In Garcia's Shadow, the Dead's New Guitarist Has His Own Sound
March 5, 2003
By BEN RATLIFF
BUFORD, Ga. - Let's say you are the replacement for Jerry
Garcia in the Grateful Dead. Your new job is to go in front
of 20,000 fans and play music that they probably know
better than you do. Should you play like Him? Ought you
dare try?
These were among the questions facing Jimmy Herring, an
affable and studious 41-year-old guitarist steeped in
Southern rock and schooled in jazz-fusion but basically a
newcomer to the Dead until a brief, unsatisfying tenure
five years ago with a band that played Dead songs. Last
year the surviving members of the Dead asked him to fill
Garcia's role - as if such a thing, to legions of
Deadheads, were possible.
Not long ago Mr. Herring was just another struggling guitar
player in Atlanta, living from week to week on gig money
and getting by with help from his wife, Carolyn, a
schoolteacher.
But when he joined the Other Ones - the name under which
the four remaining original members of the Dead toured last
year, with supporting help - he began an intensive study of
Garcia, who died in 1995. Mr. Herring learned most of the
Dead's 38-year repertory, including the 128 songs on last
fall's tour list. Other songs were thrown at him 20 minutes
before showtime and even, to his horror, in midperformance,
via a sudden cue from a band member.
"I just have to listen to the best of my ability," he said
a few weeks ago, over catfish, fried okra and sweet iced
tea at a restaurant near his Buford house. "Sometimes,
instead of trying to play the chords with them, I just play
fills around what they're doing.
"But that's the beauty of what the band is going for. They
love playing without a net, not knowing if you're going to
make it or not."
It may be harder to satisfy the fans. "I'm not trying to
copy," Mr. Herring said. "I just want my playing to sound
fairly authentic, as far as the Grateful Dead goes. I don't
have to harmonically play what he played. I don't have to
copy his riffs and lines. But I'd like for the overall
picture to be somewhere within the kingdom."
Phil Lesh, the Dead's bassist, said that Mr. Herring had
gracefully passed the test. "I was looking for somebody who
would bring his own interpretive approach to the music," he
said. "Jimmy's absorbed the essence of Garcia that he wants
to carry with him. He knows the hooks, the critical phrases
or fills that can identify or define a song, or be used as
material in improvisation. And improvising is one of the
things that Jimmy does really well."
Members of the Dead - just the Dead, which is the new
band's official name as of last month - are not averse to
change. Mr. Lesh, influential in the group, wants to
reinterpret the old songs. The Dead is playing at more
energized tempos, with some new songs by Mr. Lesh and the
singer and rhythm-guitarist Bob Weir; and it now has Mr.
Herring, whose style differs noticeably from Garcia's
gentle phrasing. Looking utterly serious as he fires out
perfectly formed single notes, Mr. Herring has a musical
vocabulary that sounds like an even mix picked up from
Duane Allman and Dickey Betts, Jimi Hendrix and Garcia,
bunched together by his own alert, relentless attack.
He is tall and pale, his whitening red hair in a ponytail
that runs down to the middle of his lumberjack shirts. He
can look like a stolid hippie mountain man, with a slight
resemblance to Allman. But at essence Mr. Herring, the son
of a schoolteacher and a superior court judge from North
Carolina, is a jazz fan and striped-bass fisherman with a
nearly guileless demeanor. He is a calming presence, a
blessing for any touring band.
"I learned when I was real young that I didn't have the
moves or the looks to be a pop star," Mr. Herring said. "So
I got drawn into instrumental music and jazz. I was into
pyrotechnical music: Charlie Parker, John McLaughlin and
guys who played with that kind of wizardry. I always knew
the Dead had something that was great, but I never really
knew what they were about."
Garcia was more like him than he knew: a jazz enthusiast
who was not born to be a pop star either. Mr. Herring was
never a Deadhead, and his musical training was rooted in
1980's guitar-school pedagogy. (He studied at the Berklee
College of Music in Boston and the Guitar Institute of
Technology in Los Angeles.) His introduction to Garcia's
style has been almost academic, a careful processing of
information.
"Jimmy has incredible attention to detail," said his friend
Derek Trucks, the bandleader and a former guitarist with
the Allman Brothers Band. "He can talk about tying fishing
knots for hours," he said. "In the same way, he can sit in
his basement in his house with his guitar and just go
forever."
Since Mr. Herring joined the Dead his family's standard of
living has vastly improved: he, his wife and their two
children now live in an airy, high-ceilinged house in
Gwinnett County, an Atlanta suburb. When he wants his
family to see him on tour, the Dead usually pays for plane
tickets and lodging. In May, when it is time to rehearse
for the next tour, the Dead will fly him to its
headquarters in San Rafael, Calif.
