The 1953 song Jerry Garcia considered “the borderline” of rock and roll
At Far Out, we like to write about a broad breadth of music. That means everything from songs that were released just this week to tracks that helped define different branches of rock.
However, even we, who commit a great deal of time to writing about music, are guilty of falling into the trap of essentially stopping towards the beginning of the 1960s.
That’s not to say we don’t write about certain jazz acts or blues musicians who came before; however, music at the beginning of the ‘60s resembles our modern musical landscape very closely. It was defining. And as a result, we (and the majority of other music enthusiasts) tend to focus on it a bit too much.
While a lot of the bands that made it big in the ‘60s and ‘70s have helped define what we now know as the current music scene, that’s not to say there weren’t exceptional songs and artists knocking about before.
You had the birth of rock and roll, and I mean the real birth of rock and roll, early enough that people thought it could have just been a fad. Additionally, you had artists come forward with unique and strange approaches to rhythm and melody, which would eventually set the scene for so many other great acts.
The Grateful Dead were a band that essentially transcended time with their excellent performance style. They would go on stage and perform with a very limited amount of planning. There was a setlist, sure, but it was largely built around improvisation and experimentation. The band would draw from the music they liked throughout the ages, as well as what they were feeling at that very moment.
“The Grateful Dead has some kind of intuitive thing – I don’t know what it is or how it works, but I recognise it phenomenologically,” said Jerry Garcia when talking about their live sets. “It’s been reported to me hugely from the audience, and we’ve compared notes about it among ourselves in the band. We’ve agreed that we’ll continue to keep trying to do this thing – whatever it is – and that one best attitude toward it is a sort of stewardship.”
Intuitive, sure, but their exceptional musical talent also stemmed from the different kinds of music that the band liked to listen to before they became a band. For Jerry Garcia, this meant going back to the cusp of rock and roll, essentially listening to the blueprint for the genre that he would eventually make his own.
One of the bands that always stayed with him was The Crows, specifically their song ‘Gee’. Released in 1953, this was an R&B track that essentially sat on the teetering edge of rock music. There were still creases to be ironed out, sure, but you can really hear the birth of the genre in the wonderful notes that they play. This is a song that stayed with Garcia throughout his time with the Grateful Dead.
“I remember, like, the Crows, you know, ‘Gee’. Very early, before it actually started to become rock & roll. That tune, ‘Gee’, was sort of the borderline,” he said, “It was basically black music, the early doo-wop groups. I love that stuff. Hank Ballard and the Midnighters were a big early influence for me. My brother would learn the tunes, we would try to sing them, and he would make me learn harmony parts. In a way I learned a lot of my ear training from my older brother.”
