell— Matthews sought to replicate the process of these masters’ lithographs using the same time-honored methods. The edition consists of 925 numbered, hand-pulled lithographs on Rives BFK 100% French rag printed from 14 hand etched plates with 40 numbered Artist’s Proofs (“A/P”) and 10 numbered Printer’s Proofs (“P/P”) for a total edition of 975. Each lithograph has the embossed seal of ArSeaEm/Tiff Garcia. A Certificate of Authenticity, hand signed by Tiff Garcia with the embossed seal applied, is delivered with each lithograph.