San Francisco Sessions, 1970

**updated 8/10/2015, especially under heading D**
**update2 8/11, more, especially, in section D**
**updated 8/12, re-ordered sections (now goes from more micro and Jerrycentric to more macro (and less so)), also reworked some of section D, though not really many new words.**

I have been processing information from contracts filed at the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) Local No. 6 in San Francisco.

• San Francisco Sessions, 1967-1968
• San Francisco Sessions, 1969
• This is the 1970 iteration, with bonus features. For this one, I include the Garcia events. They are formatted in blue. There is one GD entry, which is formatted orange.
• San Francisco Sessions, 1971
• San Francisco Sessions, 1972 

Let me speak to (A) Garcia sessions; (B) Dead-related stuff,(C) other Garciaverse echoes, and (D) an analysis of what these contracts tell us about San Francisco Rock on film in 1970.

A. Info on some of Jerry's prolific 1970 studio work:

1. Materials around the iconic Paul Kantner/Jefferson Starship Blows Against the Empire (RCA LSP 4448 [SF 8163], November 1970) tip the possibility of Garcia working on "Mau Mau" (July 17 and 22), not currently given at Deaddisc. This material may have ended up on the cutting room floor. They also us to date his credited contributions to "Starship" (July 15, August 10-11) (LIA corrected me on earlier error, saying this was previously uncredited.)
2. The song "Old Man" pops up July 15 and August 10. I am assuming this is Covington's execrable "Whatever The Old Man Does (Is Always Right)", unreleased from the Jeffersons' Bark (Grunt FTR 1001, September 1971) sessions.
3. Brewer & Shipley, Tarkio (Kama Sutra 2024, February 1971): Deaddisc shows Garcia only on "Oh Mommy". The session paperwork also lists "50 States Of Freedom", hard to know if Garcia played on that one and/or if any material was used. There is one contract for two sessions, so my hunch is that there was one session for each song, and Jerry probably only attended one of the two. Who knows. The sessions were Friday, August 21, 1970 at 5pm and 9pm. Work on the record picks up again in October, but Garcia, still/again at Heider's, makes no further appearances.
4. Lamb, Cross Between (Warner Brothers WS 1920, 1971): Deaddisc says "Jerry Garcia plays on Flying (banjo), Flotation (pedal steel) and Reach High (pedal steel)" and notes "Garcia's contribution to this LP is not documented on the LP cover. There is simply a note on the back cover that says 'special thanks to Jerry Garcia', which has been interpreted as meaning Garcia played on the album. It has subsequently been confirmed by Walter Rapaport, the co-producer of the album, that Garcia played on Flying, Flotation and Reach High. The contribution to Flotation is only 4 notes." For what it's worth, the contract gives us time: Monday, October 5, 1970, in the afternoon.
5. Thanks to commenter runonguinness, I see that RCA buys some "Soul Fever" on Tuesday, October 6, 1970, eventually to appear on Papa John Creach's self-named Grunt record (FTR 1003, December 1971). ROG notes "it is credited to Papa John, Garcia, Rolie, Brown and Covington and it does sound like just one guitar". Deaddisc does show a Garcia credit, listing Papa John Creach - electric violin, Dave Brown - bass, Joey Covington - drums, Jerry Garcia - guitar, Gregg Rolie - organ). So I guess the really tantalizing question is whether Carlos Santana showed up, and he and Jerry played together. It's interesting to me that there are just about no instance of that particular shared studio, and the Shared Stage only came about post-Garcia's 1986 coma. A few months later, in a near-miss (as far as we know), Carlos was billed playing with Merl Saunders at the Matrix). In the alternative, some Carlos licks hit the cutting room floor.

