Dead Fingers Talk: Our 1987 Jerry Garcia Interview
This article originally appeared in the July 1987 issue of SPIN. In memory of Jerry Garcia, who died on Aug. 9, 1995, we’re republishing this interview
When a supernova explodes, by the time you see it, its light is — well, at least as old as Jerry Garcia. Does that make contemplating its brilliance “nostalgia?”
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That seems to be the only way the uninitiated conceive of the Grateful Dead. Even people who’ve witnessed their feel-good-and-pass-it-on spiritual celebrations can miss the point. It’s easy to focus on the Dead scene’s assorted “cosmic” effluvia — the tie-dyes, the hallucinogens, the bongs and braids and blissed-out flower children — but it’s the vibration from the vortex, the inspired, endlessly creative good-time music of the world’s greatest experimental-electric-folk-blues-garage band, that makes the phenomenon happen. It’s not for everyone, but it endures. And as it does, mutating through exposure to the vast, increasingly strange popular culture of 1980s America, it becomes too diverse to categorize.
The Dead keep evolving into something new, while their unwritten credo of benign anarchy remains unchanged. So does Jerry Garcia, their lead guitarist, vocalist, and reluctant guru for the past 22 years. His frame may have thickened and his hair turned gray, but his battered corduroys and oversized T-shirts look the same. The fingers are as nimble as ever, and now that he’s fully recovered from a brush with death, after suddenly falling into a diabetic coma last July, so is his mind.
RIPPLE
Garcia: Music is a language of its own. It’s as close as earth comes to having a universal language, although even music, like language, is idiom. Music lets everybody talk at once and everybody listens at once.
FRIEND OF THE DEVIL
Garcia: We’ve always harbored a basic distrust of big charity just like we have a basic distrust of big business or big anything, but I hate to be categorical about stuff like that because I don’t have any panaceas. I don’t have those kinds of ideas. My ideas tend to be rats in cages rather than tigers loose on the streets.
ATTICS OF MY LIFE
Garcia: Our success has been very slow, luckily, so it hasn’t been a great shock the way it might have been. We’ve enjoyed a long slow curve. We still don’t know if we have one audience that would fill one stadium, or whether we have audiences to fill several stadiums, because our audience is devoted enough to come to wherever we’ll play. It’s kind of elusive. It may look bigger than it actually is. Probably the best way to figure it out is to release a record. That’s about the only kind of gauge we have, and even then I’m not really sure. Maybe a handful of Deadheads will buy the albums and circulate them freely to their friends. But I’m not worried about it. It’s tremendously gratifying to have an audience that’s large enough to support us the way they do. It means we have more chances to be better. I welcome that. If there are people who find enough cultural furniture in the Grateful Dead outback, that’s great with me. It’s where I live.
CAT UNDER THE STARS
Garcia: The record I worked hardest at and liked best was Cats Under the Stars [a solo LP]. That was kind of like my baby. It did worse than any other record I ever did. I think I probably gave away more copies than I sold. It was amazingly, pathetically bad. But I’ve learned not to invest a lot of importance in ’em, although it’s nice to care about your work. As far as I personally am concerned, I don’t feel I’ve played that well on Grateful Dead records. I feel I’ve played better in shows, generally, and on other people’s records.
LIVE DEAD
Garcia: If I didn’t make another record, I wouldn’t lose a lot of sleep over it. Making a record is going into a mode that’s different from what the Grateful Dead does. What the Grateful Dead does is perform live. When we make a record it’s, “OK, now we’re going to make a record.” Which means, “Now were gonna get weird.” There are all kinds of ways of dealing with that. Sometimes it’s fun to do something in the studio that’s completely outrageous or requires a completely different kind of thinking. It depends on what kind of ideas you’re having. When I write a song, sometimes I get ideas for a setting and sometimes I don’t. But the thing about being in a band is that if I don’t have ideas for a setting, everybody else helps provide that. There’s the thing of composing music, and there’s arranging and performing music. When you’re playing in a band, and the band functions, the band produces the arrangements. That’s what the Grateful Dead is good at doing. Sometimes they evolve over a long period of time. Sometimes they snap right into exigence. It depends on the tune. It depends on a lot of other things.
BROKEDOWN PALACE
Garcia: I’m not particularly prolific when I write. I’m lucky if I squeeze out two tunes a year, maybe three. Sometimes I hit a streak and do a few more. But usually it’s slow going, and if something real special happens, it’s a matter of tremendous luck. If you’re somebody who produces a lot of music and you have access to a recording studio, then a recording studio is an instrument in the same sense that the Grateful Dead is an instrument. The difference is that you perform for a record and maybe never perform the song again in your life. The record is the definitive statement about the song — that’s it, that’s as long as it lives, that’s as long as it lasts, and that’s it. I’ve been in that mode at various times; I’m not in it much lately and I haven’t been thinking that way much.
GOOD LOVIN’
Garcia: Since the ’70s, I’ve put a certain amount of energy into trying to improve as a musician. That’s all taken up with me and my relationship to my instrument, which is different from my relationship to the Grateful Dead. In the Grateful Dead, there are nights when I have a good night, but the rest of us don’t. I like the nights when we all have a good night. Then, I’m not so concerned about my own performance. It’s more of a flow — it’s just happening. Over the years, it’s more like when we have an on night, it’s an on night for everybody. When we have an off night, it’s an off night for everybody. Now our off nights are at least competent. They may be flat, but they’re not awful. It used to be if we had a bad night it was awful. I mean fuckin’ awful. So our percentages have improved.
