Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, August 10, 1995 TAG: 9508100065
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARK MORRISON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The Grateful Dead is dead.
``Jerry Garcia represented the Dead. I don't think it stands alone without him,'' said Lolly MacLeod, a 34-year-old Deadhead who has seen the group in concert more than 30 times and has a dog named Jerry.
``There's no more band, no more touring, no more nothing,`` said John Thacker, a Virginia Tech student, as he sat in the Underground, a Blacksburg bar, drinking beer and flipping channels in search of more news on Garcia's death. ``It changes everything.''
Garcia, 53, the band's guitarist, died of a heart attack Wednesday at a drug treatment center in San Francisco.
At Pedro's in Blacksburg, where The Kind - probably the best-known area Dead-style band - was playing its usual Wednesday night gig, lead guitarist Mark McLeod, 35, said, "[Garcia] was the spirit of the whole thing ... "
Members of the band - which has been together for almost a decade - gathered about noon on Wednesday to talk about Garcia's death and decided to go on with their show, in spite of their shock at the news. "To think that Jerry's dead - it's really sad," McLeod said.
Brandon Mitchell, 21, owner of the Tie Dye Guy store, a sort of Deadhead headquarters in Roanoke, said he had received dozens of calls at the Tie Dye Guy asking whether the news was true. The reaction and emotions from the callers were all the same:
``Surprised, very, very shocked and very upset,'' he reported.
Mitchell last went to a Grateful Dead concert last month in Washington. Mitchell said it was a great concert and that Garcia seemed in top form. He was surprised to hear Garcia died in a drug treatment center.
``I had no idea he was back on the stuff.''
Most fans seemed to believe that Garcia, after years of notorious drug use, had been clean now for several years. And, as Scott Edmondson of Roanoke put it, the Dead always had a certain immortality. ``They're the Grateful Dead. You don't ever expect them to pass away. I mean, maybe the keyboard player, but not Jerry.''
Others, however, weren't so surprised.
``I was disappointed, not particularly surprised, because of the life that he led, the lifestyle,'' said MacLeod, a sales representative at WDBJ (Channel 7). ``Once you have an addiction like that, it's hard to make a clean break.''
Emily Brady, 46, of Salem. added: ``I wasn't as shaken as I was when I heard about John Lennon," who was murdered in 1980. "I knew that Jerry was aging. John was more of a shock.''
Still, when Brady first heard the news on the radio in her car, it hit her hard enough that she had to pull over and call a friend's answering machine to share her grief. Brady saw the band in concert only once, when the Dead played the Roanoke Civic Center in 1987. But she has been a lifelong fan and sports a Grateful Dead bumper sticker on her car.
She said she always played the group's music whenever she got the blues. It cheered her up.
``It was the tempo ... and the feeling that they, too, were surviving,'' she said.
Brady and others pointed to Garcia's contribution to the musical world - although many of them had trouble pinpointing exactly what it was.
MacLeod perhaps explained it best when she said Garcia brought a lot of traditional folk music and roots influences into the Grateful Dead's music. By doing so, MacLeod said, he kept that form of music alive and made it more popular.
Edmondson, 25, attended two Dead shows in Charlotte, N.C., this past spring. In the first show, he said Garcia flubbed guitar licks, forgot lyrics to songs and generally was out of step with the rest of the band. But in the second show, he hit every cue, every note. It was vintage Garcia, he said.
``When he's off, you let him have that, and you hope he comes back the next night.''
Edmondson said a part of him holds out hope that the Dead will go on without Garcia, although he doesn't see it happening. ``How can you replace Jerry? You can't,'' he said. ``I hope they will, though. I would still try to go check them out if they did.''
Staff writer Stephen Foster contributed information to this story.
by CNB