Speaking of Dylan, in 1969 the reclusive bard traveled to Music City to record Nashville Skyline with help from country sessions players and Johnny Cash. The prolific nature of Jerry Garcia is evident in the breadth of albums he released through his musical career. 8 essential Grateful Dead albums you need to own. Garcia Albums This lists albums by Jerry Garcia other than with the Grateful Dead. Available on this page: • link to a web-site specific to this artist - click on the name above • album track-listing and personnel details - click on album title This list then is of the best Jerry Garcia solo albums, including collaborations. Non-Western time signatures, untraditional chord progressions, and Middle Eastern themes confronted the listener, as the band seemingly eschewed the standard blues or folk melodies that piloted their previous output. Recording during their hiatus from exhaustive and expensive touring, the band was set on developing brand-new songs in the studio, and the normally expansive lyricist Robert Hunter settled on writing lyrics on the fly, built around Garcia’s guitar play. Shop eight volumes of Jerry Garcia Band live music & more! Wake of the Flood also saw the introduction of the band’s operatic suites with Weir’s jazzy “Weather Report Suite” and the Garcia/Hunter triumph of “Mississippi Half-Step,” a funk-folk boogie that could’ve easily slid into The Band or Bob Dylan’s mid-’70s repertoire without anyone blinking an eye. Kreutzmann later wrote that this album’s underlying concept was to “demonstrate how these songs were mirrors of infinity, even when they adhered to their established arrangements.” And that they did. Speaking of the holy book, the Dead also shine on their near-polyrhythmic take on blues traditional “Samson and Delilah,” once again turning doom-laden imagery into an outright boogie. Holiday Sale! Lead track “Foolish Heart,” with its rococo keys and “clock”-like (Jerry’s words) mechanics, was the Dead’s lackluster attempt at cracking the Billboard Top 100 a second time, but alas, it failed. This is the closest the Dead came to dabbling in the mid-’70s progressive-rock of Yes or the jazz-fusion of Mahavishnu Orchestra. Jerry Garcia lamented that producer Keith Olsen “put the Grateful Dead in a dress.” But ignore those guys (kidding!). Jerome John "Jerry" Garcia (August 1, 1942 – August 9, 1995) was an American singer-songwriter and guitarist, best known for his work as the lead guitarist and as … Blues.”. All Good Things: Jerry Garcia Studio Sessions is a six-CD box set by Jerry Garcia. Garcia stated this song was among his favorite collaborations with Hunter, and after he died six years later, its elegiac hymn took on an even more melancholic feel. Explore releases from The Jerry Garcia Band at Discogs. As such, this list solely focuses on the albums featuring original studio recordings—i.e., albums like Europe ’72 are not included, despite the heavy use of studio overdubs and mixing. Got a tip? ... Now, two decades after Jerry Garcia’s death, the band is saying goodbye to the Grateful Dead with five beyond-sold-out shows. Everything about Blues for Allah represented a break from the Grateful Dead-as-usual. Recorded and released mere months after the above album, American Beauty is the album even the most casual listener associates with the Grateful Dead. It is ordered by when the tracks were recorded, rather than the date the album was issued. Nevertheless, Built to Last, which was the band’s second attempt at recording a studio album on a theater stage with no audience, sounds cohesive and tight in parts, perhaps aided by the springy but now dated production. Essential tracks: “Help on the Way,” “Slipknot!,” and “Franklin’s Tower.”