JGMF on Tales From the Golden Road

Dear readers, David Gans and Gary Lambert will be hosting yours truly on "Tales From the Golden Road" on the SiriusXM GD channel today at 5 PM eastern, to talk about the topics you know well from the site and, especially, Jerrybase! m0thra and I keep working the site, lots more features, new data, eye candy and more to come!

Call or email goldenroad@siriusxm.com or visit their Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/tftgr. Phone in live to 888-897-4748.

BTW, the partnership for the site was born in comments here, somewhere. I noted I didn't handy way to work with GOTS setlist data, LIA gently chastised me for not having gotten that shit together, m0thra volunteered to help, and the rest is history. If anyone can link me to that discussion, as the uhr moment for Jerrybase, I'd be grateful!

(Of course, it could have been at one of the other blogs, I dunno.)

update: here it is! I had said "I don't really have the data I'd need to map song debuts."

On April 18, LIA replies

Really? This is alarming. Being able to find when Garcia played songs seems like a basic necessity for Garcia scholars! But there currently seems no way to conveniently search this stuff online, short of looking through all the setlists. Someone needs to put together a song database for Garcia's repertoire.

I say I probably have the data for it, m0thra offers his services, which really are a form of white magic, and off we went.

Studio Sessions at Jerrybase

We have pushed a lot of new studio sessions (a subset of "private" musical activities" which also include rehearsals, private events, etc.) to Jerrybase. They appear in blue in your search results.

There is lots of info here that you didn't know. For example, take a look at 1978, and see a few jazz standards you may not have known were played in this period by Keith, Jerry and John in their little "hot jazz" combo thing. I am super proud of having gathered up this information, which sheds new light. It's dramatically incomplete, it mostly covers the 1970s, but most of it has not been systematically documented until now.

Thanks to the amazing m0thra for his generous time and programming skills in getting this stuff presented!

Jerrybase Is Live!

https://www.jerrybase.com/

m0thra and I have been working hard for several weeks to bring together Jerrybase.

Check it out. Visit the About page for email addresses to which to send feature requests, bug reports, data issues, etc. We have lots more planned, but this is the beginning.

Thanks especially to the faithful readers, commenters, collaborators, and associated freaks and weirdos for all of your help.

Gloria NON Advenit! JGB at Keystone Palo Alto, Saturday, July 10, 1984

update 1: Jeez ... I now think Gloria must have arrived 7/10/84-7/11/84, a Tuesday-Wednesday in Palo Alto. Working backward: she is mentioned in reviews of August 1984 east coast shows. It is an iron law that the band played local warmups before leaving on tour, which would be these birthday shows. And it is just about an iron law that new members broke in on off-nights, off-the-beaten path, or both. Tues-Weds in Palo Alto fits the pattern better than a Saturday (7/28) in Berkeley the weekend of Jerry's birthday.

Having spent some time with it, I am prepared to declare that I hold that the titular show, JGB at Keystone Palo Alto on Saturday, July 28, 1984 Tuesday, July 10, 1984 represents Gloria Jones's public debut with the outfit. It thus also marks the birth of JGB #21b, THE Jerry Garcia Band, which would play together through November 1993, making it Garcia's longest-running aggregation outside the Brent Mydland-era Grateful Dead.

I have been circling around this conclusion for almost a decade now. Let me reconstruct. Older reckonings had Gloria starting on 7/21/83, or 9/30/83. In late 2010, I found an ad for 11/27/83 naming DeeDee Dickerson and not Gloria alongside Jackie LaBranch, which got me to thinking those earlier understandings were wrong. Five years later, I went through band itineraries for the November-December 1983 tour, which included DeeDee's flight arrangements and so on. So far, this has DDD present through '83, consistent with Corry's current reckoning (as JGB #21a, b. 7/20/83, d. 12/13/83).

I did a bunch of stuff in 2014. First, I conjectured that 1/8/84 was Gloria's first gig, which probably led to Corry's current dating for JGB #21b. I am now pretty sure that was wrong because, second, I found a show review from Santa Barbara (5/19/84) which namechecks the band, including DDD. This is no guarantee, of course, since JGB member names were not always  correctly rendered by local journos, but it was suggestive. And, third, I found pictures from 8/11/84 which show Gloria onstage. So, the bookends have now moved forward quite a bit - DDD was in the house 5/19/84, and almost certainly the last night of the little mini SoCal jaunt it was a part of, 5/20/84 at Wolf & Rissmiller's in Reseda. The next show was 7/28/84, part of a four-night birthday run for Garcia, warming up for the East Coast tour.

So I did some listening around those bookends, the May shows now presumed to be with DeeDee, and the July-August shows now presumed to be with Gloria. Despite obviously strong priors (and probably other bias in favor of finding a difference), I hear differences in the backing vocals. I couldn't characterize them beyond saying they are different. Basic methodology was to find clean tapes (sbd preferred) that have clear backing vocals. I ended up focusing on the first chorus of "Cats Under The Stars" on 5/18/84 (an FM-SBD tape, shnid-32156) and on 7/28/84 (sbd, shnid-14428). Again, the backing vocalists sound different. There aren't a lot of board tapes in these frames, so then I compared the opening stanza of "Catfish John" on the same 5/18/84 and the next known version, 8/10/84. Again, I detect a difference.

update 2: the original version of this post had Gloria arriving July 28th. But I now think it must have been July 10th.

On this basis and on the basis of earlier sniffing around 10/82 and 7/83, I am prepared to "call" the following:

• DeeDee Dickerson's tenure with the Garcia Band ran from 10/24/82 1/13/83 (with JGB #15b) through 5/20/84 (with JGB #21a)
• Jacklyn LaBranch's tenure with the Garcia Band ran from 1/13/83 to the end (4/23/95).
• Gloria Jones's tenure with the Garcia Band ran from 7/10/84 (with JGB #21b) to the end.

My only concern is that I thought there was a new member on 1/8/84 based on audience chatter. That, combined with the fact that journos didn't always have the most up-to-date information about who was in the Garcia Band, gives me some pause. I hope the listening analysis I did holds up!

Now, how about 7/28/84, listening notes for which I post below?

The setlist novelty here is Allen Toussaint's "Get Out Of My Life, Woman", which came in strong and stuck around pretty much to the end of the Garcia Band. The JGB never varied its setlists that much (certainly not relative to the GD), and I don't really have the data I'd need to map song debuts, but this is just about the only new-to-the-repertoire tune I can think of between, say, 1981 and 1985. Are there any others, like, is there a single other cover tune that JGB added to the repertoire between, say, "Eleanor Rigby" in 1980 (sort of) and "It Stoned Me" in 1986? Anyway, great tune, done well, and at points "hot-hot-hot", per my notes.

The show, overall, offers plenty of sloppy pep. I hated when he couldn't figure out how to end "Cats Under The Stars", and this version suffers from that. There's plenty of mumblyverse, slop, and hot energy in tunes like "Tore Up Over You". Not bad, all told.

Listening notes below the fold.