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| California Aggie, January 25, 1971, p. 8; photos by Jim Quigley. |
So the Marmaduke picture answers the NRPS question. Then I have a few other questions from this great little display. First, who are the guys besides Weir, Garcia and Kreutzmann in the bottom-right panel? The guy far-right could be Mickey, I guess, but to the right of Billy in the picture ... who is that? Second, there's the James and the Good Brothers reference. And, sure enough, a brief review in the same paper ("Dead, Riders, Brothers," California Aggie, January 27, 1971, p. 6) mentions that the show went James and the Good Brothers, NRPS, and two sets of GD.
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| Reviewer, Aggie. 1971. Dead, Riders, Brothers. California Aggie, January 27, 1971, p. 6. |
So, yes Virginia, the New Riders did play Thursday 1/21/71 at Freeborn Hall, UC Davis. And it appears from Jim Quigley's photos to have been "fantastic".
Update 10/12/2014: there is now an audience tape of the GD set in circulation [shnid-131516, flac 2496 | shnid-131517, flac1644], which I hope to listen to and report on soon. In anticipation, here's the last visual I have for the show (a preview), and, below that, a link to LIA's post on this show.
LIA: http://deadsources.blogspot.com/2012/07/january-21-1971-freeborn-hall-davis-ca.html, which reproduces the following: Abramson, Hilary. 1971. Grateful Dead Shake Freeborn Hall. Woodland Democrat, January 22 1971, p. unk.
Makes sense that it would be one of the James and the Good Brothers band members. Billy and Jack Casady "discovered" them, and Billy played on their album (as did Hot Tuna's drummer, Sammy Piatsa) which Bob Matthews & Betty Cantor-Jackson produced.
ReplyDeleteThe upper right photo looks like one of the Good Brothers. He could be the same person in the lower right photo but it's too hard to tell from the photocopy. Most likely I would guess at least one of them is Bruce Good (guitar on the album) or possibly Brian Good (acoustic guitar) or Larry Good (banjo).
Here's the album at The Grateful Dead Family Discography:
http://www.deaddisc.com/disc/James_And_The_Good_Brothers.htm
Close up of the album cover at Discogs:
http://www.discogs.com/viewimages?release=1312641
They are still playing together:
http://www.thegoodbrothers.com/
Hey! Here's a photo of them with Jerry Garcia from that era:
http://www.thegoodbrothers.com/plogger/index.php?level=picture&id=42
With URLs properly linked:
ReplyDeletethe album at The Grateful Dead Family Discography
close up of the album cover at Discogs
The Good Brothers home page
a photo of them with Jerry Garcia from that era
Yeah, the JATGB guys were my first guess. It does look like them on the GD stage. Thanks for the picture and info!
ReplyDeleteIs Pigpen on the harmonica playing the lead instead of Jerry?
ReplyDeleteOn Truckin' that is.
DeleteYes! (But Jerry's still playing lead as well.)
DeleteWhen the audience tape surfaced, it turned out to be a much more exciting concert than I'd expected. The Smokestack Lightning>Truckin' w/ harmonica is a unique Dead moment! (Pigpen's harmonica playing was really underused by the Dead, I think; there are just a few examples of him using it in non-blues tunes.) One reviewer of the show said that "Pigpen on harmonica was exceptional," and that Truckin' was "an orgiastic, cathartic experience" for the audience.
The Other One is fantastic as well, and the transition to Cosmic Charlie is one of the best ever (even though some oblivious "teeny boppers and high school cools" are chattering through it).
Deadbase states that Mickey was absent for this show. Based on his image above, and one of the reviews, he was obviously there. I wonder how Deadbase got this wrong.... what source(s) they were relying on for such misinformation?
ReplyDeleteDeadbase source may have been me. There's a complicated yet boring reason that I thought Hart may not have been there, so I may have passed that information on. I didn't realize that Deadbase had this information but I passed a lot to John Scott. This was in the mid-80s, so information was scarce. I probably thought Hart was still in NRPS at the time. I no longer recall any of the details, and in any case it was completely incorrect.
DeleteThe first SBD reel has just turned up as dead.net Jam Of The Week stream for 2023-10-06 containing the Dead's Set 1 up to four minutes into Hard To Handle (Ooh nasty!) but with a glitch in Me & My Uncle. It certainly sounds like it is just Billy on drums and I hear no Good Bros or Graham Nash (who is mentioned as guesting in the comments for http://jgmf.blogspot.com/2011/07/nrps-19710121-freeborn-hall-uc-davis.html)
ReplyDeleteYeah, no guests. But I still hear two drummers - it's just that they're badly recorded. (Plus one of the reviews mentions two drummers.)
DeleteI hope more of the show turns up on dead.net sometime - the recording has so many problems it's probably unreleasable. But it's nice to hear the unique Smokestack>Truckin' from the SBD.
I think this little period is super interesting. I listened to 1/24/71 Seattle a week or two back while pedaling to and from work, and it had some killer stuff.
Delete