. Under the heavy influence of Bakersfield icons Merle Haggard and Buck Owens, this was the band trading in their nitrous-filled space suits for some cowboy boots and the great wide country-rock open—the invention of what I like to call “chillbilly” music. Studio albums: 20: Live albums: 52: Compilation albums: 3: Singles: 3: As a guest musician: Jerry Garcia was an American musician. Stephen” and “China Cat Sunflower”), the album is considered a milestone in psychedelic rock—one that influenced countless garage bands across the country into melding murder ballads, folk music, and acid rock into a blissful lifestyle. The result is a challenging but immensely rewarding experience, best highlighted by the opening triptych. with Howard Wales, or the early Merl Saunders/Garcia Live at Keystone stuff recorded for Fantasy, but it's OK. One of its founders, Garcia performed with the Grateful … Widely regarded as the Dead’s most reviled studio album, Shakedown Street has the infamous label of being “Disco Dead.” The late ’70s saw a mad rush for great American rock artists to stay relevant amid the commercial dominance of disco and airy soft rock. Nearly all of the songs showcase the band’s penchant for folk-rock or R&B, but with a big heap of interstellar synths. Albums recorded by Jerry Garcia, including release dates and UK & US CD availability through Amazon. Cuts like Jerry’s breathtaking, twinkling ballad “Stella Blue” and the slide-guitar-and-bass-thump of “Row Jimmy” show off the band’s astounding songsmanship, while “Eyes of the World” boasts of the technical mastery of the Dead as a cohesive unit in a jazz-like ensemble. In 10 minutes or less, stunners like “That’s It for the Other One” and “Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks)” seemingly open up portals to faraway universes—abridged versions of the otherworldly experiences such songs became during live Dead sets. “We failed miserably,” he joked. Released 25 January 2005 on Record Collection (catalog no. The finely tuned harmonies of “Attics of My Life” make for one of the greatest pensive moments in the Dead’s catalog, while “Brokedown Palace” serves as one of the most heartbreakingly anthemic funeral songs ever written (to my loved ones: please play it at my burial alongside Dylan’s “Every Grain of Sand”). It contains Garcia's five solo studio albums, and an additional disc with previously unreleased studio recordings. Warner Bros. Records offered the Grateful Dead the opportunity to cut their own solo records, and Garcia was released around the same time as Bob Weir's Ace and Mickey Hart's Rolling Thunder.Unlike Ace, which was practically a Grateful Dead album, Garcia was more of a solo effort, as Garcia played almost all the instrumental parts. Mars Hotel notably served as a vehicle for some of Phil Lesh’s better songs: “Unbroken Chain,” in all its avant-garde synth-folk glory (yes, the airplane-like descending noise is jarring), has to be heard to be believed; and on “Pride of Cucamonga,” Lesh tried his hand at country-rock songwriting and wildly succeeded. Hippie-folk tunes like “Sugar Magnolia” and “Ripple” sound like what most millennials imagine their parents’ hazy, lazy summer memories look like, while “Truckin’” is the quintessential American open-highway song. Jerry Garcia Articles and Media. There was a Top 10 single at last: “Touch of Grey,” from the 1987 LP, In the Dark . The albums are remastered for the box set, and include bonus tracks such as alternate versions and outtakes from the album recording sessions. Rolling Stone rightly described this studio effort as at times “vacuous,” “terminally long-winded,” and “uninspired fluff.” For a band that made its bones in collectively unearthing the beauty of protracted vamping, descriptors like “long-winded” and “meandering” sure twist the knife in this album’s heart. The only track not limited for time by scrupulous record executives was “Viola Lee Blues,” a 10-minute enthralling odyssey that transforms a three-chord bluesy jugband melody into a multidimensional vamp that easily fit as a soundtrack to many Bay Area boomers’ acid-test experiences. The key to Workingman’s Dead not being yet another sepia-toned, late-’60s nod at Big Pink is that the Dead managed to keep their unique weirdness intact. A large number of original studio albums and live releases are highlighted here, but, with Jerry being the most recorded musician of all time, there's always something new just … Hart Valley Drifters, Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band, Legion Of Mary, McGanahan Skjellyfetti, Mickey & The Hartbeats, Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, New Riders Of The Purple Sage, Old & In The Way, Reconstruction (4), The Good Old Boys, The Grateful Dead, The Great American String Band, The Jerry Garcia Band, The Warlocks (4) Essential tracks: “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodleloo,” “Row Jimmy,” and “Stella Blue.”