Jerry Garcia’s Last Recording Wasn’t with the Grateful Dead
Jerry Garcia’s last known recording session was July 16, 1995 — not with the Grateful Dead, but in David Grisman’s basement studio in Mill Valley, California. The song was “Blue Yodel Number Nine,” a Jimmie Rodgers tune for a Bob Dylan tribute album. Twenty-four days later, Garcia was dead.
This is the story of how Grisman’s basement became the only place Jerry Garcia could breathe — and why the Garcia/Grisman sessions from 1990 to 1995 represent the most honest music of Garcia’s final years.
Garcia and Grisman first met in 1964 at a bluegrass show at Sunset Park in West Grove, Pennsylvania — two kids jamming in a parking lot. By 1967, Garcia was already pushing musical boundaries, sitting in with avant-garde jazz legend Ornette Coleman and exploring the experimental spirit that would define his career. Six years later, Grisman played mandolin on “Ripple” and “Friend of the Devil” from the Grateful Dead’s American Beauty. In 1973, they formed Old and In the Way with Peter Rowan, John Kahn, and Vassar Clements. Then they didn’t speak for over a decade — until the Rex Foundation reconnected them in 1990.
Over the next five years, Garcia and Grisman recorded dozens of sessions at Grisman’s Acoustic Disc studio, producing the Grammy-nominated Garcia/Grisman album (1991), Not for Kids Only (1993), Shady Grove (1996), and the legendary Pizza Tapes with Tony Rice. They performed on The Late Show with David Letterman on September 15, 1993. Their story is captured in the documentary Grateful Dawg, directed by Gillian Grisman.
