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Coming to grips with the decline of Mr. Garcia post-70s, much in the vocal department is a depressing side road for me.  Maybe because, as I tout so openly, I am middle-aged.

The 1984/85 New Year’s Eve performance of Shakedown Street, a song I always liked on the radio, on the So Many Roads collection, has to contain the worst vocal performance of a lead vocalist on any officially released album ever.

Jerry, by my calculation, was 42 or 43.

Now, maybe that night he was famous for having a cold or something, but come on.  The Scarlet Begonias from Hamilton, Ontario, 1990, a few tracks later on So Many Roads isn’t much better.

Then I get to Terrapin Station, 9/12/1991 a couple more tracks in, and I find myself moved.  Before I have a chance to read the date, the melody grabs me as it always does and immediately I find myself in another state of mind.  Then the singing.

I am listening to a dying man.  Easy to say now, but he didn’t die for another four years.

Yet he’s dying there.  No man who wasn’t dying would be allowed to sing in that vocal state – he’d hurt his vocal cords and do permanent damage.  Only a man with no future would have been permitted to push himself like that.

I cannot get beyond the line “I will not forgive you”, although I know its a trick played by retrospect.

Then, later “The storyteller makes no choice, soon you will not hear his voice . . . “

If you have any love for what Jerry Garcia created, or for the man, take a listen to this vocally painful version if you haven’t in a while.

All but despondent, I then stumble upon Whiskey in the Jar, a gem in so many ways.  If the chatter mid-rehearsal in 1993 is to be taken at face value, Garcia begins playing this old Irish folk tune from deep memory, then singing along.  If  I had any doubt that Garcia’s first love was bluegrass and that he was a genius, it is dissolved here.

His banter with Bob Weir about the song and its lyrics captures what so many have written about him — he is enraptured by the music, a bit of a wise guy in the process — “I haven’t [heard it in 30 years] either, I just remembered it” he responds to Bobby, with either a bit of prodding one-upsmanship in his voice or maybe he’s just on something.

When he says “great lyrics, it’s a cool song” he sounds like a teenager.

He would later, some research reveals, record the song with David Grisman later that year — adding another must-hear to my long list.

So Many Roads, performed with the Grateful Dead that final show in Chicago in 1995, closes the CD.  I recognize that there are a lot of interesting coincidences and foreshadowings going on, and as a novice I will not attempt to put it all together.

I will simply note that I have read Garcia idolized Dylan, and that the ending background vocals are quite reminiscent of Knocking on Heaven’s Door.  That The Well has some really great message board threads organized by song, and that I read somewhere that Robert Hunter sometimes wrote lyrics for Garcia to serve as a message to Garcia.

And that there are many oblique references to other Dead-repertoire songs in the lyrics to So Many Roads.

My favorite is the one I caught on my own, the first line:  “Thought I heard a blackbird singing”, reminding me of Morning Dew.