“Everything but”: The one genre Jerry Garcia never listened to
No artist is the same when it comes to their musical taste. As much as someone might regard Elvis Presley as one of the finest rock and roll frontmen who has ever lived, there are bound to be a few who thought that he was nothing but a puppet or prefer some of the other musical acts that came before him like Little Richard or Chuck Berry. Musicians are bound to take their inspiration from wherever they want, but for as seasoned a musician as Jerry Garcia was, he never bothered listening to this genre.
Then again, were the Grateful Dead ever meant to fit into one genre? Looking through their back catalogue, some of their best moments have been about going off the beaten path and making a song that has much more to do with blending different styles in on themselves than trying to be solely one specific style.
In fact, that’s the whole reason why the Haight-Ashbury scene existed in the first place. Everyone had grown tired of the same old sounds coming out of rock and roll, so when the Summer of Love opened up in the late 1960s, it wasn’t out of the question for people to embrace everything from folk to hard rock to spoken word poetry and incorporate that into their sound in some way.
Whereas those influences help mould artists into a particular sound, Garcia was more interested in his band being a tapestry of sound. Many moments have echoes of bluegrass here or jazz there, but the main allure behind the group is about letting the music wash over you and seeing where everything takes you in between the sweeping solos.
At the same time, the group never claimed to be the heaviest rock band in the world. Since the most dangerous band at the time was probably The Doors, Garcia felt that what they were doing was far more overreaching and didn’t really cater to traditional rock and roll at all.
That’s because Garcia never considered himself a true fan of rock and roll when he started out, saying, “What I like to play is the music that we play. I don’t want to call it rock and roll because it isn’t exactly. It is, but it isn’t. It’s our music. We’ve developed it. We’ve developed our own sound, and it’s our own music. That’s what I’m into. I still listen to bluegrass. I don’t listen to that much rock and roll. I listen to almost everything but rock and roll.”
And Garcia isn’t exactly off the mark in thinking that The Dead wasn’t purely rock and roll. Listening back to some of the more adventurous pieces of Live Dead, there are sections of their sound that seem to go beyond the blues rock riffing of their contemporaries and start to veer towards jazz in some places, almost as if Miles Davis was conducting jams with guitars instead of horns.
Even when Garcia started working with Bob Dylan on Dylan and the Dead, both of them seemed to be coming from a different place than what rock and roll was supposed to be. Because rock and roll had a specific sound and a certain attitude that came with it, and whereas most of the heavy hitters wanted to play the loudest music possible, Garcia wanted to take his fans on a journey with sound.
