Not Fade Away: The Online World Remembers Jerry Garcia by David Gans
- Stuart Ake
- 21 hours ago
- 4 min read
Published 1995 by Thunder's Mouth Press
The magic of the Dead’s music – a real-time experience rich in subtleties that takes some effort to comprehend and rewards repeated contact—is hard to translate to the uninitiated and irresistible to its adherents. The narrative quality of the Dead’s art encouraged the formation of community, and the strength of the bonds among the members of our community is the real subject of this book. Most of the people who loved Jerry Garcia never met him, but they felt intimate with him just the same.
When Jerry Garcia died on August 9, 1995, the mainstream press took note, but much of the coverage felt predictable. I was in Blacksburg, Virginia when the phone in my parents’ home rang and my longtime friend Fredrik Johansson delivered the news.
Because the 24-hour cable news cycle had not fully coalesced, we flipped between MTV and CNN and waited. Kurt Loder came on soon after and confirmed Jerry’s passing. Within days, the cash grab was on. Check-out stands at supermarkets filled with glossy commemorative issues. I bought a handful hoping for new insights, but because the mainstream had long treated the Grateful Dead and Deadheads as a punchline, most articles simply rehashed familiar stereotypes.
Within a few months, David Gans assembled Not Fade Away, a collection of tributes and reflections drawn from the online world, much of it orbiting The WELL, one of the earliest and most influential virtual communities. The project began with a publisher inquiry, relayed through a book packager, about what kind of Garcia book might be appropriate in that moment without becoming exploitative. Published in November 1995, Not Fade Away preserves the words of a community reacting in real time trying to make sense of the loss.
Reading it for the first time thirty years after Jerry’s passing, what stands out is the wide range of how grief gets expressed. The book gathers messages, stories, recollections and testimonies from people processing the loss in very different ways. Some write as lifelong Deadheads. Others dance in from the margins, trying to explain how Garcia or the Grateful Dead entered their lives by accident. For me, those were the passages that resonated most. They show how the band’s world could open itself to people who did not fit any stereotype, and how one night or one song could change a life.
With the benefit of 30 years of history, Not Fade Away is a portrait of Deadhead culture at the moment the analog world was tipping toward the digital one. In 1995, the digital world we now take for granted barely existed for most people. The WELL, founded in 1985, was not social media in the modern sense, but it offered a place where community could gather quickly through writing. Gans understood that something important was happening and he preserved not just grief, but one of the earliest examples of global communal mourning unfolding online.
What moved me most were the stories of unexpected conversion. A self-described vampiric goth gradually opening herself to the beauty around her at her only Grateful Dead show at Shoreline. A journalist describing how a flash of possibility at a Jerry Garcia Band concert helped embolden him to expose a crooked politician. An awkward run-in with Jerry in a Philadelphia hotel sauna. They show the different scales on which Garcia could work in people’s lives.
“I went, and sat on the lawn at Shoreline, being sullen and angry, as was my wont. But after a song or two, and after watching the people around me really enjoying themselves, I began, horror of horrors, to actually have a not-so-bad time. And, as things progressed, the not-so-bad time began to slowly slide into an oh-all-right-this-is-kind-of-fun time. And, then, finally, into a OK-I-don’t-care-who-sees-me-I’m-really-enjoying-myself time. Laura Lemay
I wish I had found Not Fade Away when it first appeared. Back then, even for those of us haunting bookstore shelves and record bins, it was easier to miss a book. For me, reading it now carries a different weight. The distance of thirty years does not diminish the emotion. If anything age gives the book added power as I found myself reading these tributes differently after losing friends, family and pieces of myself I cannot get back.
Since noon Wednesday, when the news of Jerry Garcia’s death began to flash around the world, I have had to grapple with what it means to come to the end of one of the most significant adventures I have ever had. Mind was a long ride on the bus, lasting over twenty years. I had been preparing myself for this moment for quite a while now, particularly as Garcia’s decline accelerated in recent years. But, in the end, there is only so much preparation one can make for an event as momentous and unwelcome as this one, only so much insurance one can take out against grief. Gary Greenberg
If you can find a copy of Not Fade Away or if it’s been sitting on the shelf, it's worth revisiting. Each voice makes the case that the power of Garcia lies in the lives he altered. David Gans knew that in 1995 and was wise enough to get it down. The fact that the book also preserves an early online culture marked by intelligence and vulnerability feels especially valuable now, when so much of the internet rewards cruelty. It is a time capsule from the moment mourning went online and managed to remain... human.
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