Band member · core

Jerry Garcia

Lead guitar · vocals

Years1965–1995

Shows2,328

Born1942

Mark▲

⟶ View era · Europe '72▶ Play featured show

Jerome John Garcia: guitarist, singer, reluctant figurehead. Wandered in from the Palo Alto folk scene in 1965 with banjo fingers, and cycled through Strats and SGs and worse before Doug Irwin built him Wolf, then Tiger. Over thirty years his lead-guitar voice, singing, conversational, halfway to a pedal-steel sigh, defined whatever a Grateful Dead song was. He wrote most of the catalog with Robert Hunter, took the longest solos, and held the band together by drift. He died in his sleep at a rehab clinic on August 9th, 1995, a month after the last show.