“Buy some land or something”: The only time Jerry Garcia came close to selling out
1972 was an incredible time for the Grateful Dead.
Even though the band didn’t put out a studio album that year, they more than made up for it with a large collection of new material from across the Dead world. By that point, the Grateful Dead had already established themselves as one of the most adventurous live bands in America. Their concerts were constantly evolving experiences, with songs stretching into long improvisational journeys that changed from night to night.
There was, of course, Europe ’72, the legendary live album that captured the final tour of the late Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan and the first tour of Keith Godchaux. Bob Weir also put out a solo album that year, Ace, that was a Grateful Dead studio album in everything, but name: all members of the current iteration of the group (minus the ailing Pigpen) were featured as Weir’s backing band.
Another key to the cornucopia that was 1972 in Deadland was Garcia, the solo debut of Jerry Garcia. Although billed as a solo effort, the record still carried the unmistakable spirit of the Grateful Dead’s musical world. Garcia’s songwriting had always been deeply intertwined with the band’s identity, meaning many of the album’s tracks felt destined to find their way into the group’s ever-expanding live repertoire.
Like Ace, Garcia featured a wealth of new material that was destined to become iconic once they were integrated into the Dead’s live shows. ‘Deal’, ‘Loser’, ‘Sugaree’, ‘Bird Song’, and ‘The Wheel’ would all soundtrack the following two decades of Dead history, becoming beloved pillars of the band’s live sets all the way until their final year in 1995.
The main difference between Ace and Garcia was personnel: Weir opted to use the Dead as his backing band, while Garcia decided to be a one-man band. In fact, the only other musician on Garcia is Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann. All guitar, bass, pedal steel, piano, and vocals come straight from Garcia himself, overdubbed to create a wealth of sounds that originated from just one mind.
Why did Garcia decide to play everything himself? It wasn’t as though he disliked collaboration – around this time, Garcia spent most of his free time on stage with keyboardists Howard Wales and Merl Saunders. When he wasn’t playing gigs with them, Garcia sat in with the New Riders of the Purple Stage as their pedal steel guitarist. But when he holed up at Wally Heider Studio in July of 1971, Garcia wanted no visitors, to the extent of fooling passersby with a sign that read “Closed Session: Anita Bryant”.
According to Garcia himself, the reason for the almost-truly solo album was simple: he was using the album to pay for a new house. The Grateful Dead treated money in a communal kind of way. Still, when Garcia and his longtime partner Carolyn ‘Mountain Girl’ Adams looked to move to Stinson Beach, California, he needed some serious dough. The solution was for Garcia to record an album and use the advance from Warner Bros. to purchase the house.
“Because it was my house, I thought it should be my record,” Garcia told Rock Magazine in 1972. “I wouldn’t have felt right about it if it had been a Grateful Dead record to pay for my house. It was sort of an extracurricular activity, and also Ramrod, whose our main equipment guy, and Kreutzmann worked with me on the record. So I gave them each a percentage of it, so they had the ability to buy their own place, buy some land or something.”
“One of the prime reasons for doing that was that I borrowed a lot of money from the record company in order to buy a house out in California,” Garcia would later recall, as recited by author Steve Silberman on the episode of The Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast focusing on the album. “And I had no way, of course, to pay it back except to make a record. That’s why the record is ‘Wheel’ and ‘Deal’.”
