Jerry Garcia named his favourite Pink Floyd album
The Grateful Dead were never meant to be the kind of music for commercial singles. For anyone who has ever indulged in the band’s catalogue, the music is responsible for making a range of musical colours that your mind’s eyes could never see before. No one writes that kind of music without an eclectic list of influences, but Garcia thought Pink Floyd’s The Wall was one of the greatest album statements that he had ever heard.
When looking at how both bands were brought up, The Dead and Floyd have each had their origin stories in the world of psychedelic rock. Whereas Garcia was looking to make massive jams that reflected the kind of optimism of the late 1960s, Pink Floyd would be marred by controversy before they had even released their second record, with Syd Barrett falling prey to his internal demons.
As Roger Waters struggled to pick up where Barrett had left off on A Saucerful of Secrets, The Dead were already moving on to the next phase of their career. While it was easy to detect hints of bluegrass and country music in their sound, Garcia was starting to figure out ways to make his guitar talk throughout their best material.
Going through their next handful of releases in the 1970s, Garcia would be making songs that aligned with the progressive rock mindset. On the album Terrapin Station, the sort-of title track ‘Terrapin’ saw the band making a huge musical movement across one side of the record, a practice which seemed indebted to what Floyd had done on Atom Heart Mother or what Genesis had achieved on Foxtrot.
None of these were about writing epics for the sake of writing long songs, though. As much as The Dead were able to jam, those drawn-out moments usually centred around the band trying to open up new doors that no one had heard before, relating to the audience in a far more natural way than they would be if they were just playing the hits.
As Grateful Dead tried to communicate with their audience, The Wall represented Waters’ feelings about becoming more distanced from his audience. After becoming a stadium rock band, the rock opera reflects Waters’ state of mind as he deals with emotional turmoil in the limelight, eventually shutting everyone out altogether halfway through the album.
What Waters did may have been closer to musical theatre compared to what Garcia was doing, but he eventually talked about how much he loved the album. While he never claimed to be the biggest Pink Floyd fan, Garcia remembered being knocked out hearing how far Waters was able to take his craft, trying to have a conversation with his audience while feeling them growing further apart.
The addition of David Gilmour’s guitar practically rivals that of Garcia as well, featuring two of the greatest solos of all time back to back on the song ‘Comfortably Numb’. Waters may have been writing The Wall as an exercise for himself, but sometimes that kind of personal statement finds a way to relate to millions of people without you realising it.
