Saturday, December 17, 2016

Reading Notes: McNally 2015



McNally, Dennis, ed. 2015. Jerry on Jerry: The Unpublished Jerry Garcia Interviews. New York: Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers.


I didn't quite know what to expect. On a read, it felt like this was all material that I already knew. From a strictly informational perspective I didn't feel like I got anything I didn't know out of Jerry's mouth. But when I went back to transcribe some key things, so engaged the book a second time, I felt like it really painted an intimate picture of Jerry by Jerry. McNally did a great job in using his own creative talent to let Jerry --a Jerry, a version of Jerry-- paint a lovely little posthumous self-portrait.

This is sort of like my "in praise of editorial judgment" thing --no reader here could possibly disagree-- Dennis McNally obviously knew Garcia well, was blessed to have spent a lot of time talking about everything under the sun with him, and he creatively arranges a lot of the material that I know (of), but hadn't really understood. It's nicely paced, a nice easy afternoon conversation, plenty of room to breathe, unlike so many of the Garcia interviews we get to hear. It's a nice piece of work, and it'll be on my shelf (or wherever I put it) for the long haul. (It's so nice that I won't even lament that absence of spatiotemporal identifiers for the quotes.)

A note on "reading notes": this is just my selective culling of quotes of particular interest to me. There's nothing representative about this stuff, I don't imagine. I pick up different stuff from LIA (who can remember it all without the contrivance of "reading notes"). The method is to sort these quotes into their respective topic buckets  (with little tags like #why and such), then put the book aside and move on to the next thing.

Raw notes below the fold. I lost steam with bolding the names at some point ...




#why "Both his playing and his life rested on dynamic interaction with other people".[1]

"the celebrity interview, an opportunity for an artist to talk about himself and to pitch a current endeavor in as brief and efficient a manner as possible, was completely lost on Jerry".[2] see especially "Bob Coburn interviews Jerry Garcia" for an example of Garcia's antipitch. The January '76 Bonnie Simmons interview is another.

1990s: "withdrawn and depressed toward the end of his life".[3]

"In the early days of the Garcia Band, Jerry would arrive at the Keystone in Berkeley and spend all afternoon running scales on his guitar, with a joint and a cup of coffee at hand. Occasionally he would tell his roadie and confidant Steve Parish, 'Go get me someone weird'".[4] #adayinthelife

s-Elvin Bishop "was a musician from Oklahoma who attended the University of Chicago and fell into the highly creative blues scene of the early 1960s there, joining the Butterfield Blues Band before moving to the Bay Area".[5]

s- Ruth "Bobby" Clifford: "A trained nurse, she was interested in music; she had a good voice and exposed Jerry to opera".[6] #musics

s-Tillie Clifford "A free-thinker, labor union activist, and true San Franciscan. Jerry adored her".[7]

"The Crows": "an R&B street-corner doo-wop group from New York City, had a hit in 1953 with their first song 'Gee', which was the first R&B tune Jerry would recall hearing. He particularly liked the untrained street-corner quality to their vocals".[8]

s-Joe and Jim Edmiston, brothers and friends of JG who played in the Thunder Mountain Tub Thumpers.[9]

Clifford "Tiff" Garcia – "the nickname came from the very young Jerry's struggles to say his name".[10]

s-Nicki Scully (née Rudolph) was girlfriend to Ken Goldfinger.[11]

s-"Wally Hedrick was a noted member of the 'Funk Art' assemblage school of painting" .. taught at California School of Fine Arts. played guitar and jazz banjo. "it was his playing of a Big Bill Broonzy record in class that inspired Jerry to want to learn to play guitar. Wally also influenced Jerry morally, [15] encouraging his bohemian tendencies to seek a life of art and spirit rather than money".[12]

s- Ron Rakow was friends with Peggy Hitchcock, "an heir to the Mellon fortune, a friend of Timothy Leary's who made him welcome at her family's Millbrook Estate, and a friend of Ron Rakow's" (McNally 2015, 15)

Bill Keith was the first "city billy" to play with Bill Monroe.[13]

One of JG's earliest musical memories comes from The Great Gildersleeve radio program.[14] One of the singers he listened to was Katie Lee, who happened to be Jerilyn Brandelius's step mother.

