‘Bringing It All Back Home’: the Bob Dylan album that changed Jerry Garcia’s life
Jerry Garcia is one of the enigmatic men of the golden era of rock. Famed for his pivotal role as part of the iconic jam band The Grateful Dead — a group that made its name on the pulsating and evolving live performances they toured — Garcia is rightly seen as one of the most creative members of the counterculture revolution.
For Garcia, music was about the moment. Whether that moment took him off course for the chorus was by the by; for Garcia, it wasn’t the destination but the journey that was important. This attitude, complemented by the band’s impressive musical chops, meant the group welcomed an unparalleled fandom that would shape their outlook and create one of the first instances of modern musical fandoms. But Garcia was a fan of plenty of other musicians himself.
That’s not to say that Garcia spent his time effusing on late-night TV shows about the latest and greatest acts he had seen. Instead, Garcia chose his words carefully and shared his love of those unique musicians who really stirred something inside him, including Bob Dylan. He often noted the impact of Bob Dylan on his life and once even went further to announce that one record from the freewheelin’ troubadour changed his entire life.
Garcia and Dylan shared a special relationship, too. Not only did Dylan act as a guiding light for the songwriting style that would dominate the airwaves in the sixties and beyond, influencing both The Grateful Dead and Garcia’s solo work, but when Dylan was down on his luck, Garcia and the band extended an invite to join them on tour.
1987 would see Dylan and The Dead tour across America, but it was back in 1965 that the first rumblings of Bob Dylan hit Garcia and took his breath away. However, it wasn’t always that way.
“I never used to like Bob Dylan until he came out with electric music,” he once explained when noting a selection of his favourite albums of all time. “And I’m not sure why I like that more. I sure liked it a lot more. Boy, when Bringing It All Back Home came out. Yeah, lovely. Very fine guitar player. [Bruce Langhorne] It just all of a sudden had something going for it.” The guitarist continued, “Beautiful, mad stuff. And that turned us all on; we couldn’t believe it.”
Garcia expanded on that viewpoint when he spoke to Rolling Stone in 1972, sharing that prior to the release of Bringing It All Back Home, his interest in Bob Dylan, the folk artist, was minimal. “Back in the folk music days I couldn’t really dig this stuff, but on Bringing It All Back Home, he was really saying something that I could dig, that was relevant to what was going on in my life at the time. Whether he intended it that way or not is completely unimportant.”
It was a similar feeling that countless artists could attest to. Before Bob Dylan, the idea of sharing one’s own expression — something rooted in one’s reality — was completely unheard of on the pop charts. Dylan would inspire The Beatles’ own John Lennon and Paul McCartney to even change their ways. However, outside of the industry, Dylan changed things in a seismic way for the audience at home, purely by connecting with people.
The Grateful Dead began rehearsing in Palo Alto in 1965, the same year Dylan released Bringing It All Back Home and we imagine it may have helped push Garcia, Bob Weir and the rest of the band toward their pinnacle at the top of the jam-rock circuit.
The power of Bob Dylan shouldn’t be underestimated, as Garcia neatly surmised in 1972: “Dylan was able to tell you the truth about that other thing. He was able to talk about the changes that you’d go through, the bummers and stuff like that – and say it in a good way, the right way.”
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