Jerry Garcia

For Dead Heads who've gotten too brittle, or too co-opted, to maintain the nomadic lifestyle embraced by younger legions of devotees, Jerry Garcia offers a suite alternative.Two generations of admirers still flock to Grateful Dead concerts 30 years after the psychedelic survivors helped invent the San Francisco sound -- but many find their tie-dyed rock-and-roll hearts now beat under a pinstripe suit or silk blouse. For them, the days of sleeping under the stars or in VW vans are long past.

From the name the Grateful Dead gave its first album, Live Dead, to Jerry Garcia's sudden death at a retreat called Serenity Knolls, the band was always a paradox: virtuosos with a sloppy sound, anti-materialists who made a mint, an act that lived in the moment yet rocked on for 40 years. But even Garcia, a man who mined old blues and country for his psychedelic wanderings, might have had trouble seeing this coming. Tomorrow night at the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, on what would have been Garcia's 66th birthday, tie-dye meets tie and tails as the BSO performs the world premiere of a work known as Dead Symphony No. 6. (The orchestra will perform a Led Zeppelin-based work Saturday.

When Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Adams Garcia discovered that her longtime love, Jerry Garcia, was seeing another woman, she became incensed. The younger of her two daughters with the Grateful Dead guitarist, Theresa, wasn't even a year old.Desperate to hold her family together, Carolyn Garcia said, she drove to a Mill Valley, Calif., film studio and confronted Deborah Koons, who was working there on a movie about the Grateful Dead, and pleaded: "Please go. Please let Jerry come home."She said she had handed her rival a one-way plane ticket to New York, where Koons had been living when she met Jerry Garcia.

Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right. -- from "Scarlet Begonias" (Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead) In the lengthening shadows of a summer afternoon, thickets of music fans -- on blankets, in lawn chairs, chucking Frisbees -- have turned a West Virginia hillside into a patchwork of tie-dye. Huge amplifiers on a stage pulse with the warbling of electric guitars. The American Roots Music Festival is about to begin. Halfway up the hill, where you've spread a tapestry on the ground, a stranger sidles up, a barrel of a man with bowed legs, a full white beard and an expression that says, "Hey, brother, want to chat?"

Thirty-eight years ago, during the Haight-Ashbury heyday of West Coast pop music, a gleefully visionary guitarist, Jerry Garcia, couldn't contain himself. Already the creative force behind the Grateful Dead, the multitalented Garcia kept trying new instruments and forms. He even built a new band - the New Riders of the Purple Sage, nowadays better known as NRPS - around his fascination with one of the most difficult stringed instruments, the pedal steel guitar. "Not to idolize the man, but he was the hippest guy, the most musically dedicated person I've ever been around," says Buddy Cage, who replaced Garcia as NRPS steel player in 1971 and has been in the band, more or less, ever since.

Was Jerry Garcia an unhappy man? Did his back-and-forth with the needle signal private torment? The Garcia commemorative issues from Rolling Stone, People and Entertainment Weekly don't quite provide the answer. In Rolling Stone, Garcia's widow, Deborah Koons Garcia, assures us that "the last years were the happiest," that he "had a very happy and fulfilling personal life" and that he "loved his work and the Grateful Dead and all the adventures being in the band threw his way." He only suffered physically, she claims: "He found himself drawn back, wanting to do drugs again because his body hurt so much" from withdrawal.

The day the music died.That's no exaggeration for the multigenerational throng of Grateful Dead fans, who mourned the death yesterday of guitarist Jerry Garcia. News of Mr. Garcia's death after a heart attack spread fittingly by word-of-mouth in local Dead sanctuaries such as Fells Point. In one store after another, Grateful Dead music was played in tribute. "Truckin' " and "Sugar Magnolia" and "U.S.A. Blues." All that classic, bluegrassy rock and roll.Candles were lighted. Vigils held. Beliefs spoken:Garcia was God. Yes, he was a drug addict.

TERRA ALTA, W.Va. - It's an odd place for a business district, this quarter-mile stretch of gravel road on a rolling, 700-acre farm in the mountains of West Virginia. But tent after tent adorned with handmade signs - "Sunshine Octopus Creations," "Knot Just Hemp," "Grateful Dan Imports" - and the men, women and kids poring over their wares testify to the lure and staying power of a man none of them ever met but that all feel they knew like a brother. It hardly seems like a decade since Jerry Garcia, good-time maestro and founding member of the Grateful Dead, died of a heart attack at age 53. The 3,000 or so fellow travelers here for the 20th Annual Jerry Garcia Birthday Bash are mourning Jerry the way Deadheads celebrated his music for 30-plus years - gathering to soak up tunes, trade tapes and stories, and thrill to the feeling that there's a life to be lived on the margins of "straight" society.

From the name the Grateful Dead gave its first album, Live Dead, to Jerry Garcia's sudden death at a retreat called Serenity Knolls, the band was always a paradox: virtuosos with a sloppy sound, anti-materialists who made a mint, an act that lived in the moment yet rocked on for 40 years. But even Garcia, a man who mined old blues and country for his psychedelic wanderings, might have had trouble seeing this coming. Tomorrow night at the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, on what would have been Garcia's 66th birthday, tie-dye meets tie and tails as the BSO performs the world premiere of a work known as Dead Symphony No. 6. (The orchestra will perform a Led Zeppelin-based work Saturday.

SAN FRANCISCO - A long-standing custody fight over the famed guitars of the late Grateful Dead lead-man Jerry Garcia finally has ended, setting the stage for an auction of a storied - and intensely coveted - piece of rock history. After nearly a year of on-again, off-again litigation, lawyers announced Monday that they had reached agreement on the ownership of the five instruments that had been handmade for Garcia by Bay Area luthier Doug Irwin, and then bequeathed back to their maker.

