Sunday, November 30, 2014

Reconstruction at the Rainbow – April 11-12, 1979

Probably my last substantial piece for at least three weeks.


A. Background

Once upon a time, twentysomething New Yorker Barry Fey set out to promote rock shows in Chicago and wound up in Denver. Arriving there in 1967, he would have found a town built on stuff coming out of the ground –primarily gas and oil, metals and minerals, and crops-- stuff depending upon stuff coming out of the ground --cows, the relevant industries-- and stuff emanating from stuff growing out of the ground –the smell of the Greeley's stockyards as winter's northerlies come down out of Wyoming. He would also have found an associated superstructure of mores, institutions, and organized violence. Socially, big money gas- and oilmen, deeply filthy roughnecks, miners of all kinds, plus farmers, officials, and secretly-nervous burghers make for a splendid cocktail of piety and sin. He started working out of the old Petroleum Club building, at 16th and Broadway downtown, and eventually he made his pile. Pick your pioneer trope, graft it onto the big-time music business as it played out over four decades in Denver (and hence, America, and hence, the world), drape it on Barry Fey's sometimes-400 lb. frame, and let 'er rip.

Promoters arrange relative risk, and thus prices; they make markets. Garcia could play music, but there's very little evidence that he was ever good at, say, doing paperwork. He had learned a lot from the Dead's record company experiment, and all of the business that preceded and followed it. So he was, in a sense, savvy. He just mostly didn't want to have to hassle the business side of things, and was willing (and could generate the dollars necessary) to pay specialists, to an increasing degree as his earning power and wealth expanded. Insofar as we think the value of Garcia's musical production thereby created, out of whole Pareto-improving cloth, exceeded the number of dollars privately collected, then we see that even the work of promoters can create positive externalities, albeit under the heading of "consumer surplus". Axiomatically, they make the world a better place, a funny thought. Anyway, Fey was that guy for the Dead and Garcia in Denver.

B. Denver Dog

That fateful year of 1967, two weeks before the historic Monterey Pop Festival in June, Fey was promoting preppy rock acts and relatively clean-cut weirdness in our Queen City --nothing as wild as Howard Wales's The Green Men, I don't think—and decided to check out the San Francisco scene, with a view toward promoting a Denver group (Eighth Penny Matter) and figuring "out a way to bring that San Francisco vibe to Denver" (Fey 2011, 20). The twenty-nine year old right-coaster and former Marine was not a hippie, but he was close to that scene and certainly had an eye for good business. With his honeymooning wife, he arranged to meet with Avalon Ballroom impresario Chet Helms at Family Dog Productions, which was apparently looking to franchise to mid-sized western cities such as Denver and Portland [Corry email]. Fey recalls getting dressing in his Penn gear –"blue blazer [almost!], blue shirt, pumpkin and blue tie, gray flannel slacks [and] penny loafers"-- to do some business with the anti-businessman.

The Feys must have splurged on the Deluxe Hippie Cliché package for the occasion. They get the full Chester Helms treatment – meeting on the floor in the center of the room, sitting in the lotus position -oh, for a fly on the while to have been working on its documentary, to have gotten film of Fey in the lotus position-- , a single vase with a single blossom, longhairs "wearing beads, flowers, robes and what looked like bearskin rugs" (Fey 2011, 18-19). Later, trying to fit in, Fey swaps in some Jesus sandals, all else remaining equal. Now he's rockin' grey flannel slacks, blue shirt, pumpkin and blue tie – and sandals. The Summer of Love cliché-o-rama crew was also apparently working that day, because the couple caught a free show in Golden Gate Park ("I think it was either Quicksilver or the Dead" – wasn't it always?), a scene of "the most beautiful example of mass peace and harmony I'd ever seen", and then an unnamed band at the Avalon. He went back to Denver the next day.

Around this time a Denver teenybopper club called The Byrd, at 1601 West Evans Street [map], went belly up. The space had been a supper club called the Sultan's Table, a Whisky-A-Go-Go franchise, and a previous youth set hopbox, The Posh. Fey got a call about the room, in a building owned by attorney Francisco Salazar, who would eventually house his offices there. On September 8, 1967, the Denver Dog opened its doors. Fey served as "Denver liaison for Family Dog Productions", booking the local acts to open for the San Francisco and national bands sent out by Chet and Bob Cohen (Fey 2011, 20). Now, being a Chet Helms Joint never conduced to sound management, stable finances, or long-term success. The Denver outfit (which included Betty Cantor on staff), seems to have been as purebred a Family Dog operation as you'll ever find, shambolic, gleeful, deeply weird, and more than slightly out of control.

It's not all Chester et al.'s fault: Denver ain't San Francisco (though SF wasn't as friendly as you'd think—Family Dog was rousted out of the Avalon before the end of 1968!). Colorado's culture was still more 50s than 60s at the time. (The basic comparison still holds today -- it's Trump Country outside Denver, the college towns, and the resort areas.) Waking into a suburban Denver steak house with some of the talent? "You should have seen the jaws drop. Not only were they gawking at Janis [Joplin], who looked every bit like the hippie rock star she was, there was Chet Helms, who was tall and with those animal skin clothes he wore and the long hair and beard; he looked like Jesus. And of course, big, fat me in my shorts and tennis shoes" (Fey 2011, 23). The Denver establishment, and especially capitalism's sharp end, its particular coercive apparatus, the police and prosecutors, didn't just gawk. It fought back, hard. DPD narcotics squad sergeant John Gray "and his minions relentlessly harassed the bands … the patrons, and especially the Dog management" (Parker 2013). Apparently the Dead took a bust in their hotel (Fey 2011, 23), foreshadowing their much more famous bust the next month at 710 Ashbury. Faced with these very hot and porky headwinds, "Chet and the Dog folks were forced to split town sometime in January/February '68" (Parker 2013).[2]

C. Fey Businessman

The Denver Dog went up like a Technicolor gusher, but Barry Fey made his bones with it and The Dog, the successor operation he ran out of the same room for another four months (Parker 2013). Unlike Chet (the comparison isn't fair to either), he was just a great businessman. If he was the anti-Chet, he was like another great businessman, also one of his competitors and nemeses (charting at #2 on Fey's list of pricks [Fey 2011, 114]): Successful San Francisco (then world) impresario Bill Graham.[3] Both New Yorkers who made it big out west, each built his thing brick by brick. He had to fight, cajole, prod, probably bribe, and perhaps even win over city forces antithetical to a robust musical entertainment industry inviting ascots at one extreme and spittoons on the other. Like Graham, Fey had to fight fellow promoters who were constantly pressuring his turf, sallying and checking his defenses in Kansas City, Oklahoma City, Denver itself.

