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.
And so, Garcia presents a rare vantage: Jerry Garcia, studio auteur. A lifelong devotee of the concert stage, it’s hard to imagine him feeling comfortable in this position at any other point in his career. But coming off the band’s recent success, he was in a newfound position of stability. The first order of business, he decided, was buying a house for himself and his partner Carolyn Elizabeth Adams, aka Mountain Girl, where they could raise the kids, explore the California wilderness, and tend to Mountain Girl’s marijuana plants without any interference from the public. “Renting a house in Marin County is one of the most difficult things to do in the whole world,” Garcia confided to NME, and so he accepted a $20,000 advance from Warner Bros, hit the studio, and tried not to overthink it.
