“Hard to understand”: the guitarist Jerry Garcia always wanted to jam with
Jerry Garcia could play on stage with pretty much anyone. His style lent itself to jamming in the best possible sense.
His band, Grateful Dead, became famous because of their improvised approach to music – yes, they went into the studio to record songs like any other band, but they didn’t stick to the strict boundaries of these recordings when playing live, as instead, their studio recordings acted as a blueprint, something which they could lean on but didn’t need to fully stand by.
“A list of song titles would mean very little in terms of what actually goes on inside the album,” said Lenny Kaye when explaining why the band’s live record, Live / Dead, is one of his favourite albums. “Like the early Cream, the Dead in concert tends to use their regular material as a jumping-off point, as little frameworks that exist only for what can be built on top of them.”
People loved attending their shows because of their unpredictable nature – no one ever knew what they were truly walking into when they went to a Grateful Dead gig, and because of the band’s innate ability to play live together, their shows ended up being a reflection of that specific moment over anything else. If you wanted to go to a gig and have a totally unique experience, there truly was nowhere better to go than a Grateful Dead gig.
“The Grateful Dead has some kind of intuitive thing – I don’t know what it is or how it works, but I recognise it phenomenologically,” said Garcia. “It’s been reported to me hugely from the audience, and we’ve compared notes about it among ourselves in the band. We’ve agreed that we’ll continue to keep trying to do this thing – whatever it is – and that one best attitude toward it is a sort of stewardship.”
Given they had such a reputation as a live band, there were a lot of famous artists who wanted to hit the road with them – for instance, Bob Dylan went on tour with the band, and they worked incredibly well together. It begs the question, though, who would Garcia want to play with if he had his pick of the lot? When this hypothetical was put to the Grateful Dead frontman, his pick was a surprise to many.
“Oh, yeah. I’d follow around Django Reinhardt, the Gypsy guitarist,” he said. “I have every single one of his records. Most of what he plays is hard to understand, no matter how much I’ve listened to it. Either he’s got fingers a half a mile long or — I just don’t know how he’s doing it. And he played all this with a messed-up left hand. His technique is awesome.”
Reinhardt certainly is an inspiration to many for both the reasons that Garcia highlighted above. Firstly, he was a phenomenal guitarist who could play solos and passages better than anyone who came before or has come since. However, perhaps the most impressive thing about the guitarist is how he managed to achieve such a sound without the use of two fingers on his fretting hand.
Following a caravan fire in 1928, Reinhardt suffered severe burns, which meant that his ring and pinky fingers on his left hand were no longer functional. These are pivotal digits for the majority of guitarists, and a lot of people may have thrown in the towel had they found themselves in this position, but Reinhardt wasn’t most people. He stayed committed to his craft, overcame adversity, and cemented himself as one of the greatest guitarists to ever live in doing so.