Both of these guys were anti-hippies, but not anti-hippie. Fey: "I was kind of a narrow-minded Hawk when I moved to Denver in 1967. I'd see these real pretty girls with these hippies, these ugly guys, and wonder, 'What don't I know?' But, after I went to San Francisco later that year and experienced Haight-Ashbury and the Summer of Love, I was adopting a more tolerant view" (Fey 2011, 160). He almost certainly had different pharmacological tastes from, say, the Family Dog crowd. His drugs of choice seem to have been food, soda pop, and maybe cocaine. He partied like, well, a rock star, with many of the very biggest stars of his time (Stones, Who, etc.). But it seems like he mostly avoided partaking of anything that would get in the way of balancing the books at the end of the night. "I was the only one who wasn't dropping acid," he said of the early days (Fey 2011, 27). Sounds a lot like Bill.

And so he carved out the middle of the country as his territory, enjoying remarkable success given that monopolies, exhibiting as they do what the economists call "positive returns to scale", tend to like to expand – and he had regional ones on either side. Hemmed in by Graham to the west and Scher to the east, Fey could have been a road apple, like Poland ground up between the German Reich and the Russian bear, around the year of Fey's birth as it had ever been. But he made it work, promoting some of the biggest shows of the time over a forty-year career.

II. Side-Tripping at the Rainbow

If, in a Deadcentric cosmology Fey was Graham, booking the area's arenas, rinks, and stadiums, in the Garciaverse he played the Front Range Freddie Herrera, fulfilling the same make-business-easy-on-Garcia functions around his side gigs. I don't know all of the clubs that Fey was involved with, though JGBP mentions the legendary Ebbets Field (1020 15th Street, Denver, CO, 80202 [map].[4] His autobiography mostly focuses on the big money gigs. Regardless, in early 1979 Fey and partner Chuck Morris opened the Rainbow Music Hall at 6358 East Evans Avenue [map].

It sounds like a funky room – the building had housed a three-screen cineplex, but when Fey took it over in early 1979 he knocked out the walls and created an oblong oddity, none of the estimated 1,300 seats of which was more than 70' from stage[JGBP]. I think I have heard that the hall's steep stageward cant put the audience somewhat on top of the performers. The location looks really marginal, though I confess I don't know it; it looks pretty far southeast of downtown and even three miles due east from the University of Denver ("DU", in the regional patois, as the University of Colorado is "CU").

Garcia first played the Rainbow three months after it opened, in the shows I am narrating here. JGBP's Garcia-at-the-Rainbow list looks a little iffy to me, so I'll give my list and annotate questions around slips.

·        4/11/79 Early and late shows Reconstruction
·        4/12/79 Early and late shows Reconstruction
·        4/13/79 Reconstruction—I believe this did not happen. See below.
·        4/22/79 Reconstruction—No idea where this comes from, but the Dead played Spartan Stadium at San José State this date.
·        7/14/79 ReconstructionCANCELED (! Ref: "Jerry Garcia Ill, Shows Canceled," Denver Post, July 13, 1979, p. 62). Note that he was not too ill to try to record some stuff at Club Front ("Jack-A-Roe" from the Beyond Description box set).
·        11/19/81 Jerry Garcia Band
·        11/20/81 Jerry Garcia Band-- No idea where this comes from, but I am doubtful.
·        5/20/83 (early, late) Jerry Garcia Band
·        5/21/83 Jerry Garcia Band
·        5/23/85 early and late shows Acoustic w/ John Kahn

The history of Denver, Colorado is of course replete with colorful characters, most notably in the present context Beat Muse and Merry Prankster Neal Cassady. As ever, during Fey's era Denver intermediated the economic geography of rock, a recent manifestation of a process beginning with westward expansion. I need to learn more about how the Transcontinental Railroad ran through Cheyenne rather than Denver, and how it has overcome the corresponding disadvantage of being off-the-path in the broader sense to grow larger than it. I suspect silver and gold. (Can anyone recommend a key book?) Anyway, it's a linchpin in the linchpin belt binding the US together across the middle.

In the Side Trips sense Denver is small in magnitude. The Dead came pretty regularly, but the Side Trips rarely did – summed up by what I list for the Rainbow above. It's probably on a par with San Diego [JGMF], such that, partly as a result of the dumb, off-the-path infrequency of Garcia's visits, tapes tend to be either missing entirely (the 5/23/85 Garcia-Kahn show, for example) or only sporadically and confusingly present (e.g., these Reconstruction shows). That makes it interesting, a little mysterious, of course.

But the most important thing about Denver for my work here is that it packs an inferential punch.

We can see very clearly, in Fey, the Garcia enterprise's taste for competent, reliable promoters, and its revealed preference for long-term relationships. Freddie fit the bill for local club gigs through '87, then Bill Graham, augmenting his long and eventually locally monopolistic relationship with the Dead; John Scher, from his first base in Passaic, eventually ran all of the Dead's business east of the Rockies, sometimes with and sometimes supplanting venerable east coast promoters such as Don Law in Boston and Ron Delsener in NYC. Fey was Garcia's man in Denver. So, blogging about Reconstruction at the Rainbow can tell us some things about not only the Garciaverse, but also, say, the Grateful Dead in 1991, when the band was rock's #1 concert earner, and in which the only guy besides Graham and Scher who got a topline taste was one Barry Fey.

We also get some good spatial generalizations, i.e., some insight into out-of-town gigs. Most directly, Denver is "like" lots of other places. People sometimes think of it as practically a mountain resort town, à la Vail, Aspen, Park City, Jackson, really rarefied air. But it's not – it's a foot-of-the-mountain town, for sure, but it's also the last plains city, making it like its I-70 neighbors Kansas City and St. Louis; it sounds some of the Indian and Spanish echoes of Cheyenne and Albuquerque; and it's a western town, like Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Reno and San Francisco, all hosts to gold and silver rushes over the years. Insofar as it is representative of these places, it tells us about quite a swath of territory, everything west of the Mississippi around the country's Base Line. But even more importantly that relentless homogenizer, capitalism, often works to reduce the importance of place, and, in all kinds of senses, but especially the market sense, Denver is "like" every other mid-sized city in the country in the market sense, with its urban, suburban and college bars, clubs, theaters, arenas and stadiums.

In short, lessons from Denver generalize – they "travel", in the lingo.

III. Front Range Reconstruction

On April 11-12, 1979, Reconstruction played the only out-of-state gigs of its eight-month history, at Barry Fey's Rainbow Music Hall in Denver. Let me first clear up some metadata issues around these shows, then just drop some thoughts on the music.

A. Metadata

I am working primarily from a listing, an ad, a review, and a bunch of tape. On this last, I now hold three distinct filesets of April '79 Reconstruction at the Rainbow material. The tapes, as is so often the case, yield some gold nuggets of sound and color, but also track all kinds of human failure to communicate, confusion and conjecture. Right up my alley, so I am working from the following:
1.       "4/11/79 early and late shows", shnid-10140. By my system, this is jg1979-04-11.recon.early-late.aud-unk-jupille.10140.shn2flac [source1];
2.       "4/12/79 early and partial late shows", noshnid; jg1979-04-12.recon.early-partlate.aud.xxxxxx.flac1644 [source2];
3.       4/12/79 late show, circulated as "4/13/79", shnid-126161, jg1979-04-12.recon.late.sbd.126161.flac2448 [source3].
If you want to listen to Reconstruction at the Rainbow, I'd direct you to the last of these, which derives from a cassette copy of master soundboard cassettes made by a Rainbow employee for a visiting Deadhead later in the year. It's a very good recording of a good show. The other tapes vary in quality between OK and rotten-sounding. All of them, including the cleanly-provenanced soundboard tape, bear incorrect (as that tape does) or questionable metadata. Let me pin them down following Archimedes rather than Chronos.

