Why Jerry Garcia thought the Grateful Dead were “perilously close to fascism”
No band lived up to their hippie ideals quite like the Grateful Dead. Across their 30-year career as a group, the Dead formed a true collective known as “the Family”, with band members, managers, roadies, girlfriends, and causal friends all making up the Grateful Dead family. When it came time to make decisions on the band’s behalf, everybody in the family got an equal say, often to the detriment of group cohesion and productivity.
There were plenty of actual managers that floated through the band’s orbit over the years, including Bay Area native Rock Skully, British tour manager Sam Cutler, and, most notoriously, Mickey Hart’s father Lenny, who absconded from the position with most of the band’s money in 1970. But there was also an unwritten hierarchy that surrounded the Dead, one that quite clearly put guitarist and singer Jerry Garcia at the top.
But Garcia had no interest in being the leader of the Grateful Dead. Unfortunately, the band’s progress would often be stunted because Garcia refused to take the lead. He was comfortable being the musical leader, spinning the band towards certain jams, picking out the best cuts while assembling Europe ’72, and even directing their concert film The Grateful Dead Movie. But when it came to business decisions and public profiles, Garcia had no desire to be the figurehead of the Grateful Dead.
Never mind that he was, but Garcia’s level of power and influence over the growing fanbase of the Grateful Dead caused him to take a step back. In later years, the vibrant and talkative Garcia never approached the microphone when he wasn’t singing, largely because Deadheads began to take everything he said as gospel. The deification that Garcia saw happening to himself scared him (and likely pushed him further into drug addiction), and in one of his final interviews, Garcia explained why no single person should wield as much power as he did at the height of the Grateful Dead’s fame.
“See, for the first 18 years or so, I had a lot of doubts about the Grateful Dead,” Garcia said in an interview that eventually appeared in Amir Bar-Lev’s documentary series Long Strange Trip. “I thought, ‘Maybe this is really a bad thing to be doing, you know, this could be really pernicious.’ Because I was aware of the power. If I had started to think about controlling the power, it would be, like, perilously close to fascism.”
Garcia tried to actively undermine his own control over the Dead and Deadheads, but he couldn’t stop it. “I did a lot of things to sabotage it,” Garcia admitted. “It’s like, ‘Fuck that! I’m not gonna go along with this. I won’t be a part of this.’ I mean, it’s the thing of you don’t want to be the king, you know? You don’t want to be the president. You don’t fucking want that. I mean, nobody should have that.”
Garcia’s own aversion to influence and power, and his active attempts to circumvent that power, ultimately didn’t matter. The Grateful Dead amassed perhaps the most loyal fanbase in all of music, with Deadheads clinging to every last word that came out of Garcia’s mouth. In the end, Garcia would up sabotaging his own life, including his precarious health, instead of undermining his influence on legions of Deadheads. As was the thesis for the final part of Long Strange Trip, it became everything until suddenly there was nothing.
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