Ron Stevenson Jerry's Army buddy. "It was Garcia's attempt to counsel him away from suicide that caused Jerry to miss several reporting times and would lead to Jerry's general discharge. Ron also taught Jerry some rudiments of fingerpicking acoustic guitar".[15]

#SF "San Francisco was something I was always conscious of … I don't know how kids normally take the place they grew up, but for me, San Francisco was a magic place. I mean, I used to go out to Sutro's [Baths] and places like that and just breathe in the reality of it. … I just loved those places. I was there from the time I could get on a fuckin' Muni bus, you know, or a streetcar. From the moment I could get on those damn things, and cop a dime somewhere to do it, I was all over that city".[16]

#religion he went to mass at Corpus Christi [Church] until they went to the Peninsula.[17]

#religion being Roman Catholic, problems with sex? "Always weird for me. Yeah, because of the hang-up between what I would describe as love and sex. … Those were both things that always hunge me up, but I – I had a hard time being just loose, sexually, really. It was hard for me to just fuck somebody. I never enjoyed that".[18] #sex

#religion Catholicism didn't really talk to him about sex. "For me, Catholicism was much more a matter of the invisible world. It bent me much more in that Justin Green way [namechecks Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary]".[19]

#religion "The theater [of the Latin mass] got to me much more than any ideas."[20] They weren't really churchgoers, maybe go down there to keep up appearances when the offerings are made.

#Spain "My grandparents on my father's side spoke Spanish, I think exclusively, and … I learned to speak Spanish speaking to them".[21] He never knew he learned it until the Dead played Spain, and he realized he could understand people.

Ruth Garcia: "My mom was into music, which she sang. Apparently she was pretty into it when she was in school, and she was into operettas and that as a singer, and she played a little piano, and she was an opera buff, too, an opera nut. I mean, she was big on it. I grew up with ears full of opera all the time".[22] "She was big on classical music and big on opera. … she took me to the opera once in awhile. And she was a big fan of Leonard Warrant and Risë Stevens and the opera singers who were famous in those days. … I was always hearing her, and she would sing snatches of arias. She had a pretty good soprano voice and she played a little #song-'Moonlight Sonata' on the piano".[23]

s-Katie Lee on The Great Gildersleeve radio show? "I remember that from when I was a little kid. I mean, a little, little kid."[24] She is Jerilyn Brandelius's stepmother.

McNally asks a perceptive question about how the wider world was mediated: "What were your connections with … the outside world, as it were? Radio, obviously. I mean, you were a little kid before television."[25] #TV #radio

Garcia, continuing on Katie Lee: "There was something about that that was so … It was very romantic to me even though I was just a little kid. Something about her voice. You know? … I didn't know anything about music, then. I wasn't aware of styles, or … I wasn't aware there was such a thing as country music. This was when I was a little kid. And for me, all music was just undifferentiated stuff that came out of the radio." [26] #radio more on Katie Lee: "I remember that because it was the thing of the beautiful, the unaccompanied female voice"[27] #women

#musics: "Seeing these folk musics [as a little kid] – it was the purity of it that got to me, and the pure melodic thing of it that just got right to me. I don't know, something about it that said something to my soul. You know? I couldn't say what it was. It was a totally emotional thing."[28] #depression

He heard the record with Jerilyn, "bong, it flashed me back and it was so far out. I remembered myself as a little kid in my room, me and my brother, listening to the radio, you know, at night …" #radio "And the thing about radio is that you spun the worlds of radio in your head. You know? And so radio drama had that wonderful thing of the mental world …"[29]