Jacob "Jake" Einstein, a radio station owner whose broadcasts drew a devoted audience for the alternative rock music scene he championed, died of an aortic aneurism and emphysema complications Wednesday at his Potomac home. He was 90. Mr. Einstein, who called himself "the oldest hippie alive," spent nearly six decades in radio work, much of its as a salesman and station owner who had an astute ear for emerging musical tastes. He made a name by giving a free hand to his disc jockeys to play the music they wanted - not what the music industry was pushing.

Thirty-eight years ago, during the Haight-Ashbury heyday of West Coast pop music, a gleefully visionary guitarist, Jerry Garcia, couldn't contain himself. Already the creative force behind the Grateful Dead, the multitalented Garcia kept trying new instruments and forms. He even built a new band - the New Riders of the Purple Sage, nowadays better known as NRPS - around his fascination with one of the most difficult stringed instruments, the pedal steel guitar. "Not to idolize the man, but he was the hippest guy, the most musically dedicated person I've ever been around," says Buddy Cage, who replaced Garcia as NRPS steel player in 1971 and has been in the band, more or less, ever since.

A long, strange trip it's been from hippie Haight Street to a White Marsh Hilton, but more than a decade after his death, Jerry Garcia's legacy keeps on keeping on - and commanding $70,000 for a signed watercolor. So perhaps it's fitting that a touring show "featuring one of the largest collections ... ever assembled for public display" of the Grateful Dead bandleader's artwork made its local stop yesterday at a business hotel tucked between Corporate Drive and Mercantile Road. A musical icon of the 1960s counterculture movement who commanded a massive, multigenerational following until his death in 1995, Garcia cultivated a folksy, anti-establishment, papa-bear-on-pot image.

JERRY GARCIA'S OTHER ART Music fans know Jerry Garcia for the music he made with the Grateful Dead, but Garcia was also a painter. He attended the San Francisco Art Institute before joining the band that eventually became the Dead, and his works have been described as realist, as surrealist and as geometric abstraction. See for yourself when Image Makers Art and 100.7 The Bay bring Jerry Garcia: A Visual Journey to Baltimore this weekend. This traveling exhibition includes lithographs, etchings, silk-screens and five original watercolors by Garcia.

TERRA ALTA, W.Va. - It's an odd place for a business district, this quarter-mile stretch of gravel road on a rolling, 700-acre farm in the mountains of West Virginia. But tent after tent adorned with handmade signs - "Sunshine Octopus Creations," "Knot Just Hemp," "Grateful Dan Imports" - and the men, women and kids poring over their wares testify to the lure and staying power of a man none of them ever met but that all feel they knew like a brother. It hardly seems like a decade since Jerry Garcia, good-time maestro and founding member of the Grateful Dead, died of a heart attack at age 53. The 3,000 or so fellow travelers here for the 20th Annual Jerry Garcia Birthday Bash are mourning Jerry the way Deadheads celebrated his music for 30-plus years - gathering to soak up tunes, trade tapes and stories, and thrill to the feeling that there's a life to be lived on the margins of "straight" society.

Gadsby's open house Gadsby's Tavern in Alexandria, Va., hosts Tavern Day, an open house of the historical landmark. Gadsby's Tavern consists of two buildings dating to 1785 and 1792. The buildings were a social centerpiece in Alexandria in the 18th century. Many of the country's founding fathers, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and James Madison, frequented the establishment. This Sunday, there will be costumed tours of the buildings and dances from the 18th century along with refreshments.

GALLUP, N.M. -- In a land famous for its red rock canyons, sprawling American Indian reservations and blazing neon signs, one of the more humble attractions is the 800-pound guitar that ** stands in the municipal sculpture garden next to Interstate 40."It's just about perfect," said attorney Frank Seanez, brushing some wind-blown dust off the statue, which motorists can spot while speeding toward the Arizona border.The guitar is a memorial to Jerry Garcia, the bearded leader of the Grateful Dead, who died of a heart attack on Aug. 8, 1995.

Never again say "Never again." The Holocaust was the model for the Serb captors of Srebrenica.If prevented from marketing to American teen-agers, the cigarette companies can always sell their wares to Third World youth.Jerry Garcia is on his final trip.

Robert Alan Dare, an accountant for The Arc Northern Chesapeake Region who enjoyed collecting Christmas ornaments and singing, died of colorectal cancer Thursday at his Darlington home. He was 49. Mr. Dare was born in Havre de Grace and raised in Aberdeen. A 1973 graduate of Aberdeen High School, he was a member of its wrestling team. He also sang in the school's a cappella choir and was a member of the All-State Chorus and All-Eastern Chorus. He earned an associate's degree from Harford Community College and a bachelor's degree in business in 1977 from the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va. Mr. Dare had worked as an accountant for the Boys & Girls Clubs of Lancaster, Pa., before becoming business administrator in 1984 at the John Carroll School in Bel Air. He also taught accounting and business classes, and coached junior varsity wrestling.

SAN FRANCISCO - A long-standing custody fight over the famed guitars of the late Grateful Dead lead-man Jerry Garcia finally has ended, setting the stage for an auction of a storied - and intensely coveted - piece of rock history. After nearly a year of on-again, off-again litigation, lawyers announced Monday that they had reached agreement on the ownership of the five instruments that had been handmade for Garcia by Bay Area luthier Doug Irwin, and then bequeathed back to their maker.