The 1967 song that became a burden for Jerry Garcia
Credit: Far Out / Alamy Everything that Jerry Garcia ever played seemed to come from his heart first before anything else. Even though the Grateful Dead were always going to be an acquired taste for many, you couldn’t deny that the band seemed to be having the time of their lives, weaving together some of the best music that they could make whenever they took the stage. When a song started and ended didn’t matter as long as they could create that magic onstage, but there were more than a few songs where Garcia seemed to be a little bit too tired of going through the motions whenever they played.Then again, going through the motions is practically the opposite of what any Grateful Dead show should be. The appeal of the band was seeing them do extensions upon certain ideas and trying to make the best with what they had whenever they jammed, so if there were any songs that seemed like work, it didn’t take them long to throw them out of the set or start tweaking different parts of the tune.But a lot of their best tunes were often a bit more malleable than what most other people were working with. Garcia didn’t want to settle for writing certain parts that were going to stay the same every single time he played them, and even when working with people like Bob Dylan, Garcia wasn’t about to change his entire style of playing to suit one of the greatest lyricists of all time. Nor did Dylan want The Dead to change for him, either.After all, some of Dylan’s best material was a lot more malleable as well, and when he got together with the band, it seemed like a match made in heaven. The Band already had a common knowledge of when Dylan was going to switch things up or change the key of a song or add an extra verse, and for a band that’s known for jamming first and weaving together the song in real time, a lot of what turned up on Dylan and the Dead felt like it should have been a match made in heaven.When you’ve been moving for that long, though, there comes a point where some songs get stale, and ‘Minglewood Blues’ was the best example Garcia could give for a song that he was sick of playing, saying, “I would say it’d have to be probably―I’m starting to get tired of (some of) the Dylan tunes. But I still love ‘em. I think― ‘Minglewood Blues’ probably. We’ve done that more than is fair and right, you know? I try to get Bob to start doing more of his regular tunes from the past. And he keeps saying, ‘Well, I’m gonna rewrite the words on this or rewrite the words on that’. Or something like that but he never does.”At the same time, that was always how Dylan worked to a certain degree. He didn’t play songs thinking about how the rest of the band was going to react to them half the time, and part of the fun that bands like the Heartbreakers had was not knowing whether one night would be the night where he changed things up or if they would be safe to rely on the same kind of arrangement when they got up onstage.Further reading: From The VaultThe blues singer Chuck Berry compared to meeting the Pope: “It was the feeling”The 1979 Led Zeppelin song that Jimmy Page hated: “That is not us”The greatest showman Mick Jagger ever saw: “I was an instant convert”But for Garcia, he needed a little bit more than that. The worst thing that any band could have been in his mind was predictable, and when you look at some of those shows with Dylan, there would be a few moments where Garcia didn’t really want to go through the same batch of songs like he had been doing every single time Dylan wrote with them.Which probably explains why the band parted ways with the wordsmith only a few years down the line. They were never sworn enemies by any stretch, but when you look at where Dylan was going and where the Dead had been throughout their career, they seemed to be on completely separate creative wavelengths after one too many records together. ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE The Far Out Bob Dylan NewsletterAll the latest stories about Bob Dylan from the independent voice of culture.Straight to your inbox.
