How to get out of a rut, according to Jerry Garcia
Jerry Garcia had a fascinating devotion to the guitar. The Grateful Dead axeman is now rightfully seen as one of the most innovative and technically proficient players in rock history, but Garcia didn’t get there by chance. If happened to encounter him at home, in the studio, or backstage before a show, chances were good that you would have seen Garcia practising his scales in an endless pursuit to perfect his chops.
Garcia was admittedly hard on himself when it came to his own playing. While being interviewed by Jas Obrecht for a 1985 feature in Frets Magazine, Garcia was asked when he felt like he played his best. “It’s something where I don’t know when I’m going to play my best,” Garcia shares. “Sometimes I can’t even judge if it’s my best or not until, say, later on, if I listen to a tape.”
“Almost all the time, when I listen to a tape, I can’t believe it’s me,” Garcia added. “My own mental image of myself is that I play a lot worse than I actually do, and I’m usually surprised when I listen to the tapes.” When asked if he’s self-critical about his playing, Garcia laughs and says that it’s “almost to the point of nihilism.”
“If it was left up to me, if I never heard anything, I think I would have given up long ago,” Garcia admits. When the follow-up question involves getting out of creative ruts, Garcia illuminates the conversation with some surprising advice.
“When I feel like I’m really seriously stale, that’s when I start to crack books,” Garcia says, “Because you really need something to move. And there’s so much to music, there’s no excuse for feeling stale. Nobody’s such a great musician that they can be burnt out on all music. And so, for me, it’s a matter of finding something. It’s just a matter of going out, putting a little bit of effort into it, and I can almost always find something that I don’t know anything about and start a sort of ‘itch-scratch’ cycle.”
Garcia also admits that, at the time of the interview, there was “no one who really knocks me out completely. There’s nothing that I hear right now that really makes me want to dash to my guitar. But there’s plenty of stuff in the past. If I go looking for stuff, I can find it, but there’s nobody really playing right now who kills me.”
Garcia called the music of the mid-1980s “pretty derivative” but admits to tuning into MTV occasionally to see if anyone can truly inspire him.
Check out Garcia’s full interview for Frets down below.
