What was psychedelia to Jerry Garcia?
Drugs have always seemed to have an influence over the creative arts, whether it was the opium addictions of the romantic poets or the PCP-fueled funk of James Brown. However, when artists first got a hold of LSD back in the 1960s, its vast psychedelic effects altered the course of human creativity forever, particularly in the case of Jerry Garcia.
It was back in 1943 that the hallucinogenic properties of lysergic acid diethylamide were first discovered, but it wasn’t until two decades later that people outside of laboratory settings were able to experiment with the substance as they pleased. Before too long, acid had reached everybody from the fresh-faced pop titans of The Beatles to the swathes of spaced-out hippies occupying communes and college campuses across the United States. Among the first to fully embrace its transformative qualities, however, were Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead.
Forged through the acid tests of Ken Kesey, the Grateful Dead reflected the expansive vibrancy of this drug-fueled new world better than most. Sure, they had their contemporaries in the San Francisco Bay Area, with the likes of Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother doing their own bit to espouse the joys of LSD experimentation, but nobody took to the drug quite so all-encompassingly as Garcia and the gang. In fact, if you’ve ever been to a Grateful Dead show sober, you were undoubtedly the outlier in that audience.
“It just changed everything, you know,” Garcia once recalled of his first experiences with LSD, taking his first of many trips around 1963 or 1964. Expectedly, that experience changed the course of Garcia’s life forever, sending him down the path of becoming a kind of guru of psychedelia. “It freed me, you know; the effect was that it freed me because I suddenly realised that my little attempt at having a straight life and doing that was really a fiction and just wasn’t going to work out,” he explained.
For Garcia, though, that liberating nature barely scratches the surface of psychedelic expression. Psychedelia isn’t merely the creative aftereffect of a hallucinatory experience; for the songwriter, it reflected something far deeper within the human psyche. “For me all music is psychedelic,” the songwriter once declared. “Country and western music is psychedelic. The blues is psychedelic. Everything is psychedelic. All music.”
In typical Garcia fashion, the Grateful Dead frontman didn’t see fit to expand upon that theory any further, but the inference appears to be that, for him, psychedelia is inseparable from human creativity in general. Garcia would still have been a creative mind without LSD; the drug is not some miracle cure for a lack of imagination or artistic drive, it simply opens your eyes to the tools that are already in your arsenal.
So, sure, the acid-fueled hippie ramblings of psychedelic rock might seem worlds apart from the plodding rhythm of country music, but there is a throughline of creative expression which in and of itself is psychedelic in one regard.
That thought process certainly adheres to the discography of the Grateful Dead, too. Although they are routinely – and justifiably – viewed as harbingers of psychedelic rock, if you dig beneath the surface of their colossal output you will find a vast mix of sounds and influences, stretching from bluegrass right through to reggae and jazz.
Sonically, Garcia and the band went through countless different iterations over the years, but the core creativity of the group always remained constant. According to Garcia, that unwavering artistic drive is the essence of psychedelia.
