the whole jerry garcia grateful dead thing is perfect for me, so much infornation to obsess over. there are 15, 000 live recordings on https://archive.org/details/GratefulDead, so i could bounce around that to find the best ever version of a song (and there's a community to debate). obsess over guitars, amps. i could get in to the history in films and books.
i'm just saying that because i did get obsessed when i was 16. i took acid with a bunch of friends in the woods of plymouth MA (my home town, americas home town). i got lost in the woods, lost in thought. all i had was a sony discman, and dave's mom’s copy of “American Beauty”. the moment that phil lesh’s bass comes in on “friend of the devil” is the moment i became obsessed, and its never let up.
i read that jerry garcia needed to play all the time. there’s so much work from him outside of the dead: jazz, reggae and everything in between. he had incredible taste in the songs he’d cover: bob dylan, jimmy cliff, allen Toussaint, the beatles and so on.
The reason i’m compelled to go on and on about one song is this: even after 20 years of obsessive, the man always has tricks up his sleeve that i haven't seen yet. thats what happened on my walk around brooklyn yesterday. i was moved to tears.
Legion of Mary was a short lived band garcia had in the mid 1970 while the dead was on a break. i couldn't yet speak to much of its history, im really here to talk about what happened to me on my headphones yesterday.
you could trip on a random Dead recording but legion of mary content is elusive. they played a lot fewer shows in smaller venues than the grateful dead.
jerry garcia was not a coal miner in the same way that bruce springsteen wasn't a factory worker. it doesn't matter, they can credibly inhabit that role for a the length of a song to convey universal emotions. they are part of the american songbook in the way that john steinbeck is part of the american literary canon.
anyway i had never heard the song until it came on my headphones via spotify radio yesterday on my stroll down flatbush ave here in brooklyn. i was moved to fuckin tears! not tears of joy or of sorrow. i don't know what they were tears of but it was so beautiful. i was having an moment with my deeper self righty there in front of popeyes chicken.
garcia wasn't known as a great singer, but he never needed to be. this 1975 recording is the best i've ever heard him sing, but that really doesn't matter much.
i love when people play instruments in a way that you know immediately who it is. jerry is like that, you know its him within the first 5 notes.
ok, im really going to try to explain something beyond words, so bear with me. now, a musician that can emote and send his feelings as notes through an instrument (through practice, training) has access to a larger emotional pallet than fits into words. jerry garcia or miles davis types have access to a larger gradient of emotions than the speaking language can touch. thats what happened to me when i listened, i was crying from a feeling that cant be explained.
i feel like i’m mohammed coming down the mountain. please listen and tell me what you feel
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