The disastrous festival Jerry Garcia said was Jimi Hendrix’s “best performance ever”
I went to see a band called Maruja a few months back, and they dedicated 15 minutes of their set to an improvised jam section. I’ve never seen jam bands like the Grateful Dead live, although I am a big fan of the concept, and in those 15 minutes, I had it reaffirmed how much time I have for improvised music.
For a bit more context, Maruja are an incredibly political band. A lot of their songs talk about corruption and inequality in great, intricate and well-thought-out detail. They fill the role of protest band incredibly well. However, that improvised section was protest music at its most raw and grounded. The sound becomes less about the world at large and more about what’s happening in that room at that moment. That could be a sense of dread, fear, excitement, or euphoria; regardless, it was left on that stage and won’t ever return.
The Grateful Dead were always notoriously hard to define. Even their publicists struggled to put together some kind of description of them because the appealing nature of the band was constantly evolving. However, that improvised feel and the special moment created by the band and the listener are probably the closest you can come to understanding why people love them so much. They bundle up the past, present, and future in their shows and present them to you in a well-wrapped package.
Improvisation is something that I wish happened a bit more regularly in modern music. Everything feels a bit too structured at times, and I believe there is room for a random guitar solo or on-the-spot variation of a song. It was something that the Grateful Dead excelled at, as they would use their studio recordings as good guidance for their shows, but then would move things around and change the style depending on various factors. A great deal of Jimi Hendrix’s live performances were also improvised. Once again, he would use his songs to give him a chord structure and tempo, but then would let his guitar do the talking.
Given their styles overlapped somewhat in this regard, it’s not a huge surprise that Jerry Garcia was a big fan of Hendrix. The two knew each other and would occasionally hang out if they were playing the same shows. This happened at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, as both acts were playing. Garcia said the Grateful Dead’s set was a disaster, as they had always struggled to win crowds over at big festivals; however, when discussing Hendrix, he said it might have been one of the guitarist’s greatest ever shows.
“Jimi Hendrix, I feel it was one of his best performances ever. Yeah, well, we’d been hanging out with him a little bit before the shows and during the previous days,” he recalled. “He was a really nice guy, I knew him from when he played with John Hammond, so, you know, he wasn’t a complete stranger.”
When discussing what about Hendrix’s set he was so impressed with, Garcia mentioned the music, but also said that the visuals of the show were also stunning. “The whole visual quality of what was doing and the power trio stuff,” he concluded. “It wasn’t a surprise to me exactly, but he did it with such panache, you know? It was spectacular. It was great.”
