Credit: Far Out / Alamy

The classic Bob Dylan track Jerry Garcia called “one of the best songs ever written”

Mon 6 April 2026 16:31, UK

“I was green with envy,” David Bowie once said, “When I heard Bob Dylan’s got about 140 songs to choose from.” He was far from alone.

Such is the measure of his profuse brilliance that many of the greatest artists of all time have found themselves looking up at Dylan’s tower of song, marvelling in admiration from 100 floors below, amazed and envious. As Leonard Cohen proclaimed when his prolific peers was granted a Nobel Prize for literature, “[the award] is like pinning a medal on Mount Everest for being the highest mountain.”

At least for Jerry Garcia, he could be sure that the admiration flowed both ways. “There’s no way to measure his greatness or magnitude as a person or a player,” Dylan wrote in his tribute after Garcia passed away in 1995. “I don’t think any eulogizing will do him justice.”

Dylan proclaimed that Garcia was, in essence, a physical semblance of the true American dream. Not the American dream that pertains to a white picket fence and propriety, but the wild, wavering freedom of ‘being’ in the great rolling bulge of the US.

Bob Dylan - Musician - Piano - 1960s — Credit: Far Out / Alamy

“He was that great,” Dylan said of his refusal to eulogise the Grateful Dead man, “much more than a superb musician, with an uncanny ear and dexterity,” the ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ singer added.

Continuing, “He’s the very spirit personified of whatever is Muddy River country at its core and screams up into the spheres. He really had no equal.” While he might not have had an equal, Garcia would certainly tell you himself that he had a superior in Dylan. Not only did he have the honour of playing with the original vagabond, but he can also rightfully have claimed to have influenced Dylan greatly.

One of the most simple yet symbolic ways he did this was by helping to promote a meaningful masterpiece back into Dylan’s set. With well over 600 songs published to his name, it is easy for some anthems to be overlooked even by the man himself. For a while, this was the fate that befell ‘Joey’ from Desire. “That’s a tremendous song. And you’d only know that singing it night after night,” Dylan told Paul Zollo. “You know who got me singing that song?”

The answer was obvious to anyone who had seen Dylan and The Dead tour. Dylan was, frankly, in a damning drought in the ’90s. He had released tracks like ‘Wiggle Wiggle’, the very worst of his entire career. As for his studio time, “I was completely disillusioned,” he recalled. But Garcia looked at his back catalogue and got to the heart of the matter, praising a gem with plenty to say but never quite the platform to shout about it in ‘Joey’.

“He got me singing that song again,” Dylan continued. “He said that’s one of the best songs ever written. Coming from him, it was hard to know which way to take that. [Laughs] He got me singing that song again with them [The Grateful Dead].”

Concluding, “It was amazing how it would, right from the get go, it had a life of its own, it just ran out of the gate, and it just kept on getting better and better and better and better, and it keeps on getting better.” There is an argument within that self-assessment that performing it even helped to shape Dylan’s latest glowing chapter.

As he added, “To me the song is like a Homer ballad. Much more so than ‘A Hard Rain’, which is a long song, too. But, to me, ‘Joey’ has a Homeric quality to it that you don’t hear every day. Especially in popular music”. Since that point, he has continually defied the confines of popular music, writing in reflective odysseys like ‘Murder Most Foul’ and finding glowing success all the same.

Sometimes, even the King suffers a drop in confidence and needs a drop of praise to pep him back to his prime. Garcia’s choice pushed him towards a new appreciation of his past, and Dylan’s at his best when he’s at his most timeless. As he said of ‘Joey’, “That’s a great song. Yeah. And it never loses its appeal”. With those words ringing, Dylan swiftly ditched trends and synths and got back to the tradition of folk that always seems fresh when it is espoused from the barbed mouth of the people’s Bard.