What does Jerry Garcia play on “Eyes of the World” and why does it sound so cool

What makes Jerry Garcia’s guitar style so magical? What makes a person like me slog through so much indifferent-to-terrible Grateful Dead music to hear it? Rather than try to understand the whole corpus at once, I think it makes more sense to zoom in on specific phrases and passages and see how they work. In a previous post, I examined a phrase from the studio version of “The Music Never Stopped”. In this post, I will look at the intro to “Eyes of the World” from 11/11/1973. 

I’m not going to talk about “Eyes of the World” as a song; I’ll save that for another post. Instead, I’m only concerned with Jerry’s solo in the first minute.

Here’s my chart and tab. The intro to “Eyes” is an open-ended groove on Emaj7. The tune begins with a riff played by Bobby high up on the neck, moving through different voicings of Emaj7, E6, and E6/9. Between them, these chords combine every note in the E major scale except for A. My nickname for this pitch collection is the “Eyes mode.” You could think of it as E major pentatonic plus D-sharp, or more abstractly, as two groups of whole steps a fifth apart. 

I don’t know whether Jerry arrived at this intervallic symmetry in his head or as a fretboard pattern, but it’s an appealing sound.

Jerry’s solo begins halfway through the fifth measure. He mostly plays the Eyes mode, aside from an occasional A and some chromatic connectors between scale tones. To understand how he makes such plain-vanilla raw material sound so jazzy and colorful, first let’s consider how the key of E major is “supposed” to work in traditional tonal theory. The most stable notes in the key are E, G-sharp and B, the root, third and fifth of the tonic triad. The other notes in the E major scale are tendency tones, which “want” to resolve to notes in the tonic triad.

• Scale degree seven (D-sharp) is very unstable. It wants to resolve to the tonic (E).
• Scale degree four (A) is also very unstable. It wants to resolve to the third (G-sharp).
• Scale degree six (C-sharp) is less unstable. It wants to resolve to the fifth (B).
• Scale degree two (F-sharp) is also less unstable. It wants to resolve either to the tonic or the third.

The V7 chord (B7 in the key of E) has both of the highly unstable tendency tones (D-sharp and A) and one of the less unstable ones (F-sharp). That creates a strong pull toward the tonic triad. In Western European tradition, the resolution of (tense) B7 to (resolved) E is the defining sound of E major.

So, that’s tonal tradition. Now, what is happening in “Eyes”? The Emaj7 chord is an inherent contradiction. You have that nice stable E major triad, but you also have D-sharp on top pulling hard toward E. It’s the tonic and the leading tone together, both resolved and unresolved. Adding C-sharp into the mix adds more contradictory information. It’s consonant, but it also pulls. This “stable yet unstable” sound is the heart of the “Eyes of the World” groove.

Sometimes Jerry does play the “Eyes” groove as if it’s traditional tonal music. In measure ten, he plays B and G-sharp, implying the tonic E chord. Then he plays A and F-sharp, implying B7. Finally, he plays G-sharp, F-sharp, and E, the “Three Blind Mice” melody, implying a return to the tonic. This is a tidy classical I-V7-I. But it is also an outlier. Jerry mostly avoids A in the rest of his solo. Also, while he treats E as his melodic destination a lot of the time, he rarely approaches it in such an orderly and tonal-sounding way.

The real magic begins in measure fourteen, where Jerry plays a syncopated one-bar phrase. In measure fifteen, he repeats the phrase with some small embellishments. In measure sixteen, he repeats the embellished version, and then continues it into a flowing stream of sixteenth notes up the scale. In measure eighteen, he resolves to a long C-sharp, and then walks back down the scale from D-sharp in a series of syncopated scale fragments. You don’t need to know any music theory to recognize deliberate melodic phrasing when you hear it. It’s the difference between aimless noodling and structured in-the-moment composition. Jerry did his fair share of aimless noodling, but when he put his mind to in-the-moment composition, he did it very well.

In measure twenty, Jerry does a pair of pull-offs, from G-sharp chromatically down to F-sharp, then from F-sharp chromatically down to E. Chromatic pull-offs are a big Jerry-ism, as he explains in a Guitar Player interview in 1978:

Generally, I like to pick every note, but I do tend to pull-off, say, a real fast triplet on things that are closing up-intervals that are heading up the scale. I do it almost without thinking about it. I almost never pull off just one note. I seldom hammer on, because it seems to have a certain inexactitude for me. I think that was a decision I made while playing the banjo.

My preference is for the well-spoken tone, and I think coming straight down on the strings with high knuckles makes it. So my little groups of pull-offs are really well-articulated; it’s something I worked on a lot.

This kind of interview is a bittersweet read for a fan like me. On the one hand, Jerry is always thoughtful about his playing and the music that informs it. When I was younger, I learned a ton about the history of American vernacular music just by chasing down songs and artists that Jerry mentioned in interviews over the years. Jerry was my first exposure to Elizabeth Cotten, Irving Berlin, Merle Haggard, and Howlin’ Wolf, among many others. On the other hand, Jerry was not in touch with other parts of his own psychology, like the part that drove him to slowly kill himself with heroin and cocaine. As Mickey Hart put it heartlessly but accurately in the Long Strange Trip documentary: “He was a cool guy, until he killed himself.”

Rather than dwell on that, let’s give the last word to Ken Kesey. In a letter he wrote to be read at Jerry’s funeral, Kesey described “that golden Garcia lead line… that familiar slick lick with the uptwist at the end, that merry snake twining through the woodpile, flickering in and out of the loosely stacked chords…a wriggling mystery, bright and slick as fire”. When I listen to the 11/11/73 “Eyes” intro, I definitely hear that merry snake twining through the woodpile. Learning to twine through my own woodpiles has been a major motivation behind my own guitar practice.