NEWS
By Jacques Kelly and Jacques Kelly,Sun reporter | September 18, 2007
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.
FEATURES
By Jonathan Pitts and Jonathan Pitts,sun reporter | June 30, 2007
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.
NEWS
By Gadi Dechter and Gadi Dechter,Sun reporter | February 25, 2007
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.
ENTERTAINMENT
By GENA R. CHATTIN GENA R. CHATTIN | February 22, 2007
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.
FEATURES
By Jonathan Pitts and Jonathan Pitts,SUN STAFF | August 9, 2005
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.
ENTERTAINMENT
August 4, 2005
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.