After high school, he drifted for a while and, after getting into a few scrapes, he went and joined the army, but it didn't suit him and, after collecting 8 AWOLs and a number of other courts-martial, he was discharged. In 1957, at the age of 15, he got his first guitar and began to learn the basics so he could play along with the rock and roll hits of the time, his then favorite guitarist was Chuck Berry.
He listened to a lot of jazz and country music on the radio and then fell in love with the sounds of rock and roll when it began to cause a stir in the mid-1950s. He was a well read teenager and showed a talent for Art which would become a lifelong interest for him. Jerry spent a lot of his youth with his grandparents as well as suffering from bouts of asthma that at times left him bedridden. At the age of 4, he lost the middle finger of his right hand in a woodcutting accident with older brother, Tiff, who cut it off by mistake and, a year later, tragedy struck again when he watched his father drown in a river during a fishing accident. Garcia, whose mother was a registered nurse and whose father, Jose, was a small time jazz musician, had a troubled childhood. One of the most prolific and iconic guitarists of the second half of the 20th Century, Jerome John Garcia was born in San Francisco, California, USA on August 1st 1942.