At lunch Mr. Herring spoke about what he has discovered
about Garcia's music: "Garcia's wasn't a very in-your-face
sound. It was gorgeous. And as a writer he was a master of
simple chord progressions." He thought some more. "Against
the triad harmony he used, you have fewer notes you can
play that sound right. There are only three notes in those
chords, so what you mostly end up doing is playing
arpeggios through the chord changes."
"It narrows down your choices harmonically," he continued,
"and it's difficult to come up with something creative. Not
for him, though. He could sound like he was crying. He
played ballads beautifully. I've also come to love Garcia's
sound, and his touch. His main sound was ice-bell clear,
with reverb. With a sound as clean as that, your touch is
everything."
Mr. Herring's career has been a series of apprenticeships.
The first was with the singer and bandleader Bruce Hampton,
a bearish avant-gardist who has managed to attract many
curious Atlanta musicians since the late 1960's. In 1989
Mr. Herring joined Mr. Hampton's group, Aquarium Rescue
Unit, which mixed rock, free-jazz, bluegrass and much else.
He stayed with Mr. Hampton until 1996, touring in a van and
playing nearly 300 nights a year.
His first brush with Garcia's music came in 1998 with a gig
in a group called Jazz Is Dead. Assembled by a West Coast
promoter, that band was formed to put jazz-influenced
musicians together with Dead tunes. His reputation having
spread through Aquarium Rescue Unit, Mr. Herring got the
call, even though he had neither paid any attention to the
Grateful Dead nor considered himself a jazz musician. He
accepted so that he could get a chance to play with T
Lavitz, from the Southern rock band Dixie Dregs, and the
drummer Billy Cobham. His first assignment was to buy a
copy of the Dead's 1975 album "Blues for Allah" and learn
the pieces on it. He had never bought a Dead album.
"I found the music interesting, but I had to learn it so
fast that I wasn't doing justice to it," he said. "My view
of the music at that time was too shallow."
After he had spent two years with Jazz Is Dead, the Allman
Brothers came calling, but that was a mixed blessing. Mr.
Herring was asked on short notice to replace Mr. Betts, who
had been suspended from the band under acrimonious
circumstances. Over four months, he saw lots of "Where's
Dickey?" T-shirts. That cast a pall over the job. "I felt
like I was with someone else's wife," Mr. Herring
remembered.
Mr. Lesh called in January 2000, on a recommendation from
Mr. Trucks. Mr. Lesh was auditioning for his new
side-project band. But that band would be playing Grateful
Dead songs, and Mr. Herring worried about jumping into that
world, with all its history and associations. "I started
having an identity crisis," he said. "I was thinking, `Am I
trying to live off of something that's already happened?' "
His fears were quelled at the audition, which convinced him
that the band was about the music, not nostalgia. "With the
Dead's stuff, the same thing can be played so many
different ways," he said. "It was built into its design
that you could do the same song in three-four, or in seven,
or fast or slow, or as a waltz."
The job with Mr. Lesh's band eventually led to being picked
for the Dead. One of the many Grateful Dead discussion
groups on the Internet offers a variety of considered
criticisms, all relating to Garcia. One says that despite
his technical prowess, Mr. Herring can't get at Garcia's
spooky, "outskirts of town" feeling. Others complain that
he plays too fast, or that there is not enough variation in
his tone. An opposing faction defends his speed and
accuracy as a welcome change.
Mr. Herring said that almost all the feedback he received
in person was positive, but that he suffered from some
self-imposed anxiety. "Garcia would approach the same song
in a different way quite often," he explained. "It's hard
for me sometimes, because after I learn some beautiful
lines of his, I'll say, `That's so good, I've got to learn
that.' For example, there's a version of one song,
`Cassidy,' in which Jerry's playing mind-blowingly elegant,
poignant stuff. Angel-butterfly-wings-cascades stuff."
(Deadheads: the reference is to the recording, on "Dick's
Picks, Vol. 20," of a concert in Landover, Md., on Sept.
25, 1976.)
"But then I'll hear another version, and he's not doing
those things. I feel that I needed to let go and quit
trying to learn these specific lines because people might
say, `sounds like he's only heard the 1976 version.' "
Mr. Lesh said: "My advice to him would be not to listen to
the old tapes at all anymore. It's a different band now."
Tell that to thousands of Deadheads, many of whom have
commiserated with Mr. Herring about the difficultly of, in
effect, replacing Babe Ruth in the outfield.
"The band has made it so easy for me," Mr. Herring said.
"Deadheads are always coming up to me with this sorrowful
look in their eyes, thinking it's a lot worse for me than
it really is. I have to say to them, `You know, it's really
not that bad.' " |
