The greatest heavy American group, according to Jerry Garcia
Jerry Garcia isn’t normally the first person that people think of when they talk about the nastier side of hard rock.
There are many facets to what the Grateful Dead did throughout their career, but even if they could put together one of the tastiest jams that anyone ever heard come out of San Francisco, it’s hard to really expect them to start throwing down the same kind of riffs you heard out of Led Zeppelin. They were much more interested in creating a musical utopia when they went onstage, but there was no shame in having a little bit more grit in their delivery every now and again as well.
But when looking at Garcia’s track record, his expertise was more in melody than anything else. He had internalised everything that made his favourite records so good, and whenever he got a guitar in his hands, he wasn’t interested in making any old classic rock lick. He wanted to make songs that people never would have expected to hear, and all of his solos sounded like weaving together a lush tapestry of sound half the time.
But that’s not where rock and roll was headed by the time the Summer of Love ended. ‘The Dead’ had been there to see the dying breaths of the genre at Altamont back in the day, but once they started to work out a place for themselves in the 1970s, the rock and roll scene had graduated to hearing heavier stuff. The biggest names in rock were slowly becoming bands like Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith, and songs about coming together didn’t really need to exist anymore.
At the same time, not every band that played loud riffs was devoid of melody by any stretch. Jimi Hendrix was already playing louder than everyone else back in the day, but no one could deny the pure beauty that was coming out of his amplifier every time he kicked off one of his solos. So when a band like Cheap Trick burst out of Chicago, Garcia seemed more than a little bit impressed with what he heard.
While the term ‘power pop’ didn’t really have a name yet, Cheap Trick were the ultimate example of what that genre was going to be. They had the same bad attitude that any punk could have got behind, but when listening to their records, you could hear that they had a serious Beatles fixation to, especially in the way that Robin Zander sang a lot of their ballads like ‘If You Want My Love’ and ‘Voices’.
And despite not being the biggest fan of what the heavier stripes of rock were doing, Garcia could still see that Cheap Trick were better than the rest, saying, “Some of that stuff I really like a lot. The so-called New Wave music. Well, I really like the band Cheap Trick. I like them a lot. They’re great. I think they’re really great. What I like about it is the spirit, you know. I mean, the guys are putting out and trying hard.”
If you wanted to see the true ex-factor of the band, though, it was going to happen onstage more often than not. At Budokan was still one of their biggest albums of all time for a good reason, and even though the energy of those shows gave their material a kick in the ass, the hidden instrument in the mix half the time is hearing all of the girls screaming whenever they kick into ‘I Want You to Want Me’.
It was far from the kind of lovefest that most Dead shows were, but Garcia could still recognise what made a band like them so great. Cheap Trick weren’t going to be playing the same mile-long solos that Garcia was used to, but there’s a lot to be said for a band that could take the three-minute pop song and turn it into something magical.