MORNING DEW
Garcia: I get surprised by live performance. Somebody will say “Hey, listen to this tape of you guys…,” and I hear things and I can’t believe it’s us. Sometimes it sounds so nifty. Really, the only thing that counts is the last performance. That’s the sum total of everything. The emotional reality of that is way in advance of anything. It doesn’t do me any good to know that we were great once.
CASEY JONES
Garcia: I feel bad about that guru kind of stuff. I’ve made a real effort, so far anyway, to tell people that I’m not leading anybody anywhere. I’m extremely paranoid. If you look at what we’re doing, it has all the elements of the most extreme fascism. So that scares me a lot. I worry about it. That’s not what we’re about. It’s not what that power is about. It’s not about directing it somewhere. And it’s certainly not up to me to decide what it’s for or what it even is or even if it exists. But if people find something to believe in, in the midst of all that stuff, it’s OK with me. It’s just that I think there are better places to look than in other human beings. Would you like to have the responsibility of leading thousands of people off into some oblivion somewhere? If you thought that you were capable of it, you would automatically be the wrong person. So I’m disqualifying myself early. Whatever it is that the Grateful Dead does, it’s not me doing it.
RAMBLE ON ROSE
Garcia: The Grateful Dead is always in the process of becoming something. In that sense, we’re not that different from 10 years ago. It’s never that we arrive at this moment and we look around and say, “Oh, hey, too much, we’re the Grateful Dead now.” It’s always being on the verge of breaking over into some new space. What happens is new material gradually gets absorbed by the band, and old material, we forget we knew it, it sort of disappears. And then, we go back and dig up other old material that we’ve forgotten and it’s new again. We’re kind of endlessly recycling stuff, and each time something comes back a little different. Or real different, depending on the tune or on what’s going on in the rest of culture. We are of this time, of this society, so everything that happens touches us.
FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN
Garcia: Drugs are one of those things everybody has to decide for himself. I’ve learned lots from drugs, and I think life would be terribly dull without them. I think the whole drug thing … they’ve just got it all wrong. It’s so wrong that I feel funny addressing it. I don’t want anybody to have the idea I’m somehow endorsing drugs. But I think anything that gives you the ability to change your personality or see things from another perspective is helpful. But it’s people’s responsibility to deal with it in their own ways. There are definitely traps there too. I just feel that the whole way drugs are dealt with is totally wrong. They should be like food. Is anybody considered a food addict because they eat three times a day? So if you’re going to put something in your body, why can’t you think of that as your food? If a person is an addict, strung out on some drug, I mean, it’s up to them whether they take it or not. Who are we trying to protect is the question. We’re all being controlled somehow. So why not be able to take a little more of that control onto yourself? If it were like that, people wouldn’t die of overdoses. That’s the kind of stuff I don’t like. It’s a drag to lose a friend because of an overdose. But other than that, in terms of morality, I have no problem with drugs. To me, drugs are like food.
SUGAR MAGNOLIA
Garcia: I like mushrooms. They’re more reliable and less jangly. They’re sort of good-natured. I’ve never heard of anybody having a bad trip on mushrooms. They’re sort of jolly vegetables. I generally don’t like the ones that are off of the Methedrine chain. They’re too jangly for me. I like a drug to be invisible, physically. I hate physical discomfort.
DARK STAR
Garcia: They say my illness was pretty serious, but I missed it. I really wasn’t there for the worst of it. For me, it wasn’t a near-death situation. I didn’t have any of those kinds of experiences. The kind of experiences I had were certainly psychedelic. I just felt as though I were involved in some kind of incredible struggle, but it never occurred to me to stop struggling. So I struggled until I finally just sort of surfaced. Then the struggle took a different tack, but my “me,” my soul or whatever, was just struggling. I wasn’t really in control, like having a dream.
This illness changed me, but then so did LSD. So did going to Egypt. I’ve had about a dozen totally life-altering experiences. They’re kind of before-and-afters. There was the me before I went to Egypt (with the Dead in 1978), and there’s the me since I’ve been to Egypt. The automobile accident when I was young, that’s one of the things that got me committed to being a musician. It kind of gave me a boot. Before that I was kind of running around on the streets and fucking off. I wasn’t absolutely motivated by something. It was sort of an indirect thing, like this illness. When I was in the hospital, the only thing I could think about was, “Man, if I get out of here, I’m gonna play every chance I get.” The worst thing about being in the hospital was not being able to play.
AMERICAN BEAUTY
Garcia: Material things matter almost not at all. No matter what I have around me, I treat it badly. Everything I’ve got has cigarette burns in it. I’ve never really been able to get attached to stuff. I have a few nice things. I’ve had nice things in the past and lost them mostly, or given them away or drifted apart from them. I have a hard time having material lust. There aren’t that many things crying out to me on the material plane saying, “Have me, own me.” I’m just not that sort of person. I never was. Experience is my material. If I’m attached to this plane, it’s because of experience. That’s the thing that keeps me here.
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