Where Are They Buried? (66 page)

As his band steamrolled through the 1970s, Jerry also pursued an array of side projects, including the bluegrass group Old And In The Way, guest spots with a number of popular artists, solo efforts, and touring with his own Jerry Garcia Band in the lulls between Dead tours. In the next decade though, Jerry’s solo output slowed as he battled heroin addiction, and in 1986 Deadheads were spooked when Jerry went into a diabetic coma, from which he emerged seemingly unscathed five days later.

By the time the 1990s rolled around, the Dead was a cultural powerhouse and a concert phenomenon that couldn’t misstep; even a line of Jerry-designed ties netted a few million dollars. But Jerry had sunk back into heroin addiction. In the summer of 1995
he entered Serenity Knolls, a drug-rehabilitation facility in the hills north of San Francisco and, while struggling to overcome his chemical dependency there, Captain Trips died of a heart attack. He was found dead during a routine bed check, expiring in a very Spartan room that contained little more than a dresser and a closet. Witnesses said, “it looked like he just went to sleep.”

At 53, Jerry was cremated. Some of his ashes were scattered in the Pacific Ocean and others were placed in the Ganges River near the town of Rishikesh, India.

While Jerry’s death spelled the end of the Dead as a continuing creative entity, the story was far from over, and the band’s merchandising arm went into overdrive. In addition to
Dick’s Picks
, a series of archival releases of classic live material, licensed products ranging from Dead tee shirts to sporting goods flooded the market. Plans were even announced for Terrapin Station, an interactive museum site.

In December 1995 the remaining band members announced that the Grateful Dead was officially disbanding. But in 2002, the Dead rose, coming together for shows billed as “a Grateful Dead Family Reunion.”

JULY 14, 1912 – OCTOBER 3, 1967

Borne of Oklahoma hardscrabble people, Woody Guthrie had almost no formal education, his father died drunk, and his mother killed his only sister in an insane rage. But out of that heartache and adversity, and as a caustic witness to the impasses that mark the psyche of America’s everyman—oil field busts, labor union lockouts, Depression and Dust Bowl despair, World War horror, and Cold War paranoia—Woody bequeathed his inimitable folk songs and colloquial prose.

At 18, long after his family had broken up, the oil prosperity of Woody’s hometown went bust, and he began a journey that he never entirely abandoned (that is, until he was institutionalized for the last dozen years of his life). By 1933, he was married with three children and living in Texas but, while the Great Depression had made it hard to scrape together an existence, the Dust Bowl that hit in 1935 made it nearly impossible. Leaving his family behind, Woody and his guitar embarked on a Steinbeck-ian odyssey, joining the mass migration of Okie refugees who plodded westward in search of opportunity.

By the time he arrived, hungry and broke, in California in 1937, Woody had suffered the scorn of the outsider, a badge he wore the
rest of his life. After walking into a Los Angeles radio station, he became a regular, performing his corpus of “people’s songs”: “I Ain’t Got No Home,” “Talking Dust Bowl Blues,” and “Hard Travelin’,” among dozens of others. The radio gig provided Woody a pulpit for commentary on everything from unionists to legislators, from Jesus Christ to John Dillinger. Not surprisingly, he railed against the establishment; he even abdicated his own rights in a songbook of lyrics: “This song is copyrighted for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin’ it without our permission will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do. W.G.”

Never comfortable in one place for too long, Woody hitchhiked east in 1940 and, along the way, wrote, “This Land is Your Land,” inspired by Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” In New York, Woody was embraced for his “authenticity,” and cultural anthropologist Alan Lomax recorded him in a series of conversations and songs that are today’s folk music touchstones. Then, in what seemed to be a departure from his philosophies, Woody accepted an obligation from the Bonneville Power Commission to write songs for a film promoting the development of the Columbia River and its newly constructed Grand Coulee Dam. The resulting
Columbia River Songs
was yet another remarkable collection.

Amidst all this activity, Woody remarried and, in a period of relative domestic stability, completed a semi-autobiographical account of the Dust Bowl,
Bound for Glory
. While World War II raged, he had four children with this second wife, but even they were not enough to exempt him from the draft, and he served until 1946.