B. The Grateful Dead Node

1. I found no 1970 GD contracts in the union records, which is a tragic shame. Might such materials exist in the Grateful Dead Archive?
2. The Planet Eart Rock and Roll Orchestra (PERRO) sessions at Wally Heider's included some Dead guys, though Phil Lesh is curiously absent from any of the paperwork I have seen. Bill Kreutzmann has an appealing looking session on July 29th with Paul Kantner and David Crosby), Mickey Hart makes a less-appealing-to-me Joey Covington-led one on September 2, 1970. That session, BTW, also seems more reliably to put Spencer Dryden in the New Riders' drum chair at the Matrix this night, but for some weird reason I have listed Hart. I assume this is my error?
3. Bob Weir makes the James and the Good Brothers sessions in December, also with Mickey.
4. Note the new studio "Alembic, Inc.", address 320 Judah Street in SF, late in the year. These are the earliest references I have found to that particular dba configuration.
5. There's a Grateful Dead film contract dated 10/2, with no performance date listed. The location is given as “remote locations at Family Dog, PHR". It was contracted by KQED (Bay Area Educational Television Association), under the moniker "San Francisco Rock". Under heading D below you'll find that end up concluding that this session transmogrified into the live broadcast from Winterland on October 4, 1970. I have more to say about this in section D, below.

C. A few quickies more on the margins of the Garciaverse:

1. PERRO at Heider's. QED.
2. Paul Kantner spent a lot of time in the studio, and the amount of studio time at Heider's paid out of RCA monies speaks to just how lucrative the Jeffersons' contracts really were. Doug Sahm (Mercury) and Joe McDonald (Vanguard) get a lot of time in, as well.
3. An awful lot of the PERRO contracts are AWOL, based on the comparison of the union files with, e.g., the metadata attached to circulating recordings.
4. John Kahn at Heider's: January 15 with Steve Miller; April 16 (approx) with Butterfield; August 17-18-19 with Brewer and Shipley (also Bill Vitt), as well as October 5-6-7 and 14, 1970 with Brewer & Shipley but w/o Vitt.
5. Other Garciazens making appearances in the contracts include Ron Stallings and David Crosby, though not with Jerry in these materials.
6. Martin Fierro kept pretty busy, mostly with Sir Douglas and QMS.

D. "San Francisco Rock", 1970 film contracts

In this section, I use the 1970 Bay Area Educational Television Association (i.e., KQED) "San Francisco Rock" film sessions to shed some light on San Francisco Rock, 1970 - what was played, when, etc.
1. The Concept

Ralph J. Gleason (b. - d.) was brilliant enough to see the leading edge of a wave of musical, cultural, social effervescence gathering around San Francisco from 1965 forward, turbo-boosting his own transition from newspaper jazz man to hip capitalist (Kramer 2013's formulation). He had a hand in the creation of untold countless precious artifacts including newspaper columns, radio broadcasts, interviews, records and tapes, and of course films. In 1970 KQED apparently paid him to do a five-year introspective, arranging to have the three biggest Haight-Ashbury bands filmed in "San Francisco Rock", the Airplane the first week of August, Quicksilver the first week of September, and the Dead the first week of October.

1. ca. August 3, 1970 (contract date) Family Dog on the Great Highway (film S.F. Rock): Jefferson Airplane (Balin, Dryden, Casady, Kantner, Kaukonen, Slick)
2. ca. August 31, 1970 (contract date) Sonoma State College (film – S.F. Rock, Part I): QMS (John Cipollina, Gary Duncan, David Freiberg, Greg Elmore)
3. ca. October 2, 1970 (contract date) “remote locations at Family Dog, PHR", (film – S.F. Rock): GD (Lesh [leader], Garcia, Hart, McKernan, Weir, Kreutzmann)

"San Francisco Rock" was a Ralph Gleason joint at T+5, nearly to the day. What a great idea! But, as it happens, maybe it all didn't quite work out as planned. Whatever does? So Gleason looks typically prescient in seeing the promise of marketing something at the 5 year totem, but the end results skew a little, as artifacts must.

2. The State of the Bands in/and the Broader Time Period

a. The Bands

The Jeffersons are still huge, but the peak has been passed in terms of the Airplane's live act, which I date rather precisely to 4/15/70. May brings the low swamp of Grace's "shrimp rap", the tape that turned me against live recordings of the Airplane from later in that year - I just can't get the taste of that local low off my aural palate - and by 10/4/70, or maybe it was 10/5, Marty expresses his need for a new band not just to the assembled mourners, but over howevermany watts on KPFA.