1. source3 is the 4/12/79 Late Show

The source 3 board tape only emerged into the digital realm within the last year or two labeled 4/13/79. But I am about 95% sure it's the 4/12/79 late show. Why?

a.       I have seen the Garcia office's gig folder for these shows (though I did not have time to look at the actual contracts), and it lists April 11-12.
b.      The ad, listing, and review are all very clear that shows are on Wednesday and Thursday, the 11th and 12th.
c.       The ad tips David Bromberg and John McEuen at the Rainbow on Friday the 13th and Saturday. It's possible that Bromberg and McEuen canceled and Garcia filled in, but highly unlikely. Return tickets would have been booked in advance, and they almost certainly would have had Jerry coming home right after the scheduled gigs. Things were highly routinized by this time – Sue Stephens maintained beautiful tour itineraries with *all* of the key information, great traveling documents – and return tickets had certainly been arranged. We know from years' of consistent evidence that Garcia almost always came back the day after the tour ended.
d.      Reconstruction was booked Saturday and Sunday at Keystone – its first Saturday in front of the *real* home crowd (despite already being together, in at least some sense, for ten weeks). That doesn't rule out a Saturday in Denver, of course, but it makes it less likely.
e.      I have an old fileset dated 4/12/79 (source2 in my list above) which includes the first two songs from this gig, but from an audience recording. It's a tiny fragment, but triangulation is never to be scoffed at.
f.        We know the provenance of the tape is from the Rainbow soundman, with two subsidiary consequences.
                                 i.            While in the Garciaverse Betty or whomever labeled tapes based on when the gig started, it's perfectly possible that the Rainbow guy labeled it 4/13 once the night was through.
                               ii.            It's also possible he had messy handwriting and his 2 looked like a 3.

In short, there is no evidence, where there should have been, of a Reconstruction gig at the Rainbow on 4/13/79 (points a and b). A putative 4/13/79 Reconstruction gig is strictly contradicted by the ad, and other factors augur against it (points c and d). There is a tiny piece of convergent validation via an alternate piece of tape (point e). Finally, "outside" tapes might not have been labeled in the ways we have become so accustomed to as practiced by Bear, Betty and all of the rest (point f).

The fact that this has emerged labeled 4/13/79 on a tape with such clean provenance is troubling, but I think I have dispensed with it. Perhaps even less troubling, because tape labels are so unreliable, but also richly illustrative of the shit that can happen around metadata –again, because tape labels are so unreliable—is the fact that this same set of material circulates in degraded form as 4/12/79a. In other words, it's also found on source2. This tells us that the Rainbow crew member and/or the source of this 1st gen tape also made other copies, and then supergenerated copies somewhere down one or both of those paths landed in the digital realm. And why not? Soundboard tape of Reconstruction was unheard of prior to the arrival of the Betty Boards in 1986-1987 – even audience tape was hard to come by. So a complete Reconstruction set, from a master soundboard cassette, was a real gem, if you're into that sort of thing. In fact, I am maybe more surprised that it didn't circulate more widely, or end up in the digital realm in better shape far earlier than it did.

2. source2 supplies 4/12/79

If source3 is 4/12/79b, I am inclined to think that the source2 material is 4/12/79, since it's partly overlapping. source2, then, primarily supplies 4/12/79a. If that's correct, we have the whole Thursday show, complete.

3. source1 supplies 4/11/79b

source1's "4/11/79 early show" is a degraded copy of the 4/12/79 early show just discussed from source2. (Isn't this fun?) But source1's "4/11/79 late show" embodies material distinct from what I have determined to be either of the sets from the next night. So, it must be one of the Wednesday night sets, and we can start the bidding at the late set, since that's what the tape says (any port in a storm, don't y'know).

The Wednesday night show reviewer (Brown 1979) doesn't mention whether he saw the 7 PM or 10 PM show. But given that his review was published the next day I have to figure it was the early show. He probably doesn't know most of the tunes, but he names three songs, two sung by Jerry and one an FM radio staple: Jimmy Cliff's "Struggling Man", the blues "It's Too Late", and, as an encore, an instrumental version of the Doobies' "Long Train Runnin'". Only the first of these appears on the distinctive fileset. Furthermore, Garcia would typically sing only one blues per show with Reconstruction, which would have been "It's Too Late" in the early show, whereas the "late show" fileset contains a "Someday Baby". So, while it's possible that the fileset is just missing the two songs that Brown mentions that it lacks, this seems very unlikely.

Accordingly, source1's distinctive material probably really is what it purports to be, the Wednesday, 4/11/79 10 PM show.

4. In sum on the metadata

I feel reasonably confident that I have pinned down all four Reconstruction at the Rainbow sets with some degree of precision. For the Wednesday, April 11, 7 PM set we have the Brown review and no tape. For the other three sets, we have tape but no review. In lieu of a proper review, I'll gather up some listening notes – you get what you pay for.

B. Some Set-by-Set Notes


Brown begins by trotting out the hostile-to-indifferent critic's modal knock on Garcia shows, his adoring fans, cultishly welcoming their "guru-guitarist". It's true that a lot of frothing-at-the-mouth Deadheads could be found wherever Garcia was playing, and they could be annoying; Schadenfraude could lead the disinterested critic to laugh over their failed calls for that cocaine song, their never-unfurled (does that make them forever "furled") twirls around a spacy Dark Star that wasn't. "This band isn't into jamming. It's all rehearsed and arranged," Kahn explained. The critic says that "the Denver audience had a hard time accepting Garcia's new role as a neo-George Benson guitarist left to battle synthesizers and horn arrangements". In short, the review suggests, Garcia should stick to what he knows and what his fans want, and should leave aside this "mediocre jazz unit".