Garcia's first heavy musical connection: "The very first one was when I must have been three or four or something like that, and there was [35] a record of some tune, like, I think it was #song 'The Girl I Left Behind'. Another little folk song, a little marching song or something like that. And a windup phonograph that my grandparents had up in their country place. There was no electricity, just a windup phonograph with the little needles and a few, [a] handful of old records … old, dusty shit."[30]

"Nobody listened to this or even looked at it but me. And there was this one record, and I put it on and I'd play it and I'd play it, and I'd wind up the thing and play it over and over again. I played it for hours on end. I don't know what it was about it, but I remember doing that and I remember there being something about the song, something about the music. It was like scratching an itch. … #song 'Sweet Betsy From The Pike', one of those American folk songs … I literally wore those records flat. I don't know why. It was like a compulsion …"[31]

You could get Grand Ole Opry in San Francisco? "Oh, sure. Because it was network. It was everywhere. On Saturday night, The Grand Ole Opry was on at least an hour everywhere."[32] #musics #country

"My grandmother loved it [The Grand Ole Opry]. She loved that, and she loved Hawaiian music".[33] #pedal steel #musics #country

#TV first TV was a Hoffman. "My grandmother had the first TV on the block", in 1949.[34] "Uncle Miltie. Time for Beany was one of the important things for me. The old Beany, the puppet show" … Bob Clampett and Stan Freberg did that puppet show … "It's one of the very earliest TV experiences that I remember. And later on, Jackie Gleason in that era, you know, and The Toast of the Town [a.k.a. The Ed Sullivan Show], Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca and all that stuff."[35]

"Man, I loved early TV. It was so formless, so straight. There was one country and western program in the Bay Area [Hayride, on KGO in 1950]. One live country [show hosted by] Dude Martin, and he featured –the guy he featured was Rusty Draper [a finger-picking guitarist], who was the guy that made a popular single record of #song 'Freight Train'."[36] #musics #country #Elizabeth_Cotten

#movies: Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein, 1948. Garcia had deconstructed the plot, turning the three monsters in the film (Frankenstein, Dracula and Wolf Man) with the WWII Axis Powers.[37]

McNally, near the end: "In the last year of his life, clearly not himself and plagued by diabetes (which he didn't treat properly), his mood swings made him somewhat silent and withdrawn … he clearly didn't want to be bugged."[38] #1990s

#film #movies: La Dolce Vita; Last Year at Marienbad ["It concerns ambiguous characters in a confusing environment".[39]], The Fly[40] is one he hasn't seen [but saw the original], but he knows the director (David Cronenberg) from Scanners and Videodrome.

#film #movies "I'm a movie kid. You know? And I'm a movie buff to boot."[41]

#film #books Garcia likes Stephen King, likes Different Seasons and cites Stand By Me. "Stephen King has a real touch with characters. I read all his books. I like horror stories. Stephen King writes well."[42]

#movies recently MG recommended Dreamchild, 1985. This is about Alice in Wonderland.[43]

#film Close Encounters of the Third Kind was pretty well made for" Jerry.[44] "I was glad that somebody was brave enough to make a movie about that weird—I always applaud the weirdness in human life. You know what I mean? I mean, such as it appears. That's the stuff that's fun to look out for because, what the fuck? You know? We've already burned out the normal shit."[45]

#weirdness "It's the strange, the dark alleys that interest me, and that whole experience."[46] #chiaroscuro

#movie #film Close Encounters "music as a language".[47] Wow.

