How Jerry Garcia improved so many of Bob Dylan’s songs: “A step further”
It’s probably fair to say that over the course of his 60+ year career, Bob Dylan has had very few misses. The bar that he has set for himself since the early 1960s is an incredibly high one, and while records like Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde represent him at his best, the low points are still considerably higher than most people are capable of offering when they’re not performing to their greatest ability.
If you’re going to pick faults in his work, the easy target would obviously be his vocal style. It’s hoarse, occasionally lacks the ability to hold a tune, and certainly isn’t for everyone, but it’s also so unmistakable to the point that it helps form part of Dylan’s identity. His songs wouldn’t sound right if he were a more polished vocalist, and the imperfections in his voice are what make him such a unique talent that stands out from the crowd.
Another area that one might be able to critique Dylan in is the fact that his songs are often incredibly bare-bones and simplistic, but once again, this adds to the overall rawness of his work. You’d be hard-pressed to actually call these slight shortcomings faults in his work, and the fact that they’ve become defining characteristics highlights just how well it works for him as a performer and songwriter.
However, if you were to ask Dylan himself whether he believed that his songs were lacking in any way, he’d tell you that his work in the studio was sub-standard compared to how his songs used to grow in a live capacity, and that there was one performer who made this evidently clear to him. Other artists have often covered Dylan’s work, and in several cases, they make his compositions a lot more elaborate, with more expansive arrangements and additional sections.
The first artist who helped Dylan realise that his compositions could be taken further was Jerry Garcia, and in a 1997 interview with Edna Gunderson, he spoke of how witnessing the Grateful Dead guitarist perform covers of his own work helped him come to this realisation. “I can’t say that I’ve made any great-sounding records,” he began. “A lot of the older songs were just blueprints for what I’d play later on the stage. Jerry Garcia proved that to me.”
Garcia and the Grateful Dead have performed numerous Dylan numbers as part of their live sets, with the guitarist providing interpretations of ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ and ‘Positively 4th Street’ among others, and the band introduced a number of Dylan songs to their repertoire after Garcia’s passing. However, Dylan thought that the ways in which Garcia perceived his work were far more inventive and influential in how he could expand his sound in his own live shows.
“He took a lot of the songs and actually recorded them and sang them a step further than they were on my records,” Dylan confessed. “He heard where they should go. I would hear his versions of songs of mine, and I’d say, ‘OK, I understand how it should go.’ Then I would play that and might even take it a step further. There have been other artists who have recorded my songs and shown me the way the song should go.”
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