I note Garcia doing some good listening and some stellar playing. Here are brief listening note excerpts. The first comes from the first song of the night ("Get Up And Dance"), in which I find Garcia really listening to Merl, and John playing some of the best music of his life.
Garcia singing harmonies right up front, then steps into some KILLER guitar work 2:44ff. Wailing over 3, very fluent and fluid playing. Man, he sounds great. See my notes in the R field about the Jerrcentric recording – great // to him just plucking, too. 8:20ish Merl signals return to the GUAD theme. Garcia hears it, is listening, and sprints to the corner, meeting Merl on the '1'. Nice. The rest of the band is on it just behind, but tastefully. Great band. John Kahn really played with Reconstruction.
The second comes from one of my favorite Reconstruction-only Side Trips tunes, "Nessa", culminating in some context.
Amazing, amazing, amazing to hear Garcia play this song. Wow. Neumeister is playing killer lead trombone, Garcia is comp'ing, this tape is right in Jerry's monitor, so we hear a lot of guitar, but perfectly supporting the trombone, which is shredding. I have heard a good fair bit of trombone, and Neumeister is incredible. Jerry steps up for a big solo over 4 and he is playing this patiently and intently, in perfect mastery of the chart, though I am about 99.9% certain he wasn't using one. Oh my goodness, right over 5 Jerry hits some hard-won notes, then signals he's ready to step back, Gaylord Birch is hitting the shit out of the skins, around 5:30 Rev nudges his head, so over 6 he can be leading some turns. Garcia, loud on this tape, is strumming well, a killer rhythm guitar player in this jazzy Latin space. It's a good far out tune. Merl steps up 7:23, but he's not loud enough. I don't know if this is PA issue, how Jerry monitored things (which would be telling, although I would be surprised he'd have John so low), whether Merl just has himself turned down, or what. Occam probably says it involves the technicalities of sound (re) production, no small things, they. John steps forward 9:11. @ 9:23 "Yeah John!" Note that these Denver heads know John by name. Now, these could be Bay Area heads (or New Jersey – see Brown 1979) heads just in town, just happened to have deck, mics, and fresh tape and batteries -- Deadheads visiting friends, maybe-- they'd know, too. Whatever, tip o' the hat to the Denver scene.
Note (2) finds Ron Stallings (I think?) mic-checking … "Denver, Denver".


I mentioned the "Another Star" from this show in "Risky Reconstruction". Here let me emphasize Jerry as a supporting player, working with John behind Merl and the horns, and as a good old fashioned guitarslinger shredding some ear drums, on Nina Simone's "Do I Move You?":
Garcia's guitar work in the 3-minute range is nothing short of spectacular. The crowd is yelling, stunned. laughing as Garcia winds down his piece with a big dig @ 4:04, chunking big ugly chords for the sax and keys to work over, he's still pretty loud and they aren't very. 4:42 Merl steps up to a synth solo. Garcia is playing beautifully in support, doing some unwinding runs while Merl does his thing. Jerry and John locked in with each other. At 6:15 Garcia is again just playing wonderfully. Listen to how high on the neck he is, searing at 6:39! Putting some raunch on it 6:55 over 7. Working well with the horns, a little more syncopation in this piece than previously. They drop back to the verse very nicely around 7:30.

Hearing Garcia play "What You Won't Do For Love" just tickles me:
This is so lovely. Jerry is playing very carefully and sounds reasonably well-rehearsed. The crowd can occasionally be heard exclaiming with glad surprise at hearing this deep groove. @ 3:11 Neumeister takes the first solo. The arrangement is really tight and everyone plays it nice and tight, too, nice and close, warming up. Jerry is very fluid and fluent, he's clearly been running lots of scales at home and hanging around Front Street and John's place and wherever.
IV. Conclusion

Reconstruction at the Rainbow is exactly how spring 1979 felt. Tight t-shirts, feathered hair, multiracial groups with big flared pant bottoms, glittery lettering, Corvettes, white dudes rocking curlyfros, disco balls, champagne and cocaine. Denver's on another energy boom (oil is skyrocketing, gas is up), skyscrapers not just soaking in the blue, but also ground- and society- scrapers, replacing  turn-of-the-century watering holes, cathouses, flophouses (not necessarily separate spaces, natch), and markets and their (sometimes vintage turn-of-the-century) Irish, Italian, German, Swedish, Slovakian, Mexican, Native and Other occupants; ten gallon hats, rhinestone boots and blow at $20 a line (Lindsay 1979) replacing newsboy caps, miner's grit and homebrew gin at 5 cents a shot. It'd crash soon, but meantime April 13, 1979, chilly day in Denver down at the Rainbow, would not have been a bad time and place to spend an evening with Reconstruction.

REFERENCES and NOTES:

! tape: I now hold three distinct filesets of April '79 Reconstruction at the Rainbow material. The tapes, as is so often the case, yield some gold nuggets of sound and color, but also track all kinds of human failure to communicate, confusion and conjecture. Right up my alley, so I am working from the following:
4.       "4/11/79 early and late shows", shnid-10140. By my system, this is jg1979-04-11.recon.early-late.aud-unk-jupille.10140.shn2flac.
5.       "4/12/79 early and partial late shows", noshnid; jg1979-04-12.recon.early-partlate.aud.xxxxxx.flac1644.
6.       4/12/79 late show, circulated as "4/13/79", shnid-126161, jg1979-04-12.recon.late.sbd.126161.flac2448.
! JGC: 4/11/79a, 4/11/79b, 4/12/79a, 4/12/79b, "4/13/79" [believed spurious]
! listing: Denver Post, April 11, 1979, p. 40.
! ad: Boulder Daily Camera, April 8, 1979, p. 57.
! review: Brown, G. 1979. Reconstruction Gig Not From Dead Catalog. Denver Post, April 12, 1979, p. 56.
! venue: JGBP. 2012. Rainbow Music Hall, East Evans Avenue and South Monaco Parkway, Denver, Colorado. Jerry's Brokendown Palaces, October 29, 2012, URL http://jerrygarciasbrokendownpalaces.blogspot.com/2012/10/rainbow-music-hall-east-evans-avenue.html, consulted 11/17/2014.
! ref: Fey, Barry, with Steve Alexander and Rich Wolfe. 2011. Backstage Past. Forewords by Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne and by Pete Townshend [sic]. Lone Wolfe Press.
! ref: Lindsey, Robert. 1979. Upper-Income Users Spur Cocaine Dealing. New York Times, September 5, 1979, p. A17.
! ref: Parker, Jim. 2013. The Family Dog – 12/31/67, Denver, CO, U.S.A. Mild Equator, URL http://mildequator.com/performancehistory/concertinfo/1967/671231.html, consulted 11/30/2014.

APPENDIX: LISTENING NOTES

~~

Reconstruction
Rainbow Music Hall
6358 East Evans Avenue
Denver, CO 80222
April 11, 1979 (Wednesday) - late show, 10 PM
aud shnid-10140 shn2flac

--late show (11 tracks, 75:14)--
l-t01. Get Up And Dance [10:32] [0:02] % dead air [0:02]
l-t02. //Nessa [#10:51] ->
l-t03. Drum solo [1:24] ->
l-t04. Nessa [1:00] [0:04]
l-t05. Strugglin' Man [6:31] [0:03]
l-t06. //Soul// Roach [#13:#21] [0:03]
l-t07. //I Just Want To Stop [#4:36] [0:03]
l-t08. Someday Baby [8:28] [0:07]
l-t09. //Another Star [#10:33] [0:05]
l-t10. band introductions (2) [0:44]
l-t11. Make It Better [6:27] [0:10]

! ACT1: Reconstruction (January 30, 1979 - September 22, 1979)
! lineup: Jerry Garcia - el-g, vocals;
! lineup: Merl Saunders - keyboards, synthesizers, vocals;
! lineup: Ron Stallings - saxophone, vocals;
! lineup: Ed Neumeister - trombone;
! lineup: Gaylord Birch - drums, vocals.

