“Jerry Garcia could hear”: Why Bob Dylan thought the Grateful Dead played his songs better
Whenever Bob Dylan went into the studio to make one of his masterpieces, I don’t really think that playing everything perfectly was on his mind.
He was always looking to capture a feeling on each of his records, and if he was worried about the music sounding absolutely perfect, chances are he would have made sure that his harmonica didn’t sound like a clothespin going through your ears when it started to overtake the mix on some of his early acoustic records. What mattered was the lyrics and the melody, and Dylan felt that many of his songs were meant to be carried on by other bands.
After all, that’s what some of the greatest songwriters before him had done. Carole King and Gerry Goffin were giving their songs away to other people when they began their career in New York, and while Woody Guthrie has one of the most world-worn voices of all time, his way of interpreting traditional tunes and encouraging others to carry on what he was doing was what Dylan was after when he first picked up a guitar.
And it’s not like there haven’t been a wealth of great Dylan covers over the years. Not all of them are to Dylan’s taste, and he will gladly tell you that he thinks when a band like Guns N’ Roses didn’t really understand what they were doing when they were covering one of his tunes, but there are always going to be moments when he felt privileged to have someone like Johnny Cash cover one of his tunes. No matter if you don’t like country music or not, getting ‘The Man in Black’ to cover your tune is like being sanctified by a musical god.
If you look at where rock and roll was heading, though, a lot of Dylan’s music seemed to be expanding by leaps and bounds in the 1960s. Not all of his songs really needed to cater to fitting in the pop song framework, and some of the best tunes in his catalogue are when he continues for several verses at a time, each one more captivating than the next. That’s what made Bruce Springsteen stand at attention, but Jerry Garcia was paying attention as well.
The Grateful Dead were a much different band than what Dylan was used to, but they could at least recognise what Dylan was doing. His way of bringing in new lyrics and improvising wasn’t all that different from a jazz player jamming, and when they started doing some of his songs in concert, Dylan felt that there were some moments where their versions managed to outshine what he was doing half the time.
The lyrics were still the primary focus, but what they were doing with his songs was a lot closer to what Dylan was hearing in his head, saying, “Some of these arrangements I just take. The Dead did a lot of my songs, and we’d just take the whole arrangement, because they did it better than me. Jerry Garcia could hear the song in all my bad recordings, the song that was buried there. So if I want to sing something different, I just bring out one of them Dead records and see which one I wanna do.”
But it’s going to take a lot of arguing to say that Dylan and the Dead is one of the best pieces that either of them made. It’s clear that Dylan was happy to be working with that kind of group, but when looking at how Dylan approaches some of his performances to this day, it makes more sense for him to make something that didn’t have to rely on the same kind of jamming mentality that they had.
Somewhere along the way, the actual song tended to get lost more than a few times, but Dylan’s reverence for the band went beyond being able to play the best music that he could with them. He wanted the chance to learn from what they were doing, and a lot of his later records felt like him taking that same rambling mentality and applying it to how he wrote his own masterpieces like ‘Murder Most Foul’ or ‘Highlands’.
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