The Quick has a lot of energy in this period, but more of the kind that the the fractious Jeffersons always wallowed in, and less of the relatively --relatively!!-- interpersonally harmonious Grateful Dead scene. (I just came across a quote of Garcia saying in 1970 how well the Dead guys got along on the road - that must have been chez LIA somewhere?) There's a reason David Freiberg could jump from the Quick to the Jeffersons, besides his bad-ass bass playing, his vocal strength, song chops, and all the rest of it - he seems not to have suffered much from the burn of working with difficult, brilliant people.

The band peaked hard November 7-11, 1968 at the Fillmore West, spun the electric circle Happy Trails, and then crashed to Dino Valente's unambiguous re-entry into the band, his subsequent departure with Duncan in tow, the east coast motorcycle trip, aresulting relatively fallow first half of 1969, toodling around a little bit with Nick the Greek and then welcoming Nicky Hopkins into the fold. There is much more hot music to be played throughout the spring, but by summer 1970 Quicksilver, as it happens, is in the process of breaking apart. Nicky leaves the live act in August, Cip sort of quits after --again? 10/4/70?-- the horns come in 10/4/70 and 10/5/70 and the radio broadcast is painful to listen to. Nothing can survive the onslaught of Dino Valente --his "Long Haired Lady", which includes the line "uni-corns pran-cing, in my mind" should have earned him a lifetime ban from the commissioner-- and by 1971 they have Whodat playing the bass and would never make meaningful music again.

That said, Gleason didn't entirely miss with Quicksilver - the performance that ended up happening, being filmed, and the film eventually released is a fine one, indeed, in many respects. I say more below.

The Dead's cards showed loss, recovery and some mighty fine music, and unlike the other two bands the arrow is pointing up after 1970 - a strong buy, and go ahead and go long. The spring and fall records Workingman's Dead and American Beauty were, respectively, strong on the charts and just-released, the first a weary tune and the latter a wreath of the titular bloom. Darkness swirled around them, who took refuge in each other, sharing lives with all of their music. The last quarter of 1970 is its weakest one, by far, anchored not least by the shambolic performance that I think we have contracted here, Winterland 10/4/70.

 b. San Francisco Rock, ca. 10/4/70

Indeed, Winterland 10/4/70, the night that Janis died, the manic, brain-blasting qualities of the various broadcasts (which really were never gotten together, technically -- all of the tapes pretty much suck), the Airplane and Quicksilver falling apart at the seams, and the less well-known to me show the next night in many ways stand as an epitaph to the whole idea of getting up close and personal with "San Francisco Rock" five years along. All three "S.F. Rock" bands performed, revealing that five years will take a toll on people and the groups they comprise, living under the spotlight and fueled by all kinds of drives will bring out some really good and some, well, less so. I think it's no coincidence that the three bands contracted for "San Francisco Rock" would be playing together.
(see also LIA | cryptdev | Corry on the broadcast angle )

c. Art and Commerce

In short, I think Gleason succeeded in capturing some clear truths about "San Francisco Rock" in 1970, and I find the footage that we have to be artistically successful on a lot of levels. I don't think they worked out all that well commercially, but then again this is public television we're talking about here. The fact that Gleason gets to release this material under his own name (see just below) is interesting ...

3. The "Ralph J. Gleason Presents" DVD releases in Light of the Contracts

When I first saw the contracts, I assumed that they gave rise to film already released under the banner of "Ralph J. Gleason Presents" DVDs:

A Night at the Family Dog (EV 30122-9, 2007, IMDB)
Go Ride the Music & West Pole (Eagle Vision EV30181-9, February 2008).

