The one guitarist who left Jerry Garcia in awe: “I just don’t know how he’s doing it”
He was the genuine article, a real soulful musician who put his creativity above all else. To put it simply, it took real chops to impress Jerry Garcia.
Still considered one of the most fluid guitar players to ever plug into an amp, Garcia also had a keen ear for melody and a refined singing voice at his disposal. He was a musician’s musician, playing and practising at every hour, whether he had a show to do or not. Garcia was pure music personified, so effusive praise for others was rare territory.
Garcia was from a generation that had more than their fair share of impressive musicians. Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix and Jeff Beck were just three musicians who found their fame at the height of the counterculture movement Garcia was pushing forward. But they all possessed something that didn’t appeal to the Dead guitarist; they wanted to be heroes.
It wasn’t that Garcia was particularly stuck up or refused to give out compliments. Often, it was simply that he didn’t hear anything that really gave him pause. While being interviewed for Frets Magazine in 1985, Garcia opened up about some of the classic players who inspired him, including Chet Atkins and Robert Johnson.
When asked if he could go back in time to ask any musician about their style, Garcia opted for legendary jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. “I have all of Django’s records. Every single one of them,” Garcia proudly said. And why should he want to go back in time and watch the great man in action? The simple reason: trying to understand how he pulled it all off.
Garcia continued: “Most of what he plays is even hard to understand no matter how hard I’ve listened to it. In terms of the actual technical how it’s happening, because I listen to it and I hear when a note is being struck and when a note is being articulated with the left hand, and he’s doing things where I don’t know how he’s doing them!”
“I can’t imagine. Either he has fingers half a mile long or… I just don’t know how he’s doing it,” Garcia continues. “And this is with a fucked-up left hand. He’s able to cross his fingers over this way. He’s able to do runs where this finger crosses this finger over here. That much I’ve figured out because there are things he plays that work that way, and you couldn’t do it any other way. There’s no other way to do them.”
“They’re lightning fast too, and his technique is awesome,” Garcia enthused. “Even today, nobody has really come to the state that he was playing at. As good as players are, they haven’t gotten to where he is. There are a lot of guys that play fast and a lot of guys that play clean, and the guitar has come a long way as far as speed and clarity go, but nobody plays with the whole fullness of expression that Django has.”
“I mean, the combination of incredible speed – all the speed you could possibly want – but also the thing of every note having a specific personality. It’s just something… you don’t hear it. I don’t haven’t really heard it anywhere but with Django.”
In contrast, Garcia brings up Eddie Van Halen, the biggest guitar player in the world at the time. Garcia claims that while Van Halen has the speed part of the equation down, “there isn’t much there that interests me. It isn’t played with enough deliberateness, and it lacks a sort of rhythmic elegance that I like my music to have, I like my notes to have. There’s a lot of notes, but there isn’t a whole lot of… the notes aren’t saying much.”
Check out the full interview down below.