"movie #film "I waited for that movie to come out. I really did. And you know, there is an interesting series of teeny-weeny coincidences that go along with that. I'll tell you about it. Do you know who Jacques Vallee is? [Vallee is a scientists who worked on the mappings of Mars for NASA and was part of developing ARPANET …] [47] Vallee is one of the few real scientists who's involved in the flying saucer stuff. The Lacombe character [in Close Encounters] … He's sort of patterned after Jacques Vallee, who is actually a computer guy, a computer scientist, but he's an astrophysicist. He's a young guy, not very old, and he and Allen Hynek are the two scientists who are most seriously involved, scientifically, with the flying saucer phenomenon."[48]

Jacques Vallee thinks there are no coincidences, only events that happen within their respective probability distributions. "When Close Encounters came out, we were booked at the hotel on the street corner opposite the theater where it opened in New York, where it opened ten days before general release. It was at the Ziegfeld Theatre, and I was there with my band and we were playing at the Academy of Music [later the Palladium. {sic: it was the Palladium by the time of Garcia's November 1977 engagement.}]"[49]

"So I'm down there at the Academy of Music [11/77] and these guys come up the stairs and say 'Hey, would you okay this Conehead poster because Connie Conehead wears a Grateful Dead t-shirt?' … that's where I started to get to know Franken and Davis."[50]

Close Encounters: Garcia "and Candelario went to see that movie about six times during the week. It was right down the street. You know? We could go out. There were no lines or anything. It was the easiest thing in the world to just go over there. And the movie was so great looking on the big screen, brand new print".[51] I wonder what he means by "we could go out – like, he could [still] go out to the movies right in Manhattan xxx check xxx and not be hassled?

Notes GD Movie had also debuted at Ziegfield. "It was just, you know, one of those things, like a perfect moment".[52]

#musics R&B: "The first song I liked was 'Gee' by the Crows. And it had a real, it had a real street kind of voice. The guy's voice was … it had a real street voice. And I remember the sound of it was – yeah, yeah. … As a doo-wop group, the Crows sounded great. And it still sounds badass, too. … That was the first tune that I remember."[53] #sound More on 'Gee' "That was an important song. That was the first kind of, like where the voices had that kind of no-trained singer voices, but tough-guy-on-the-street voice", as McNally calls it, "street corner".[54]

#comic books discussed McNally ca. pp. 50-

#musics "I never liked [the Bill Haley stuff] that much, but what I did like was the way 'Rock Around The Clock' sounded when it was at the beginning of Blackboard Jungle [1955].[55] #movies #film #sound

#musics "I never liked Bill Haley that much. For me, I liked the black stuff better, you know. And at that time, like "Shake, Rattle and Roll" – there was a 'Shake, Rattle and Roll' that Bill Haley and the Comets did, and there was a 'Shake, Rattle and Roll' that Joe Turner did. There was an R&B version out about the same time that I liked much, much better."[56] #race

Tiff introduced him to R&B #musics[57]

#musics "KWBR and KDIA … were the two R&B stations in the area. And I preferred the one in Oakland, KWBR. And I just … my ear fell into it, you know?"[58] #sound He listened to Ray Charles, John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed, Lightnin' Hopkins, B.B. King as guys he could hear on the radio.[59] Later he mentions Muddy Waters and Jimmy McCracklin.[60] More on KWBR: "It had Bouncin' Bill Doubleday on it. It didn't have George Oxford, Jumpin' George. He was on KDIA in San Francisco".[61]

McNally conjures the scenario, from when Dead backed Etta James (12/31/82), of "moving it to a little bar on Mission Street …", to which Jerry replies "I could have been there and been very happy."[62] #why

After his dad died, his mom moved it from 1st Street, to "where the SUP [Sailors' Union of the Pacific, 450 Harrison St., corner of First Street], is now, and that was when my father had it. My mother sold it, sold the property, and the SUP was built there, and she got the next corner where the 76 [Union Oil Co.] building is now" [now replaced by 1 Rincon Center).[63]

Garcia's mom kept "a workingman's bar, it was just open during the day. It closed when the union hall closed, pretty much, and a few of the executives, the stronger-willed executives from the 76 would come down and hang out with the sailors who drank there. And it was fun. It was a nice bar."[64]

