The movie that changed Jerry Garcia’s life
The Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia became one of the most prominent voices in the counterculture movement of the 1960s. The band garnered legions of fans with Garcia at the helm, and he was the only member to play in the group for the entirety of their 30-year career.
Musically, Garcia was inspired by the likes of Ray Charles, B.B. King, John Lee Hooker and Chuck Berry, and he began to long to play rock and roll music. However, he was also influenced by literature (particularly Jack Kerouac) and the vast world of cinema. The latter medium contains one film in particular that changed Garcia’s life, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.
The horror-comedy was directed by Charles Barton and released in 1948, starring the famous comedy duo Abbot and Costello, as well as Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula. It tells of Dracula’s hunt for a “simple brain” to reanimate Frankenstein’s monster, and the perfect brain just so happens to belong to Costello’s character, Wilbur Grey.
Discussing the first time he saw the film in The Movie That Changed My Life feature with AMC, Garcia said, “My mother, I think, must have taken me to see it, I guess when it came out in 1948. It frightened me, and I wouldn’t even actually look at it. I must be hidden behind the seats, I had my head down, and I cried, and occasionally I would glimpse the screen, and I would go ‘Ooooh’.”
“It was just sheer panic; it’s like the first time you are on a rollercoaster. I don’t remember anything except being just frightened,” he added. “I remember the coffins, they open up the coffins, and there is this big face, and I was just (screaming). It scared me really out of my wits.”
Garcia’s father had died the year before, in 1947, so he admitted that it was already an “emotionally heavy” time in his life, strengthened by the theme of bringing the dead back to life. Despite his fear of the film, it also struck a deep fascination in Garcia with the iconic monsters in Frankenstein, Dracula and The Wolfman, which led to other kinds of cinematic art.
“I mean, overwhelming,” Garcia added. “It led me to the discovery of the German expressionist theatre and film. The James Whale original Frankenstein, beautiful lighting, beautiful sets, the great angular and stuff. The Dracula character, these things are all personal icons in my life.”
So Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein is the reason that Garcia became fascinated with art and the feeling of being afraid. “I used to draw pictures of the Frankenstein monster over and over, endlessly in different positions and different configurations,” he noted. “The thing of being afraid the first time, I think there was some desire on my part to embrace that, you know. To not let that control me that way. That whole business evoked something; it like touched something, something very strong.”
Interestingly it was the comedy aspect of the film that was also central to it, providing a life-changing moment for Garcia. “The thing of being funny is a smart strategy to get by,” he said. “In life, if you’re not powerful, if you’re not huge, muscular, if intimidation is too much work for you, it works well at disarming powerful adversaries”.
So too did the weirder moments of the film’s premise play a vital part in Garcia’s adaption to the “bizarre”. He said: “I have a general fascination for the bizarre that comes directly from that movie. That was my first sense of ‘There are things in this world that are really weird.’ I don’t think that I knew that before I saw that movie.”
He concluded: “In some way, that became important to me, and I guess I thought to myself on some level, ‘I think I wanna be concerned with things that are weird.’ I think that seems interesting to me because it seems like fun. That is, in fact, who I am.”
