As a precocious youth, Jerry Garcia found escape through painting, studying the Bay Area figurative style of abstract art. Late in life, it was scuba diving, acquainting himself with the ocean floors of Hawaii, petting octopuses and eels, setting a world record for the longest time spent underwater. But when he was turning 30, all Jerry wanted to do was play pedal steel. You can hear the fruits of his exploration between the years of 1969 and 1974 all over live recordings from the Grateful Dead, on guest appearances on classics by friends like Jefferson Starship and CSNY, and throughout the early catalog of New Riders of the Purple Sage, a band started with the express purpose of honing his skill in collaboration.

But if you really want to hear what Jerry Garcia could do with the pedal steel, listen to “The Wheel.” It’s the closing track of 1972’s Garcia, among the most beautiful four minutes of music in his vast catalog. Bursting to life from a discordant jam, the cyclical folk song feels like adjusting to new visibility under the sea. Seesawing between buoyant major chords, with Garcia’s vocals layered in tight coils of harmony, his pedal steel guides the way, untrained but masterful, exuding a joy that radiates from the speakers, even 50-plus years later.

At the time of its release, Jerry distinguished his debut solo album from his previous work by being “completely self-indulgent.” Think about this for a second. This is an artist who made fine art of self-indulgence. He reshaped the modern rock concert in his own sprawling, unhurried image; he played guitar solos like nobody has, before or since, largely based on lyrical motifs that felt designed to drift effortlessly forever; he admitted to viewing studio albums—those old-school totems of discipline and meaning—as a “necessary evil” to function within an industry he loathed; he led a band who would develop a setlist staple composed entirely of drum solos and prolonged ambience.

So, what was different this time? For one thing, it happened in a flash. The bulk of the music—developed through improvisations between Garcia on acoustic guitar and his Dead bandmate Bill Kreutzmann on drums, with lyricist Robert Hunter scribbling away in a corner—happened in roughly the span of a week. After just 21 days, the whole record was sequenced, mixed, and handed over to the label. Soon, he’d be back on the road with the Dead, playing the legendary shows that would be documented on the extraordinary live album Europe ’72. Coming after the band’s twin peaks of Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, both released in 1970 and both succeeding in pushing the group beyond cult fame into wider acceptance, Jerry’s solo music did little to embellish the winning streak he was already on.

If this makes Garcia sound like a blip—an itch he had to scratch, one small twinkling star in an ever-expanding galaxy—then it kind of was. “I don’t want anyone to think it’s me being serious or anything like that—it’s really me goofing around,” he told Rolling Stone. “I’m not trying to have my own career or anything like that.” And yet, Garcia goofing around for a week in the studio in 1972, among this company, also stands as one of the most captivating cosmic Americana records of all time—an album whose consistency, energy, and vision helped introduce some of the most enduring songs to the Dead’s live set for decades to come.

If Garcia was only a document of those great songs—the loping singalong “Sugaree,” the pulsing Janis Joplin elegy “Bird Song,” the spiritual ballad “To Lay Me Down”—it would simply be a critical moment in the bandmembers’ catalogs alongside Bob Weir’s Ace, released that same year. But where Ace was a solo album in name alone, Garcia was decidedly a showcase for Jerry himself, exhibiting things he could not and would not do in the Dead. Exploring the limits of a 16-track recorder, he played nearly every instrument himself. There’s the pedal steel, of course, but also bass, piano, organ, and, in the most novel moments, a sampler that he orchestrates to create a kind of avant-garde musique concrète he would never return to again.

Where the best Dead studio records feel like cozy, reined-in presentations of their best songs, Garcia is in its own class entirely. For one thing, Jerry clearly approached the record without thinking how it would hang together in a live set. Instead, each song is ornamented as its own set piece, building to a larger, heavenly atmosphere that owes more to art-rock than to the era’s post-hippie glow. Harkening back to the Dead’s playful beginnings as the house band at Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests in San Francisco, he incorporates sound collage and tape manipulation. There are false starts, recurring motifs, songs that segue into one another without pause. As it turns out, Garcia goofing around in the studio felt a lot like most other artists trying to craft their masterpiece.

And so, Garcia presents a rare vantage: Jerry Garcia, studio auteur. A lifelong devotee of the concert stage, it’s hard to imagine him feeling comfortable in this position at any other point in his career. But coming off the band’s recent success, he was in a newfound position of stability. The first order of business, he decided, was buying a house for himself and his partner Carolyn Elizabeth Adams, aka Mountain Girl, where they could raise the kids, explore the California wilderness, and tend to Mountain Girl’s marijuana plants without any interference from the public. “Renting a house in Marin County is one of the most difficult things to do in the whole world,” Garcia confided to NME, and so he accepted a $20,000 advance from Warner Bros, hit the studio, and tried not to overthink it.

