My parents were both big fans of the Grateful Dead, and my dad collected a bunch of Jerry Garcia's other work over the years. He had albums released by The Jerry Garcia Band and collaborations between Garcia and David Grisman that got an awful lot of play. Because of this I was exposed to lot of Garcia's music and covers. His guitar picking was the first I recognized and his voice can always calm me down. There's just something so soothing about his music; I'm sure at least part of it is that I began listening to it at such a young age.
Garcia has an impressive catalog of music, but I'm almost never sure what songs are originals and which ones are covers. It wasn't until Across the Universe came out in 2007 that I realized Dear Prudence was actually a song by The Beatles. I'd only ever heard Garcia's cover of it. I've had an impressively difficult time tracking down a list of songs that Garcia wrote either the lyrics or music for on the internet. You'd think someone would have already compiled something like that and posted it on a fan site. Perhaps I just didn't look hard enough.
So I thought I'd play it safe for this answer and leave you with Touch of Gray, The Grateful Dead's one and only hit single, since I know they wrote it. But I know my mom would be disappointed if that's the only Grateful Dead song I posted (I'm still going to post it here, since I like it a lot).
The thing is, it's hard to pick just one Grateful Dead song (even harder to pick just one Jerry Garcia performance). Ripple is pretty standard
Friend of the Devil will always have a place in my heart
And one of my favorite songs is The Way You Do The Things You Do (but I don't think this one is a Jerry Garcia original).
I'll go with Jimmie's Chicken Shack, and given the rest of this post their Brokedown Palace cover. Unfortunately YouTube doesn't have a video of it, and since that's also not really their song how about Lazy Boy Dash - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ttd-8N1KHro
ReplyDeleteI may jump on this bandwagon too. This choice is very difficult for me. I have artists who have changed my life, artists who have defined my playlists for years, and new artists who dominate my interests of late. My favorite artist changes frequently. For this, let's go with my all-time favorite artist, who has defined who I am and how comfortable I am with that person since I was a child. Nirvana. There are a wealth of songs I could choose for this, I have two favorite covers of theirs: The Man Who Sold the World by David Bowie (another contender for Favorite Artist) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fregObNcHC8 and Lake of Fire by The Meat Puppets http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uT1BuLYt2RU.
ReplyDeleteAs for an original song, one of my favorite Nirvana songs ever is Rape Me from In Utero http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csEtzhVl-bQ. For me it is the quintessential Nirvana song, at once vulgar and thoughtful, it is the grunge era epitomized.
Narrowing it down to one favorite artist is really hard. It's why I ended up going with one that had such a huge influence on my life from the beginning
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