Words & Music by Mike Power

The Grateful Dead had Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, and Bill Kreutzman when they started out. They also had Mickey Hart, Donna and Keith Godchaux, Tom Constanten and Brent Mydland, as well as lyric geniuses Robert Hunter and John Perry Barlow. And they had Pigpen.

Pigpen is the one on the left

Ron McKernan was the heart and soul of the Grateful Dead in their early days and an inspiration that still burns in the performances of its surviving members.

Pigpen dropped out of school when he was 16 and started hanging out in clubs where he met Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir with whom he formed Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions. Pigpen pushed them to go electric and with the addition of Phil Lesh on bass and Bill Kreutzman on drums they became the Warlocks and then the Grateful Dead.

There was a fire in Pigpen that burned through the band and the San Francisco music scene. He played keyboard and harmonica and sang the shit out of any song he lent his lungs to.

With Janis

According to his friend, the DJ Dusty Street, “he drank himself to death. Toward the end, he was real skinny — real skinny, man his arms were skinnier than mine. He was down to about 126 pounds, and in his prime he was 180. He drank junk — Ripple and Thunderbird, even Thunderbird mixed with raspberry Kool-Aid. And even after he was making some money, the highest-grade lush he ever drank was Bourbon Deluxe. He was never quite sober, even when he woke up in the morning; he’d wake up drunk.To make it worse, he used to drink and not eat. We all were telling him not to drink, for years. Then he got sick, and he couldn’t drink any more.”

His landlady found him on the floor next to his bed, dead from the hemorrhaging of blood vessels around his liver. He was 27 years old. He would have turned 72 yesterday.

Here he is the year before he died performing “Mr. Charlie,” a song he wrote with Robert Hunter: