Chatty Cathy in the House: JGB at the Stone, December 18, 1981

LN jg1981-12-18.jgb.all.aud-martin.16379.shn2flac

I recently learned the term "chompers" to describe people who talk through shows. Well, this phenomenon is as old as time, with the triad of the drum, the chomper and the shusher perhaps very nearly co-constituting each other In The Beginning.

Bill Kreutzmann drums, the chomper talks all show long, and I don't really hear a shusher on the in-your-face ambient recording pulled by taper Steven Martin through modified Nak 700s at the Stone on December 18, 1981. A Whistling Wally appears briefly, but thankfully he rethinks or otherwise abandons his accompaniment. Nothing in the show draws particular comment. This one is all about the tape, which totally puts you there.

I still don't understand how Kreutzmann came to be in the JGB in 1981-1982. What sequence of events and decisions produced this outcome? I dunno.

Some stuff I have been going through recently really lays bare just how impossibly intermingled were the finances of the Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia (an sich) in this period. Money big and small is moving on the regular, especially in the GD -> JG direction, partly through the practice of the O/A - an "on account" withdrawal that facilitated Jerry getting lots of cash, very frequently, in the days before widespread ATMs. But there were also much bigger loans, often in the low five figures. After every Garcia Band tour, there's a reckoning of income and expenses --we are moderns, after all, and must genuflect before Double Entry Bookkeeping--, and big chunks of what's left go to such things as paying Jerry's back taxes and paying back the GD. Ownership of assets such as the Neve console or the rest of the Front Street studio setup, which Jerry respectively bought and paid for with his Cats Under the Stars advance from Arista in 1977, was murky. Despite the heroic efforts of Bonnie Simmons and Sue Stephens and many other office folks, for many, many years it seems like Garcia just kept burning through wads of cash while Phil, inter alia, seethed. It's hard to blame the rest of the guys for worrying about all of this, though of course there would have been no "this" without Jerry, so they were in a little bit of a bind, limited in what they could do.

I know these thoughts are inchoate. I will say a lot more, and presumably more coherently, in Fate Music. But I do think that the story of 81-82 Jerry Band clearly expresses the mess of the man's life, financially and otherwise, in this period of time. They'd take in $107k on a tour like JGB in February 1981, and see $112k soaked up immediately, to say nothing of ongoing, longterm, lingering giant debts or everyday petty and not so petty cash needs. And I wonder if Billy being onboard after business was settled with Ronnie Tutt was related to all of this. Of course, it could just be that Rock had his number. Again: I dunno.

In the meantime, the band played on, and the people drank, danced, chatted, and taped, and it was kind of a hoot, all things considered.

Jerry Garcia Band
The Stone
412 Broadway
San Francisco, CA 94133
December 18, 1981 (Friday)
Martin MAC shnid-16379 shn2flac

--set I (6 tracks, 5 tunes, 46:33)--
s1t01. ambience [0:22]
s1t02. The Way You Do The Things You Do [7:42] [0:12] % [0:05]
s1t03. Sitting In Limbo [11:53] [0:09] %
s1t04. /Mystery Train [8:36] [0:08] %
s1t05. /Mississippi Moon [9:58] [0:08] %
s1t06. /Deal [7:22] (1) [0:04]

--set II (5 tracks, 4 tunes, 49:36)--
s2t01. ambience [0:32]
s2t02. Sugaree [10:31] [0:20]
s2t03. I'll Take A Melody [15:14] [0:13] %
s2t04. Russian Lullaby [12:47] ->
s2t05. Tangled Up In Blue [9:53] [0:03]

! ACT1: Jerry Garcia Band #14a
! lineup: Jerry Garcia - el-g, vocals;
! lineup: John Kahn - el-b;
! lineup: Jimmy Warren - electric keyboards;
! lineup: Melvin Seals - organ;
! lineup: Bill Kreutzmann - drums;
! lineup: Julie Stafford - vocals;
! lineup: Liz Stires - vocals.

JGMF:

! Recording: symbols: % = recording discontinuity; / = clipped song; // = cut song; ... = fade in/out; # = truncated timing; [x:xx] = recorded event time. The recorded event time immediately after the song or item name is an attempt at getting the "real" time of the event. So, a timing of [x:xx] right after a song title is an attempt to say how long the song really was, as represented on this recording.

! Jerrybase: https://jerrybase.com/events/19811218-01

! db: https://etreedb.org/shn/16379 (this fileset); https://etreedb.org/shn/135462 (Ohr Weinberg MAC).

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

! JGBP: http://jerrygarciasbrokendownpalaces.blogspot.com/2012/07/stone-mothers-412-broadway-san.html

! band: JGB #14a (http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2012/01/jerry-garcia-band-personnel-1975-1995.html). We used to call this 14c, but it was born before b then came back, and we use the order in which they appeared to identify.

! R: such a fun tape! Jerry's vocals are low, but there's great ambience (including very chatty chomper nearby - it's not a new thing, folks!), and the backing vocalists are coming through strong, especially one of them. Chatty Cathy does keep distracting me, e.g., in Sugaree. Shush!

! R: field recordist: Steven Martin

! R: field recording gear: 2x modified Nakamichi CM-700 mics > Sony TC-D5 cassette deck

! R: field recording media: 2x Maxell XLII

! R: transfer: Nakamichi Dragon playback > Cardas audiophile cables > HHB CDR 800 master CD > Microboards QD2 CD clone > HP 9350i extraction (EAC v0.9 beta 4) > tracking (CD Wave v1.6) > patching (SF Studio 6.0) > sector boundary verification (shntool v1.01) > .shn encoding (mkwACT v0.97 beta 1). CD > SHN by Joe Jupille (jjoops@attbi.com). shn2flac jgmf 12/18/2021.

! R: seeder comments: This is a nice recording with lots of crowd ambience and energy, and most tunes barely clipping in.  In both respects it strongly resembles a different master of the same show made by Ohr Weinberg (Senn 421s > Sony TC-D5M Dolby B MAC, transfer by Jim Wise via Nakamichi Dragon > Sony PCM-R500 > HHB-800).  They are indeed different masters, though. Weinberg's master has a tape flip at the transition between Russian Lullaby and Tangled Up in Blue at the end of set II, while Martin's flips @ 7:24 of Tangled Up.  So I could have used Martin's to patch Weinberg's or Weinberg's to patch Martin's.  I chose the latter, and I think it was the right choice based on the 7:24-8:16 piece in Tangled Up. Besides the clipped starts of songs, no other flaws were noted. A MisSHN in the Rain Installment of the Music Never Stopped Project.

! R: s1t04 Mystery Train clips in

! R: s1t05 Miss Moon clips in

! R: s1t06 Deal clips in

! R: s2t03 ITAM @ 5:47 a guy whistled a measure, and I thought Whistling Wally was gonna join Chatty Cathy on this tape. But it appears to have been a momentary burst of enthusiasm.

! P: s2t03 RussLull John steps forward 5:48. The crowd seems to support and encourage this, for reasons that must forever remain mysterious. It's a full blown solo for quite awhile. Ends at 9, crowd gives John a nice round of applause. Note they have been drinking for hours by this time. (I keed, of course.)

! P: s2t05 TUIB gets nice and loud

! s1t06 (1) JG: inaudible set break announcement