Garcia Plays Dylan doesn’t have the completeness factor of this year’s other marvelous Jerry Garcia estate releases–those are fuller documents and cross sections of Garcia’s career, focusing on the magic of select nights or periods. But it adds another dimension and a different sort of thoroughness those releases can’t, by nature, explore: the connection between two storied musicians as exemplified by one’s tackling of the other’s material in a variety of contexts.
A singer, guitar player, improvisationalist, and all around music maker like Jerry Garcia is suited to the tenor of Bob Dylan’s work with almost impossible exactitude. Garcia is often quoted in the liner notes (another impeccably written, connection-drawing job by Blair Jackson), and there admits of the Dylan catalog, “Those are songs I wear really well.” He extrapolates a page and a half later in an archive interview about the beauty/bitterness and funny/horrible dichotomies in Dylan’s best songs, and honestly, was or is there a musician in the entire rock spectrum who could more convincingly wring all of those traits and both of those poles out of a song like “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry?” That’s on here–a Garcia/Merl Saunders collaboration from January 1973–and it’s only the beginning.
The first CD of this two-disc collection gives us a spry, energetic Jerry from earlier, happier years, giving his all to the material in the various Garcia pursuits that performed from 1973 through 1987. These are largely spectacular readings; Garcia offers deep and imaginative explorations on “Tough Mama” (from November 1975’s Jerry Garcia Band) and “Simple Twist of Fate,” which would become a JGB standard. A take on “The Wicked Messenger” from an April 1975 Legion of Mary show is especially potent–keyboardist Saunders and saxophonist Martin Fierro playing off Garcia’s ribbon-y solos and helping him guide the song’s characteristically dark tone into a raunchier bit of curled-lip, country rock menace. Although it comes from the JGB’s “classic” late 80s lineup, the “I Shall Be Released” that closes Disc 1 is out of place–to jump so quickly from 1975 to 1987 is jarring, as it’s to hear Garcia’s decline as a singer in that 12 year stretch a lot more dramatically than it was. But it’s still effective rock-gospel, with Gloria Jones and Jackie La Branch harmonizing beautifully.
The second disc focuses on later JGB shows and on the Grateful Dead’s Dylan interpretations from 1985 straight through the end. It serves as a nice companion piece for (and not as a retread of) 2002’s Postcards of the Hanging, the previous Dead-do-Dylan release–that album focused on the Dead in tribute to Minnesota Bob, this album is focused squarely on Garcia, with Dylan’s music as the grist.
Although Garcia is weakened, he still manages to hit the emotional core on these cuts; interestingly, and a testament to how variously Dylan songs can be framed, his slowly declining state doesn’t necessarily make these lesser Dylan interpretations, it just shifts the gravitas to something more painful and resigned. That sort of approach plays up the darkness of “Senor (Tales of Yankee Power)” from a 1993 JGB show and connects especially to a leaden “Visions of Johanna,” from the Dead on July 8, 1995. Even when the lead vocals aren’t his, Garcia’s sparkling guitar proves his point instead.
The hallmarks of what make most if not all Garcia releases loveably ragged are here, too: these certainly aren’t the most inspired Jerry performances of “When I Paint My Masterpiece” (JGB, February 1980) or “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” (JGB, February 1976), the latter of which crawwwwwls along for a protracted 17 minutes of somewhat anticlimactic blather. But even in its weaker moments, this album makes its statement and deftly illustrates its proposed connection between two American legends.
It hammers the point home with the final two songs on Disc 2, which break with the rough chronology to give us the Grateful Dead doing a downright rollicking “The Mighty Quinn” from July 1989 and a devastating “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” from March 1990. The latter particularly crowns a truly inspired and well-chosen collection.