JGMF

! R: symbols

! meta: Having determined that the putative early set was actually the 4/12/79 early set, I only include the distinct late show material here. Below you may find remnants of a time when these notes dealt with both 4/11/79 shows - ignore them.

! data: JGC URL http://jerrygarcia.com/show/1979-04-11-rainbow-music-hall-denver-co-2/.

! db: http://db.etree.org/shn/10140 (this fileset)

! map: https://goo.gl/maps/HckBP

! venue: http://jerrygarciasbrokendownpalaces.blogspot.com/2012/10/rainbow-music-hall-east-evans-avenue.html;

! listing: Denver Post, April 11, 1979, p. 40;

! ad: Boulder Daily Camera, April 8, 1979, p. 57;

! R: lineage: MAC > 3CD > EAC > SHN" Final extraction using EAC, tracking using CDWave, and .shn encoding by Joe Jupille. Sector boundaries verified using shntool. JGMF shn2flac 11/16/2014.

! note (1): I will not generally address myself with the early show fileset. Though only one lineage attached the whole "4/11/79" set of material, instead of an aud the early show is a degraded copy of the same master that I have also received as 4/12/79 (an old shn set, currently jg1979-04-12.recon.early-partlate.aud.xxxxxx.flac1644), which is the same material that I have determined, via sbd tape and deductions, to be 4/12/79b. I have to analyze a few more things before I can take a position on all of it. In terms of my "R" category, note that this runs considerably slower than the less-generated tape. I trust that tape more than this one, but someone who can hear pitch should probably check both tapes.

! R: earlier note says *For Completists Only, a rough recording*. This is not entirely untrue. Let's just say the master and its creation must have been extremely ambient. You feel this tape in the outer registers. And then it's get that extra treadwear of a few extra generations on it.

! R: seeder notes: late show: Most tunes cut in w/o much missing. Normalized to 98% using EAC's process wave function.

! R: l-t01: the horns are a little buried and Garcia's guitar is way forward in the mix. Since these people were  yelling for Jerry, all around the taper, I take it we are Jerryside, and pretty close at that. Merl is also buried, which is unfortunate. It's pretty much all Jerry right now in 8, even though he's just comp'ing. Levels drop @ ca. 5:35.

! P: l-t01: GUAD Garcia singing harmonies right up front, then steps into some KILLER guitar work 2:44ff. Wailing over 3, very fluent and fluid playing. Man, he sounds great. See my notes in the R field about the Jerrcentric recording - great to him just plucking, too. 8:20ish Merl signals return to the GUAD theme. Garcia hears it, is listening, and sprints to the corner, meeting Merl on the '1'. Nice. The rest of the band is on it just behind, but tastefully. Great band. John kahn really played with Reconstruction.

! band: Reconstruction: Here's a hypothesis: As Jerry lost hope after the commercial failure of Cats Under The Stars, John Kahn lost hope when Reconstruction never took hold.

! P: l-t02-l-204: Nessa: Amazing, amazing, amazing to hear Garcia play this song. Wow. Neumeister is playing killer lead trombone, Garcia is comp'ing, t his tape is right in Jerry's monitor, so we hear a lot of guitar, but perfectly supporting the trombone, which is shredding. I heave heard a good fair bit of trombone, and Neumeister is incredible. Jerry steps up for a big solo over 4 and he is playing this patiently and intently, in perfect master of the chart, though I am about 99.9% certain he wasn't using one. Oh my goodness, right over 5 Jerry hits some hard-won notes, then signals he's ready to step back, Gaylord Birch is hitting thie shit out of the skins, around 5:30 Rev nudges his head, so over 6 he can be leading some turns. Garcia, loud this tape, is strumming well, a killer rhhythm guitar player in this jazzy Latin space. It's a good far out tune. Merl steps up 7:23, but he's not loud enough. I don't know if this is PA issue, how Jerry monitored things (which would be telling, although I would be surprised he'd have John so low), whether Merl just has himself turned down, or what. Occam probably says it involves the technicalities of sound (re) production, no small things, they. John steps forward 9:11. @ 9:23 "Yeah John!" Note that these Denver heads know John by name. Now, these could be Bay Area heads (or New York) heads just in town, just happened to have their deck, mics, and fresh tape and batteries -- Deadheads visiting friends, maybe-- they'd know, too. Whatever, tip o' the hat to the Denver scene. If I were tracking this, I might want to track in that l-t02 9:11-10:52, i.e., 1:41 of time is John lead piece. Gaylord Birch's piece is tight as, well, a drum.

! P: l-t05 SM I wasn't listening very closely, but it didn't grab me.

! R: l-t06 Soul Roach cut/splice @ 10:19, then warbling

! P: l-t07 IJWTS, beginning "When I think about those nights in MOntreal", first makes you wonder why a black guy was ever in Canada in the 1970s, until you realize that the  guy singing it, xxx, is white, a fact that his record company tried to disguise to sustain the play the track was getting with black stations and clubs. It's an improbably great song, but in this setting it is a little cringeworthy, Ron Stallings in his white suit and shoes and a nightclub croon. It's a nasty thought, but science can be cruel: I wonder if part of the reason Garcia stood so far back on some numbers in Reconstruction, really obscured by shadow, is that he was, maybe, a teeny-tiny bit embarassed. It's exceptionally interesting to me to hear Garcia playing a contemporary soul and trying to process the dissonance, but there's no reason you, reader, should subject yourself to it.

! P: l-t09 Another Star is simply wonderful. Merl takes first lead, horns tight. @ 1:20 a trombone run, they are doing nice short pieces, Jerry hinting at and then hitting some scrubbing @ 1:38. Merl another lead piece. I like how they have this arranged. Merl-horns, twice 'round, now 2 Garcia is taking some beautifully fluent lead turns, multilayered longs scales, some dropped chords. Nice run up to 3:30, ut now I'd like to hear something different. He indeed changes it up 3:44, playing the melody of Stevie Wonder's "Another Star"! Man, this was gold for a minute there. Repeats his earlier thing 4:15ish, but then digs in a bigger break 4:22, so that's what he's going to do, halvsies, now 4:45 it's not even sequences, but blended, scales and decay, decaying scales. @ 5:57 Garcia really steps back with some galloping strums, Merl takes some nice leads, I still wish he were higher in the mix, I can barely hear him.

! l-t10 (2) Nice provenance on the tape, Ron Stallings mic-checking "Denver! Denver!", his usual "hello anybody" routine. This is Reconstruction. John Kahn on the bass. Merl Saunders on the organ. Jerry Garcia on guitar. Ron Stallings on tenor sax. Ron Stallings ... Ed Neumeister." Someone else "Gaylord Birch on the drums." Claps your hands, try to get a groove goin' on here, etc.