Returning home to Coney Island, Woody formed the Weavers with Pete Seeger, which became the most successful folk group of its era. But after just a few years, restless and disillusioned with New York’s “sissified and nervous rules of censorship,” he rolled out again and, in California, married a third time. Around this time, Woody’s behavior became unpredictable and his guitar-playing erratic. Confused about his condition, he took the only reasonable course of action and hit the road yet again, eventually tracing a path back to New York.

After being mistakenly diagnosed with everything from alcoholism to schizophrenia, in 1954 Woody admitted himself to a New Jersey hospital. It was later learned that he suffered from Huntington’s Chorea, a degenerative disease of the nervous system that would slowly steal from him every physical and mental capacity. Upon learning that the affliction is inherited maternally, Woody realized that it had also been responsible for his little sister’s death.

For the next dozen years, Woody deteriorated in a shuffle among various infirmaries, while his hundreds of songs were made popular by the newest folk revival. Finally unable to sit up or even speak, Woody died at 55 at a hospital in Queens, New York.

Woody was cremated and family members, including his son, Arlo (also a folk singer), threw his container of ashes into the ocean. Waves soon tossed it back onto the beach, so for a second attempt, the container was opened to prevent floating and, while the wind whipped some of the ash back into their faces, the ghost of Woody Guthrie slipped beneath the Atlantic surf.

JULY 6, 1925 – FEBRUARY 9, 1981

Bill Haley led country-and-western bands around the Philadelphia area beginning in 1942, but by the early 1950s he had morphed the style of his band, the Comets, into a new sound that would eventually become rock and roll.

In fact, it can be fairly argued that Bill is the true father of rock music, which he bore at around 4:30 p.m. on April 12, 1954, in a Manhattan sound studio. From the moment when the studio’s silence was broken by drummer Billy Gussak’s two sharp rim shots, music would never again be the same. After the drum opening, Bill Haley shouted out the inspired and immortal words, “One-two-three o’clock, four o’clock ROCK!” and the song “Rock Around the Clock” became the international anthem of rock music. The song was perfect and, though it’s since been covered by hundreds of artists, none has ever captured the special magic of Bill Haley and the Comets on that spring day in New York City.

Though “Rock Around the Clock” went to the stratosphere, the song proved to be Bill’s highwater mark and, throughout the remainder of his life, he was content to release just the occasional recording and tour with various rock and roll revival shows.

At 55, Bill died in his sleep of a heart attack at home in Harlingen, Texas. He was cremated and his ashes remain with his family.

JANUARY 21, 1941 – APRIL 22, 2013

Richie Havens landed in Greenwich Village when he was seventeen. He spent his days crouching his six-and-a-half-foot frame
in front of an easel, painting portraits of tourists to make a spare living during the day, while he perfected his earthy music style at night, playing several engagements at clubs with names like The Fat Black Pussycat. A couple of albums, including 1967’s
Mixed Bag,
gained him limited recognition but it was at the Woodstock music festival in 1969 that he strummed himself into rock music immortality by opening that epic event.

It wasn’t supposed to be that way. Richie was scheduled to be the fifth act on stage but when the equipment of other artists got stuck in traffic on the New York Thruway, opportunity banged on his dressing room door in the form of organizers who pressed him to start the show. “It was five o’clock and nothing was happening yet,” he remembered. “I was supposed to sing forty minutes, which I did, and from the side of the stage they go, ‘Richie, four more songs?’ I went back and did that, then it was, ‘Four more songs…’ and that kept happening ’til it was two hours and forty-five minutes later I had sung every song I knew.”

Sitting on a stool and strumming his openly-tuned acoustic guitar in a fervent but rhythmic style, his booming, gravel-road voice mesmerized the hippie crowd. But the most majestic moment of the set actually came as he began to run out of material. Reminiscing many years later Richie said he remembered “that word I kept hearing while I looked over the crowd in my first moments onstage. The word was: freedom.” Chanting that word over and over, backed by his second guitarist and conga player, he eventually segued into the gospel song “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” which he had heard in church as a kid. The combined, surging medley wasn’t just a crowd-pleaser; it later became a highlight of the
Woodstock
movie, which immortalized Richie and his orange dashiki.

