The guitarist Jerry Garcia said had “the nicest tone”
Feel is an underrated tenet of guitar playing, and Jerry Garcia recognised this. In fact, it was a delicate touch that catapulted the Grateful Dead to cult empyrean. He wasn’t alone in this view either; Jimmy Page once said: “Let me explain something about guitar playing. Everyone’s got their own character, and that’s the thing that’s amazed me about guitar playing since the day I first picked it up. Everyone’s approach to what can come out of six strings is different from another person, but it’s all valid.”
That sense of nuanced personality was something Garcia held in great esteem. His love from Django Reinhardt, Robbie Robertson, and Santana is well regarded, but there was an obscure star he adored too: the unfortunately forgotten Roy Buchanan.
Garcia loved his idiosyncratic way of filagreed riffing, appearing in the documentary The World’s Greatest Unknown Guitar Player from 1971, and explaining: “He’s probably just the most original country-style rock and roll guitar player, a Fender guitar player. He has the nicest tone, the most amazing chops technically, super fast. And much neglected.”
Part of the reason Buchanan was so neglected amid the counterculture boom was because of his religious bent. As John Lennon famously declared, Christ was out of fashion, and so was Buchanan’s divine way of playing. As the guitarist explained himself: “I found something at church I don’t believe I could quite explain. A feeling within – inside of us. It’s something I can always turn to. I think it shows in my music – how I feel. It’s kind of a sacred feel. Once you get it, it’s hard to ever change it. I wouldn’t change it for the world.”
Nevertheless, guitar purists saw past the piety and revered his work. For instance, Les Paul also said, “We never heard anything quite like what Roy was doing. He interested the hell out of me. He’s not playing an arpeggio the way you learn an arpeggio. If you had studied the instrument you played straight on, the chromatic scale you’re taught in school (sic).“
Adding: “This guy was anything but conventional – he was just out there. He was unrestricted, as far as what he played. If he felt like getting from here to there, it didn’t matter how he got there. If he didn’t pick it, he plucked it with his fingers. There were no rules with Roy. He was cruising down his own lane.”
As a lover of individuality, it is easy to see why Garcia admired him so much. However, perhaps the greatest influence he had on the sound of the Grateful Dead came from the fact that although Buchanan was proving highly experimental, his ventures were always grounded in a melodic sense of pleasantry. After all, he was trying to be godly, and dissonance and distortion have little place in that.
