How Jerry Garcia’s proudest album flopped: “Pathetically bad”
It’s easy to define why some bands are successful. Then you have other musical outfits where their success is tricky to put a finger on. Grateful Dead are a band who fall in the latter category.
The band is one of the most successful musical outfits on the planet; there is simply no escaping it. Despite the fact that Jerry Garcia is no longer with us, and the original line-up of the Grateful Dead continues to change, their goddamn success doesn’t dwindle. They continue to draw in big fucking crowds, and people continue to listen to their music. How do they do it?
Fans’ experiences with the Grateful Dead are always entirely subjective, but a lot of it is attached to their great live shows. They are famous for being an exceptional jam band who don’t rely too much on their actual songs but instead use them as a starting point to improvise and create live music that can only ever exist in the heat of the moment.
Jerry Garcia was well aware of just how special the band’s live sound was. It’s not just that it’s good to listen to, but it’s on a level so high that fans can’t help but feel somewhat spellbound by it, not just the quality, but the fact that the music only exists in that particular moment in time.
“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.”
Fans agreed. Guitarist Lenny Kaye once said that the band’s live album, Live/Dead, is one of the greatest records ever made, because it highlights the pinnacle of live performance. He admires the band’s ability to not rely too much on their songs but instead just use them as a jumping-off point rather than the entire backbone of the show.
“Live Dead explains why the Dead are one of the best-performing bands in America,” he said. “Why their music touches on ground that most other groups don’t even know exists… A list of song titles would mean very little in terms of what actually goes on inside the album.”
While Jerry Garcia will have no doubt been happy about the fact that the band were so well respected as a live outfit, it also led to disappointment within his solo career. He would work extensively on some of his studio albums, but because they didn’t have the same feel that their live shows did, fans wouldn’t be quite as attentive. It led to record sales that he was quick to call “pathetically bad”.
“The record I worked hardest at and liked best was Cats Under the Stars [a solo LP]. That was kind of like my baby,” said Garcia. “It did worse than any other record I ever did. I think I probably gave away more copies than I sold. It was amazingly, pathetically bad.”
Concluding, “But I’ve learned not to invest a lot of importance in ’em, although it’s nice to care about your work. As far as I personally am concerned, I don’t feel I’ve played that well on Grateful Dead records. I feel I’ve played better in shows, generally, and on other people’s records.”
