The one band Jerry Garcia said was never interesting: “What I grew up with”
It takes a certain kind of listener to get on the same kind of creative wavelength that Jerry Garcia was on.
As much as the Grateful Dead were about creating a communal atmosphere whenever they played together onstage, there was never any doubt that Garcia was the one steering the ship throughout most of their career. But even by the standards of the guitar genius, there were more than a few rock and rollers that weren’t nearly as groundbreaking as they could be.
And if you look back at the Dead’s track record, it’s not like Garcia was willing to step in the same shit twice whenever he played. His music was an ever-evolving tapestry of sound whenever he performed, and when he started working on some of his best material, it was always about trying to get the perfect sound for whatever the song needed rather than working on whatever tricky lick he could shoehorn into whatever song he was working on.
Even when he was working on other people’s records, a song like ‘Teach Your Children’ by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young wouldn’t be nearly as beautiful without his pedal steel guitar. But when you look at what Garcia was playing on a lot of the greatest Grateful Dead records, it’s not like he was trying to reinvent the wheel all the time. It was about showing people genres that they hadn’t heard before, which was sorely needed by the time the late 1960s rolled around.
While the hippy movement opened up a whole new world of possibilities, Garcia’s tastes went much further than rock. If he were to have been born a decade later, he would have probably embraced the idea of being in a fusion band, but for the era when the Haight-Ashbury scene was the biggest thing in the world, all Garcia wanted was to move away from the tired blues tropes that everyone else had been doing.
Because even by rock and roll standards, the biggest bands of the time were into the blues a little bit too much after a while. The Yardbirds were already dropping their guitarists like flies half the time, but whereas someone like Eric Clapton was a purist whenever he performed, it didn’t take Jimmy Page long to go in a much different direction when he worked with Led Zeppelin. A lot of that came from ingenuity, but Garcia felt that The Rolling Stones were getting way too complacent.
Despite having a love for bands like The Beatles, Garcia felt that The Stones never really took off for him because of how stagnant they became, saying, “The Stones were what I grew up with. It was just a retake of those old Chess records. It was all stuff I’d heard before. I understood the way it worked and the way it functions. It wasn’t the music so much that interested me.”
But for The Stones, their form of rebellion was the blues half the time. A lot of those early records had seen them trying to follow in the footsteps of their blues idols, but when they started making records to compete with the Fab Four like Between the Buttons and Their Satanic Majesties Request, they needed to shed their skin and mature a little bit before they had tunes like ‘Gimme Shelter’ and ‘Brown Sugar’ under their belt.
They might not have claimed to be the most original band in the world, but that was beside the point half the time. What mattered was whether they could make the crowds move whenever they performed, and looking at how many people are still listening to ‘Satisfaction’, the band gave their crowds more than their fair share of thrills whenever they played.
