When Jerry Garcia fought back against a heckler
It was a rare occasion when Jerry Garcia did anything else but sing into his onstage microphone, avoiding witty comments and audience participation like he did three-chord pop songs. By the late 1970s, the Grateful Dead had managed to outlast nearly every one of their contemporaries in the San Francisco psychedelic rock scene of the 1960s. They had more than a decade of material behind them, and after some stylistic soul-searching, the band had stumbled upon their signature jam-heavy sound. But some fans began to see Garcia as more than just a singer and guitar player.
“I thought, if I’m going to be onstage, I’m not going to say anything to anybody or address the crowd, because it doesn’t matter what you say, sometimes just the sound of your voice might inadvertently set somebody off,” Garcia told his partner Barbara Meier in 1991. “The situation with psychedelics is so highly charged that you never know what’s leaking in. I don’t mind doing it in the music, because that’s where I divest myself of ego. It’s egoless, something I trust. If the band has something to protect, it’s the integrity of the experience, which remains shapeless and formless. As long as it stays that way, everything’s okay.”
In the documentary Long Strange Trip, Grateful Dead publicist Dennis McNally intimates that Garcia was hesitant to speak during shows because crowds usually hung onto his words to an uncomfortable degree. But it wasn’t always this way: in the 1960s and 1970s, Garica was occasionally gregarious and even a bit chatty on stage. While Bob Weir usually took the MC role (right down to his infamous “Yellow Dog Story” in between tunings and string repairs), Garcia had some occasional words to say as well.
One of the more infamous examples came during the band’s October 30th concert at the Taft Auditorium in Cincinnati, Ohio, in the fall of 1971. As the band wind through their second set, a fan in the crowd continuously shouts out a request for ‘Truckin’, the band’s autobiographical opus that had become a live staple after being featured on the album American Beauty the year before.
Garcia was known to largely ignore requests and call-outs during concerts, limiting his banter to asking the crowd to move back and brief welcomes on occasion. That night, Garcia was feeling a bit fiery and decided to respond to the nagging request for ‘Truckin’ after ‘Ramble On Rose’. After briefly claiming that the band didn’t know how to play it, Garcia gave the fan a piece of his mind.
“Come on man, you gotta be a cop, is that it?” Garcia asks directly at the shouter. “‘Play ‘Truckin’! Play ‘Truckin’!’ We’ll play whatever we like.” The crowd gives Garcia a roar, and Weir adds that it’s a free country. Garcia then asks, “What about all those people that might not like ‘Truckin’?” Granted, that’s probably a low number, but the fan doesn’t have a response ready, and Garcia goads him a bit more before letting him off the hook.
Ultimately, the interaction doesn’t seem particularly malicious, even if Garcia does seem a bit perturbed at having to constantly face down the vocal fan. Eventually, the fan got his wish. After a sprightly version of Weir’s ‘Sugar Magnolia’, the band counts off ‘Truckin’, giving the heckler what he was asking for.
Check out the ‘Jack Straw’ from the October 30th concert down below.
