Bob Dylan is one of the most important American musicians of all time, who had a profound impact on songwriting not only in the United States but also around the world. He inspired many of his contemporaries and bands that emerged a few years after his first album, who, under the influence of his music, were able to take their compositions in different directions.
One of these bands was the Grateful Dead, who also had a deep impact on American culture and have millions of devoted fans. Over the decades, Dylan has spoken about the Dead and shared his opinion on the band.
What is Bob Dylan’s opinion on the Grateful Dead
“The Grateful Dead are not your usual Rock and Roll band. They’re essentially a dance band. They have more in common with Artie Shaw and bebop than they do with the Byrds or the Stones. Whirling dervish dancers are as much a part of their music as anything else. There is a big difference in the types of women that you see from the stage when you are with the Stones compared to the Dead. With the Stones it’s like being at a porno convention. With the Dead, it’s more like the women you see by the river in the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? Free floating, snaky and slithering like in a typical daydream. Thousands of them,” Bob Dylan said in his book “Philosophy of Modern Song”.
In his view, with most bands, the audience participates in shows like spectators at a sporting event, simply being present and watching, but Deadheads don’t keep their distance, they become part of the band.
“The Dead are from a different world than their contemporaries. Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big Brother, all of them together wouldn’t even make a part of the Dead. What makes them essentially a dance band probably begins with the jazz classical bassist, Phil Lesh, and the Elvin Jones-influenced Bill Kreutzmann.”
He continued:
“Lesh is one of the most skilled bassists you’ll ever hear in subtlety and invention. And combined with Kreutzmann, this rhythm section is hard to beat. That rhythm section along with elements of traditional rock and roll and American folk music is what makes the Dead unsurpassable. Combined with their audience, it’s like one big free-floating ballet,” he said in his book.
According to him, the Dead had three main singers, two drummers, and three-part harmonies, which made them a band that was hard to compete with. He sees the group as a “postmodern Jazz musical Rock and Roll dynamo” and described Bob Weir as a “very unorthodox rhythm player” who had his own style, playing in a strange way that somehow matched Jerry Garcia’s guitar work.
Dylan also admired the writer and poet Robert Hunter, giving the song “Truckin'” as an example of their greatest tracks. “When you go to a Dead concert you are right there in Pirate Alley on the Barbary Coast, right there by the San Francisco Bay. At any time you could drop through a trapdoor into a rowboat and be shanghaied to China and not even know it,” he said.
Bob Dylan said Jerry Garcia was superb musician
Dylan was a good friend of the Grateful Dead members and had the chance to perform with them many times over the decades. After Garcia’s death in 1995, he shared a statement with Rolling Stone, calling him a superb musician and praising the uniqueness of his guitar playing.
“There’s no way to measure his greatness or magnitude as a person or as a player. I don’t think eulogizing will do him justice. He was that great. Much more than a superb musician with an uncanny ear and dexterity. He is the very spirit personified of whatever is muddy river country at its core and screams up into the spheres. He really had no equal.”
“To me he wasn’t only a musician and friend. He was more like a big brother who taught and showed me more than he’ll ever know. There are a lot of spaces and advances between the Carter family, Buddy Holly and, say, Ornette Coleman, a lot of universes. But he filled them all without being a member of any school. His playing was moody, awesome, sophisticated, hypnotic and subtle. There’s no way to convey the loss. It just digs down really deep,” Bob Dylan said.
At first Bob Dylan felt that the tour with the Grateful Dead would work
The time when Dylan and the Dead spent the most time together was in 1987, when a successful stadium tour featuring both took place in North America. They played shows together and separately during the run. The result was the collaborative live album “Dylan and the Dead”, released in 1989. However, it features only songs written by Dylan.
Curiously, at first he thought his tour with them wouldn’t work and even considered leaving. But after one of the rehearsals he got a good feeling about it and really enjoyed performing with them. “Elliot Roberts, had set up some shows for me to do with The Grateful Dead. I needed to go rehearse with the band for these shows. So I went to San Rafael to meet with The Dead. I thought it would be as easy as jumping rope. After an hour or so, it became clear to me that the band wanted to rehearse more and different songs than I had been used to doing with (Tom) Petty (on my previous tour).”
“They wanted to run over all the songs, the ones they liked, the seldom seen ones. I found myself in a peculiar position and I could hear the brakes screech. If I had known this to begin with, I might not have taken the dates. I had no feelings for any of those songs and didn’t know how I could sing them with any intent. (…) Returning to The Dead’s rehearsal hall as if nothing had happened, I picked it up where we had left off. (I) couldn’t wait to get started, taking one of the songs that they wanted to do. (I was) seeing if I could sing it using the same method that the old singer used.”
He continued:
“I had a premonition that something would happen. At first it was hard going, like drilling through a brick wall. All I did was taste the dust. But then miraculously something internal came unhinged. In the beginning all I could get out was a blood-choked coughing grunt. It blasted up from the bottom of my lower self, but it bypassed my brain.”
“That had never happened before. It burned, but I was awake. The scheme wasn’t sewed up too tight, would need a lot of stitches, but I grasped the idea. I had to concentrate like mad because I was having to maneuver more than one stratagem at the same time. But now I knew I could perform any of these songs without them having to be restricted to the world of words. This was revelatory. I played these shows with The Dead and never had to think twice about it. Maybe they just dropped something in my drink, I can’t say. But anything they wanted to do was fine with me. I had that old jazz singer to thank,” Bob Dylan said in his book “Chronicles Vol.1”.
Dylan said that Jerry Garcia showed him that his songs could have been better
Bob Dylan has been one of the most prolific songwriters of all time, and besides achieving success with his own releases, numerous other artists have had huge hits by covering his songs. Some of those tracks even became better when rearranged by other bands and singers. In Dylan’s opinion, Jerry Garcia was one of the musicians who showed him that his songs could sometimes be improved.
“I can’t say that I’ve made any great-sounding records. A lot of the older songs were just blueprints for what I’d play later on the stage. Jerry Garcia proved that to me. He took a lot of the songs and actually recorded them and sang them a step further than they were on my records.”
“He heard where they should go. I would hear his versions of songs of mine and I’d say, ‘OK, I understand how it should go.’ Then I would play that and might even take it a step further. There have been other artists who have recorded my songs and shown me the way the song should go,” Bob Dylan said in an interview with Edna Gunderson in 1997.
Bob Dylan has paid tribute to the Grateful Dead in his solo shows, most recently when he covered “Friend of the Devil” in 2022. It was the first time he had performed one of their songs live since 2007.