Now 18 years old, Garcia moved to Palo Alto, California, where he lived informally over the next several years, playing in clubs and bookstores near the campus of Stanford University and encountering many of the people he would work with for the rest of his career. In April 1960, he enlisted in the Army, but he proved unsuited to Army life and was dishonorably discharged in December 1960. He continued to be uninterested in studying, however, and in January 1960, at the age of 17, he dropped out. Soon, he was playing in bands in high school. He showed greater interest in art, attending the California School of Fine Arts during the summer of 1957, and for his 15th birthday that year, his mother gave him a guitar (after he convinced her to take back the accordion she had given him at first). The family lived in various locations in San Francisco and its suburbs, and Garcia attended several different schools where he was an indifferent student, forced to repeat eighth grade. His mother took over management of the tavern, and he was sent to live with his grandparents for the next five years, moving back in with his mother after she remarried in 1953. At the age of four, he lost the top half of the middle finger of his right hand in a wood-chopping accident the following year, his father accidentally drowned while fishing. Garcia displayed an early interest in music and took piano lessons as a child. His father was a Spanish immigrant who had been a clarinetist/saxophonist and bandleader until a dispute with the musicians union led him to give up music as a profession and buy a tavern his mother had been a nurse before her marriage. Jerome John Garcia, named after the show tune composer Jerome Kern, was born August 1, 1942, in San Francisco, California, the second son of Jose Ramon Garcia and Ruth Marie (Clifford) Garcia. The Grateful Dead were not primarily a singles act, but Garcia composed or co-composed the music for four of the six singles the band placed in the Billboard Hot 100, "Uncle John's Band," "Truckin'," "Alabama Getaway," and the Top Ten hit "Touch of Grey," as well as his only solo chart single, "Sugaree." In addition to his musical efforts, Garcia was viewed as an icon and spokesman for the hippie movement of the 1960s, the counterculture fueled by psychedelic drugs and rock & roll that the Grateful Dead embodied for their fervent fans, the Deadheads, as well as to the public at large.
But the Grateful Dead remained his primary musical outlet, and he performed thousands of concerts with them and appeared on dozens of their albums (many of them live recordings), 28 of which reached the Billboard charts during his lifetime, including the million-sellers Workingman's Dead, American Beauty, Europe '72, Skeletons from the Closet: The Best of Grateful Dead, What a Long Strange Trip It's Been: The Best of the Grateful Dead, and In the Dark, and another eight that went gold. Concurrently for much of that time, he also led his own Jerry Garcia Band (JGB), and he performed and recorded in a variety of configurations and a variety of styles, particularly styles of folk and country music, sometimes switching to banjo or pedal steel guitar for the purpose.
Guitarist, singer, and songwriter Jerry Garcia was best known as a founding member of the Grateful Dead, the rock band for which he served as de facto leader for 30 years, from 1965 until his death in 1995.
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