Artist:   Jerry Garcia
Song:   "Deal"
Album: Garcia
Label:   Rhino
Year:    1971

Jerry Garcia was not a good singer, but he was a great singer. And in the oddity of that equation lies his real magic. Known for helping create psychedelic music as a life pursuit, the man once nicknamed (against his wishes) Captain Trips also possessed a voice that carried so much heartfelt emotion it could overwhelm the knowing listener. What’s strange is how strongly the Grateful Dead always got knocked for their vocals. But maybe it took a well-opened mind to hear the beauty of Garcia’s voice, how he conveyed the eternal optimism of America, as beat up and dragged down as it had become. He had seen into the future, and likely knew what was coming, but the way he stood up to the hard news was always nothing short of heroic: “If I told you all that went down/it would burn off both of your ears.” “Deal” is the first song on his debut solo album, and it kicks off like a regular rambling into an Old West saloon. Robert Hunter’s words are bigger than just song lyrics. He lives in a world of expansive allegory, with paperback copies of Moby Dick and On the Road stuck in his back pockets. Once Jerry Garcia hits the guitar solo mark, he opens the throttle and whips out lead lines with a restrained scream, cutting a deep slice right down the middle of the song. Besides singing, he plays six instruments on the song, aided only by Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann, and builds a world that Samuel Clemens, if he had been alive, would probably have been cheering wildly from the sidelines. Some listeners understood the achievement of Garcia’s 1971 release, and others waited it out until the next Grateful Dead album came out. To the man making the music, none of that mattered. He was looking around the next bend, ready for action and a new adventure.