Recommendations of the Editorial team
Just as the Grateful Dead were more than just a “jam band,” so was Jerry Garcia more than just the likeable Captain Trips of the scene. In the 35 or so years he spent writing and recording with the Dead and on his own, Garcia was an unusually versatile musician. He was equally at home in folk, bluegrass, electronic music, old ballads, country, reggae and Chuck Berry-style rock ‘n’ roll.
He wasn’t just “Jolly Jerry,” either, as his longtime songwriting partner Robert Hunter told ROLLING STONE in a 2015 interview. “This man almost had an anguish that he had to fight,” Hunter said. “I suspect it had something to do with losing his father so early. Maybe it had something to do with his finger being cut off. Who knows, but he definitely had a dark side. But you know, what great man doesn’t have that? His bright side, his exuberant side, seemed to far outweigh that. The darkness went into a lot of his music. And without it, what would this music have become?”
All of Garcia’s sides – musical and inner – come to light in this collection of the 50 greatest songs he played with the Dead and on his solo albums.
50. “He’s Gone,” “Europe ’72” (1972)
Like all members of the Dead organization in 1970, Garcia was shocked when her manager Lenny Hart – who also happened to be Mickey’s father – fled with more than $150,000 from the band’s earnings. Hart was found and arrested the following year. But Garcia had the final say.
Shortly before the Dead’s European tour in 1972, he and Hunter wrote this elegiac song about the incident. Over the course of hundreds of performances, it became a response to the deaths of people close to the band. Including (when played by Dead successor bands like Furthur) Garcia himself.
49. “New Speedway Boogie,” “Workingman’s Dead” (1970)
The disastrously violent Altamont Speedway Free Festival in December 1969 had a profound impact on the Dead, who had helped organize the event. But ultimately didn’t go on stage after the chaos had finally escalated.
“New Speedway Boogie” was released just two weeks later. Hunter’s indictment of journalist Ralph Gleason’s view of the festival. Garcia described the finished track as “one of those miracle songs. It’s one of those songs that you only have to play through once. The words just fit so well that it was immediately obvious, just bam! It just fit. Simple and straightforward.”
48. “Doin’ That Rag,” “Aoxomoxoa” (1969)
Here, Garcia reinvents the past: While playing in the jug band Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, before joining the Dead, Garcia performed the Memphis Jug Band’s 1928 song “Lindberg Hop (Overseas Stomp),” whose central chord progression he transformed into this dizzying homage to the ragtime sound (with free associative texts by Hunter).
It’s an excellent example of how Garcia was able to fuse different eras into a coherent whole. But like some other songs on Aoxomoxoa, he may have felt like this song was a bit overloaded. The band dropped him from their live repertoire shortly after the album’s release.
47. “Might as Well,” “Reflections” (1976)
This upbeat solo track from Garcia immortalizes the Dead’s time on the Festival Express tour, the legendary train journey across Canada during which they shared the stage, the booze and the train compartments with Janis Joplin, The Band, Delaney and Bonnie and others.
“It was everything that sixties and seventies rock had promised. And it was served to us on this trip, along with a huge bottle of whiskey!” says Hunter, who wrote the lyrics. “I wrote this on the train. To the rhythm of the moving train.” By the time the song was recorded in the mid-70s, that utopian glow had already faded. But Garcia breathed new energy into him.
46. “Brokedown Palace,” “American Beauty” (1970)
Lesh considered this proudly old-fashioned ballad “one of the best products of the Garcia-Hunter collaboration.” And one can only agree with that. (The Dead must have thought so too, since the song was often played as an encore.)
Combining Hunter’s lyrics about letting go with a touch of Southern gospel underscored by the Dead’s woody harmonies, Garcia played some of his most subtle, coolly flowing guitar parts on the studio recording. With an approach that reinforces the song’s lyrics about wanting to “listen to the river sing sweet songs to lull my soul.”