! l-t10 MIB I like this tune a lot, but they don't quite have the head of the arrangement together.

~~

Reconstruction
Rainbow Music Hall
6358 East Evans Avenue
Denver, CO 80222
April 12, 1979 (Thursday) - early show, 7 PM
82 min aud early + partlate

--early show (8 tracks, 61:33)--
e-t01. dead air [0:03] /Make It Better :04-6:06] [0:14] %
e-t02. Linda Chicana [9:32] [0:10] %
e-t03. /I Just Wanna Stop [4:18] (1) [0:08] %
e-t04. /Welcome To The Basement [4:59] -> bass feature [1:41] -> Welcome To The Basement [2:17] [0:08] %
e-t05. /The Hunter Gets Captured By The Game [4:50] [0:08] %
e-t06. Do I Move You? [10:54] [0:04] %
e-t07. Another Star [9:51] [0:06] %
e-t08. Struggling Man [5:59] (2) [0:10] %

--late show (2 tracks, 20:44)--
l-t09. [0:17] What You Won't Do For Love [7:07] (3) [0:32] %
l-t10. Soul Roach [12:42] [0:06] %

! ACT1: Reconstruction (January 30, 1979 - September 22, 1979)
! lineup: Jerry Garcia - el-g, vocals;
! lineup: Merl Saunders - keyboards, synthesizers, vocals;
! lineup: Ron Stallings - saxophone, vocals;
! lineup: Ed Neumeister - trombone;
! lineup: Gaylord Birch - drums, vocals.

JGMF:

! R: symbols

! meta: shnid-10140 has this same material dated 4/11/79 (though missing IJWTS), but I am pretty sure it's 4/12/79a.

! db: none

! JGC: http://jerrygarcia.com/show/1979-04-12-rainbow-music-hall-denver-co/ (early show); http://jerrygarcia.com/show/1979-04-12-rainbow-music-hall-denver-co-2/ (late show).

! map: https://goo.gl/maps/HckBP

! venue: http://jerrygarciasbrokendownpalaces.blogspot.com/2012/10/rainbow-music-hall-east-evans-avenue.html;

! listing: Denver Post, April 11, 1979, p. 40;

! ad: Boulder Daily Camera, April 8, 1979, p. 57;

! R: source: unknown tape > ?? > shn > flac1644.

! R: provenance: This material derives from some random shn files I gathered in 2003, just dated 4/12/79 with no early/late designations. I believe that it was the complete early and late shows, but switched from aud to degraded sbd source after "Soul Roach". An old post to DAT-Heads listed "4/12/79 RECONSTRUCTION, early & late, RAINBOW THEATRE-DENVER, CO, AUD REEL > ? > DAT & SBD REEL > ? > DAT." The shns correspond, so I presume there's a DAT gen in my lineage, not that it matters. I have not included the sbd portion here, since it now circulates in much better shape as shnid-xxxxxx (MSC > C).

! R: Recording is decent. Bass isn't really really distinct, and there could be crisper high end, but you can hear pretty much everything. Most tunes clip in, with missing material seeming to range from a note or two to a few seconds. There is some hiss here.

! P: e-t02 Linda Chicana: Ed Neumeister takes the first solo in the 2 range, and it is very good. @ 3:30 Garcia steps up.

! e-t03 (1) Ron Stallings: "Thank you. Ed Neumeister on trombone."

! P: et04 WTTB Garcia is playing some amazing notes as John is chugging through the front of the song. Merl comes in 0:40, nice tone, but things maybe sounds a little pitchy? Garcia takes first solo in 2, and his guitar playing sounds absolutely great.

!P e-t05 THGCBTG is an amazing song choice for Garcia to sing. Such a great song!

! P: e-t06 DIMY Garcia's guitar work in the 3-minute range is nothing short of spectacular. The crowd is yelling, stunned. laughing as Garcia winds down his piece with a big dig @ 4:04, chunking big ugly chords for the sax and keys to work over, he's still pretty loud and they aren't very. 4:42 Merl steps up to a synth solo. Garcia is playing beautifully in support, doing some unwinding runs while Merl does his thing. Jerry and John locked in with each other. At 6:15 Garcia is again just playing wonderfully. Listen to how high on the neck he is, searing at 6:39! Putting some raunch on it 6:55 over 7. Working well with the horns, a little more syncopation in this piece than previously. They drop back to the verse very nicely around 7:30.

! P: e-t07 Another Star - @@ wow. This is such a great composition (Stevie Wonder). Stevie's arrangement makes it a great horn tune, and the horns can set this chart aflame. These guys are killin' it. Garcia jumps in for his solo right around the 2 minute mark, and he is playing like a man possessed -- This is some of the most molten Garcia guitar work you will ever hear. I cannot recommend this strongly enough. I implore you - listen to this! The horns take some nice frontward turns, Merl turns himself up 4:42, Garcia is absolutely shredding, some scrubbing right over the 5, wonderful guitar work. Now he's alternating tones, low to high, breaking out some chunks of tempo. 5:33 he steps into a strong chunka chunka vamp for Merl, who steps forward with some organ lead. Horns now backing Merl, who is spinning it out like a wizard over a crystal ball, all arcing fingers, allowing a little decay in, Merl still out front but Jerry is absolutely pushing him, now steps back a little more 7:15 and Merl drops some more slightly decayed wizardy, like 10 degrees off from center. Horns fronting a few measures I'd like to hear these guys step out more. Garcia harshly scrubbing 8:22 - homey says "check it out". The horn guys really signal the end over 9, Merl answers them and they are back to the straight "Another Star" melody. I bet Jerry's disappointed they are already bringing an end to it. I bet at some point he gave them the old "let's stretch that out even more, man". I am sure they have it charted out, but they are pros and I am sure if we time "Another Star" we'll see it lengthen out over the course of Reconstruction's (too-brief) run.

! setlist: at note (2), it sounds like Ron Stallings says "good night", and you can hear the crowd saying something like "don't leave us!". Then the tape clips, and then when it re-enters in front of WYWDFL there's a lot of excitement in the air. I had first thought these two songs could be an encore, but it now seems pretty clear to me that they are the start of the late show, from the same taper.

! l-t09 (3) band introductions. The band gives a special hoot for Garcia, of course. Things sound nice and energetic and positive.

! P: l-t10 Soul Roach is not particularly to my taste. Jerry starts his feature late 4 over 5, still playing very well.

