Why Proof named his only album after Jerry Garcia: “I never fucked with Grateful Dead”
D12 member Proof only managed to release one solo album before his untimely death in 2006. It came out just a year before that, and it bore an unexpected title.
Searching for Jerry Garcia was released on August 9, 2005, via Proof’s own label, Iron Fist Records. It was, indeed, named after the Grateful Dead frontman, who died on August 9, 1995. In other words, Proof’s album was released precisely ten years after Garcia’s death.
Proof wasn’t exactly the most obvious Jerry Garcia fan in the world, so his reverence for the late rocker was a little bit surprising. As a matter of fact, Proof himself once admitted that he didn’t actually listen to the Grateful Dead very much at all.
In an interview posted to The TRshady Forum following his death, Proof explains that he wasn’t a fan of the Dead while he was growing up. “Nah,” he said, “I never fucked with the Grateful Dead like that. I’m straight out on some hood shit or whatever you wanna call it, I just happened to see a documentary on his life and at that point in my life he touched me in that moment, my moment that I shared with him touched me enough to redirect my album in that direction.”
Proof elaborated on his discovery of Jerry Garcia in a published interview with Rolling Stone. “I was watching Searching for Bobby Fisher and Mark Hicks [D12’s manager] put in a Jerry Garcia documentary,” he explained. “In this movie, he talked about never doing the same show twice. I did that to D12 sets overseas. Plus, he didn’t care about record sales—he just wanted to make fans happy.”
As Proof explained in the unpublished interview that was uploaded to The TRshady Forum, he came to view Garcia as the “epitome of what it is to be an artist.” While their styles of music were drastically different, Proof nonetheless felt they were similar souls.
“He crossed boundaries,” he said, “he took protests, he did everything. His momentum wasn’t built off record sales, his momentum was built off the love of what music was to him and of what music he wanted to make, so that made me want to fuck with Jerry Garcia and the artist he was.”
It wasn’t all positives that made Proof relate to Garcia. “Plus his demise came through drugs, stress and poor diet,” he noted, “which, even if you don’t have all three, you got one of them motherfuckers in your life. Whether you’re fucking with some weed or not eating right with some McDonald’s, you feel me? We find Jerry Garcia in that type of shit, so we all searching for him in a way. You just don’t know it.”
Still, admiring Garcia and taking inspiration from him is one thing. But Proof actually wanted to use his name in the title of his album, plus he wanted to incorporate references to him in the artwork. Achieving all that would be a legal matter, but, as he explained to Rolling Stone, this turned out not to be a problem.
“I called his estate, and I couldn’t believe they gave me permission [to use the name]!” he said. “They didn’t ask for money. So I’m like a disciple, preaching the gospel of Jerry Garcia. The dude is phenomenal.”