. Our response to COVID-19: More Info › (In fact, the song was performed as the first encore at the Dead’s last-ever show in 1995.) The Dead could write pop music, too, you know. We haven't included Jerry Garcia live albums or compilations, so everything you see here should only be studio albums. Rhino's double-disc Very Best of Jerry Garcia is arguably exactly that. (Yes, it’s true that there are probably no studio-album songs that weren’t done better live, but just play along with the concept here.). 1, Saunders/Garcia/Kahn/Vitt, 1988 Keystone Encores Vol. There are many obstacles (mostly imaginary) to the average person listening to the Dead, but once you get it, you truly get it: The Dead were among the greatest rock, folk, and country-rock songwriters of the 20th century. Now this is how you're supposed to do a compilation -- especially by someone who isn't making music on this plane anymore. In 2003, Rolling Stone ranked Jerry Garcia 13th in their list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time". If this album didn’t include the supremely cheesy disco-rock cover of “Dancin’ in the Streets,” it would probably shoot up a few rankings. The band later lamented how their studio inexperience resulted in a failure to capture the songs’ live energy, but taken as is, the album is the epitome of boogying, fuzz-slinging, drug-fueled San Francisco partying in 1967. As the title track’s porn-groove cheesiness made quite apparent, instead of embracing their perpetual outsider status, the Dead opted for light and bouncy. It's true that there's a bunch of stuff missing here: there are no cuts from Hooteroll? Genres: Folk Rock, Jam Band, Progressive Bluegrass. Albums. Get a year of Beast Inside for only $19.99, 8/27/1972 at the County Fairgrounds in Veneta, Oregon, when Jerry himself told Weir it was totally fine, recorded while he was well aware he was near-death, as drummer Bill Kreutzmann wrote in his autobiography. Despite its sheer awesomeness, the band has long rejected its studio iteration: The bombastic choral and string arrangements, bassist Phil Lesh wrote in his autobiography, were a “classic example of gilding the lily.” Jerry Garcia lamented that producer Keith Olsen “put the Grateful Dead in a dress.”. Shop for Vinyl, CDs and more from The Jerry Garcia Band at the Discogs Marketplace. While the Grateful Dead’s second album is drugs, pure and simple, you don’t need to trip on LSD to fully experience it. “Musically, this is a deceptively demanding combination of American Beauty and Aoxomoxoa,” rock critic Robert Christgau wrote of the Dead’s sixth studio album. Garcia Family Provisions, the Jerry Garcia Official Store, is the place to shop for live releases! The result: Fans and critics alike dismissed the album as supremely out of touch. The deeply ambitious project and its circus-like studio environment (they recorded the album twice) put the Dead deep into debt with Warner Bros., resulting in tensions ultimately (and perhaps temporarily) solved by the successful release of Live/Dead (the band’s greatest triumph) later that year. Bob Dylan first comes to mind here, but the 2016 tribute album Day of the Dead—featuring indie luminaries like The National, The War on Drugs, and The Flaming Lips—demonstrated just how remarkable the Dead’s songs were. It eventually went gold. We are not here to debate the Dead’s greatest album, live or otherwise (that would be Live/Dead); or the best live version of any song like, say, “Dark Star” (that would be 2/18/1971 at the Capitol Theater); or their greatest set ever (undecided, but I might venture to say 8/27/1972 at the County Fairgrounds in Veneta, Oregon). Essential tracks: “Standing on the Moon,” “Built to Last,” and “Victim or the Crime.”