Happy 50th Anniversary to Jerry Garcia’s debut album Garcia, originally released January 20, 1972.
Maybe this makes me a bad Grateful Dead fan, but I’m mostly in it for the songbook. To me, the magic of the Dead is the twilit world of their music, where vagabonds and gamblers are on a never-ending search for peace. These songs tell a story that unite everyone who loves the band, and so it’s always been about the songs for me. While I love a good noodley jam from time to time, I’ve never been one to compare different versions of “Dark Star” and “Eyes of the World.”
It’s safe to say, then, that I’ve always been more interested in the Dead’s first sets than their second sets, and I’m usually looking for a clear vibe: the mid-tempo, lilting grooves, the kind of songs that sound like golden hour in the heart of summer. Throw a long Jerry Garcia solo in there somewhere and I’m a happy camper.
A startling number of those summertime songs can be found on Garcia, the solo debut from the guitarist, which makes it my favorite Grateful Dead album (even though it isn’t a Grateful Dead album). Every proper song on this record (meaning, excluding the two very odd instrumental medleys that we’ll get to in a minute) is a Grateful Dead all-timer, the kind of song that I put on a random live show hoping to find in the setlist. They’re full of light and make me feel whole, and it is incredibly bizarre to me that they are not Grateful Dead songs, at least not on paper.
The great gift of Garcia is the clarity of the vision—without the hubbub and noise of a live show, these special songs stand more on their own. While the Grateful Dead did not always succeed in wrangling their beautiful, collective mess into a palatable studio album, Garcia serving as the only instrumentalist (except drummer Bill Kreutzman) allows the songs to speak for themselves. The single vision meant that the songs were the material question for the album, rather than the Grateful Dead being at the center of attention.
Staples like “Bird Song” and “The Wheel” find focused interplay between instruments that serves the songs—instruments appear and disappear as Garcia found them useful as a composer and arranger, rather than their performances being the result of a set of separate musicians making disconnected but mutually-affecting decisions. Garcia is surprisingly economical for something in the Grateful Dead universe, which is usually defined by excess and chaos (in the best possible way).
Interestingly, though Garcia is more economical than the Dead during their live performances, it follows the band’s concert structure almost to the letter. The first side of the album offers four tracks that limit their exploration to the occasional guitar solo—this is storytelling time. But then, flip the record over, and we’re immediately met with a ten-minute avant-garde medley, more reminiscent of the Dead’s experimental improvisation and the free-form “Space” segment of their show that would not emerge for a few years.
The first instrumental passage—the three-part suite of “Late for Supper,” “Spidergawd,” and “Eep Hour” —is perhaps the greatest beneficiary of the one-man-show of Garcia. While the Dead’s instrumental passages, even the composed ones, brim with disorder, this middle section on Garcia has not only identifiable composition, but an intentional emotional journey through darkness and light. The Dead reveled in spontaneity, but this segment of Garcia feels meticulous. It is cinematic psychedelia, the kind of thing that we get to hear from Garcia precisely because he is on his own.
And then, beautifully and spectacularly, it resolves into the very special stillness of the Ballad Slot, the (to me) peak of any Grateful Dead concert, when the madness fades away and the night focuses on Garcia’s plaintive voice. This is where the emotional peak of “Stella Blue,” “Wharf Rat,” or “Standing on the Moon” might be found. On Garcia, the Ballad Slot is claimed by “To Lay Me Down,” which has a more minimal presentation than it could ever achieve on the Dead’s stage, which makes its contrast with the medley all the more powerful.
None of this is to say that the Grateful Dead were a distraction, or that Jerry Garcia should have been a one-man-show. Instead, it’s to point out that Garcia’s one-man-bandgives us certain versions of his artistry that are necessarily impossible in the context of the full band, creating a special outpost on the outskirts of the Grateful Dead universe.
LISTEN: