Showing posts with label Jerry Garcia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jerry Garcia. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Jerry Garcia Couture
In August 1992, 50 year-old Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia introduced a line of neckties. A month later he collapsed from exhaustion and was forced to cancel a tour, which tells you something about the rigors of fashion retailing. Garcia appears six times in A Book of Ages.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Jerry Garcia
On this day in 1995 Jerry Garcia, lead guitarist and eminence grise of The Grateful Dead, died of heart failure. He was 53. 25,000 Deadheads attended a celebration of his life in Golden Gate Park. In November 1995 an asteroid was named after him. Jerry Garcia appears six times in A Book of Ages. He once said: “It's pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness.” All these years later, Cherry Garcia is still the favorite flavor of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Hope I Die 'fore I Get Old
It's the birthday of Pete Townshend, the lead guitarist of The Who, writer of operas, smasher of guitars, editor of books, born in 1945. He wasn't as handsome as bandmate Roger Daltrey or contemporaries Lennon and McCartney, or as sexually perplexing and magnetic as Mick Jagger. He was simply an angry working bloke with a mean guitar. Still is. Nowadays he is also an important fundraiser for the hard of hearing.
Rock stars are interesting to chronicle because their lives are one long battle against age. Loud Peter Pans who refuse to outgrow tight pants, criminals who write poetry, travel armed with guitars and banned substances.
Townshend broke his first guitar in concert at age 19. It was an accident, but the crowd loved it, so he made it part of the act. On his twentieth birthday, on a train between London and Southampton, he wrote the anthem of his generation, which featured the nihilistic line "Hope I die 'fore I get old."
But he didn't. Keith Moon and John Lennon and others did, becoming permanent youthful icons. At 31, Townshend suffered permanent hearing loss during a concert at Charlton Football Ground. At 35 he nearly died of a drug overdose at the Club For Heroes. At 38 he dissolved The Who and became an employee of the publishers Faber & Faber. Did he become a man of letters? Not really. Eventually he went back out on the road, as all rock stars do. Is that Townshend I sometimes see pitching Time Life Rock 'N Roll collections on late night TV? When you live that long and play that hard it becomes harder to surprise people.
Rock stars are my favorite subcategory in A Book of Ages. Eric Clapton, Kurt Cobain, Lennon and McCartney, Jerry Garcia, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and Pete Townshend are our Keats and Shelley and Byron. Doing outrageous things, but somehow managing to remain poetic, funny, sometimes tragic, always interesting.
Rock stars are interesting to chronicle because their lives are one long battle against age. Loud Peter Pans who refuse to outgrow tight pants, criminals who write poetry, travel armed with guitars and banned substances.
Townshend broke his first guitar in concert at age 19. It was an accident, but the crowd loved it, so he made it part of the act. On his twentieth birthday, on a train between London and Southampton, he wrote the anthem of his generation, which featured the nihilistic line "Hope I die 'fore I get old."
But he didn't. Keith Moon and John Lennon and others did, becoming permanent youthful icons. At 31, Townshend suffered permanent hearing loss during a concert at Charlton Football Ground. At 35 he nearly died of a drug overdose at the Club For Heroes. At 38 he dissolved The Who and became an employee of the publishers Faber & Faber. Did he become a man of letters? Not really. Eventually he went back out on the road, as all rock stars do. Is that Townshend I sometimes see pitching Time Life Rock 'N Roll collections on late night TV? When you live that long and play that hard it becomes harder to surprise people.
Rock stars are my favorite subcategory in A Book of Ages. Eric Clapton, Kurt Cobain, Lennon and McCartney, Jerry Garcia, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and Pete Townshend are our Keats and Shelley and Byron. Doing outrageous things, but somehow managing to remain poetic, funny, sometimes tragic, always interesting.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Prodigies
On May 14, 1643, Louis XIV was crowned king of France. He was four years old. History is full of four year-old monarchs, hovered over by helpful and malign viziers and privy counsellors and stage mothers, all lovingly asserting their own power. It's a familiar picture. Mary became Queen of Scots before she celebrated her first birthday. She was given lots of advice by her French uncles.
The more famous prodigies are musical. Mozart playing the piano for kings and grand dukes before his feet could reach the pedals. Judy Garland made her stage debut when she was two. Jascha Heifetz started violin lessons at three. And so on. A reviewer in Publishers Weekly picked up my book and worried that it was a catalog of prodigies. He was pleased to see it included unprodigies as well. Dolts like Albert Einstein who didn't speak until he was three, and Thomas Edison who was removed from school because the teacher thought he was too stupid to learn.
Mostly, childhood is a forbidding sort of place where children are right to be afraid and puzzled, and grateful for every friend they meet. Mick Jagger met Keith Richard when he was four, a meeting I imagine like d'Artagnon meeting Aramis. The best accounts of childhood are a bit surreal, like Alice in Wonderland, or strangely funny, like Thurber's My Life and Hard Times, or Dickens's autobiographical novel David Copperfield. In A Book of Ages you learn that James Thurber was four when his family purchased a dog that bit people. Alice Liddell was ten when she became the heroine of her famous story. Flannery O'Connor was five when she became famous for teaching her chicken to walk backwards.
Even famous childhoods are full of loss: Isaac Newton losing his mother, Ray Charles losing his sight, Jerry Garcia losing the end of his right middle finger, Mike Nichols losing all of his hair including his eyebrows, Shirley Temple losing her belief in Santa Claus. Children learn things to compensate. We begin rehearsing the things we will become as adults. Bobby Fischer learned chess at age six. J. K. Rowling wrote her first story when she was six; it was about a rabbit with measles. Prodigious or not, every childhood is an odd mix of danger and possibility. Which is why the stories we read are simultaneously funny and sad, strange and familiar.
The more famous prodigies are musical. Mozart playing the piano for kings and grand dukes before his feet could reach the pedals. Judy Garland made her stage debut when she was two. Jascha Heifetz started violin lessons at three. And so on. A reviewer in Publishers Weekly picked up my book and worried that it was a catalog of prodigies. He was pleased to see it included unprodigies as well. Dolts like Albert Einstein who didn't speak until he was three, and Thomas Edison who was removed from school because the teacher thought he was too stupid to learn.
Mostly, childhood is a forbidding sort of place where children are right to be afraid and puzzled, and grateful for every friend they meet. Mick Jagger met Keith Richard when he was four, a meeting I imagine like d'Artagnon meeting Aramis. The best accounts of childhood are a bit surreal, like Alice in Wonderland, or strangely funny, like Thurber's My Life and Hard Times, or Dickens's autobiographical novel David Copperfield. In A Book of Ages you learn that James Thurber was four when his family purchased a dog that bit people. Alice Liddell was ten when she became the heroine of her famous story. Flannery O'Connor was five when she became famous for teaching her chicken to walk backwards.
Even famous childhoods are full of loss: Isaac Newton losing his mother, Ray Charles losing his sight, Jerry Garcia losing the end of his right middle finger, Mike Nichols losing all of his hair including his eyebrows, Shirley Temple losing her belief in Santa Claus. Children learn things to compensate. We begin rehearsing the things we will become as adults. Bobby Fischer learned chess at age six. J. K. Rowling wrote her first story when she was six; it was about a rabbit with measles. Prodigious or not, every childhood is an odd mix of danger and possibility. Which is why the stories we read are simultaneously funny and sad, strange and familiar.
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