~~

Reconstruction
Rainbow Music Hall
6358 East Evans Avenue
Denver, CO 80222
April 12, 1979 (Thursday) - late show, 10 PM
late show sbd1 shnid-126161 was "4/13/79"

--late show (8 tracks, 87:37)--
--main set (7 tracks, 76:43)--
t01. [0:02] % What You Won't Do For Love [7:29]  (1) [0:29]
t02. [0:08] Soul Roach [13:31] [0:02] % [0:04]
t03. [0:15] Lovely Night For Dancing [12:33]
t04. % Mohican And The Great Spirit [#10:25] % [0:15]
t05. [0:10] Struggling Man [6:26] [0:02] %
t06. Ain't That Loving You? [8:22] [0:18]
t07. [0:58] Long Train Running [14:26] [0:45]
--encore (1 track, 10:54)--
t08. crowd, tuning, talk (2) [1:32], It Ain't No Use [8:54] [0:27] %

! ACT1: Reconstruction (January 30, 1979 - September 22, 1979)
! lineup: Jerry Garcia - el-g, vocals;
! lineup: Merl Saunders - keyboards, synthesizers, vocals;
! lineup: Ron Stallings - saxophone, vocals;
! lineup: Ed Neumeister - trombone;
! lineup: Gaylord Birch - drums, vocals.

JGMF:

! R: symbols

! JGC: http://jerrygarcia.com/show/1979-04-12-rainbow-music-hall-denver-co-2/

! db: http://etreedb.org/shn/126161, shnid-126161 (this fileset).

! map: https://goo.gl/maps/HckBP

! venue: http://jerrygarciasbrokendownpalaces.blogspot.com/2012/10/rainbow-music-hall-east-evans-avenue.html;

! listing: Denver Post, April 11, 1979, p. 40;

! ad: Boulder Daily Camera, April 8, 1979, p. 57;

! R: Cassette master (Rainbow employee, TDK SA) > 1st gen cassette (Sony TC 158SD deck, TDK AD stock, August 11, 1979) > unknown process to flac1644.

! R: seeder note: "I recorded this on August 11, 1979 while out for the Red Rocks shows. I was staying with a guy who worked at the Rainbow."

! metadata: this is given as 4/13/79, but I am pretty sure it's the late show from 4/12. First, I have seen the gig folder for these shows (though I did not have time to look at the actual contracts), and it lists April 11-12. Second, the ad and the listing are both very clear that shows are on Wednesday and Thursday, the 11th and 12th. The ad tips David Bromberg and John McEuen at the Rainbow on Friday the 13th and Saturday. A review of the Wednesday show, published on Thursday the 12th, mentions that night's shows. It's possible that they canceled and Garcia filled in, but highly unlikely - he would have had his return tickets home, in all likelihood. That's because, third, the band would play Keystone on Saturday and Sunday. That doesn't rule out a Saturday in Denver, of course, but it makes it more likely. Fourth, we know the provenance of the tape is from the Rainbow soundman and, while, in the Garciaverse Betty or whomever labeled tapes based on when the gig started, it's perfectly possible that the Rainbow guy labeled it 4/13 once the night was through. Fifth, it's also possible he had messy handwriting and his 2 looked like a 3. Sixth, I have an old fileset dated 4/12/79 which includes the first two songs from this gig, but on an audience recording. It's tiny, and undermined further by the fact that the opaque fileset's early show is the same recording as circulates for 4/11, but in neither case does that augur well for it being 4/13. When I combine all of this stuff, I am compelled to conclude, with about 95% confidence, that this must be the Thursday (4/12) late show, scheduled for 10 PM. xxx see final post

! metadata: "What You Won't Do For Love" and "Soul Roach" is a puzzling piece of tape. Here's why. First, it appears here, putatively dated 4/13/79. I have pretty much concluded (see above) that it is rather what we in the Garciaverse would call 4/12/79 late show. I am 95% sure about that. That, in turn, is a very key piece of tape, because of the whistle-clean provenance: the Rainbow sound guy taped it and made a copy for a Deadhead in town for Red Rocks shows in August. Second, the same two songs appear on the aud I currently know as jg1979-04-12.recon.early-partlate.aud.xxxxxx.flac1644 (shns I gathered in 2003 and never processed). There they appear in sequence to be the first two songs after the end of the early set, i.e., the first two songs of the late show. That makes me identify this as the late show, which is what for all the world it sounds like. Third - however - and here's the mildly puzzling part - the taped dated 4/*11*/79, shnid-10140 xxx never mind, see "Reconstruction at the Rainbow".

! P: There's some good vibe and playing here, but I think I have to lean toward what a reviewer of one of these Denver shows suggested, xxx review xxx. It's pretty good. It's not great.

! P: t01 this is so lovely. Jerry is playing very carefully and sounds reasonably well-rehearsed. The crowd can occasionally be heard exclaiming with glad surprise at hearing this deep groove. @ 3:11 Neumeister takes the first solo. The arrangement is really tight and everyone plays it nice and tight, too, nice and close, warming up. Jerry is very fluid and fluent, he's clearly been running lots of scales at home and hanging around Front Street and John's place and wherever. I am sure he'll want to stretch out later (that Long Train Running -> Fast Tone later is hard to ignore and tends to raise expectations. But right now, it's off to a really good start.

! historical: This is exactly how spring 1979 felt, if you can remember it. Tight t-shirts, bralessness, feathered hair, multiracial groups all with big flaired pant bottoms, glittery lettering, corvettes, white dudes rocking curly fros (including the jewfro), disco balls, champagne and cocaine. The spring that budget cuts (including proposition 8) and demographic changes --the postwar blue collar GI Bill folks had raised their families, not yet yuppie 80s commuters to The City and Silicon Valley. Denver's on another energy boom (oil is skyrocketing, gas is up), skyscrapers not just soaking in the blue also ground- and society- scrapers, replacing  turn-of-the-century watering holes, cathouses, flophouses (not necessarily separate spaces, natch), and markets and their (sometimes vintage turn-of-the-century) Irish, Italian, German, Swedish, Slovakian, Mexican, Native and Other occupants. Ten gallon hats, rhinestoned boots and how-much??-blow replacing newsboy caps, miner's grit and homebrew gin at 5 cents a shot. It'd crash soon, but meantime April 13, 1979, chilly day in Denver down at the Rainbow, would not have been a bad time and place to spend an evening with Reconstruction.

! t01 (1) @ 5:35 (during song) Stallings gives Ed Neumeister a shoutout. After song, Gaylord gives Ron Stallings props. Ron Stallings: "Ed Neumeister on trombone. Merl Saunders on organ. Gaylord Birch on drums. John Kahn on the bass. Jerry Garcia on the guitar."

! P: t02 SR not my favorite tune, but Jerry plays a very electric solo ca. 7 min mark. He is playing very well. @ 9:30ff Merl takes a synth solo.

! P: t03 again @ 4:30 JG is wailing pretty nicely.  In  the 6 range Garcia is putting some nice wah on it, very much in the space of contemporary Dead tune "Shakedown Street".

! P: t05 SM good guitar work 4-minute mark. 1979 was a big change in his style, a lot more similar across the two contexts than previously.