At the last bar his mom had, "there was also a piano there, my mom's upright piano, that I used to play after hours and fuck around with, and I used to listen to Jerry Lee Lewis on the jukebox, and Buddy Holly".[65]

#song "white port lemon juice ("W.P.L.J.") [the Four Deuces]. That was one of my anthem songs when I was in junior high school and high school."[66]

#musics Ray Charles: "I remember 'Lonely Avenue' was one of the first ones. I remember really liking 'I Got A Woman'."[67]

"#sounds "I remember noting the different feelings that different records had, the different styles, the bands, the way they … you know? The way the records themselves sounded, the textures of them."[68] Garcia would say to his friends "Sit down and listen to this record and listen to how that thing sounds there".[69]

#sounds "repeat slack echo that was big on early rock 'n' roll records … I remember listening to them and wondering, and those things were an important part of why I liked certain records and why I liked the sound of things."[70]

Under heading "Jerry on Community", McNally narrates "Whatever its name or lack thereof, the bar at the corner of First and Harrison deeply influenced Jerry by becoming the first of the communities he would belong to. It was a workingman's bar in what was then a blue-collar workingman's town, directly across the street from the headquarters of the Sailors' Union of the Pacific. A central part of the SUP's heritage profoundly honored the memory of the two strikers killed twenty years before just a few blocks down the hill on 'Bloody Thursday', during the city's great strike of 1934. Plenty of the men at the bar had been part of that strike, and they treated Jerry as family."[71] #unions

"You've got to figure just because you're a musician doesn't mean you're smarter than anybody else. It doesn’t mean your better or smarter or anything than anyone else. … Being a musician is just a matter of choice. It certainly doesn't entitle you to anything."[72]

Contrasting himself with Jagger: "I personally wouldn't want the responsibility, you know? I wouldn't care to have that many people waiting around to see what I wanted them to do. … I would feel awful if I made wrong decisions. And I wouldn't care to do that. I've already been through that in my head".[73]

"Let's everybody have all their dreams fulfilled. … It's like if we have a vehicle to dreams, let's knock 'em down, you know. Let's set 'em up and knock 'em down. … This life is what we can do with it. … So long as it's going that way, let's do it that way. Let's be good to ourselves. Let's be good to each other. I wouldn't know what else to do in life. It would be a terrible bummer to not be able to go through life with your friends, anyway. That's what the very start was about, you know."[74]

"There is nothing wrong with performances. Performance is a great trip. There is an art of performance."[75] connect to Judy Garland cabaret economics.

ch. 3 of McNally 2015 goes back to North Beach, a lot of Jerry's early influences. Lots of social network possibilities.

#drugs discovered pot that eventful summer of 1957, so his mom took him out to Cazadero in 1959, to get him straight.[76]

Garcia was 14 when he got turned on, discussion of Beats, Wally Hedrick,[77]

#why "music and me is a whole life thing"[78]

"The reason I got my first guitar was that same teacher, Wally Hedrick, played acoustical guitar, and he brought a record of Big Bill Broonzy and his acoustical guitar to one of our classes. He also played banjo, four-string banjo, in one of the jazz bands around San Francisco. Traditional jazz. And I heard him play the guitar, and I heard Big Bill Broonzy on this record, and that's when I decided, you know, I definitely do want a guitar."[79]

Of picking up a guitar, Garcia says "I had to do it, man. I had to make that sound. You know? Man, I'm telling you. It was like a disease with me. It took me over, it really did."[80] WOW #why #sound

#why workaholism: "Here's my little Rockman practice amp, right here. Here's my books down here. I'm working now on fourths. You know, I've got a bunch of exercises here. In the middle of the night is when I'm happening, you know. Like, about two or three in the morning, I break this sucker out and then I play it, and I look up and it's six, you know? Five or six. I don't know how long I do it, and sometimes I do one little thing over and over and over and over again, and it's one of those things, it gets me, you know."[81]

