THE END OF JERRY GARCIA AND THE GRATEFUL DEADHe was the unlikeliest of pop stars and the most reticent of cultural icons. Onstage, he wore plain clothes -- usually a sacklike T-shirt and loose jeans, to fit his heavy frame -- and he rarely spoke to the audience that watched his every move. Even his guitar lines -- complex, lovely, rhapsodic but never flashy -- as well as his strained, weatherworn vocal style had a subdued, colloquial quality about them. Offstage, he kept to family and friends, and when he sat to talk with interviewers about his remarkable music, he often did so in sly-witted, self-deprecating ways. "I feel like I'm stumbling along," he said once, "and a lot of people are watching me or stumbling along with me or allowing me to stumble for them." It was as if Jerry Garcia -- who, as the lead guitarist and singer of the Grateful Dead, lived at the center of one of popular culture's most extraordinary epic adventures -- was bemused by the circumstances of his own renown.And yet, when he died on August 9, 1995, a week after his fifty-third birthday, at a rehabilitation clinic in Forest Knolls, California, the news of his death set off immense waves of emotional reaction. Politicians, newscasters, poets and artists eulogized the late guitarist throughout the day and night; fans of all ages gathered spontaneously in parks around the nation; and in the streets of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury -- the neighborhood where the Grateful Dead lived at the height of the hippie epoch -- mourners assembled by the hundreds, singing songs, building makeshift altars, consoling one another and jamming the streets for blocks around.

Across town at San Francisco city hall a tie-dyed flag was flown on the middle flagpole.Chances are Garcia himself would have been embarrassed, maybe even repelled, by all the commotion. He wasn't much given to mythologizing his own reputation. In some of his closing words in his last interview inRolling Stone,in 1993, he said: "I'm hoping to leave a clean field -- nothing, not a thing. I'm hoping they burn it all with me. I'd rather have my immortality here while I'm alive. I don't care if it lasts beyond me at all. I'd just as soon it didn't.

"Jerome John Garcia was born in 1942, in San Francisco's Mission district. His father, a Spanish immigrant named Jose "Joe" Garcia, had been a jazz clarinetist and Dixieland band leader in the 1930s, and he named his new son after his favorite Broadway composer, Jerome Kern. In the spring of 1948, while on a fishing trip, Jerry saw his father swept to his death in a California river. "I never saw him play with his band," Garcia toldRolling Stonein 1991, "but I remember him playing me to sleep at night. I just barely remember the sound of it."After his father's death, Garcia spent a few years living with his mother's parents in one of San Francisco's working-class districts. His grandmother had the habit of listening to Nashville's Grand Ole Opry radio broadcasts on Saturday nights, and it was in those hours, Garcia would later say, that he developed his fondness for country music forms -- particularly the deft, blues-inflected mandolin playing and mournful, high-lonesome vocal style of bluegrass's principal founder, Bill Monroe. When Garcia was ten, his mother, Ruth, brought him to live with her at a sailor's hotel and bar that she ran near the city's waterfront.

He spent much of his childhood there, listening to the boozy, fanciful stories that the hotel's old tenants told, or sitting alone, reading Disney and horror comics, and poring through science-fiction novels.When Garcia was fifteen, his older brother Tiff -- the same brother who, a few years earlier, had accidentally lopped off part of Jerry's right-hand middle finger while the two were chopping wood -- introduced him to early rock & roll and rhythm & blues music. Garcia was quickly drawn to the music's funky rhythms and rough-hewn textures, but.