On a deluxe edition released in 2004, we get our only behind-the-scenes into those sessions. (To avoid bootleggers and onlookers, they booked the room for Anita Bryant, the conservative singer whose name alone would scare off anyone who’d actually care about Garcia.) These jams, referred to as “studies,” are swift and upbeat, showcasing the way that Kreutzmann could follow Garcia’s lead, tumbling along the toms at the featherlight touch of his fingers on the fretboard, bringing out the jazz inflections inside Garcia’s phrasing. Together they keep the mood light and swift, never letting one idea hold the focus for too long. (“Cocaine was our special guest throughout those recording sessions,” Kreutzmann confesses in his memoir.)

Overdubbed with all of Garcia’s vast instrumentation and tender harmonies, the album becomes a showcase for so many of his talents. In 1972, he was an extraordinary rock frontman, able to carry the empathic gospel of “To Lay Me Down,” a recording that centers almost entirely on his vocal delivery, and the shouty climax of “Deal,” which leads the record with a rousing burst of adrenaline rarely matched by the Dead in studio. Jerry was a fan of the Band, and you can hear a bit of their 1969 self-titled album in the way Garcia unfolds, reviving old folk ideas in vivid, quietly subversive ways.

The album also arrived during a transformative period for Hunter. His songwriting on Garcia drifts beyond the storytelling mode that characterized Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty while continuing those tales of gamblers and drifters, narrators too far gone to realize what the audience already sees coming for them. He seemed inspired by the philosophical bent emerging in the Dead’s work, and he continues writing choruses that can feel like mythological riddles (“If the thunder don’t get you then the lightning will”) or old drinking songs misremembered around a campfire (“Last fair deal in the country/Sweet Susie/Last fair deal in the town”). Maybe due to the concentrated burst of writing, the songs span a wide array of moods but constantly return to the same settings and motives, inspiring some critics to view it as a conscious attempt at a song cycle. (Bob Seidemann’s cover art—a collage assembled by hand to blend themes of the record into a psychedelic American flag—has added to this interpretation.)

As with any studio record he was involved in, Garcia improved on most of these versions with decades of live performances. Where the album version of “Loser” is crisp and dynamic, the definitive take happened at Albany’s Knickerbocker Arena nearly two decades later, when Garcia could rip even harder into that solo and make its desperation feel alive and undeniable. But unlike most of Garcia’s albums, these studio versions never just feel like blueprints for the more immersive live takes to follow. They are proudly suspended in time, cut with a dose of surreality that makes this one of his most fun albums, front to back. From the swagger of the delivery—“I can tell the Queen of Diamonds by the way she shines,” he sings with an actorly twang—to the playful performances on uncharacteristic instruments, the music is as accessible as any of the Dead’s landmark records without necessarily replicating their strengths.

Because the proper songs have become so beloved in the band’s canon, the more experimental material can sometimes be overlooked. Starting Side B with the instrumental “Late for Supper/Spidergawd/Eep Hour”—a 10-minute experiment that would find another home soundtracking parts of the cult-classic Grateful Dead Movie—Garcia lingers in chaos and space before letting a more traditional, even Beatles-esque, melody take the frame, just five minutes in. Maybe pushing his own patience with the concept, he seems to have cooled by the second instrumental piece, which is a great deal shorter and bears the somewhat apologetic title “An Odd Little Place.” These were not the pretensions of an artist aspiring for the avant-garde nor the provocations of a new celebrity testing his fame: These were momentary infatuations. They found a home on record simply because they inspired him at the right time. “Making the record was very fun and easy,” he commented at the time, “to the point that I feel like I got away with something.”

And maybe he did. Here was a record designed as a means of personal introspection, recorded in a hermetic style he would never repeat, delivered to a growing audience of devotees, inspired by the urgent need to place a down payment on a house. (“That’s why the record is ‘wheel and deal,’” he joked, referring to the first and last titles on the tracklist.) But where so many of Garcia’s most essential performances are documented through live recordings—open-ended paths to transcendence occurring in real time—this music presents an inverse: a brief moment in isolation, shared with the world once he’d already moved on.

Still, the magic remains. For how strained his relationship to the industry would become—“You don’t understand 25 years of burnout, man,” he’d tell Bruce Hornsby backstage after one of several lackluster performances during the later years—these songs exude the pure joy and discovery that Garcia found in art. After all, by now he must have known that he could dazzle and hypnotize audiences with guitar playing for the rest of his life. Maybe it was starting to feel like work. In every moment, Garcia returns his mind to play. “Won’t you try just a little bit harder/Couldn’t you try just a little bit more?” are among the lyrics that Hunter scribbled down as Garcia and Kreutzmann improvised the ecstatic jam that would become “The Wheel.” As Garcia sings the words, the pedal steel dips and winds through the air, lawless and eternal, the notes surprising even him as he paws away at the strings. You can always try a little bit harder. The key is knowing when it’s just time to float.

Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan.