01 Deal
02 Bird Song
03 Sugaree
04 Loser
As a precocious youth, Jerry Garcia found escape through painting, studying the Bay Area figurative style of abstract art. Late in life, it was scuba diving, acquainting himself with the ocean floors of Hawaii, petting octopuses and eels, setting a world record for the longest time spent underwater. But when he was turning 30, all Jerry wanted to do was play pedal steel. You can hear the fruits of his exploration between the years of 1969 and 1974 all over live recordings from the Grateful Dead, on guest appearances on classics by friends like Jefferson Starship and CSNY, and throughout the early catalog of New Riders of the Purple Sage, a band started with the express purpose of honing his skill in collaboration.
But if you really want to hear what Jerry Garcia could do with the pedal steel, listen to “The Wheel.” It’s the closing track of 1972’s Garcia, among the most beautiful four minutes of music in his vast catalog. Bursting to life from a discordant jam, the cyclical folk song feels like adjusting to new visibility under the sea. Seesawing between buoyant major chords, with Garcia’s vocals layered in tight coils of harmony, his pedal steel guides the way, untrained but masterful, exuding a joy that radiates from the speakers, even 50-plus years later.
At the time of its release, Jerry distinguished his debut solo album from his previous work by being “completely self-indulgent.” Think about this for a second. This is an artist who made fine art of self-indulgence. He reshaped the modern rock concert in his own sprawling, unhurried image; he played guitar solos like nobody has, before or since, largely based on lyrical motifs that felt designed to drift effortlessly forever; he admitted to viewing studio albums—those old-school totems of discipline and meaning—as a “necessary evil” to function within an industry he loathed; he led a band who would develop a setlist staple composed entirely of drum solos and prolonged ambience.
So, what was different this time? For one thing, it happened in a flash. The bulk of the music—developed through improvisations between Garcia on acoustic guitar and his Dead bandmate Bill Kreutzmann on drums, with lyricist Robert Hunter scribbling away in a corner—happened in roughly the span of a week. After just 21 days, the whole record was sequenced, mixed, and handed over to the label. Soon, he’d be back on the road with the Dead, playing the legendary shows that would be documented on the extraordinary live album Europe ’72. Coming after the band’s twin peaks of Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, both released in 1970 and both succeeding in pushing the group beyond cult fame into wider acceptance, Jerry’s solo music did little to embellish the winning streak he was already on.
If this makes Garcia sound like a blip—an itch he had to scratch, one small twinkling star in an ever-expanding galaxy—then it kind of was. “I don’t want anyone to think it’s me being serious or anything like that—it’s really me goofing around,” he told Rolling Stone. “I’m not trying to have my own career or anything like that.” And yet, Garcia goofing around for a week in the studio in 1972, among this company, also stands as one of the most captivating cosmic Americana records of all time—an album whose consistency, energy, and vision helped introduce some of the most enduring songs to the Dead’s live set for decades to come.
If Garcia was only a document of those great songs—the loping singalong “Sugaree,” the pulsing Janis Joplin elegy “Bird Song,” the spiritual ballad “To Lay Me Down”—it would simply be a critical moment in the bandmembers’ catalogs alongside Bob Weir’s Ace, released that same year. But where Ace was a solo album in name alone, Garcia was decidedly a showcase for Jerry himself, exhibiting things he could not and would not do in the Dead. Exploring the limits of a 16-track recorder, he played nearly every instrument himself. There’s the pedal steel, of course, but also bass, piano, organ, and, in the most novel moments, a sampler that he orchestrates to create a kind of avant-garde musique concrète he would never return to again.
Where the best Dead studio records feel like cozy, reined-in presentations of their best songs, Garcia is in its own class entirely. For one thing, Jerry clearly approached the record without thinking how it would hang together in a live set. Instead, each song is ornamented as its own set piece, building to a larger, heavenly atmosphere that owes more to art-rock than to the era’s post-hippie glow. Harkening back to the Dead’s playful beginnings as the house band at Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests in San Francisco, he incorporates sound collage and tape manipulation. There are false starts, recurring motifs, songs that segue into one another without pause. As it turns out, Garcia goofing around in the studio felt a lot like most other artists trying to craft their masterpiece. From: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jerry-garcia-garcia/
