Jerry Garcia And The Grateful Dead

Want to read the rest of this paper? Join Essayworld today to view this entire essay and over 50,000 other term papers

Garcia was fifteen, his older brother Tiff - who years earlier had
accidentally chopped off Jerry's right-hand middle finger while the two were
chopping wood - introduced him to early rock & roll and rhythm & blues music.
Garcia was quickly drawn to the music's funky rhythms and wild textures, but
what attracted him the most were the sounds that came from the guitar;
especially the bluesy "melifluousness" of players such as; T-bone Walker and
Chuck Berry. It was something he said that he had never heard before. Garcia
wanted to learn how to make those same sounds he went straight to his mother
and told her that he wanted an electric guitar for his next birthday.

During this same period, the beat period was going into full swing in
the Bay Area, and it held great predominance at the North Beach arts school
where Garcia attended and at the city's coffeehouses, where he had heard poets
like Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Kenneth Rexroth read their best works.

By the early ...

Get instant access to over 50,000 essays. Write better papers. Get better grades. Already a member? Login

other
members also began an experiment with drugs that would change the nature of the
band's story. Certainly this wasn't the first time drugs had been used in
music for artistic expression or had found their way into an American cultural
movement. Many jazz and blues artists had been smoking marijuana and using
various narcotics to intensify their music making for several decades, and in
the Fifties the Beats had extolled marijuana as an assertion of their non-
conformism. But the drugs that began cropping up in the youth and music scenes
in the mid-Sixties were of a much different. more exotic type. Veterans
Hospital near Stanford University had been running experiments on LSD, a ...

Succeed in your coursework without stepping into a library. Get access to a growing library of notes, book reports, and research papers in 2 minutes or less.

CITE THIS PAGE: