The Grateful Dead was a unique band and the late guitarist and singer Jerry Garcia was a fundamental part of what made it so. He continues to inspire musicians who are fans of the group, but it was never easy for other players to sound like him, because he had such a distinctive style, one that was deeply connected to the way he saw music and translated it to the guitar.
During the past ten years, Garcia’s legacy has been kept alive by Dead & Company, more precisely by guitarist John Mayer, who was already a fan of the band and had to study everything Garcia had done. Over the years, he has talked a lot about their music and given his opinion on Garcia as a guitar player, sharing his view of the way he played the guitar and composed songs.
What is John Mayer’s opinion on Jerry Garcia as a guitarist
John Mayer considers Jerry Garcia a unique guitarist who cannot be emulated, since everything Garcia played was singular. “I’m a good enough guitar player to know a great guitarist when I hear one. But I had to become an even better one to begin to understand the depth and complexity of Jerry Garcia’s playing. I’ve always said that musicians play like they are. In the case of Garcia, his performances serve as a detailed map of a man, his intentions, his desires, and his impressions of the world around him. And going by that map, Garcia was a lovely, mighty soul. I never met him, and will never understand the loss of those who did. But the vast archive of his music amounts to the makings of a starry night sky that turns listeners into explorers.”
(…) He wasn’t pulling notes from an anguished place within, he was catching them with a butterfly net as they went flitting by overhead. On a tactile level, he held the guitar with grace. It wasn’t a weapon, it was a vehicle. He took it easy. He may have played fast, but he was thinking slow. And that makes us listen with a smile.”
John Mayer continued:
“I put Jerry Garcia on the same level as Miles Davis and Bill Evans because of the intention in his performing. Once you’ve learned all the notes, and the chords, and the bends and the runs, you come to the final frontier of playing which is the why of it all. That’s where the power was and still is in his playing.”
“He played from a real place, a place that faced out to the world. (It was) not for his own reception or gratification. He played for the joy of interacting with the band and with the music he loved. (…) Even after learning these things, they offer very little help in sounding anything like the man. That’s because he didn’t play anything stock or repetitive. There are no “signature Jerry Garcia solo riffs” as exist with so many revered guitarists. To “sound like Jerry,” you have to make people feel like he did, and well—good luck with that,” John Mayer said in Jay Blakesberg’s book “Secret Space of Dreams“.
John Mayer said Jerry Garcia played the guitar almost like a piano and that he met who he really was through his compositions
The praised guitarist, who has been a member of the Grateful Dead’s spin-off group Dead & Company since 2015, explained that one of the most interesting things about Garcia’s playing was that he did not play the guitar in the regular, traditional way, it was more as if he were playing the piano. Also explained how he discovered who Jerry really was through his compositions.
“What’s interesting about his playing, that I actually thought about very recently, Jerry Garcia exists before the concept of a guitar hero. So there was a certain muscularity that guitar heroism picked up in the 70s, early 80s. I feel there was a certain atomic bomb kind of playing on the guitar. (…) (Jerry’s playing) is pre-high energy guitar ripping and it’s more subtle and nuanced. It’s a little more like swimming than it is cigarette boats, it is scuba diving, (see the correlation).”
“Before guitar playing got so acrobatic… and I think all us guitar players who have moved all the way through turn it up, crank it, put a tube screamer on it and let it rip, there is an elegance that we never quite caught on the guitar that we’re now super curious about finding this elegance.” Mayer then said that Jerry didn’t play the guitar the regular way, it was like someone playing the piano. “Just happened to be played this way (the regular way to play a guitar) but it was (like someone playing a piano).”
He continued:
“(When I joined the band) I knew I was coming from a different world. Like I was already coming from a different universe. So for me (to know more about Jerry), anything I would have gotten from (watching a Garcia) interview, I would have gotten from every single note that he was playing. I (was anxious) to learn the arrangements, so that I could understand the relativity of what made his playing different on any given night.”
“Once I can do that, I can lock into like this control group: ‘Ok, this is how ‘China Cat Sunflower’ goes’. (I hear) all the different permutations of his playing on top of it. I mean, down to the note. For me, it was like hearing his theory about the world or his philosophy on life, through playing. I still get that. I always felt like I could hear the records Jerry was listening between the tours or backstage on a record player. (That influence) always make its way in. You (notice) little things and you go: ‘oh, look at what he was listening to’. (They used to do a song called) ‘Next Time You See Me’. I could tell: ‘Oh, he’s having a Freddie King moment’.”
John Mayer continued:
“Once you understand how the arrangement goes and once you understand the base line of what the song is, you can understand that people’s souls live in the variances between their performances. That to me is how I really picked up the personality of this person, just through playing. I still can hear in this person that I don’t know, who’s left this archaeological artifact through his choices. So a man leaves his fingerprint via his choices. If you already know how ‘China Sunflower Cat’ goes then you can gauge the soul of a person. (You see it) in these spaces between what they normally do and what they did that time,” John Mayer told Comes a Time Podcast in 2021 (Transcribed by Rock and Roll Garage).
Mayer said he feels Jerry Garcia’s presence on stage
The Grateful Dead came to an end in 1995, when Jerry Garcia passed away at the age of 53. At the time, Mayer was 18 years-old and would start his musical career three years later, in 1998. Besides maintaining his solo career, Mayer has been touring with Dead & Company for one decade already. He was asked by The Clubhouse, in 2019, if he felt Garcia’s presence when he was playing with the band.
“Yeah (I feel his presence). It’s deep and in my imagination, I better preface that by saying in my imagination there are moments where… I would never think to vocalize this, doesn’t feel like I deserve to vocalize it. But there are times I go ‘you tell me what to do’. It’s really something like ‘look at me, I don’t know how to finish this’. It’s very touching,” John Mayer said (Transcribed by Rock and Roll Garage).
However, he does not feel that Dead & Company is always close to what the Grateful Dead once were. In his view, sometimes the band it’s not very connected to what the Dead represented with Garcia. “It’s incredible to say, I mean, we’ve been together for eight years. (This) is the length of a lot of bands who come and go, you know. Eight years is a tenure as a band.”
He continued:
“There have been times that I think that we’ve done such a good job of individualizing. Sometimes we pull away from Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, a little bit, and that’s ok. We become a little more Dead & Company. A little less umbilically tied to Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead,” John Mayer told Nugs in 2023 (Transcribed by Rock and Roll Garage).
Since 2015, Dead & Company’s line-up is the same with Mayer, Mickey Hart, Bob Weir and Bill Kreutzmann. They are accompanied by Jeff Chimenti (Keyboards), Oteil Burbridge (Bass) and Jay Lane (Occasionally substituting Kreutzmann since 2021). Since they got together the band played live in the United States every year, except in 2020.
What makes Grateful Dead’s music so interesting according to Mayer
John Mayer is a musician who can really deeply identify the structure of a band’s sound and songwriting. As he said in an interview made available by Enter Jam, what makes the Dead’s music interesting is that it mixes Pop and Jazz characteristics.
“So, what makes Grateful Dead’s music so interesting, it really is in between Pop music and Jazz music. It’s Pop music with the sensibility of moving you’re playing over the chords, the way Jazz music has. Jazz music never stays still. It’s constantly recontextualizing the scale for the chord. But same thing is in most of Grateful Dead’s music, which is what I dig about. For someone who’s played guitar for a long time, it’s just like mini games,” he said.
During his career, John Mayer released 8 solo studio albums. The first one was back in 2001 and the most recent one in 2021. He won several Grammy Awards as a solo act and has a big fan base.