Wednesday, June 09, 2010

1966: Darby Slick et al. "Jammin' With Garcia"

Chapter 5 of Darby Slick's autobiography, I guess (1), is entitled "Jammin' With Garcia" and recounts a Friday evening jam session, ca. 1966, in the Mission District. These one-offs are inherently interesting, of course, but especially interesting to me is the question of how often they occurred. I had always bought into the mythology that the GD (and its personnel, especially Jerry) were playing around pretty much all the time in the Halcyon days before the Summer of Love (TM). Corry Arnold has asserted that this probably happened a lot less than the mythology would have us believe, for example calling notions about frequent free concerts in Golden Gate Park "sadly wishful". Slick's vignette doesn't get at the question of frequency, but it does provide a first-person account of one free-form gig in these very early days of the hippie scene. The jam was apparently some sort of party to raise funds for something, perhaps the Mime Troupe. The crowd was SRO and flowing outside, where as many as 50 people were trying to get in.

I will just make a few notes about this as extracted from Slick's account. I'll focus especially on personnel, what they played, location, and date.

Personnel:
  • Jerry Garcia: electric guitar;
  • Bill Kreutzmann: drums;
  • ?Peter Albin?: bass;
  • ... joined by ...
  • Jerry Slick: drums;
  • Darby Slick: guitar.

Performance:
  • "we all started to jam the blues, almost the only music we could launch into with no more discussion than 'It's in "A".'"
  • ca. 45 minutes

Location:
  • Mission District
  • in a loft
  • Slick parked three blocks away, across the driveway of a cement company
  • MJB coffee plant nearby


Date: I have no idea; a Friday night ca. 1966.

I don't know much about Slick, but he certainly writes glowingly of this night and of Jerry: "There was magic in the room that night, and though I have played in many jam sessions over the years, that is the one I remember with the most love, the most respect. ... I was left with a conviction that Jerry Garcia is a man of great spirit."

REFERENCE:
(1) Slick, Darby. 1991. Don't You Want Somebody to Love: Reflections on the San Francisco Sound. Berkeley: SLG Books. {pdf of chapter 5}

11 comments:

  1. Man, blogger sucks. Can't even format bullet lists.

    Anyway, Yellow Shark has generously provided a matrix that identifies Friday nights in 1966 in terms of the known activities of the Great Society, GD and Big Brother.

    The Friday dates that, on present understanding, are open for all three bands are the following. Of course, given the surely incomplete state of our knowledge some of these probably aren't possible at all. Anyway ...

    Friday, January 07, 1966
    Friday, January 21, 1966
    Friday, February 04, 1966
    Friday, February 18, 1966
    Friday, April 01, 1966
    Friday, April 08, 1966
    Friday, April 15, 1966
    Friday, May 20, 1966
    Friday, September 30, 1966
    Friday, October 28, 1966
    Friday, December 16, 1966

    My hunch is that this is a spring evening --no textual basis for this, just a gut feeling-- so I'd guess one of the April dates or the May date. But I doubt we'll ever know.

    Thanks, Ross!

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  2. from Facebook, 2018-01-25
    Darby Slick -"This is a famous event, should be discoverable: the first Bill Graham Mime Troupe benefit, but I'm not gunna' look it up."

    That makes it 12/10/65. Perhaps they moved to the Mime Troupe loft at either 450 Alabama or 3450 Twentieth Street (corner of Capp Street) after the Fillmore gig. Waiting for his response.

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  3. He notes the birds flying south, so winter-ish makes sense. Not sure why I thought it might be spring. He notes that there was a cement factor nearby, if that helps.

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  4. He does mention that they were taking up a collection for the Mime Troupe. It's also a Friday. Both of these resonate with 12/10/65. At the same time, he describes a Friday evening in a Mission District loft. The loft means it wasn't *the* Mime Troupe benefit, which was at the Fillmore. The "evening" seems to imply it wasn't late late late, after the Fillmore gig. (Does anyone know what time that happened? If it happened earlier in the day, that could line things up.)

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  5. I haven't seen the book so I don't know how specific his memories are, but I do want to question...how can we be sure it was a *Friday* evening? Or that it was actually a benefit for the Mime Troupe and not for some other outfit he's forgotten? A "loft" is certainly not the Fillmore, possibly not even an advertised event we can trace.

    Ralph Gleason's review of 12/10/65 has it going from at least 9:30 pm-1 am, perhaps quite a bit longer.

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  6. He said it was a Friday, and he says there was a collection for the Mime Troupe.

    Here's something I didn't know until yesterday: "Mime" in "Mime Troupe" is pronounced like "meme" (in English), a la "meem". I did not know that.

    I doubt it was advertised. It sounds like a casual get together. Of course, the whole thing could be a pastiche.

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  7. Thanks for the link!
    Reading it, I'm even more doubtful about any of the details; this is a heavily embellished narrative. Darby's mentioned that he was writing a novel about the music scene in the early '60s, and this is full of novelistic techniques.
    "Friday evening" I think is just meant to set the scene, to imply "a busy weekend night" rather than a Friday in particular. (If it was a weekend.) And "people would be asked to donate money to something, I think, the Mime Troupe," is about as unspecific as possible. 'A Mission District loft' is really the only detail I trust.
    Incidentally, the placement of this chapter early on in the book would seem to imply a date around fall 1965. But, other than the (fictional?) cold-weather references, I don't think any specific dating is intended or remembered; this jam exists outside space & time, as it were.

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  8. Yeah, alas. I am too literal to understand how people can be literary in this kind of setting.

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  9. The placeholder for 19651210 (which was a Friday) – the description from Darby Slick better suits the first Mime Troupe Benefit (Appeal 1) which was held on 19651106 (a Saturday) when the Calliope Warehouse Loft at 924 Howard Street, San Francisco hosted Jefferson Airplane, Fugs, Sandy Bull, John Handy Quintet, The Committee, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jeanne Brechan, Jim Smith, Ullett & Hendra, The Family Dog, Sam Hanks, Mystery Trend, Peter Orlovsky, Allen Ginsberg. The performers listed on the handbill concludes with "& Others Who Care". Perhaps the local folk-rock crowd cared? The Mystery Trend played without prior announcement.

    The loft was rented by the SF Mime Troupe at the time. The price of admission was what you could afford to pay. In an interview in the SF Examiner (19820207) Paul Kantner notes of this show: "Benefits arose out of natural needs in the area … if one of your friends got busted, for instance. One of the first benefits the Airplane did was for the SF Mime Troupe, down around Mission or Howard in a loft actually Calliope Warehouse which got so crowded, the people spilled out in to the streets."

    In conclusion, 19651106 would be a better placeholder date than 19651210.

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    Replies
    1. Now that you mention the first Mime Troupe benefit, it's obviously the best candidate for Darby's jam...how did we miss that before? I guess Darby's recollection was a bit better than I trusted.
      That said, it's striking to find Garcia & Kreutzmann taking part in a jam with other musicians in San Francisco so early on - possibly before the Dead had even played any shows in San Francisco!

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