The art of a guitar solo

Saturday 4/6/24

Wanted to focus in on one of the best guitar solos I've ever experienced, and I think that's the way to say it. The solo is by Jerry Garcia--following a first guitar solo by Bob Weir--at the Grateful Dead's 8/6/71 Hollywood Palladium show, and it comes on the band's cover of Otis Redding's "Hard to Handle," for which Ron McKernan sings the lead vocal.

I've talked about certain similarities between the Dead and the Duke Ellington band. They're probably America's two greatest groups. I'm just going to flat out say that as a band, in what a band can be as people who play together, the Grateful Dead are the best I've heard. I've heard them do things that no one else can do. And they're constantly surprising. I feel like you could study their music and nothing else for all of your life and you'd learn a lot about life. About art. There's really nothing like them.

But we can make certain comparisons with Ellington's group. This Garcia solo reminds of Paul Gonsalves' solo for twenty-seven choruses on "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue" with the Ellington band at Newport in 1956. Watch this video here. The guy who posted it did a great job with the text. The whole thing will get you going.

Ellington bassist Jimmy Blanton was long dead by this time--being one of jazz's most tragic losses, given his age and what he might have done, and jazz has known more than its fair share of those--but when I mentioned partnerships before, I could have included Ellington and Blanton. He was the most important player the Duke ever had in his band and the most gifted. The way he played bass changed everything for Ellington. Opened up so many possibilities.

Phil Lesh's bass playing did the same with the Grateful Dead. You're going to hear him counterpoint both guitar soloists in this recording--Garcia especially, even though the floor--once he starts going--belongs to Garcia above all.

Then again: You could choose to focus on Lesh and be blown away by his dexterity. What I love about the Dead is how they reward someone who listens well. Listening is its own art. Reading can be, too. We get better at these things. Sometimes, there's a rare artist who offers us rewards all the greater when we do. It's like our consciousness extends and there's this new world, provided by that artist, in which we can both lose and find ourselves.

As Gonsalves plays chorus after chorus, you'll hear the audience losing their minds. I mean, wouldn't you? This is awesome.

Now let's get back to the Dead. There's both an audience source and a soundboard source for this gig. The audience recording is stellar. You are in the joint. The taper was perfectly positioned, thanks in part to Weir, who we actually hear giving advice from the stage on where to stand. That's friendly.

I could definitely understand someone having the audience recording be their go-to for this show, but for the purposes of this exercise, I'm going to use the soundboard recording. You know how you go to the symphony and you think about something like the quality of string articulation? Think about when you listen to With music like this, as this level, the guitar is the same way, and you want to hear maximum articulation with this performance. It's like when you're listening to your cherished copy of Sir John Barbirolli's English String Music, which doubtless you do often, yes? The string articulation causes hearts to flutter, in the good way, not the atrial fibrillation way.

So: Go to Archive and song nine from this August 1971 Hollywood show, which is "Hard to Handle." Listen closely, because what you're going to hear is Jerry Garcia drop out on due to a broken string on his guitar. McKernan keeps vocalizing as Weir steps forward to play the first solo.

Weir is a rhythm player, and when rhythm players solo, they tend to do so in a rhythmic style that's an extension of what they're more typically doing. Think about John Lennon on "You Can't Do That" or "Yer Blues" (the first solo of that song is his, while the second is played by George Harrison) or any Keith Richards' solo. Weir solos almost as if he's comping.

Meanwhile, Garcia is restringing his guitar. Lesh takes over from Weir, his bass simultaneously functioning (paradoxically--but it was this kind of thing that Ellington also recognized in Blanton's abilities) as the song's rhythmic substrate and its free-form driver, the band locked in a groove that you just don't get that often in music of any sort. The stage isn't so much set as it is ready and waiting. It's a subtle difference, perhaps, but a real one that the opportunistic artist who loves a challenge--and to challenge himself--recognizes.

Garcia gets his ax back in order and about seventy percent of the way through the track, he returns, and it's time to shred, and shred he does while building this solo that is a structured song--or an instrumental aria--unto itself, an assertion of will, ingenuity, passion and fire.

Everyone's going off by then, which makes Garcia start going even more. He's thinking fast, playing fast, but with transcendent finesse and rigorous design. Hear the crystalline notes and note the architectonic nature of the enterprise.

What we have is the guitar solo as musical, artistic, emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual event. Garcia finishes, and what you hear from the crowd is the sound of people who have been enraptured and are communally expressing that. All because the man broke a string.

It's not just that, of course. But minus that broken string, we probably wouldn't have gotten what we got.