Jerry Garcia
Jerry Garcia in an undated photo. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

A “midwife of grace.” An “oracle and a prophet of God.” The “unofficial priest of a small but powerful movement that began to sweep America for almost three decades.” To what minister of God might such titles append? What great awakening of religious fervor did such a figure usher in? And in what churches can his message of love and healing be heard today?

Well, they were all said of Jerry Garcia. Yes, that Jerry Garcia.

The lead guitarist and vocalist of the Grateful Dead died 30 years ago this week, leaving behind legions of devoted and brokenhearted fans. He also left behind millions more who were slightly puzzled about just what they should make of him, the Dead and the counterculture in which they existed for 30 years before Jerry’s death—and which perdures today in diverse and subtle ways.

Jerry Garcia was born in 1942 in San Francisco, Calif., to musically inclined parents who managed a bar. He was raised Catholic, and later in life referenced the awe of being present at Mass as a young man. In 1976, Garcia was interviewed by a Catholic priest, the Rev. Miles Riley of San Francisco, for the latter’s “I Believe” television program. Asked about his religious beliefs, Garcia said he had been raised as a “laissez faire Catholic.” His father died when Garcia was just five, and the family moved around in the following years. He was arrested in 1960 for stealing a car (okay, his mother’s) and served briefly in the U.S. Army to avoid jail time.

The Grateful Dead (Garcia, Bill Kreutzmann, Phil Lesh, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan and Bob Weir, later joined by Mickey Hart and their primary lyricist, Robert Hunter) initially formed in 1965 after some putative starts under different names. Garcia was an informal frontman from then on, though he always rejected the title. 

The Dead spent the next three decades touring, becoming a somewhat accidental icon of the hippie counterculture of the late 1960s and the Platonic form of a jam band. Despite never really breaking into mainstream pop music circles (the band had one Top-40 single, “Touch of Grey,” and even that came more than two decades after they formed), they were universally known for their devoted and freewheeling fanbase. If you’re a certain age, you remember the Volkswagen buses with a bumper sticker: “Who are the Grateful Dead and why are they following me?”

To be a Deadhead was to be a true disciple of the band—and they had some unlikely devotees, including basketball legend Bill Walton, actors Bill Murray and Whoopi Goldberg, “Simpsons” creator Matt Groening, writer Stephen King and former president Bill Clinton. Oh, and Woody Harrelson…but you would have guessed that already. Despite a musical repertoire that almost never explicitly mentions drugs (I can think of three songs tops that do), the band has also always been associated with a psychedelic counterculture.

Garcia himself had no time for the plaudits or messianic language applied to him—“Nobody ever heard you use that microphone as a pulpit” and “your steadfast denial of dogma was as close as you ever came to having a creed,” Ken Kesey wrote to him after his death—but three decades later, he remains an iconic figure in the American counterculture, and Deadheads can still be found all around (not just at Phish concerts). If he was not a religious figure, he certainly inspired a culture imbued with religiosity.

“The Dead provided an unconventional replacement for a life of consumerism and division based on class and race,” wrote Michael O’Brien in a 2023 article for America. O’Brien was born after Garcia died, and yet he still recognized the preponderance of rituals shared by Dead fans and the powerful sense of community that had persisted over decades. “Everyone was ecstatic just to be in the presence of like-minded people whose values of acceptance and kindness were palpable,” he wrote of a Dead & Company (one of the successor bands to the original lineup) concert. “Whether under the influence of drugs or not, everyone around that ballpark was high on life.”

The famous mythologist and scholar of comparative religion Joseph Campbell related a parallel experience after seeing the Grateful Dead live in 1985:

The first thing I thought of was the Dionysian festivals, of course. This energy and these terrific instruments with electric things that zoom in… This is more than music. It turns something on in here (the heart?). And what it turns on is life energy. This is Dionysus talking through these kids. Now I’ ve seen similar manifestations, but nothing as innocent as what I saw with this bunch. This was sheer innocence. 

Further, Campbell wrote, the concert exhibited a “fervent loss of self in the larger self of a homogeneous community. This is what it is all about!” It reminded him of experiences at an Easter liturgy at the Russian Cathedral in New York, or Mass at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, or a visit to the Hindu Jagannath Temple in India. “It doesn’t matter what the name of the God is, or whether it’s a rock group or a clergy,” he wrote. “It’s somehow hitting that chord of realization of the unity of God in you all, that’s a terrific thing and it just blows the rest away.”

In a 2022 article published in the Proceedings of the Grateful Dead Studies Association, Daniel Pinti noted the parallels between the Rev. Matthew Fox’s notion of the priest as a “midwife of grace” and Garcia’s own life and sense of self. Fox (who officiated at both Garcia’s third marriage and his funeral) told Pinti that “in his conversations with Garcia he saw him as one who in walking his unique path functioned in just that way.” Even if Garcia never explicitly acknowledged it, Pinti wrote, he played that role:

Unseen, unacknowledged, or unexperienced grace was something Garcia could midwife into the world and introduce others to. And, like any true priest, Garcia’s priesthood was rooted not in telling us what to do, but in showing us how we can all do the same.

A less likely religious figure also weighed in on Jerry in recent years: In a 2020 column in his diocesan newspaper, Bishop Thomas J. Tobin of Providence, R.I., used a lyric from “Ripple” to make a point: “Let it be known there is a fountain that was not made by the hands of men.” 

“Although the Grateful Dead doesn’t usually deal with religious themes, for a believer, the reference to a fountain ‘not made by the hands of men’ clearly points to God,” Bishop Tobin wrote. 

If you’re still shaking your head in confusion about the above, the bishop isn’t alone—there is an America staffer who has confessed to playing “Ripple” for a group meditation at a Kairos retreat in high school. And why not? Angsty high schoolers need to hear the following wisdom:

There is a road, no simple highway
Between the dawn and the dark of night
And if you go, no one may follow
That path is for your steps alone.

Jerry Garcia died on Aug. 9, 1995, of a heart attack. He had turned 53 only a week earlier. In the three decades since, other members of the Grateful Dead have toured in various iterations, and other jam bands have taken up some of the mantle and attracted some of the fans. But Garcia’s wildly maned visage remains one of the most recognizable images of an entire genre of music.

At the band’s final concert together, at Chicago’s Soldier Field a month before Garcia’s death, the last song of their encore was “Box of Rain.” Some of its lyrics:

Walk into splintered sunlight
Inch your way through dead dreams to another land
Maybe you’’re tired and broken
Your tongue is twisted with words half spoken
And thoughts unclear
What do you want me to do
To do for you to see you through?
A box of rain will ease the pain
And love will see you through.

•••

Our poetry selection for this week is “Designer Death,” by Deborah DeNicola. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.

Members of the Catholic Book Club: We are taking a hiatus while we retool the Catholic Book Club and pick a new selection. 

In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.

Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:

Happy reading!

James T. Keane

James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.