For more than thirty years, Jerome John Garcia played guitar and sang in the traveling menagerie and living social experiment called the Grateful Dead. What started as a jug band in Palo Alto evolved into a rock and roll institution, playing to audiences composed of both gray-bearded boomers and tie-dyed baby Deadheads. At the center of this phenomenon was Jerry, whose musical gifts and affable manner made him the symbol of all things magical. In Dark Star, we see Garcia through the eyes of those closest to him, who speak for the first time since his death: the ex-wives and lovers who did their best to make him happy but in the end always seemed to lose him to the road; the close friends who watched in helpless frustration as he battled a long-running heroin habit he tried again and again to kick; the children of fellow members of the Grateful Dead for whom he was the father he could never be to his own daughters; the musicians who looked up to him as a guru and an older brother.