! P: t06 Merl is definitely in his Full Cleveland lounge act mode. Jerry walking behind him, definitely has the divorcee's bar feel, some of those plush, dingy, smoky, smoky, sleazy banquetted 1970s lounges, the tables with a particularly indescribable kind of stick. Now this is definitely a more talented group than you'll find at your local smorgie-(or Hofbrau-)near-the-airport, and Garcia's guitar packs a little more punch than your spongy picker. Over the 4-min mark his tone sears pretty deeply. Yow! Merl does some full B3 work through 4 over 5, Jerry and the rhythm section holding it tight for him, horns laying back for the chorus line.

! P: LTR Reverend Ron's first solo starts off-key late 2-min mark. @ 4:30 Stallings soloing hits a Coltrane note, Naima or something. Garcia solo 5:15ff. Neumeister @ 7:55ff.

! setlist: t07 was listed as "Long Train Running -> Fast Tone", but they never play "Fast Tone" here.

! setlist: I am calling IANU an encore, because the tape is continuous over the whole encore trip.

! t08 (2) Ron Stallings: "Yeah, you didn't get enough?" Crowd: "Nooo!" Stallings: "You want some more? Here we come." Yikes.


[1] See Fey 2011 for most of what follows.
[2] Fey (2011, 24) says they split in February.
[3] See Fey 2011, 108-114 for some great Barry Fey-Bill-Graham stories.
[4] Here are more Ebbets data, but have your popup blocker primed and ready.

16 comments:

  1. I think your assessment of Barry Fey as a sort of Denver Freddy Herrera was right on the money. This period seems to be the window where Reconstruction might have crossed over to being a "real" band.

    One mysterious event rights into this time frame, namely the recording of "Dear Prudence." Garcia laid down tracks all the time (to some extent) at Club Front, but usually they were just demos of some kind. "Dear Prudence" was different, however--according to Edd Neumeister, they brought in a trumpet player, Mark Isham (who doesn't work for free), and they wrote out horn parts. Then Garcia decided to double the horns (a common studio technique) and so they overdubbed the parts on top of the original horn parts. Neumeister describes Jerry's attention to detail with some admiration.

    Why was Jerry recording a song at Club Front with hired horn players, and overdubbing parts? In 1979? He didn't have an album project. The album (All Good Things) just says "Spring 79." I actually think he recorded "Prudence" in the studio before it was played live. What was Jerry up to?

    Something may have been afoot in the spring of '79, and then it didn't happen. Just a guess, but there are some outliers in the spring that are otherwise hard to explain.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Gans reported in BAM in early 1979 that Garcia was working on a new album. There are a few other studio sessions around this time on All Good Things, as you suggest - I think Peggy-O is one of the tunes he was working up. But it's all very hazy and obviously didn't yield a record, so I don't know much about it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. So, one studio track for sure, an offhand remark from Gans 35 years ago about a project, and a few other demo tracks for an uncertain purpose.

      I can do 3000 words, minimum. Give me a few months

      Delete
    2. Awesome!

      If I were writing it up, I'd also work in the abortive late 1976 album, which had involved some of the other material that appeared on All Good Things, including "Magnificent Sanctuary Band". I have tried to figure out what that was, and it just seems like a project that never get off the ground, for reasons unknown (insofar as there were "reasons" at all).

      Delete
  3. It's possible that Garcia & the Dead had more aborted studio projects from '76-95 than actual finished albums. In any case, it would be very useful to have a simple listing of known Garcia/Dead studio dates in those years.

    ReplyDelete
  4. "John Gray and Long Hair: The Heat's On In Denver," Rolling Stone, November 23, 1967, p. 6.

    "John Gray, well known as the "Wyatt Earp of the West" and for his promise, "I'm going to rid Denver of all longhaired people," the city's narcotics officers are apparently conducting a concerted bust and hassle program to stifle a growing scene."

    "Gray's anti-hippie crusade had earlier brought about the issuance of a restraining order against him after the Family Dog in Denver had complained of his actions on previous weekends. Gray often searched and checked I.D's of everyone waiting outside the Dog's ballroom. He continued this illegal search and harrassment within the ballroom."

    "Finally to save further harassment ballroom manager Tony Gilrey had the restraining order issued. Gray broke the order and re-entered the Family Dog's premises. 'People used to come to Denver for the mountains, the fresh air, and for the free, open feeling it had, said Taft, 'the mountains are still here, but the friendly feeling is gone. It just isn't a place vou'd want to go to any more.'"

    ReplyDelete
  5. The February 20-21, 1968 shows at Avalon were benefits for the Family Dog, which had accrued $85,000 in expenses in Denver trying to fight The Man.

    "Family Dog Just Misses the Pound," Rolling Stone, April 6, 1968, p. 6.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Rhoney on Chester: "Chet Helms, a sweet man and a great hippie, ran the Avalon. His "anything goes" way of doing business was tenuous ... He was going broke, but he was a friend" (Stanley 2013, 115).

    ReplyDelete
  7. Saw Jer at the rainbow after 85...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'd love to update information. Have you got a ticket stub?

      Delete
  8. "June 1980 would have come and gone with no one the wiser and no acknowledgement of the day in 1965 when Phil Lesh joined the Warlocks, officially forming the Grateful Dead, were it not for Colorado promoter Barry Fey. He knew the value of the anniversary connection and booked shows in Boulder on June 6 and 7, using the anniversary connection to boost ticket sales" (Loren 2014, 199).

    ReplyDelete
  9. Interesting that John Scher did the introduction. I don't know if Fey did introductions, maybe he didn't care, or maybe it was something they put a price on. Who knows?

    https://archive.org/details/gd1980-06-08.SonyECM250.walker-scotton.miller.88452.sbeok.flac16

    ReplyDelete
  10. Corry on the Denver Dog: "It was a great idea and a good plan, except for one thing: the County Sheriff. The Sheriff hated hippies, and constant harassment of the venue, the bands and the fans rapidly drove the Denver Dog into economic failure. The career of Canned Heat was ruined due to an untimely bust, and no doubt many lesser known patrons had their lives wrecked by pot busts and other problems. Bob Seger's song "Get Out Of Denver" immortalizes the view of hippies held by the Sheriff's Department at the time"

    http://hooterollin.blogspot.com/2016/04/grateful-dead-performance-list-july.html

    ReplyDelete
  11. "Among the acts set for the $2 series in April are: Reconstruction, which comes in for four shows featuring John Kahn, Merle [sic] Saunders, Ron Stallings. Gaylord Birch, Ed Neumeister, with special guest guitarist Jerry Garcia. Morris claims 4,000 tickets were sold the first day they went on sale for the shows" (Williams 1976). For those gigs, the room would have held 1,400.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. And, BTW, I think that was Fake News: Reconstruction tickets were $8, not $2.

      Delete
  12. Appropriating Joan Didion's word about mid-50s Berkeley, late 60s Denver wsa a place with a "resolute determination to meet 1950 head-on" (Didion 1979, 98).

    ReplyDelete

!Thank you for joining the conversation!