. Where their debut was limited by label demands and studio naiveté, Anthem was where the Dead decided to let their psychedelic freak-flag fly. The gorgeous hymn made for similar messaging in 2017, when Gregg Allman covered it on his final record, recorded while he was well aware he was near-death. Unfortunately, except for the myriad of Garcia/Grisman and Garcia/Merle Saunders albums on CD, ALL of Garcia's albums are out of print again . In hindsight, the Dead’s final studio album’s title has an ironic twist: The band was no longer built to last. Their studio albums, stripped of the improvisations and sonic explorations featured in their live performances, showcase the incredible songwriting of the Jerry Garcia/Robert Hunter and Bob Weir/John Perry Barlow partnerships. In honor of Jerry Garcia’s birthday, The Daily Beast grades perhaps the most underrated aspect of the Grateful Dead’s legacy: their studio albums. The band recorded studio tracks and then mixed it together with live samples—“for the hallucinations,” as Jerry explained. After all, this wasn’t just some group of laid-back country boys playing some rock ‘n’ roll; it was a ragtag group of bearded San Francisco wild-children and space cadets temporarily resettling their minds in the Wild West. First off, any ‘Greatest Guitarists of All Time’ list is pretty much just one (or a few) people’s opinion. about. Just months before entering their then-indefinite touring hiatus in 1974, the Dead entered the studio and laid down what I would describe as extraterrestrial folk music. Jerome John "Jerry" Garcia (1 de agosto de 1942 - 9 de agosto de 1995) fue un cantautor y guitarrista estadounidense más conocido por su trabajo como guitarrista y vocalista de la banda Grateful Dead, que ganó prominencia durante la era de la contracultura (1960).Aunque desautorizó el papel, García fue visto por muchos como el líder o "portavoz" del grupo. In the 30 years between the band’s first performance at one of Ken Kesey’s acid tests in 1965 to guitarist/singer Jerry Garcia’s death in 1995, they truly ran the gamut. Amidst the growing counter-culture scene in the San Francisco Bay Area, The Grateful Dead were founded by lead guitarist/vocalist Jerry Garcia, bass player Phil Lesh, rhythm Meanwhile, on “Ship of Fools,” the band continued the legacy of American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead, offering up arguably one of the greatest folk ballads in their entire catalog. Find Jerry Garcia … Compliments of Garcia (1974), Reflections (1976), Cats Under the Stars (1978) and Run for the Roses (1982). The title track, meanwhile—with its statement of purpose and all—would’ve been a better offering for rock radio, but sadly got overlooked by whoever made such decisions. Aside from some mediocre songwriting elsewhere on In the Dark, the biggest long-term knock against this late-period album is that its unexpected radio smash-hit phenomenon “Touch of Grey” created the reviled walking-stereotype, neo-hippie, gate-crashing poseurs known as “Touch Heads.”. While their late-’60s rock ‘n’ roll peers avoided “the uncertainty of improvisation,” as Kreutzmann described it, the Dead “decided Anthem of the Sun was going to be our statement on the matter.”, Essential tracks: “Alligator,” “That’s It for the Other One,” and “Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks).”. The tight Americana songwriting of Workingman’s Dead was further polished with the addition of sublimely confident three-part harmonies that ultimately became responsible for decades of enduring folk-rock artists up to and including modern acts like Fleet Foxes. Essential tracks: “Morning Dew,” “Viola Lee Blues,” and “Cream Puff War.”. Send it to The Daily Beast here. Hooteroll?, Jerry Garcia and Howard Wales, 1971 Garcia, Jerry Garcia, 1972 Live at the Keystone, Saunders/Garcia/Kahn/Vitt, 1973 Garcia (Compliments of Garcia), 1974 Old and In the Way, Old and In the Way, 1975 Reflections, Jerry Garcia, 1976 Cats Under the Stars, Jerry Garcia Band, 1978 Run for the Roses, Jerry Garcia Band, 1982 Keystone Encores Vol. Where to start with live Dead? Essential tracks: “Casey Jones,” “High Time,” “Dire Wolf,” or just every track—whatever. Genres: Jam Band, Roots Rock, Folk Rock. The soaring, anthemic chorus—“I will get by / I will survive”—is a timeless rallying cry amid seemingly unending dystopia. It only took about twenty-nine years.”, Essential tracks: “St. What they do not think of, however, are the Grateful Dead’s studio albums. The Hunter/Garcia pairing never again produced as perfectly crafted a poetic allegory as that song. With that album, Dylan proved that rock’s biggest legends could do wonders with just some good ol’ pedal steel and twang. Stephen,” “China Cat Sunflower,” and “Cosmic Charlie.”