David Crosby Pens Poem for Jerry Garcia's 70th Birthday

'He'd tell the truth about real music/He knew the truth long before he fell'

David Crosby

Today would have marked the 70th birthday of Jerry Garcia, who died on August 9th, 1995 of a heart attack at 53 years old. In honor of the Grateful Dead icon, David Crosby has written a poem, "Cause I'm Missing Jerry Tonight." The full text of the poem is below.

Cause I'm missing him tonight

If I had to pick one of us to speak for us all
He would have done the job well
Coming from some crazy angle
He'd have known which story to tell
he'd tell the truth about real music
he knew the truth long before he fell

His fingers would touch his guitar neck
My axe would be pressed to my chest
A chord and a melody would walk in the door
Closely followed by all of the rest
Magic and tragic and triumph and storm
and all the things we had sought on our quest

You get your ego out of the way of your hearts
The whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts

A sort of field pops into existence
Everything lifts off the ground
You know that you're doing what you were born to do
That you're using the gift that you've found
To create some lift and break all the chains
with which all our people are bound
he did it for all the right reasons
and made all of our mistakes
a more human man you could not find
an accelerator without the brakes
but he had the brains and the heart and the spirit
Garcia really had what it takes

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