Former Los Angeles Times man Jim Newton, in his book Here Beside the Rising Tide, picked a representative subject through which to judge the achievements and excesses of the 1960s counterculture: Grateful Dead guitarist and singer Jerry Garcia.
Garcia served briefly in the U.S. Army before getting sucked into the nascent bohemia around the Menlo Park and San Francisco areas in the mid-'60s—one shaped partly by CIA experiments in giving LSD to citizens, including novelist Ken Kesey and Garcia's lyric-writing partner Robert Hunter. Garcia abjured electoral politics and world changing as a deliberate vocation (though Newton hits some insights by running Garcia's history alongside that of fellow California entertainer Ronald Reagan). But President Richard Nixon used Garcia in a campaign ad to represent the untamed American rebel youth many voters hoped he'd quash. Garcia's band made important appearances at many way stations in American culture, from Woodstock to Altamont to MTV to the early internet.