. - Overall album rank: #10,466 - Rank in decade: #1,551 - Rank in year: #142 - Appears in: 33 charts. Since guitar playing is an art and not something you can measure with stats it’s impossible to really define who is good and who is not. Nevertheless, please feel free to yell at me on social media and/or compare this list to the rather engrossing one recently done by BrooklynVegan. Albums include Cats Under the Stars, Jerry Garcia Band, and After Midnight: Kean College, 2/28/80. The emphasis here was on Americana songwriting, rather than on experimentation or blues vamping, and thus came an album of indelible studio tracks that do actually hold up to and sometimes outshine their live counterparts. “Victim or the Crime” is arguably the most angsty song the Dead ever recorded, with Weir practically hissing the opening line “Patience runs out on the junkie.” The lyric caused consternation within the band because of Jerry’s, um, issues, but of course, the conflict was resolved when Jerry himself told Weir it was totally fine. But make no mistake, “Touch of Grey” is a fucking fantastic song. Keyboardist Brent Mydland, who contributed four skippable songs here, would be dead less than a year after the album’s release, while drug addiction and myriad health issues continued to plague Garcia and his ability to perform as in days gone by. Essential tracks: “Ship of Fools,” “Scarlet Begonias,” “U.S. ‘Knock Me Down’ (1989): I felt it was pretty important to include a song from Mother’s Milk as the record showed just how prodigiously talented Frusciante was. (Is it just me or could the song’s intro have easily soundtracked a Scorsese segue?). Part of what makes a classically great songwriter immediately identifiable is the ease with which their songs can be covered or reworked into a different tempo, swing, or genre altogether. Essential tracks: “Touch of Grey,” “Black Muddy River,” and “Hell in a Bucket.”. 100 Greatest Guitarists: David Fricke’s Picks From Jerry Garcia and Joan Jett to B.B. While most of the songs never fully entered the Dead’s live rotation (aside from the legendary “St. Standout tracks like “Althea” and the rearranged traditional “Don’t Ease Me In” became essential ’80s-period live tunes, but the production and delivery here make them rather forgettable. Find Jerry Garcia discography, albums and singles on AllMusic. Much like “Standing on the Moon,” the dirge-like ballad “Black Muddy River,” which closes the Dead’s first and only top 10 album, now feels like a bittersweet farewell letter from Jerry, nearly eight years before he died. 40 years later, the suite holds up as a sublime (and, sure, overblown) documentation of forward-thinking psychedelia. A guitarist, singer, and songwriter, he became famous as a member of the rock band the Grateful Dead, from 1965 to 1995.When not touring or recording with the Dead, Garcia was often playing music in other bands and with other musicians. Essential tracks: “Terrapin Station Part 1,” “Estimated Prophet,” and “Samson and Delilah.”. Guitarist, singer, and songwriter Jerry Garcia was best known as a founding member of the Grateful Dead, the rock band for which he served as de facto leader for 30 years, Yet while the Dead have become associated with the amorphous, occasional eyeroll-inducing genre of “jam bands”—often synonymous with hacky-sack-toeing frat-house hippies and self-indulgent improvisational Americana-adjacent acts—they were actually just the quintessential American rock ‘n’ roll band. He released his first of 5 solo albums - Garcia (1972) in which he played every instrument except drums. Jerry Garcia Albums. Beyond topping Dylan at his own game, American Beauty is a milestone of multiple genres: It’s a folk-rock icon; an alt-country founding father; a funereal blues odyssey; a blueprint for hippie cowboydom. The obvious standout on The Grateful Dead is “Morning Dew,” which is heard here in its primitive stage, shortly before it was crafted into one of the band’s signature live songs with earth-shattering climaxes. After all, at one time or another, the band has gone on-record saying nearly each studio effort was a disappointment or failed to capture the intensity of their live performances.