Jerry Garcia’s Secret Motown Obsession

How a 1965 Junior Walker B-side built the Grateful Dead

Everyone knows the Grateful Dead as the quintessential acid rock jam band. Tie-dye, long improvisational journeys, psychedelic everything. The marketing has worked so well for so many decades that the actual blueprint underneath the band’s sound has been buried by its own iconography.

Here’s the part most fans never hear: one of the biggest influences on how the Dead actually grooved came straight out of Detroit. From Motown. And not in a casual, “they covered a couple of soul songs” way — Jerry Garcia sat the band down and made them study a Junior Walker B-side like a jazz chart.

“We studied that motherf***er,” Garcia said. The song was Cleo’s Back, a 1965 instrumental by Junior Walker and the All Stars. Once you hear it next to Dark Star, Eyes of the World, or any classic Dead jam where the instruments leave each other room to breathe, you can’t unhear the influence.

The Detroit DNA goes deeper. Pigpen’s father, Phil McKernan, was one of the Bay Area’s first R&B disc jockeys, on the air as “Cool Breeze” on KRE radio in the 1950s. Pigpen grew up on Lightnin’ Hopkins, Jimmy Reed, Howlin’ Wolf. Garcia brought the receptor cells. Pigpen brought the inheritance.

By Cornell 5/8/77 the Dead’s version of Dancing in the Street — the Civil Rights anthem written by Marvin Gaye, Mickey Stevenson, and Ivy Jo Hunter for Martha and the Vandellas in 1964 — had become a first-set showpiece. Garcia kept the Motown shuffle alive in the JGB with Melvin Seals on Hammond B-3 from 1981 until his death. The shuffle he learned from Cleo’s Back finally had a band that wasn’t trying to disguise it.

Watch the full episode on The Shakedown Archives: https://youtu.be/nF-WCJJ01-Y