Mind-Blowing Facts About Jerry Garcia, Rock’s Doomed Hippie Icon
The Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia may have looked like Santa Claus—and was just as well-loved—but his beatific smile concealed a dark side that not even music, adoration, or an endless supply of acid could erase.
1. He Was A Reluctant Messiah
Before the Beyhive, Juggalos, and Swifties, there were the Deadheads.
This tribe of intensely devoted Grateful Dead superfans still follows the band from one sold-out show to the next, but from the late 1960s to the mid-1990s, Jerry Garcia, the band’s frontman-slash-shaman, was the reluctant ringmaster of this psychedelic circus.
Unfortunately, it all became too much for him to handle.
2. He Had A Real-Life Horror-Movie Moment
When he was barely out of diapers, Jerry Garcia experienced a terrifying moment during what should have been a fun family vacation in the Santa Cruz Mountains. In 1946, at four years old, Garcia was helping his older brother Tiff chop wood for the fire pit. They got into a speedy rhythm with Tiff swinging the ax and Jerry clearing away the logs, when disaster struck…
3. He Was Forced To Face The Grisly Truth
The boys’ chopping somehow got out of sync and Tiff’s ax came down on young Jerry’s hand. Ouch. In a flash, his mother wrapped his finger in a towel and they rushed to the hospital. Garcia was too young and in shock to know what had exactly happened, and his family hid the truth from him.
But weeks later, when he removed the last of his bandages, Garcia had the surprise of his life.
4. He Endured Another Vacation Nightmare
Jerry Garcia had lost half a finger in the accident. It seems the loss was only a warm-up for the unthinkable tragedy that five-year-old Garcia would be forced to deal with just a year later—and yet again it happened during a family vacation.
In what must have started out as an idyllic scene, Garcia’s father Jose was fly fishing in California’s Trinity River.
Suddenly, though, he slipped and fell into the rushing water.
