Bob Dylan Called This Musician His Big Brother and a Major Influence: “Showed Me More Than He’ll Ever Know”

Bob Dylan has always seemed to stand alone as a distinct influence on others, whether musically, lyrically, or socially, but there was one musician to whom Dylan looked to for inspiration—someone he called a musician, friend, and big brother.

The feeling was mutual, too (although Dylan’s earliest material might have been an exception for the man the “Tangled Up In Blue” singer cited as one of his biggest influences).

Bob Dylan Called This Musician His Big Brother

Despite existing in different subgenres of the overarching category of rock ‘n’ roll, Bob Dylan deeply revered the Grateful Dead co-founder and guitarist Jerry Garcia. When Garcia died in 1995, Dylan wrote a pseudo-eulogy for the late musician for Rolling Stone. He admitted outright he didn’t think “eulogizing will do him justice,” saying, “There’s no way to measure his greatness or magnitude as a person or as a player.”

“He was that great,” Dylan wrote. “Much more than a superb musician with an uncanny ear and dexterity, he is the very spirit personified of whatever is muddy river country at its core and screams up into the spheres. He really had no equal.”

“To me, he wasn’t only a musician and friend. He was more like a big brother who taught and showed me more than he’ll ever know,” the singer-songwriter continued. “There are a lot of spaces and advances between the Carter family, Buddy Holly, and, say, Ornette Coleman, a lot of universes, but he filled them all without being a member of any school. His playing was moody, awesome, sophisticated, hypnotic, and subtle.”

“THERE’S NO WAY to convey the loss,” he concluded. “It just digs down really deep.”

The Feeling Was Mutual Between The Rockstars

In a 1972 interview with Rolling Stone, Jerry Garcia sang Bob Dylan’s praises, too. Speaking of musical influences of that time period, Garcia commented on how the Beatles’ overwhelmingly positive sound, “the happy thing,” as he called it, contributed to their success. But Dylan, Garcia argued, did the opposite. “Dylan was able to tell you the truth about that other thing.”

“He was able to talk about the changes that you’d go through, the bummers and stuff like that, and say it, and say it in a good way, the right way,” Garcia continued. “I dug his stuff really from Bringing It All Back Home. Back in the folk music days, I couldn’t really dig this stuff, but on Bringing It All Back Home, he was really saying something that I could dig that was relevant to what was going on in my life at the time. Whether he intended it that way or not is completely unimportant.”

In a previous interview, Garcia said Dylan’s ability to write about negative things in such uplifting ways was a “combination of the beauty and the bitterness [that is], to me, wonderful. It’s like a combination of something being funny and horrible; it’s a great combination of two odd ingredients in the human experience. Anybody who can pull it off that successfully is really a score. That’s something that only Dylan has been able to pull off in terms of modern songwriting.”

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