![]() I certainly couldn’t ever be him or imitate him, because I have my own thing and I have to do what I do. And it was really moving to hear what he was doing on those recordings. I heard studio recordings and I heard a number of live recordings, to sort of take over his parts on some of the songs that he had sung. I thought this song was going to go this direction, but it’s taken this complete left turn and I never would have thought of that.” He had a really unique sensibility in that way.Īnd then, of course, I fell in love with his singing. So I appreciated that as I was trying to learn it all very quickly, like, “Oh, wow. But that really was what gave me this appreciation for Jerry Garcia as a songwriter and as a composer.įirst of all, as a songwriter and composer, a lot of the chord progressions that he was using were very interesting, and a lot of the melodies that he was structuring were not typical melodies for American roots music or cosmic Americana or whatever you want to say the Grateful Dead’s music is. And yeah, it was a lot of work to be thrown into that. Like, if I went off-stage because there was a big jam going on and I knew I wasn’t going to have to sit in for another 15 or 20 minutes, I’d have headphones and my iPod there and I would go review my harmonies for the next two songs that were coming up in the set list. So what I was doing primarily during that time working with them was practicing and rehearsing and learning all day and all afternoon, and even between (songs). I mean, that’s one of the hallmarks of a Grateful Dead show is that they will play a different set from one night to the next, and then another completely different set the night after that. Is that really accurate, that you learned that many? ![]() At the time of that tour you did with the Dead in 2003, the New York Times did a story saying that you started out with a 50-song Dead repertoire that over the course of playing with them had grown to more than 200. So I was like, “Wow, I better check myself! Because something is going on here, whether I understand it or not.” But it wasn’t until after Jerry passed away, and until I worked with the other four guys in the Grateful Dead and actually sang a lot of the songs that Jerry had sung, that I was able to fully appreciate him and what he was about. Everyone was up dancing and clearly hypnotized. And I had never seen that before - you know, not one person in that entire stadium sitting down. They sound a little tired.” And then we got up there and every single person in the crowd was on their feet dancing. I remember very clearly how the band was already on stage and we could hear them as we were going to our seats, and we were like, “Oh, they sound a little sloppy. We were playing a show in Las Vegas and had some time between the soundcheck and the gig, so myself and the band went to the Grateful Dead show in this enormous football stadium, even though we couldn’t stay very long. ![]() It really wasn’t until much, much later that I came to appreciate him. I remember that I was on the road somewhere and heard about it from a fellow musician. OSBORNE: I don’t have one of those moments that are like “where were you when John Lennon was killed?” or anything like that regarding Jerry. 18.) VARIETY: We know you weren’t necessarily a major-league Deadhead in the ’90s, but do you recall at all where you were when you heard Garcia died? ![]() (Her eleventh album, “Trouble and Strife,” comes out Sept. Osborne’s immersion in Dead music and lore made her an ideal candidate for one of Variety‘s conversations commemorating the 25th anniversary of Garcia’s death - even as she celebrates her own quarter-century mark, as it was the summer of ’95 when her “Relish” album first boosted her into the national spotlight.
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