Jerry Garcia

Jerry Garcia was the lead guitar and one of the voices of the Grateful Dead, the band he helped start in 1965 and stayed with for its whole 30-year run, and though he'd sooner shrug off the title, plenty of heads saw him as the man steering the ship. His playing was the thing: long, curling, patient solos that went exploring instead of reciting, a habit born back in the Acid Test days, when a song was a map with no edges.

He couldn't sit still, either. There was banjo, pedal steel and bluegrass in his bones, and he helped found New Riders of the Purple Sage with John Dawson and David Nelson, ran the Jerry Garcia Band, jammed with his old friend Merl Saunders and turned up on other people's albums as a session hand. Garcia, his 1972 solo album, is where the songwriting steps into the light: the loping "Sugaree", the rolling "The Wheel", the barroom swagger of "Deal" and the drifting, feather-light "Bird Song".

The long run ended in August 1995, when his heart gave out at a California rehab facility after years of struggling with diabetes and addiction. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame had already taken him in with the Dead in 1994.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.