I have been able to parse things a little more closely, to fine tune against the baseline of my starting assumptions. After you read this section, I want you to believe that a) the metadata around these releases contain errors, b) I can correct some of these errors using these contracts, b) none of these contracts refers to material appearing on Night at the Family Dog or West Pole; c) the Airplane and QMS contracts refer to material found on Go Ride the Music, and thus recorded in August and September 1970, respectively; and d) the 10/4/70 gig at Winterland probably constituted the Dead's  "S.F. Rock" contribution, but none of this material has never appeared in the Gleason films.

The release metadata are a little all over the place. The contracts bring clarity. Let me move from simplest to most complicated by going in the order West Pole, A Night at the Family Dog, and Go Ride the Music.

a West Pole

West Pole is the easiest to deal with. Toby Gleason says the film was made in 1968, the back cover says it aired in 1969, and the front cover says it was previously unreleased. The overall WP&GRTM release has copyrights of 1969 and 2008.

It is wonderful to see. The Airplane and Dead material on West Pole is not from discrete sessions, but colles some pastiches some rather amazing sound and image from various times and places, different kinds of sources (live and studio), and different people into primal music videos. There's great tape of legendary venues and groups such as the Ace of Cups, some street scenes from a dingy Haight, and lots of other cool stuff.

The whole thing's a hoot to watch, but it has nothing to do with  the 1970 "San Francisco Rock" sessions.

b. A Night at the Family Dog 

Filmed on 2/4/70 (update: maybe also 2/3/70) and first released in 1970, Corry has a great writeup. The metadata are very solid, two small flies in the ointment.

First, I have always supposed a "4/2/70" Airplane session  (Abbott 2007) to be spurious, probably stems from a European orthography somewhere in the script. Tape attributed this way has crossed six or seven media, and every copy I ever heard was, IIRC, the same material known to be from 2/4/70. But I note below that it is not impossible...

Second, ihor's irreplaceable The Complete Grateful Dead Discography (TCGDD) entry lists a June 28, 2005 release of the Night DVD, with otherwise identical catalog information (Eagle Rock 2030122-9), but calling it San Francisco Rock: A Night At The Family Dog. That's the sort of coincidence some of us are paid not to believe in. On my 2007 imprint of that release, that formulation ("San Francisco Rock, A Night at the Family Dog") appears as the title of Toby Gleason's brief missive. But I'd give a full title of Ralph J. Gleason Rock Classic: A Night at the Family Dog, if forced to.

I am confident out a number of decimal places that none of the material contracted during 1970 under the heading "San Francisco Rock" has anything to do with the Night at the Dog. We should be keeping these two things separate, IMO, except insofar as Toby Gleason titled an essay that way.

Overall, here, I conclude with memory rule: 2/4/70 is the Night at the Family Dog, and A Night at the Family Dog derives from only 2/4/70. (Update: except for maybe some or all of it being from 2/3/70? Heh heh.) None of this material appears to have been contracted through the papers described below.

c. Go Ride The Music

The back cover of the release says "Go Ride the Music was recorded in 1969" gives 1969 and 2008 copyrights. But 1969 is flat out incorrect. The JA and QMS tracks derive from 1970, from material contracted by KQED under the film title "San Francisco Rock".

i. Airplane

The cover reads that "the seven Airplane clips [on Ride the Music] were shot at Pacific High Recording and feature their new drummer, Joey Covington". 

The venue is a contraindication, since the contract said Family Dog. But note the wording on the Dead contract: "remote locations at Family Dog, PHR". So PHR was certainly on the script for "San Francisco Rock", and what's more --and tremendously ironically, given the story that I plan to narrate in "Jerry and the Jeffersons", parts I and II-- the Dog was busy giving birth to The Common in early August 1969, though it sure could have used the paycheck. For whatever reason, it seems very plausible to me that they contracted the Dog and ended up at PHR.

In terms of personnel, erstwhile drummer Spencer Dryden flew out of the Jeffersons' orbit by April 1970. Depending on how literally we take the word "new", this could give oxygen to the notion that there was an Airplane ssession at Family Dog on 4/2/70, despite the strikes agsinst that idea (noted above). That said, August 1970 still consists in Joey being "new" to the Airplane, I'd say, with five years (or thereabouts) already under their belts (8/13/65 is as good a starting point as any), the guy who had been in that particular seat for only three months --though around for longer-- was still "new" to a first approximation. Either way, Covington's presence as the Airplane's drummer, rather than a guy hanging out with Jack and Jorma, speaks unequivocally in favor of 1970. 

