Why Jerry Garcia would never listen to Eddie Van Halen: “Not seriously”
Musical opposites are what drive our world around. Two driving forces operating from different ends of the spectrum have a habit of spinning things on their axis and into orbit. It’s hard to think of two guitarists who were more different than Jerry Garcia and Eddie Van Halen.
Although the two were only about a decade apart in terms of age, they might as well have been born on different planets. Where Garcia preferred a fluid and open approach to the six-string, Van Halen was disciplined and ferocious in his flurry of notes. Although the two might have had some shared interests in dexterity and speed, the differences between the Grateful Dead and Van Halen were astronomical. The two bands were, if not worlds, then galaxies apart. One band is a mercurial, free jam musical experience while the other is a highly-focused, hyper-explosive band of stadium rock prowess.
Even stranger is the idea that the two overlapped. In fact, a one-year gap separated some of both bands’ grandest accomplishments. The Grateful Dead hit a peak during their May 1977 concerts, producing some of the most beloved live performances of their 30-year career. Just nine months later, Van Halen released their iconic 1978 self-titled debut. The two bands couldn’t have sounded any different, but they both had prodigious lead guitarists acting as their respective musical guides.
Garcia was never happy to stand still and considered himself a student of his craft throughout his life, it means his work is littered with moments of transcendental bliss, where music overcomes the very fabric of nature to captivate its audience and deliver a trip that few could imagine. Eddie Van Halen, on the other hand, was a deeply confident and forward-moving guitarist who relied on speed and technical prowess to develop his skills and ascertain his place in the history books. They were chalk and cheese.
Throughout the 1980s, Van Halen ruled arena rock as one of the genre’s biggest bands. During that decade, something strange happened to the Dead. After nearly 20 years as America’s biggest cult act, the mainstream began to warm up to their jam band antics, propelling the group out of theatres and into gigantic stadiums. Theoretically, it would have been possible to see the Dead play an arena one night and then book it over to see Van Halen the next.
It doesn’t appear as though Garcia and Van Halen ever met during their respective lifetimes (Garica passed away in 1995, while Van Halen died in 2020). There doesn’t seem to be any record of Van Halen giving his opinions on either Garcia or the Grateful Dead. However, Garcia once shared his opinion of Van Halen’s unique guitar style while being interviewed for Frets Magazine in 1985.
When asked if he ever listened to Van Halen, Garica responded, “Not seriously, no. Because I can hear what’s happening in there. There isn’t much there that interests me. It isn’t played with enough deliberateness, and it lacks a certain kind of rhythmic elegance that I like music to have, that I like notes to have. There’s a lot of notes and stuff, but the notes aren’t saying much, you know. They’re like little clusters. It’s a certain kind of music which I understand on one level, but it isn’t attractive to me.”
Strangely enough, second-generation Van Halen singer Sammy Hagar eventually befriended the Dead, specifically becoming friends with rhythm guitarist Bob Weir. In fact, after Garcia’s death in 1995, Hagar claims that he was approached to fill Garcia’s shoes in a post-Grateful Dead offshoot.
“I mean, even Bob Weir and the guys in the Grateful Dead back when they were first becoming the Dead without Jerry [Garcia], when they went back the first time as The Dead, they talked to me about maybe being the guitar-player singer,” Hagar told The Washington Post. “I would kind of replace Jerry, and I was so tempted to do that because Bob’s my dear friend, and I’m going, ‘Oh, man, I just don’t want to get caught up in that bag…'”