Jerry's first band experience was with Gary Foster in a band called The Chords.[82]

#JGMS Gary Foster "was patient enough to show me shit that I otherwise would never have picked up in a million years. I mean, those songs were not, you know, they weren't bebop or anything like that, but they were the kind of changes that I didn't start to understand until I was playing with Merl for a couple of years".[83]

When first bandmate Gary Foster did a little fingerpicking, Jerry recognized it as "the sound I heard on some records, solos like on some Elvis Presley records even. [DM: Scotty Moore.] Scotty Moore, right, played some things that he did a little bit of fingerpicking, Merle Travis style. I'd never heard Merle Travis. I'd never heard Chet Atkins. I'd never heard any of those guys. And I just thought I heard something that sounded cool as hell on those records. 'What the fuck is that?' I tried to duplicate it, but it didn't seem possible."[84] #sound #musics #country

#army perfectly describes what happened, pp. 85-86.

#film #movies Illustration of Boaz from Sirens of Titan on p. 86.

auto accident 1961 slingshot of his life, pp. 97-101. This led JG to get serious, p. 102.

#drugs #LSD pp. 103-105

John Sebastian connects to Garcia via David Grisman, who was in the Even Dozen Jug Band with him.[85]

JG went to see David Nelson [Pine Valley Boys] when Richard Greene was in the band.[86]

Garcia's charisma[87]

July '89 interview with Jeremy xxx, hearkening to Olompali 1966. "The 'all' experience, yeah, that whole day. That included the experience of dying many deaths. … I run up the stairs and there's this demon with a spear who gets me right between the eyes, you know? Or I run up the stairs and there is this woman with a knife who stabs me in the back. I run up the stairs and there's a business partner that shoots me, boom, you know? It's like playing [126] the last frame of a movie over and over, with subtle variations, and that branched out into millions of deaths and all sorts of just visions …"[88]

"The last scene of hundreds of lives and thousands of incarnations and insect deaths and then, you know, like kinds of life where I remember spending some long amount of, like eons as kind of sentient fields of wheat, you know, that kind of stuff. Incredible things, in these sort of long pastoral kind of extraterrestrial kind of cultures, you know. Kind of bringing-in-the-sheaves sort of thing."[89] That is hilarious. #LSD #drugs

One time in 1966 he took some White Lightning and got himself situated at Olompali: "I was lying on the grass. I closed my eyes and I had this sensation of seeing, perceiving with my eyes closed. It was as though they were open, you know? I still had this field of vision. And this field of vision had kind of a pattern in it. It was partly visible, and then I had this thing that the outside of the field of vision was starting to unravel, like an old-time coffee can, you know that little thing that you spin around, it takes the little strip of metal off. It was like that, and it began stripping around the outside of the field of vision until I had a 360-degree view. And it revealed this pattern. And the pattern said 'All', in incredible neon, you know? [laughs] It was one of those kinds of experiences."[90] #drugs #LSD

"If you work really hard as an artist, you may be able to build something they can't tear down, you know, after you're gone. But hey, what the fuck? What I want to do is I want it here. I want it now, in this lifetime. I want what I enjoy to last as long as I do and not last any longer. You [135] know, I don't want something that ends up being as much a nuisance as a work of art, you know?"[91] #death #art

Garcia never wants to be isolate. "I don't want to be an artist suffering in a garret somewhere, you know what I mean? I want to work with other people, you know? … I've always preferred that collaborative kind of work. I'd rather be part of something than working on my [own]."[92] Line about not being so into himself that he thinks he's got things together on his own. #why

Golden Gate Park: "a real important model for me is Golden Gate Park"[93] and #film #movies Fantasia.[94]

