Before the Dead is an album by
Jerry Garcia. It is a compilation of early recordings of Garcia playing
folk and
bluegrass music with various other musicians. The recordings were made from 1961 to 1964, before Garcia co-founded the rock band the
Grateful Dead. Produced as a four-CD box set, and also as a five-LP limited edition box set, it was released on May 11, 2018.[1][2][3][4][5]
Recording
In the early 1960s, the
American folk music revival was in full swing, and the
San Francisco Bay Area had its own folk scene. In 1961, after getting out of the Army, Jerry Garcia started playing
folk music and other
old-time songs. Garcia would sing and play
acoustic guitar as a member of various ensembles and bands. Over the next few years, Garcia also become interested in
bluegrass music, and learned to play the
banjo. As his music skills evolved, he continued to play in different bands with similarly inclined musicians. A number of these performances were captured on
reel-to-reel tape. In 1965, after a dalliance with
jug band music, Garcia co-founded the rock band the
Grateful Dead.[1][2]
Before the Dead was produced by Dennis McNally, an author and former publicist for the Grateful Dead, and Brian Miksis, a documentarian and audio engineer. The two worked together to track down some of the original recordings from Jerry Garcia's formative years as a musician. They also assembled many new short essays about the songs and the early '60s folk scene in the Bay Area, along with photographs from that time.[1][2]
The 1962 performance by the Hart Valley Drifters, at the studio of
Stanford University radio station
KZSU, was previously released as the album Folk Time.
Critical reception
In Rolling Stone,
David Browne wrote, "... Garcia spent several years immersed in bluegrass and folk, playing in a succession of
Palo Alto-area bands with oddball names like the Sleepy Hollow Hog Stompers. To date, only a small portion of the recordings he made with those combos has been released, making the multi-disc Before the Dead the deepest – and most educational – dive yet into Garcia's pre-Dead musical life. Right up to his death, Garcia would periodically revisit his bluegrass roots, from the wonderful but short-lived
Old & In the Way to albums he made with mandolinist
David Grisman. But Before the Dead reveals, in more detail than ever before, when and how that appetite began and why numbers like "Deep Elem Blues" and "Rosa Lee McFall", both heard here, made their way into the Dead's repertoire."[6]
In DownBeat, Jesse Jarnow said, "An illuminating new box set, Before the Dead... shines light on Garcia's earliest music – recordings between 1961 and 1964 – most often remembered as his "bluegrass period" for his virtuosic banjo playing. But the four-CD/five-LP collection reveals a far richer picture.... No casual player, the nearly four hours of music uncover a musician filled with ambition and energy. By a year after the earliest recording, Garcia had turned to banjo. That, too, became a progression, from the ghostly frailings of the Sleepy Hollow Hog Stompers, recorded in June 1962 ("Little Birdie"), to the shredding
Bill Keith style he'd accentuated by his time with the Black Mountain Boys in 1964 ("Salt Creek"). The sequence resulted in Garcia's instantly recognizable electric guitar playing with the Dead, each crystalline, articulated note picked with a banjoist’s precision."[7]
In Glide Magazine, Doug Collette wrote, "In roughly three and half hours of live and studio recordings, captured in various ways at a variety of locales between 1961 and 1964, Before the Dead documents the late Jerry Garcia's formative years as a musician. Overflowing with meticulous attention to detail in sound, text and graphics, this 4-CD/5-LP box set reveals how this iconic musician nurtured those attributes that eventually stood him in such good stead as titular leader of the Grateful Dead... If Before the Dead proves anything, it is that this man's passion for playing, as well as his insatiable curiosity about a diversity of styles, traditional and otherwise, was well-established long before the coalescence of the Grateful Dead."[8]