How did the Grateful Dead’s Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan die?
When people discuss the rockstar cliché of the “27 Club”, names like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Kurt Cobain are typically the first that spring to mind. But another prominent member is too often forgotten: the Grateful Dead co-founder and keyboard player Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan.
That’s just Pigpen to Deadheads by and large, owing either to his penchant for squalor or to his similarities with the Peanuts comic book character of the same name, or both. He’s arguably the member of the Dead who garners more affection from fans than any other.
Pigpen was responsible for the band taking up electric instruments, which was fundamental to their transformation from bluegrass folk players, The Warlocks, to pioneers of psychedelic music. And he was the first genuine frontman they had. In the words of the band’s de facto leader, Jerry Garcia, “Pigpen was the only guy in the band who had any talent when we were starting out.”
Nevertheless, within two years of their first shows, he was being sidelined for his perceived musical limitations and unwillingness to work on improving. Despite his talent, “he also had no discipline”, Garcia noted. And over the years, while his bandmates were tripping on acid at psychedelic freak outs, Pigpen developed a fatal dependence on alcohol.
While he never actually left the Dead, he stopped playing with the band in 1972 once his health began to deteriorate severely. Whether he was still drinking at that time is a contentious issue, with Garcia’s biographer Blair Jackson claiming he wasn’t, contrary to the band’s tour manager Sam Cutler, who insisted he drank throughout his final tour with them.
So, how did Pigmen actually die?
Drummer Mickey Hart seems to concur with Cutler’s view, suggesting that living “the blues” by drinking excessive alcohol “killed” his bandmate. “He was just living the blues life: singing’ the blues and drinkin’ whisky,” he said. “That’s what all blues guys did.”
On the other hand, near the end of his life, McKernan displayed heavy symptoms of primary biliary cirrhosis (PBC), an autoimmune disorder of the liver with primarily genetic causes unrelated to alcoholism. It could be that this disorder would have killed him anyway, even if he never drank a drop of whisky. Of course, it’s a highly improbable coincidence that developing symptoms of a liver disorder when he did was in no way related to his abuse of alcohol.
Either way, Pigpen died at his California home of a gastrointestinal haemorrhage likely related to liver failure on March 8th, 1973. He’d distanced himself from the Grateful Dead over the previous months, knowing that his condition meant he’d no longer be able to tour with the band.
Although the Godchaux siblings had come into the band by then, the Dead never truly replaced Pigpen. As Jerry Garcia later told journalist Rock Scully, “This was the end of the original Grateful Dead”.
