The 1930s guitarist Jerry Garcia called too good to understand
Jerry Garcia and magical musicianship are pretty heavily entwined.
Well, not just Garcia, but the entirety of the Grateful Dead have something magic built into them. Numbers don’t lie when it comes to longevity, and when you look at the amount of number one albums that the Dead continue to have, the same number one albums that make them record breakers and undeniably timeless, it’s pretty hard to call them anything other than one of the best bands to ever take to the stage.
It all comes down to their live performances. There was quite literally magic built into them. Setlists? Strict rehearsals? Unmovable structure? No, none of that appealed to the Grateful Dead, as they would go into their shows with little to no plan, and instead would just let the moment they performed dictate how things sounded. Why do you think so many of those number one albums are live performances? The Grateful Dead have never played the same show twice, and what was happening in the world, in that city, on that stage, it all impacted what music came out of the band.
It was always something pretty special to witness, as you had the band’s great music set the bar, but then their willingness to jam and improvise made every show incredibly personal. Jerry Garcia once spoke about the magic of The Grateful Dead, and said that while he can’t quite put it into words, he knows it when it happens. The band are able to simply lock everything into place, and then the music, planned and on the spot, starts flowing.
“One of the things that’s amazing about it is that everybody experiences it on their own terms,” said Garcia, “From the point of view of being a player, it’s this thing that you can’t make happen, but when it’s happening, you can’t stop it from happening. I’ve tried to analyse it on every level that I can gather together, and all the intellectual exercise in the world doesn’t do a thing to explain it to any degree of satisfaction.”
He continued, “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 […] 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.”
Garcia didn’t only recognise that magic within his own band, but in all of music. When he listened to different artists, he could hear it immediately, and that would usually dictate which musicians he would devote his time to. One of these artists that he was happy to latch onto was Django Reinhardt, who wasn’t only a great guitarist, but an artist so devoted to his craft that he overcame horrendous adversity.
When Reinhardt was making his way up the ranks as an exceptional guitarist, he was involved in a house fire that did serious damage to his left hand, leaving him with only two functional fingers on the hand, which for a lot of people would likely end their career as a musician. For Reinhardt, it just meant that he had to relearn the guitar, making it so that he could still play despite his injuries, and the result was beautiful music, a spirit embedded with magic that Jerry Garcia adored.
“I’d follow around Django Reinhardt, the Gypsy guitarist,” he said, “I have every single one of his records. Most of what he plays is hard to understand, no matter how much I’ve listened to it. Either he’s got fingers a half a mile long or… I just don’t know how he’s doing it.”
