Jerry Garcia was a folk hero firmly grounded in the technological present. On one hand, his work produced a following of such sheer magnitude that it's impossible for the perception of him - either by the public at large or by his followers, the Deadheads - to be completely accurate and tied to fact. On the other hand, it's very easy to keep elements of his legend in check before they go spiraling off into the stratosphere. First and foremost, he was a brilliant musician -- yet the record (and DAT and analog and CD) shows a horrendous decline in the quality of his playing in the waning years of his life. It's right there, preserved on thousands upon thousands of hours of tape. Ironically enough, his decline is listened to and studied by those who idolize him the most. Never in history has a major artist's decline been so well documented -- and so well accepted, for that matter.

From the outset, author Blair Jackson makes it clear that he is "much less interested in the sordid details of Garcia's personal life than [he is] in exploring and illuminating his splendid creative gifts". To that extent, Jackson succeeds admirably, imbuing his subject with a huge warmth and intelligence that the author obviously feels a deep connection with. This game plan is executed exceedingly well for roughly the first three-quarters of the book. There is a lot of information here - and this, according to Jackson's web site, is the truncated manuscript - and, for the most part, every last bit of it is interesting.

In terms of sheer illumination, the chapters on Garcia's formative years in the pre-Dead Bay Area scene are far and away the best in the book. While later periods of Garcia's life have long been the focus of attention (after all, it was when he created the majority of his musical output), the years which shaped that output have long been veiled. Through Garcia's tenure in dozens of short-lived bluegrass and jug bands, Jackson traces the path of a hungry musician. Somehow, the yearning is conveyed. Perhaps this is because Garcia and his friends fall into a late 50s/early 60s questing archetype. It works here because the potentiality of this quest is fully realized; they did find something greater.

Enter drugs. In Garcia's life they were an aide as well as a hindrance. They also add a complex dimension to any understanding of Garcia as a person. Drugs are weird. Within a few dozen pages, both LSD and the Grateful Dead enter into Garcia's life. This is an extremely important juncture and, regrettably, where the book begins to shift from Garcia and towards the Dead themselves. There is less and less exploration of Garcia's personal experiences. Where previously the book had explored cause, it moves now to effect. This is first noticeable in the accounts of the Acid Tests. It's not terribly troubling there. For one, in the case of the Acid Tests, the cause was the effect -- they were the root of the product as well as the product itself. For another, a psychedelic experience - besides life itself - is perhaps the most subjective thing on the planet.

Like most accounts of the Tests, Jackson focuses on the group experience -- which might be the only way to get a firm hold on what actually happened. As those days slip behind, though, Jackson continues with a similar approach in his recounting of what amounts to be an extremely informative and insightful history of the Grateful Dead. This works in its own right, as a product of the questing of Garcia and his friends. It makes sense in that context; the Grateful Dead, for Garcia, were the something better that he had looked for. The problem, for both Garcia and the book, is what comes next. Nothing in Garcia's life was a be all or end all.

There was always a next step. In this case, the next step happened to be rooted in the swampy times of late 60s and early 70s. This didn't make things any easier for him as a person, nor for Jackson as a biographer. Up through the period in which the Grateful Dead really began to take off (1969-1970), Garcia's actions had a certain kind of logic to them, based on fundamental principles long since established. Unfortunately, Jackson does little to investigate the evolution of these principles. By the mid-70s, the subject's behavior - including his increasing reliance on cocaine as a stimulant and working aide, which is dealt with almost too casually - seems completely mysterious, his motivations unclear. Garcia was increasingly becoming a reclusive heroin addict, and one is almost unsure how or why it could have happened.

Not coincidentally, as the book becomes less and less lucid about Garcia's personal life, Garcia - as a person - became harder and harder to get through to. What results is a melange of impressions, somewhat removed from the man himself. The overall effect is the use of negative space -- a portrait painted by the dark area left unilluminated. On one hand, this is a quite understandable result of the turn Garcia's character was undertaking. On the other hand, it seems almost tied to Jackson's reluctance to explore the darker, almost undeniable aspects, of Garcia's persona. Unlike the chapters on the earlier years, there is little discussion of Garcia's development as a musician. Likewise, the book almost completely ignores the disintegration of Jerry's longtime creative partnership with lyricist Robert Hunter over the course of the late 70s and early 80s. Instead, for much of the time, Jackson focuses on a picture of the Grateful Dead world as a whole instead of focusing on the detail of Garcia that we yearn for.

There is an awful lot to love about Garcia, and Jackson clearly feels this. During Garcia's multiple stabs at physical and musical rehabilitation in the mid-80s, we find ourselves definitely rooting for him. With the exception of one extremely frightening incident in the early 90s, Garcia is never portrayed as anything remotely resembling an evil entity. The chapters chronicling the last years of Garcia's life are extremely optimistic and hopeful, as Garcia begins to move towards some sort of return to form. Jackson goes at great length to articulate the reemergence of Garcia's importance as a guitar player. When Garcia slips back into drug abuse in his waning years, it is almost hard for the reader not to sigh. The ending is inevitable.

For Deadheads reading the book, the ending in specific, numerous Robert Hunter lyrics will surely come to mind. For me, it was the Wheel: "the wheel is turning / and you can't slow down / You can't let go / and you can't hold on". In trying to explain that, yet another Hunter lyric manifest itself, this one from Black Peter: "See here how everything / lead up to this day". By the end, it's too late to close the book, it's simply infeasible to let go of Garcia's inimitable character - or even think of him solely on the glorious terms of his earlier years - and it's impossible to hold on as he slips away entirely.

Jackson's portrayal of the last of Garcia's creative efforts are bittersweet. They do not make him out to be a man running out of ideas, simply a man who is running out of steam. The creativity is still inherent in him, it seems, he is just having problems translating it to some sort of tangible form. There is a moment of dawning during a description of Garcia's playing during some of the Dead's last shows, where he turned his guitar down to an almost inaudible level. Jerry comes off as human. And while that's all he might've been, he was a damn impressive one at that.

For all of Jackson's indirect approaches at attempting to convey just who Jerry Garcia was... it was almost completely effective. The book ends, logically, with Garcia's public wake in Golden Gate Park. I went into reading this chapter not feeling very changed by the book. Deborah Koons Garcia begins to speak of the crowd: "[Jerry] would have loved this; he is loving it!" At that point, I damn near lost it. No, I thought. You're just plain wrong. As the rest of Garcia's karass spoke, they assessed his life. I found myself assessing their assessments as one does when they hear someone speaking about a friend. I had to put the book down three times, twice because I was about to cry and once because... I would be an out-and-out liar if I claimed that I walked away from this book thinking that I knew Jerry Garcia, but I was closer than I was when I picked it up.