Dark Star: An Oral Biography of Jerry Garcia by Robert Greenfield

Published 1996 William Morrow and Company

Published in 1996, Robert Greenfield’s Dark Star is exactly what the subtitle promises: an oral biography of Jerry Garcia built from the memories of the people who knew him. Instead of a single narrator steering the ship, Greenfield lets a chorus handle the navigation: family, friends and bandmates who sometimes harmonize, sometimes contradict one another, and often do both in the same breath. Individual recollections range from a couple of sentences to the occasional full page. The result is less a verdict on Garcia than a shifting, living portrait. A bit of context. In the immediate wake of Jerry’s passing in 1995, newsstands and checkout counters were stuffed with glossy magazine covers paying tribute… and trying to capture a buck. Because the internet had not yet blossomed, deeper knowledge of the person and the band remained scant, resulting in a plethora of articles rehashing narrow narratives which had already followed the band for decades. Ill-informed authors, perhaps even carrying the best of intentions, trumpeted the drug use and portrayed Jerry more as a myth than a man. I found the ossification of the same tired Grateful Dead tropes, a turn off. Given that background, Robert Greenfield’s Dark Star was the first book I read related to the band after Jerry's passing. Cracking the cover, it was apparent this would be a more comprehensive and complex portrait.

The book starts rooted in Jerry’s early life in the Excelsior District, family dynamics, the accident that cost him most of a finger, the drowning of his father and the short-lived, ill-fitting Army stint. In the group storytelling format, those moments arrive the way family stories do, told with different emphases, corrected midstream and filled in from multiple angles until the picture sharpens.

“What ensued was this whole long period where we all sort of functioned as a tribe. There were all these different people with different roles but we were this wonderful collection of poets, musicians, painters, writers, socialists, and pacifists, with a smattering of out-and-out lunatics.” Barbara Maier

A patchwork of forty plus voices could easily turn choppy or suffer the fate of Babel. But Greenfield keeps a core set of voices in rotation long enough that you begin to recognize them, then gradually widens the cast as the story expands. Rather than feeling fragmented, the narrative moves like a conversation around the Thanksgiving table with someone recalling a family event, another supplying a missing detail while a third quietly changes the meaning of the entire scene.

As the timeline moves into the Palo Alto scene and the lysergic acceleration of the ’60s, the story palette shifts from early-life black-and-white to full Kodachrome color. Later, as the Grateful Dead’s popularity hardens into a touring machine and the public froths with an insatiable desire for more, more, more-- the storytelling tone reflects the excitement of success. Yet, once Garcia’s health declines and his opiate addiction deepens, the portrait retreats back to black, white and greys as we watch a gifted man become increasingly trapped by the machinery around him.

“In the early eighties, I remember Jerry and I had discussions about what he was doing to himself. I said, “Is it the exposure to the public?” Immediately, he said “Yes, that’s part of it.” Couple that with Jerry’s well-known dislike of being put in the place of being the leader. He had a real dilemma there.” Alan Trist

What Dark Star does especially well is hold contradiction without forcing a single interpretation. Some voices describe Garcia’s generosity, both musical and personal, while others testify to the damage: missed connections, broken trust, and the exhaustion of orbiting someone who could be transcendent onstage and unreachable the moment he stepped off. Greenfield doesn’t sentimentalize the arc, but also doesn't edit in a such a manner that Garcia's story is reduced to a cautionary tale. He presents an intimate portrait stripped of the easy extremes of saint or statistic and delivers something more difficult: a human who was brilliant, funny, stubborn, avoidant, tender and profoundly complicated. Coincidentally, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil and Gillian McClain, published three months prior to Dark Star, employed the same technique of stitching patches from interviews. Utilizing first-person storytelling paints a vivid narrative, yet considering the number of disparate voices at play, it's an incredible challenge for an editor to successfully sew a cohesive tale. Both books succeed in their goal.

Highly readable, Dark Star is recommended for readers who want a many-angled, voice-driven portrait of Garcia and anyone curious how legends are built, and complicated, by the people who lived alongside them.