Welcome to the Web world of Garcia: An American Life, and other projects associated with me, your humble author, Blair Jackson. This site was built initially to accommodate overflow material from Garcia: An American Life, my biography of Grateful Dead guitarist/singer/songwriter Jerry Garcia, which was published August 1, 1999 by the good people at Viking Books. 

I recommend that you click on the "About the Book" button to the left for a more detailed description of what's on here (in "Cutting Room Floor") and why. The other major feature we have up now is "JG on CD," an extensive critical discography covering most of Jerry Garcia's recorded work with the Grateful Dead, as a solo artist and as a session player on albums by others.

What you see here now are my first baby steps on the Web. I hope you'll forgive the lack of zippy moving graphics, zillions of links and a lot of the other cool stuff you've probably grown accustomed to in your Web surfing. My main goal was to get this information up at the time the book was published in as simple a form as possible; maybe up the road we can get into cosmetic improvements and mind-blowing visuals. In the coming months, too, I hope to add more areas to explore, including a more detailed bibliography, listing the sources of all the quotes in the book and in the Web site additions; some favorite reviews, stories and interviews I've written over the past 25 years for a variety of publications (and not just about Grateful Dead-related artists); and more current interviews and reviews that will form the backbone of what I hope will be a free online version of The Golden Road, the Dead fanzine my wife, Regan, and I published between 1984 and 1993.

I’d love to hear your opinions about the book, the site and just about anything else that’s on your mind.

Take care, everybody!

—Blair Jackson