Jerry Garcia's Traumatic Childhood [Highlight From Episode 316]

Author Jim Newton sheds light on the dark moments in Jerry Garcia's early years, painting a picture of the trauma that fueled his passion and creativity.

Listen to Episode 316: Jerry Garcia, The Grateful Dead & the Rise of American Counterculture

----------
 
BookedOnRock.com
 
The Booked On Rock Store
 
The Booked On Rock YouTube Channel
 
Follow The Booked On Rock with Eric Senich:
BLUESKY
FACEBOOK
INSTAGRAM
TIKTOK
X
 
Find Your Nearest Independent Bookstore
 
Contact The Booked On Rock Podcast: [e-mail]

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Here's a highlight from a recent episode of Booked on Rock.
Our guests is Jim Newton. He's the author of the
new book here Beside The Rising Tide, Jerry Garcia, The
Grateful Dead, and an American Awakening. There are a couple painful.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Moments in Jerry's life early on that maybe casual fans
listening may not know the specifics about. So just if
you could talk about one the loss of his finger
and the other the emotional loss with the sudden death
of his father.

Speaker 3 (00:26):
Two very traumatic episodes in back to back summers for
very young Jerry Garcia. In the first, he was in
the mountains in Santa Cruz at a cabin that his
family often vacationed in, and he and his brother were
playing around chopping wood. His older brother and Jerry Garcia
was Jerry was putting up little pieces of kindeleen on

(00:46):
a wooden sawhorse, and his brother was chopping them into
smaller pieces, and they were playing around with it, and
his brother accidentally chopped chopped Jerry's finger off. His mother,
who had been a nurse, tried to wrap it and
rush them to hospital. They were a long way away,
and he lost his finger. Of course we all know
him now is iconically missing that middle finger of his
of the one hand. Yeah, not a great start for

(01:10):
a guitar player, obviously, but fortunately for him and for
all the rest of us, it was not of his
fretting hand. It was his right hand, not his left hand,
And so he learned to play the guitar without the finger.
He didn't never have to adjust to not having a finger.
But all of that, of course, is in the future.
In the moment, he's a four year old boy who's

(01:31):
just had his finger chopped off, and so obviously a
very rattling moment for him. And then the far more
traumatic moment the following summer, he and his mother and
father were up on a fishing trip in northern California,
and his father went out to fish, slipped on a
rock and drowned, a little bit of confusion of memory

(01:53):
as to whether Jerry actually witnessed him drowning, but whether
or not that's the case from that point forward. Obviously,
he didn't have a father. His mother was overwhelmed by
the challenger trying to raise him and his brother, so
she turned him the brothers over to their grandparents. So
he was separated from both his mother and his father
for a period, he developed asthma. It was a very

(02:15):
difficult young life for Jerry