Jerry Garcia’s favourite album that set a standard in guitar playing: “I’d never heard anything like it before”
Of all the big names that dominated the 1960s counterculture, none quite defined so authentically as the enduring blues noodlers Grateful Dead.
Formed in Santa Clara County in 1965, Grateful Dead and their de facto captain, Jerry Garcia, would drop a string of much-loved psychedelic jam records and garner a dedicated fanbase few bands can match with such community-like fervour. Burnished in the world of free gigs and festivals, the band would play countless unticketed shows and form central characters of much of the hippy era’s foundational cornerstones, from playing their first official set at Ken Kesey’s infamous Acid Test parties to forming the line-up of the mythic Woodstock Music and Art Fair.
Their captain was also never shy to offer his authoritative assessment of the bands of the day, be it praise or lambast. Growing up, the young Garcia had a deep and eclectic appreciation for music’s myriad flavours, loving rock and roll as a teen at odds with the Beat kids’ sniffy disapproval, embracing bluegrass and establishing an early regional reputation as a leading banjo player of the West Coast, and a healthy penchant for the soul hits pumped out of Motown.
It was the folk revivalism that would stand as a foundational era for Garcia, if not enamoured with its entirety. Ironically, it was when the original troubadour Bob Dylan went electric that Garcia began paying attention, on record for praising Bringing It All Back Home for possessing “a little more fun” and similarly inspiring his previous band, The Warlocks, to plug in their guitars.
A key character in Dylan lore is Joan Baez. Having been cutting records since 1960’s Folksingers ‘Round Harvard Square with Bill Wood and Ted Alevizos, Baez would soon establish a solo career with that year’s eponymous debut, borrowing elements of spiritual traditional music and later scoring the Civil Rights struggle with old The Almanac Singers member Pete Seeger and marching alongside Martin Luther King Jr.
Baez was instrumental in Dylan’s rise too, offering him a space on her 1961 tour and for a moment paraded by the press as Greenwich Village folk royalty.
Her intricate folk guitar style caught the attention of a young Garcia, in his own folk duo at the time with future Grateful Dead poet Robert Hunter. “When Joan Baez’s first record came out, I heard it, and I heard her finger-picking the guitar, Garcia once recollected. “I’d never heard anything like it before, so I got into that, and I started getting into country music, into old-time white music, mostly white spiritual stuff, white instrumental music, and I got into fingerstyle, the folk-music-festival scene, that whole thing; and I was very heavy into that for a long time…”
Garcia and Baez would join the stage together years later. Playing in San Francisco’s The Warfield for an Aids/HIV benefit show in 1987, winning plaudits among the crowd for their joint take on the traditional folk song ‘Turtle Dove’ and Dylan’s haunting ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’, eagerly taped by the Deadhead community for posterity.
