The favourite film of Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia
Jerry Garcia always has something of a macabre streak. From the day his finger landed on the phrase ‘The Grateful Dead‘ while searching for a band name in the dictionary, Garcia forever tied himself and his legacy to the world of the dead.
Garcia was no stranger to death, having lost his father to a drowning accident at the age of five. From the very earliest days of the Dead, Garcia often took the lead in singing the band’s darker ruminations on passing to the other side, including ‘Death Don’t Have No Mercy’ and ‘Death Letter Blues’. The band eventually gathered their own tracks about death, like ‘Black Peter’ and ‘Bird Song’, carving out a unique niche that fits their morbid reputation.
That fascination with the great beyond came through in Garcia’s other artistic pursuits as well. From an early age, Garcia showed an aptitude for art, often drawing pictures of horror icons like The Wolfman and Frankenstein’s Monster. Frankenstein had a particularly strong effect on him, but not the famous 1931 James Whale motion picture. Instead, Garcia had a fondness for a spinoff.
“My mother, I think, must have taken me to see it: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein,” Garcia explained on the AMC programme The Movie That Changed My Life. “In 1948, I guess that was. I was six years old. My father had died the previous year, in ’47, so that also made it kind of a heavy time in my life emotionally, and it was another big reason for my clamping onto it – that power of fear.”
“I think there was some desire on my part to embrace that. To not let that control me in that way,” Garcia added. “That whole business invoked something, something very strong, and it hit me in that archetypal centre. That was my first sense of, ‘There are things in this world that are really weird. I don’t think I knew that before I saw that movie: that there are things that are really weird, and there are people who are concerned with them. That became important to me, and I guess I thought to myself on some level, ‘I think I want to be concerned with things that are weird. I think that seems like fun.'”
Garcia’s writing partner Robert Hunter knew of his preoccupation with “weirdness” and specifically the creatures of old horror and mystery movies. Hunter referred to Frankenstein in the lyrics of ‘Ramble On Rose’ and wrote the words to ‘Dire Wolf’ after he and Garcia caught a broadcast of the 1959 adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles on TV in the spring of 1969. Garcia kept a love of horror films for the rest of his life, even though his favourite film was decidedly more comedic in tone.
