By the time the Summer of Love rolled around in 1967, the Wisdom Dude’s road days were over — the low-end ones, anyway. I had opted for better than the Mars Hotels of the world at about the time I had opted out of alcohol as a drug of preference (the two seem to go together). My home was in the Tampa Bay area, where Jack Kerouac died, and where surrealist art was, and remains, mainstream — space and counterculture are married in Tampa Bay as they are in Southern California.

In my teens, I had discovered the writings of Albert Jay Nock, and through him, Mr. Jefferson — in his own words, rather than in textbook interpretations. I had become a libertarian, sans the cultist baggage of the Objectivists. But save for the beginnings of Paine’s "Crisis" pamphlets and Jefferson’s correspondence, there wasn’t much soul in it. "Freedom" was a word tossed about by political hacks committed to the destruction of the same.

But in 1967, I bought a record album with Godzilla on the cover and something new inside. I became a Grateful Dead convert — possibly too old to be a real Deadhead, as I was (and, obviously, still am) of the band’s own generation. In 1973 I saw the Dead — experienced them — in Tampa’s then-new, now gone Curtis Hixon Hall. Freedom suddenly had a sound.

The Grateful Dead sound will always, for me, be the sound of freedom. Some of Jerry’s solos evoke the feeling of "Calvin and Hobbes" for me — the strips that have Calvin streaking naked out the door, joyful, whooping in his freedom. The Grateful Dead for me was libertarian soul, and still is.

I will never forget or forgive President Clinton’s trying to trash Jerry on that terrible day in August ’95; I can only consider it petty jealousy. Clinton was not just dead wrong, he had it backwards: Jerry gave the American people a sound, an emotional component to the ideas of liberty so cherished by the American people and so feared by our government. No politician, no media sycophant — it is Jerry Garcia who is my man of the century.

Jerry Garcia, the leader of the band, the man who gave us the sound of freedom and the sheer joy of liberty: we may well be in debt to his memory forever. And well we should be! He gave us an American sound, blues, country-western, rock and roll . . . all our native forms. It was never the same way twice, but somehow, some way, it always lit the fires of liberty within us, and we can never forget. Nor can we ever be thankful enough.