If this makes Garcia sound like a blip—an itch he needed to scratch, one small twinkling star in an ever-expanding galaxy—then it type of was. “I don’t need anybody to assume it’s me being critical or something like that—it’s actually me goofing round,” he instructed Rolling Stone. “I’m not attempting to have my very own profession or something like that.” And but, Garcia goofing round for every week within the studio in 1972, amongst this firm, additionally stands as some of the fascinating cosmic Americana data of all time—an album whose consistency, power, and imaginative and prescient helped introduce among the most enduring songs to the Useless’s dwell set for many years to come back.
If Garcia was solely a doc of these nice songs—the loping singalong “Sugaree,” the pulsing Janis Joplin elegy “Hen Track,” the non secular ballad “To Lay Me Down”—it could merely be a crucial second within the bandmembers’ catalogs alongside Bob Weir’s Ace, launched that very same yr. However the place Ace was a solo album in title alone, Garcia was decidedly a showcase for Jerry himself, exhibiting issues he couldn’t and wouldn’t do within the Useless. Exploring the boundaries of a 16-track recorder, he performed practically each instrument himself. There’s the pedal metal, after all, but additionally bass, piano, organ, and, in essentially the most novel moments, a sampler that he orchestrates to create a type of avant-garde musique concrète he would by no means return to once more.
The place one of the best Useless studio data really feel like cozy, reined-in shows of their greatest songs, Garcia is in its personal class totally. For one factor, Jerry clearly approached the document with out pondering how it could dangle collectively in a dwell set. As an alternative, every track is ornamented as its personal set piece, constructing to a bigger, heavenly environment that owes extra to art-rock than to the period’s post-hippie glow. Harkening again to the Useless’s playful beginnings as the home band at Ken Kesey’s Acid Assessments in San Francisco, he incorporates sound collage and tape manipulation. There are false begins, recurring motifs, songs that segue into each other with out pause. Because it seems, Garcia goofing round within the studio felt quite a bit like most different artists attempting to craft their masterpiece.
And so, Garcia presents a uncommon vantage: Jerry Garcia, studio auteur. A lifelong devotee of the live performance stage, it’s laborious to think about him feeling snug on this place at every other level in his profession. However coming off the band’s current success, he was in a newfound place of stability. The primary order of enterprise, he determined, was shopping for a home for himself and his companion Carolyn Elizabeth Adams, aka Mountain Woman, the place they may elevate the youngsters, discover the California wilderness, and have a tendency to Mountain Woman’s marijuana vegetation with none interference from the general public. “Renting a home in Marin County is likely one of the most tough issues to do in the entire world,” Garcia confided to NME, and so he accepted a $20,000 advance from Warner Bros, hit the studio, and tried to not overthink it.
