Cheap Trick: the “really great” new wave band Jerry Garcia called his favourite
As the lead guitarist with the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia was a hugely instrumental figure in the counterculture movement of the 1960s, which rallied against the establishment and vociferously campaigned for social change. The band was a mainstay of the scene right from the beginning and continued to hold importance to their devoted legions of fans throughout their career and even following Garcia’s death in 1995.
Given how the band were known for best known for their extensive psychedelic jams and improvisation during live performances, it would be reasonable to imagine that their influences lay firmly within the more experimental and freeform sides of music. However, while Garcia and his bandmates were heavily influenced by jazz and blues music, they also dipped their toes into genres that are normally characterised by a more rigid and structured approach rather than allowing instinct to take hold of their direction.
Just because they were synonymous with being a ‘jam band’ and were heavily immersed in pushing the psychedelic rock movement forward, that didn’t mean that the members were limited to what other areas of music they could have a vested interest in.
For example, the Grateful Dead also spent large portions of their career flirting with the edges of country and Americana. While they were able to marry their sound with this interest, Garcia would also express his love for plenty of other styles that the band never opted to incorporate.
The Dead might have been forever busy touring and recording new material—and they certainly didn’t take these commitments lightly—but Garcia clearly also found time to explore and keep up to date with current musical trends. Towards the end of the 1970s, one change that was taking place and spreading its influence across rock music was the emergence of new wave and power pop, a melody-driven approach to rock music that was often characterised by its softening of rock’s more jagged approach.
Garcia admitted that this style was something that grabbed him during the latter part of the ‘70s, and that one band in particular had something that sparked an interest. “Some of that stuff I really like a lot,” he told US radio station WCMF in 1978, referring to the new wave movement in general. Narrowing down to a single favourite, he added, “I really like the band Cheap Trick. I like them a lot. I think they’re really great. What I like about it is the spirit, you know.”
He went on to praise their “slickness” in a decidedly backhanded way, saying that the tightness of their musicianship was a cover-up for how they didn’t possess the same knack for improvisation that he might have been used to, but nevertheless, Garcia appreciated their approach. In the very same broadcast, Garcia also noted his love for Elvis Costello, another notable name of the new wave movement.
Costello himself was an equally big fan of Garcia’s work, and the duo would gain an opportunity to work alongside each other during the 1980s. While it might seem like it should be the polar opposite of everything that Garcia and the Grateful Dead stood for, there was evidently something simple that had the guitarist hooked on the new wave movement, and his vocal support of two of its most prominent acts is a clear indicator of that.
