Former Grateful Dead videographer Len Dell’Amico offers an intimate look at life with Jerry Garcia in his new memoir, Friend of the Devil: My Wild Ride with Jerry Garcia and Grateful Dead.
Dell’Amico collaborated with Garcia and the Dead on numerous projects between 1980 and 1991, from recording 60 concerts in high-end, multi-camera video shoots and producing the first national pay-per-view broadcast at Radio City Music Hall to making the iconic music videos for “Hell in a Bucket” and “Throwing Stones” and releasing So Far, a bestselling, award-winning home video released project, with Garcia in 1987.
In his memoir, he characterizes Jerry as a humble and virtuous Christ-like figure, who rejected fame and excess in favor of a monk-like existence, despite being one of the world’s biggest rock stars. In a chapter entitled “The Zen of Jerry”, he illustrates Jerry’s simple lifestyle by describing his bare-bones closet, with just a few t-shirts, flannels, and pairs of pants, and casts him as the leader of a “spiritual movement,” calling Grateful Dead concerts “fundamentally a spiritual experience, more like going to church than any other musical act I have ever worked with.”
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In another characterizing passage, he describes a disagreement between Garcia and one of his fellow bandmates about whether to fire an employee accused of stealing from the band. Garcia, he says, advocated for forgiveness, suggesting there was no need to cast out someone who clearly needed the money more than they did.
“In that moment, I had a revelation,” Dell’Amico writes. “He (Garcia) was not playing it for laughs. He was actually quite serious, reminding his friend in the gentlest way possible that he was one of us, invoking the ancient tribal stance of solidarity first, and also the Christian code of empathy for the weakest among us, teaching that we must take care of each other first and foremost.”
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Of course, Garcia was also known for indulging in certain vices, and Dell’Amico discusses those too, including the time Garcia offered him a hit of “Persian smoking powder,” a combination of heroin and cocaine.
Coming straight from someone who was right by Jerry’s side during the height of the Grateful Dead’s power, the book offers new insight into both the sage-like nature and the all too human tendencies of one of the 20th century’s most venerated cultural icons.
Friend of the Devil: My Wild Ride with Jerry Garcia and Grateful Dead is available for pre-order with a ship/release date of April 15th. Dell’Amico will join Blair Jackson in conversation at Book Passage in Corte Madera at 6 p.m. on April 11th. Admission is free. Find more information here.