In GGP, "if you go from one end to another, you find yourself in these different worlds. You know, there's places where all of a sudden it's real prehistoric, looking at those giant ferns, and everything is weird, ancient things. And then you walk a little further and all of a sudden you're in this pasture, and there's sheep grazing and there's a little pond … It changes. And you're not aware of how it's changing or where it's changing, but it does change, and it has a beautiful seamless way of doing that, and it's a work, really. Like a poem."[95]

"The Grateful Dead for me has been a tremendous mind-expanding experience, because it has ways of doing the things that I like to do that aren't the way I like to do them."[96] #GD_vs_solo dissonance

#music "The real reality is note to note. But the fact is that, for me, music is like a thing of hunks, you know, of, like, sentences. For me, an idea is not one note. … An idea is like a sentence or a paragraph sometimes".[97]

"Playing with other people makes it interactive, which also makes it fun. It's part of what makes it fun."[98] #why

#books Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human; JG mentions The Demolished Man.

Zabriskie Point sat with him "one on one. It was a pleasure to work with him, too, because, you know, Antonioni".[99] Gar had seen Eclipse and had studied him, in a sense. They discuss Blow-Up a bit, too.[100]

When Antonioni worked with JG, "he spoke in terms of the music totally in emotional terms. … He'd say 'Okay, I want it to be sad here. I want it to be sort of bright and cheerful here. Now, there is something ominous happening.' … It was all in terms of mood and in terms of emotion."[101]

Around 2/69, when they are so grumpy: Kansas City, "some little soldiers-and-sailors kind of hall … We came out after the show and a half a dozen cops were beating the shit out of some skinny little hippie. One of them could have killed him. I remember getting so furious … it made you want to kill."[102]

Ron Rakow was with them in Montreal in '67.[103]

#film Shirley Clarke Connection.[104]

Jerry on #politics pp. 181-187

#pedal_steel "I'd fooled around a bit with pedal steels and stuff, but I couldn't make any sense of them. And then we went to a music store in Denver, and there was a completely strung-up, tuned-up, nicely put together, set-up and everything, pedal steel. You know, state-of-the-art ten-stringer, with two necks and everything." [105] Sat and played with it, gained some understanding. "So I said, 'I want to buy this fuckin' thing, but can you send it to me with it in tune, you know, 'cause I'll never remember this tuning.' So they packed it up and sent it to me in tune."[106]

#pedal_steel "I've always loved the sound of it, and I wanted for years to get one and play one right. I had one, actually, in Ashbury for the longest time. An old cable one."[107]

"I wanted to get into pedal steel back when I was playing banjo. I was attracted to the sound of it on records. 'Now there is a snappy sounding instrument. That fucker really sings.'"[108] #pedal_steel

Light Artists Guild strike et seq, 8/69 "The Light Show people had no business going on strike."[109]

JG on LAG 8/1/69: "I did it because of my union background, I think, really, you know? Just because all my life I've been respecting unions, the SUP across the street, my grandmother and the Laundry Workers Union – I was a union person. I was raised in a union family."[110] #union

"I'm a member of the musicians union, which I think is one of the all-time bad jokes … Musicians union is really silly. But it's like a reflex, you know?"[111] #union #institutionalization

song-"Mission In The Rain": Garcia describes this as a very personal song, one that makes him "feel very exposed".[112]

#musics #bluegrass with Big Mon like Charlie Parker; JG: "It's white bebop."[113] Discussion of Scotty Stoneman.