Sealing the case for 1970 for me is Jeff Swenson's liner notes. which put Garcia in the Jeffersons' studio striking Blows Against The Empire. The contracts are all over that stuff, of course, and things could not be clearer: this is summer 1970.

All in all, I am about 95% sure that work contracted for "San Francisco Rock" begat the Airplane material featured on Go Ride the Music, which therefore dates to sometime in the first third of August 1970. 

ii. Quicksilver

This QMS material completely knocks me out, Dino doing his Full Narcissist, the band tearing the shit out of things, the material very uneven. Remember this rule of thumb: "Subway" good, "Long-Haired Lady" bad. Further, any song that includes the phrase "uni-corns pran-cing in my mind" must not be. It must not be. Nicky's fingers appear a time or two, and he is clearly audible Freiburg looks like he's rocking, but he's buried in the mix, I guess that's Greg Elmore hitting the skins. It went downhill fast from here, but in September 1970 (which I'll conclude this is) these guys were at a local peak not seen since late 1968 and Happy Trails. The scenery is incredible, what looks to me like a fall day in Sonoma County, not too many people dancing out in ticklish sunshine, on a little bit of a breeze.

The "San Francisco Rock" contract fits the bill most precisely with the location  (Sonoma State College) and the season (fall). 

Personnelwise, Nicky is not on the contract, but one senses that his contractual status might have been a little bit fluid (hence the disembodied fingers on the film?). Alsoa  strike against is that, as I recalled, he had stopped gigging with the Quick in August. This certainly doesn't rule out a September 1970 QMS gig for film, which remains extremely likely given the balance of all of the evidence, but it does raise small question..

The fact that Dino Valente and Gary Duncan are in town strikes me as strongly confirmatory of 1970, since as I recall they spent all of 1969 out east riding and running around, not returning until about New Year's Eve. I'd like to consult Shelley Duncan's book again to feel more confident about that, but that's my strong sense.

All told, the balance of the evidence favors the QMS material from Go Ride the Music having been contracted as "San Francisco Rock" and performed in early September 1970.

iii. implication

Go Ride the Music comprises an early August 1970 Jefferson Airplane set from Pacific High Recorders and an early September 1970 Quicksilver Messenger set from Sonoma State College, both contracted under the planned Bay Area Educational Televation Association's planned KQED film "San Francisco Rock".

d. The Dead: All Contract, No Release

Based on all of the above, here's what I think happened with the GD session. If the Jeffersons played a different room than contracted, the Dead could have, too. And having taken that step, why not get some really live material for the film, with the people who do it best, and knock out a simulcast on KQED? In short, I now believe that the 10/2/70 contract was fulfilled by the Dead through the 10/4/70 television and radio broadcast from Winterland. Why didn't the Gleason folks use some of this footage in Go Ride the Music? My best guess is that it would have been a rights and money thing. Earlier I had entertained a few other possibilities. Maybe there really was a separate Dead session filmed during this timeframe, per the terms of the contract, which has remained hidden. This seems unlikely, to say the least. Or maybe it was never consummated (i.e., the 10/4/70 had nothing to do with the "Rock in S.F." project. Maybe the Dead bailed out after 10/4/70, Janis dead and darkness, darkness all around. But I think all of that is less likely than my preferred alternative.

Note: as far as I can tell, no video of the Dead's 10/4/70 set has been seen. Is that correct?

4. "San Francisco Rock", 1970 and San Francisco Rock, 1970

[with more time, here I would close the loop on the idea that what we get on the film is pretty much what we get in the real world. I sketched this out preliminarily above.]

Barebones session listing follows. Note that, in a pure breach of common sense, I have added a fifth line to some of the most interesting entries, to identify the songs. If I ever try to parse these into real data I'll have to remember that.