Why Jerry Garcia preferred John Lennon over The Beatles
If it wasn’t for The Beatles, the Grateful Dead likely wouldn’t have existed. They might have, but they would still be a bluegrass-focused jug band playing acoustic songs in coffee houses, not the monolithic electric jam band that they became. During a time when all musicians were just trying to keep up with the Fab Four’s innovations, the Dead took the psychedelic sounds of Sgt. Pepper and began expanding them beyond traditional cosmic barriers.
That’s all to say that, although they were the major catalyst for Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Band to eventually become the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia was still a bit weary of The Beatles. “Garcia called me up and said, ‘We’ve got to go down to St. Mike’s Alley now,” remembered David Nelson, who later played the guitar with Garcia in The New Riders of the Purple Sage. “They’re playing this group, the Beatles. They’ve got the album, and I want you to check it out.’”
“So we went and got coffee and sat there looking at each other, listening on the sound system to the Beatles’ first album; the ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ album. After every song, we’d look at each other. I was going, ‘This is going to make me puke, man.’ He said, ‘Oh no, give it a chance. Let’s listen with an open mind.’ After each song, it was like, ‘Pretty good. Good harmony; like in the bluegrass band. Yeah, they do sing good harmony.’”
Despite Garcia going into it with an open mind, Nelson found that both he and Garcia weren’t fully convinced. “We finished the album, and we both looked at each other and said, ‘Okay, what’s the verdict? What do you think?’ And we both gave it the iffy sign. Not the okay sign – it was iffy.”
It was only when Garcia saw the film A Hard Day’s Night that he finally came around to the band. “Seeing it, he realised, ‘Hey great, that really looks like fun,'” Nelson recalled. “They were a little model of good times. The Beatles were light and having a good time, and they were very good too, so it was a combination that was very satisfying on the artistic level… It was like saying, ‘You can be young, you can be far-out, and you can still make it.’ They were making people happy.”
When compiling some of his favourite albums of all time, Garcia made sure to save a spot for John Lennon, but not The Beatles. Garcia chose John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, the raw and ragged LP that represents Lennon’s unfiltered expression of emotion, both positive and negative.
“I like Lennon’s new album, the solo album,” Garcia said in 1971. “But you see, I’ve never met any of these guys, I don’t know them. I can only talk about their music, and I think Lennon’s music is really beautiful. I really like listening to it in spite of its hard thing. There’s a lot of beauty — incredible, delicate music.”
Only a year later, Garcia found himself covering ‘Imagine’ during some of his solo sets. The Jerry Garcia Band became a much looser unit that welcomed contemporary covers, and even in their nascent form, Garcia was plugging into some of the best new music of the time. In the early 1970s, that had to include John Lennon.
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