In the years after Woodstock, Richie maintained his momentum, scoring a Top-20 hit in 1971 with a cover of George Harrison’s “Here Comes the Sun” and releasing a score of albums over thirty-five years, but it was onstage with his guitar that he was in his element. Touring constantly, he claimed that he never planned his shows beyond the opening and closing songs. “Many times people have come up to me after and they’d go, ‘I wrote these songs down for you to sing and you sang ’em all in a row!’ That’s the kind of communication that happens, you know,” he said. “It’s like if you let the audience lead, then you are the audience.”

At 72, Richie died of a sudden massive heart attack. He was cremated and his ashes scattered at the site of the original Woodstock festival in Bethel, New York.

AUGUST 22, 1917 – JUNE 21, 2001

John Lee Hooker was the son of a sharecropping Baptist minister who discouraged his child’s musical bent, but John’s stepfather later taught him to play guitar, and by the time he was a teenager, John was performing at local fish fries and dances. In 1945 he moved north to find work and, after landing in Detroit three years later, he recorded his first hit, a stomping guitar boogie called “Boogie Chillen’.”

John soon quit his janitorial job to pursue music full-time. He melded the country blues of his native Mississippi Delta with electric guitar and his hypnotic, one-chord jams—which often included no intelligible words, just a discord of humming and mumbling in a mysterious, stream-of-consciousness growl—became John’s hallmark. Over the next five decades, his foot-stomping songs, including “I’m In The Mood” and “Crawling King Snake,” cemented his reputation as a key shaper of the modern blues and, by default, rock music.

Interestingly, as much as John was the quintessential Mississippi bluesman, he didn’t succumb to the ills that often plagued his peers. He never had serious bouts with alcohol, drugs, or the law, and he didn’t die broke. In his later years, John enjoyed his success by tooling around in his fleet of expensive cars and, occasionally, dropping in unannounced to tear through his catalog of hits at smoky music joints.

Toward the end of his life, when his legacy was sealed as a grandfather of music, John remained confounded by his success and confessed, “People say I’m a genius but I don’t know about what.”

At 83, John died of natural causes at home in his sleep, and now rests at the Chapel of Chimes Mausoleum in Oakland, California.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Take the 51st Street exit from Highway 24 and follow it south for one mile. (Its name will change to Pleasant Valley Avenue along the way.) Turn left onto Piedmont Avenue and the mausoleum is a short distance ahead on the left at Number 4499.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the building through the glass doors toward the rear of the parking lot. Go to the end of the hall, turn left and then right, then take the elevator to the third floor. Out
of the elevator, turn left and then right, and John’s crypt is on the left, on the bottom after the French doors.

FEBRUARY 1, 1948 – AUGUST 6, 2004

With long hair styled in cascading braids and glistening jheri curls, Rick James found his fortune with a seminal triple-platinum album released in 1981 called
Street Songs
. The album catapulted Rick to the forefront of his new “punk funk” style and its gritty and sexually explicit content bolstered his bad boy reputation to a new zenith. Its biggest hit, “Super Freak,” featured a female subject who was “the kind of girl you don’t bring home to mother” but, as far as boys go, he may well have said the same thing about himself.

Interestingly, though the album sold dozens of times more copies than the relatively minor releases he had scored earlier, its success actually led to a parting between Rick and Motown as the label felt his graphic themes conflicted with the company’s more conservative approach.

The album and the Motown parting saddled Rick with a rep that was tough to live down, and the 1980s found him kicking the party boundaries further and further in an attempt to bust himself and other players out of any ordinary existence he called “L Seven.” Heavy involvement with methamphetamines and cocaine led to legal problems, health troubles, and, as one might expect, jail. In 1991 prosecutors said James and his girlfriend tied a woman to a chair, burned her with a hot crack pipe, and forced her to perform sex acts during a drug-induced binge at his home. While free on bail for those charges (of which he was eventually acquitted) he was arrested again, this time for punching a woman repeatedly in the face, and Rick ended up serving two years in Folsom Prison.