When he was four, Jerry Garcia’s mother, Tiff, chopped off the middle finger of his right hand with an axe. It was an accident; she was cutting redwood sticks to use as kindling for the fire pit. Remarkably, this did not stop him becoming a superb bluegrass and rock guitarist.

Years later, the finger was offered for sale; it was a scam, but, by then, anything owned by Garcia had become sacred. He had many health problems, including acute asthma, and possibly including the effects of his drug-taking. He died aged 53 exactly 30 years ago on 9 August 1995.

Many rock and pop stars from that period have died – or survived as international legends – but Garcia was different, very different. He was the leader and creator of the Grateful Dead, a band which, in its prime, produced three of the greatest of all LPs (as they were once called). In two remarkable years – 1969 and 1970 – they released Live Dead, Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty.

He was political – basically a gentle anarchist – and he was religious. Both impulses were products of an age of far-left politics, hippies, drugs and an understandable postwar and Cold War dismay at the state of the US and the world. In simple corporate terms there was also the threat of the ‘English invasion’. Americans assumed they would always lead the world in non-classical music, but the arrival of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Who had become yet another threat to match Soviet missiles.

Garcia was American to the core. He was born and grew up in California. He was a drifter, not least because of familial trauma – his father drowned the same year as he lost his finger – and, like most drifters, there was something he wanted to know but he did not know what it was. At first – and wildly improbably – he thought he would find it in the discipline and companionship of the army. He joined in April 1960 and was kicked out in December having shown ‘lack of suitability to the military life’. But, in that time, he had met blues and bluegrass players and guitar pickers (i.e., not strummers) and he was on his way.

He was a natural and his timing could not have been better. He became a phenomenally gifted musician and, with his foundation of the Grateful Dead in 1965, a global star. He had, by then, absorbed the rising counterculture.

This included a widespread demand for violent action against the government, but Garcia preferred to simply ignore Washington. He said its power was illusory, adding: ‘The government is not in a position of power in this country.’ There was not a violent bone in his body.

‘We would all like to live an uncluttered life, a simple life, a good life, and think about moving the whole human race ahead a step.’

This led the ‘Dead’ (as they were known) to become flag-bearers for the non-violent counterculture. They played at the student takeover of Columbia University, at Woodstock, and outside San Quentin prison on behalf of the Black Panthers.

The non-violence of the counter-culturists was not entirely innocent because they were powered by drugs: LSD and cannabis for the dreamers, heroin and cocaine for the ravers. At the dreaming end of it all was Garcia – acid and dope were his constant companions. This put dreamers not only at risk but also at the mercy of the courts. Garcia had once said about the government: ‘What do they actually do that affects a person’s life? Not much.’ In fact, quite a lot. He was arrested several times. Washington had serious power over those who aspired to be free.

Taking all that into account, what was Jerry Garcia all about? Those three great albums I mentioned are the heart of the matter. First, they were examples of supreme musicianship, a combination of blues, bluegrass, country, jazz, pop and, I suspect, many more influences than I can imagine. Then, especially on American Beauty, there was a kind of union, musical, of course, but also of the countercultural culture of the time.

For all their criticism, the hippies, yippies and the rest were in love with America. Whitman the poet and Thoreau the philosopher were their antecedents. They had the same dream of America as a simpler, better place. Their music, like that of Robbie Robertson and the Band, is a form of Americana, an eclectic gathering of forms and style, a way of celebrating the whole of America through its native musical forms.

At their finest moments the Dead captured that. And, for me, their very finest moment was a song called ‘Ripple’ on American Beauty. It is dream-like, sung by Garcia at his gentle best, and it expresses his longing for a mysterious, religious fulfilment.  I always choke up on the last line: ‘If I knew the way I would take you home.’