[1] McNally 2015, 9.
[2] McNally 2015, 9.
[3] McNally 2015, 9.
[4] McNally 2015, 9.
[5] McNally 2015, 13.
[6] McNally 2015, 13.
[7] McNally 2015, 13.
[8] McNally 2015, 13.
[9] McNally 2015, 14.
[10] McNally 2015, 14.
[11] McNally 2015, 14.
[12] McNally 2015, 14-15.
[13] McNally 2015, 15.
[14] McNally 2015, 16.
[15] McNally 2015, 17.
[16] McNally 2015, 21.
[17] McNally 2015, 21.
[18] McNally 2015, 25.
[19] McNally 2015, 25.
[20] McNally 2015, 26.
[21] McNally 2015, 27.
[22] McNally 2015, 32.
[23] McNally 2015, 33.
[24] McNally 2015, 33.
[25] McNally 2015, 33.
[26] McNally 2015, 34.
[27] McNally 2015, 34.
[28] McNally 2015, 34.
[29] McNally 2015, 34.
[30] McNally 2015, 34-35.
[31] McNally 2015, 35.
[32] McNally 2015, 36.
[33] McNally 2015, 36.
[34] McNally 2015, 36.
[35] McNally 2015, 37.
[36] McNally 2015, 37.
[37] McNally 2015, 38.
[38] McNally 2015, 38.
[39] McNally 2015, 40.
[40] McNally 2015, 41.
[41] McNally 2015, 41.
[42] McNally 2015, 41.
[43] McNally 2015, 44.
[44] McNally 2015, 45.
[45] McNally 2015, 45.
[46] McNally 2015, 45.
[47] McNally 2015, 46.
[48] McNally 2015, 46-47.
[49] McNally 2015, 47.
[50] McNally 2015, 48.
[51] McNally 2015, 49.
[52] McNally 2015, 49.
[53] McNally 2015, 59.
[54] McNally 2015, 67.
[55] McNally 2015, 59.
[56] McNally 2015, 60.
[57] McNally 2015, 61.
[58] McNally 2015, 61.
[59] McNally 2015, 61.
[60] McNally 2015, 67.
[61] McNally 2015, 67.
[62] McNally 2015, 62.
[63] McNally 2015, 64.
[64] McNally 2015, 65.
[65] McNally 2015, 66.
[66] McNally 2015, 67.
[67] McNally 2015, 68.
[68] McNally 2015, 68.
[69] McNally 2015, 68.
[70] McNally 2015, 68.
[71] McNally 2015, 69.
[72] McNally 2015, 71.
[73] McNally 2015, 71.
[74] McNally 2015, 72.
[75] McNally 2015, 73.
[76] McNally 2015, 76.
[77] McNally 2015, 76-78.
[78] McNally 2015, 78.
[79] McNally 2015, 78.
[80] McNally 2015, 80.
[81] McNally 2015, 80. Koestler described this kind of reverie in Act of Creation (yyyy), and it has recently been elaborated by xxx as "flow state".
[82] McNally 2015,82.
[83] McNally 2015, 83.
[84] McNally 2015, 84.
[85] McNally 2015, 112.
[86] McNally 2015, 116.
[87] McNally 2015, 121.
[88] McNally 2015, 125-126.
[89] McNally 2015, 126.
[90] McNally 2015, 126.
[91] McNally 2015, 134-135.
[92] McNally 2015, 135.
[93] McNally 2015, 143.
[94] McNally 2015, 143.
[95] McNally 2015, 144.
[96] McNally 2015, 145.
[97] McNally 2015, 147.
[98] McNally 2015, 149.
[99] McNally 2015, 163.
[100] McNally 2015, 162-163.
[101] McNally 2015, 164.
[102] McNally 2015, 170.
[103] McNally 2015, 172.
[104] McNally 2015, 173.
[105] McNally 2015, 203.
[106] McNally 2015, 203.
[107] McNally 2015, 204.
[108] McNally 2015, 205.
[109] McNally 2015, 207.
[110] McNally 2015, 208.
[111] McNally 2015, 208.
[112] McNally 2015, 212.
[113] McNally 2015, 232.



2 comments:

  1. "McNally conjures the scenario, from when Dead backed Etta James (12/31/82), of "moving it to a little bar on Mission Street …", to which Jerry replies "I could have been there and been very happy."[62] #why"

    Is McNally saying that Jerry played with Etta James in a bar on Mission Street after the 12/31/82 show in Oakland?

    ReplyDelete

!Thank you for joining the conversation!