Garcia personally learned guitar styles from several different players in the early years, but he also learned from listening to albums that he would copy so a parallel narrative here is how Garcia worked on his guitar & banjo techniques in the early years. This article also leans heavily toward his earlier years, when he was soaking up various influences – there’s a dramatic falling-off in the number of musicians he talks about after the mid-‘70s, versus heaps of detail about the early ‘60s. Garcia would also usually talk about a musician’s work in general, rather than a specific album of theirs. You won’t find any discussion here at all of, for instance, Indian or classical music, nor of other San Francisco rock bands and you can search in vain for a single mention of Van Morrison but other random artists will pop up sometimes. Naturally, he spoke a lot more often about certain musicians who’d directly influenced him, so a lot of stuff we know he heard or covered never got mentioned. But he often talked at length about the artists who were important to him. You’ll notice that Garcia was frequently asked what he was listening to, and just as frequently gave the vaguest answers – “I listen to everything” being the most typical. The search was a tricky one, and much is missing. Thanks to his frequent interviews, it’s possible to partially reconstruct Garcia’s listening history over the years – with many omissions, but we can still follow the main trends on his record player. Originally, I thought this would just be a short post of something like “Garcia’s Top 20 Records,” but its scope expanded considerably. For those interested, you can check out this site which lists all his covers and where they came from: One way to approach this would be to list all of Garcia’s covers and the sources he used. This can be considered the other side of Garcia’s music education. The musicians Garcia saw live were often the same ones he heard on records, so I decided to make a companion post listing the most important records he is known to have listened to over the years. A recent post listed all the concerts Jerry Garcia is known to have attended:
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |