Darben The Redd Foxx

Commenter Nick's encyclopedic discographical resources (vinyl and knowledge) rescue me/us from an error and afford a little glancing blow through American culture that helps us situate Garcia in his world.

The song currently understood as "Ptah, the El Daoud" (Alice Coltrane), previously understood "Bag's Groove" (Milt Jackson), performed by Garcia-Saunders on June 4 and June 6, 1974, is actually what I will spell as "Darben the Redd Foxx", which Nick first finds on James Moody (Argo LP 648, 1959) [youtube | wiki]. He supplies a very helpful starter discography:

• "Darben the Redd Foxx" on James Moody s/t (Argo 1959)
• "Dobbin' with Redd Foxx" on Eddie Lockjaw Davis, Bacalao (Prestige 1960, rec 1959)
• "Darbin and the Redd Fox" on Milt Jackson, Vibrations (Atlantic 1964, rec 1960)
• "Darben the Redd Foxx" on Don Patterson, Mellow Soul (Prestige 1967)
• "Darbin the Redd Fox" on James Moody, Don't Look Away Now (Prestige 1969)
• "Darben the Red Fox" on Dizzy Gillespie, live recording 1980 (sextet with Moody), see http://jdisc.columbia.edu/session/dizzy ... er-24-1980
• "Darben the Red Fox" on Rutgers University Livingston College Jazz Ensemble, Music of the Masters - Past and Present (RJE/PJ, 1981)
• "Darben the Redd Foxx" on James Moody/Hank Jones, Our Delight (IPO, 2008)

I think Nick suggested we go with "Darben The Red Fox", and WTF am I to say otherwise, but when in doubt I like to use the oldest known title. (Not sure I actually adhere to that rule, but regardless it's the one I am applying here.) So, again, I'll call it "Darben the Redd Foxx", credited to James Moody.

Do your own comparisons:

• Moody's original, starting from 12 seconds in: http://youtu.be/5jzzWcl7bbE?t=12s
• JGMS 6/4/74
• JGMS 6/6/74

A little more context from Nick.

It's a random one-shot jazz tune for them to play, but it's certainly possible that Fierro was familiar with Moody and brought it to the group, or maybe even that it was a tune that Tony Saunders was familiar with … It doesn't seem like a complicated song to learn right before a gig. I don't think it was a standard, but it clearly had enough cachet for a few major jazz artists to record versions of it, so maybe it was something that jazz musicians played often at jam sessions or something -- I don't know. The real mystery (for me, at least) is how Alice Coltrane of all people came to reappropriate the exact same melody for one of her own songs -- I wonder if it isn't lifted from some classical or folk melody, but I have yet to get to the bottom of that one.

I look forward to learning more! In the meantime, let me paint around the edges a little, as is my wont, four rough-hewn sets of strokes.

First, #jazz, fine jazz. That's all.

Second, Redd Foxx -- John Elroy Sanford (December 9, 1922 – October 11, 1991) – wow. Hello to an America you couldn't, initially, see on your TV: "Foxx was born in St. Louis, Missouri and raised on Chicago's South Side. His father, Fred Sanford, an electrician and auto mechanic from Hickman, Kentucky, left his family when Foxx was four years old. He was raised by his half-Seminole Indian mother, Mary Hughes from Ellisville, Mississippi, his grandmother and his minister." (Obviously, I want … to ... compare and classify!) But, then, amazingly, in his 50^th year, Redd Foxx was an American you could see on your TV, in "Sanford and Son", which ran from January 14, 1972, to March 25, 1977. White America, mostly guided, pushed and instructed by Black America itself, of course, and Foxx pushed it further still, making all kinds of marginalization mainstream, having and getting some good laughs along the way. It was a good show, and, though I don't much about Garcia's TV watching habits –sci fi and B horror flicks come to mind, and he testified to watching hellfire-, brimstone- and amphetamine-breathing preachers on late night Bay Area TV, probably variously that guy/those guys on Channel 2 for awhile, Channel 12 for awhile). Foxx's standup and some musical stuff appeared on more than fifty records, and it's just hard to imagine that Garcia hadn't taken some it that in at some point in his Beatnik youth or his still-transgressive early thirties. Here's the "Redd Foxx"-GRAM over the course of his lifetime:

Figure xxx. Ngram "Redd Foxx", 1922-1991

Third, on our history with this tune. It's been called "Bag's Groove" (no) and, lately, "Ptah, the El Daoud". To err is human, and is often the fun and interesting stuff. I am glad we thought it was Ptah, because that's a great tune that I probably would have missed if we hadn't. (Same goes for another candidate, Salah Ragab and the Cairo Jazz Band's " "The Crossing (Oubour)".) And it's a lot like Darben. But the song JGMS played was the latter and not the former, we now know. Cool. Updated your song lists – I have (s-Darben the Redd Foxx, #songs-D).

Fourth, a little spray-can Mona Lisa: I get a kick Garcia smiling behind his beard (or maybe not, in June 1974; so, smiling beneath his chins), maybe Tony Saunders brought it to them, someone thinks of Redd grabbing his chest and yelling "I'm coming, Elizabeth!", a chuckle is had. But then, the serious work, maybe important is the better word, the meaningful work of playing some fine jazz – because it's a great tune. It's a chuckle, but make no mistake about it – this material, in the setting in which it was played, finds Garcia in some of his healthiest, most challenging musical engagements. This is not his native musical idiom, but his willingness to tackle it speaks volumes.

As is so widely the case, the blackness of these engagements often remains hidden, mostly by deeply subtle forces, for example that, as a proportion of white paper (let's say, posters, handbills, business files and records), there was less black paper to begin with, less was ever collected/preserved/archived, less has been analyzed, and so forth. There's less tape from Slim Jenkins’ Supper Club or Esther’s Orbit Room in West Oakland (Hildebrand ND), to say nothing of the Marin City joints, than came out of the Lion's Share or the Keystone Berkeley. Even now race is a hard conversation to have – but it's a great conversation to have. Garcia was having it in tackling "Darben The Redd Foxx", and the sonar's return ping at forty years' vantage maps all kinds of American cultural depth. But it also reveals a sweet simplicity that would diminish over time. Thinking of Garcia thinking of Redd Foxx in early June of 1974, and then tackling a nice little piece of jazz, puts a little smile on me in the way that I hope it was able to put a little smile on him, free, still, to just play, something new and interesting, no strings attached.

REFERENCE

Hildebrand, Lee. ND. Blues on Seventh Street: Recollections of the West Oakland scene in its heyday. The Monthly, URL http://www.themonthly.com/upfront1302.html, consulted 1/24/2015.

Latest Legion Listing

Funny the things that pop up. Here's a listing from the Marin Independent-Journal of July 25, 1975 for Legion of Mary at the Great American Music Hall on Wednesday, July 30, 1975.

Of course, the last known Legion gig having been on July 6th, this listing caught my eye. What does it mean? I don't know. Maybe this had been booked long in advance (the GAMH seemed to roll that way, very professional), but it's really quite a surprising listing.

Notice that this listing comes in the I-J's regular Friday "Rock Billboard" column, titled this week "Lion's Share Out With Flair", which notes the imminent closing of that great Marin room, with the last few days including a 7/25/75 gig by Merl Saunders and Friends. Nice to see Merl getting right back in the saddle after parting company (the first time) with Jerry, but that late Legion listing is a head-scratcher.

update: See my 2016 post "Dating the Legion's Demise: A Revisionist Account", which puts this listing into the context of a proposed new understanding that LOM held on in some shape or fashion until the end of July 1975.

Jerry's January 1976

(formatting will almost certainly be a mess - I blame Blogger)

I.                    Preface

My band is in a state of flux right now. John Kahn and Ron Tutt and I are the main … are the nucleus of it, such as it is. We’re hoping to have a four-piece band that we all like, sometime. So far, the combinations that we’ve tried have been interesting, but not exactly where we’re trying to go musically. And so that’s, we’re waiting – we’re more or less auditioning keyboard players, playing with different people. – Jerry Garcia to velvet-voiced KSAN-FM DJ Bonnie Simmons, live in studio the afternoon of January 23, 1976, via GDAO

The demise of 1975 marks the end of the challenge-seeking phase of Garcia's Side Trips, and 1976 marks the start of a comfort-seeking phase. The transition was abrupt, but it was not instantaneous; it most directly took place over the month of January 1976. Armed with some fresh data from the GD Archives, I annotate a chronology of this liminal month.

II.                  The Pivot of 1975-1976

Time powerfully constructs the human experience. Just think of the importance of the concept of a week, in our everyday lives, for a demonstration. Years, with their added relationship to the physical universe, do so even more so.. Ever the dilettante, I get my general sense of this from Boorstin (1985), but here's what some recent science (Tu and Soman 2014) tells us (Korkki 2015).

In one study, conducted in 2010, the researchers asked two groups of farmers in India to set up a bank account and accumulate a certain amount of money by a deadline, offering extra money as an incentive. One group was approached in June, with a deadline of December that year. The second group was approached in July with a deadline of January the next year. The farmers in the first group were more likely to set up an account immediately, even though both groups had the same amount of time. That’s because the deadline was in the same year as the assignment and therefore seemed more like the present.

The turn of the year is the big one. At the level of the day, shit happens on New Year's Eve; legion is the New Year's Day on which we wake to find that "new shit has come to light". Variance is probably higher across that pair of consecutive days than any other in the calendar.

1975-1976 is to years as 12/31-1/1 is to days. No two consecutive years in Garcia's life outside the Grateful Dead differ more resolutely than this mismatched pair. His personal life sees a sharp break, as he leaves Sans Souci (and Mountain Girl and their girls) right around Christmas 1975 and moves in with Deborah Koons right around the start of the year. (It's no coincidence that relationships end and begin with particular frequency in liminal times – again, that's probably the time structuring us, and not the reverse.) Pharmacologically, and though the precise dates are not known, by many timelines, including my own, late 1975 marks the entrance of Persian as a regular part of Garcia's life. If 1975 is the year he gets hooked, 1976 is his first year as an addict to the ultimate comfort drug, the poppy. Socio- and musico-metrically, Merl Saunders and the jazz-funk parts of the JGMS/Legion repertoire exit stage right, and David Grisman leaves the Garciaverse for the next fifteen or so years. Nicky Hopkins (three-plus months) and James Booker (three-plus days) fugue through, and we land on Keith and Donna Jean Godchaux and their slower, swampier, gospel sensibilities.

It's the musical break that really interests me. The demise of 1975 marks the end of the challenge-seeking phase of Garcia's Side Trips, and 1976 marks the start of a comfort-seeking phase. Thereafter, challenge and comfort ebb and flow together, and this is how I mark the course of the Side Trips ("Musical Challenge in the 1970s"). Local peak in 1979 ("Risky Reconstruction"), way too much comfort until the next great breakpoint ("1986, Coma and Recovery", xxx-WIP), a little rise thereafter ("Great Late Jerry", xxx-WIP) and then the roll downstream, the final Grisman re-engagement a rare distillation, longer on both dimensions, deeper in amplitude. In the end, of course, there's quiet.

All is not sharp lines. The human quest for novelty (i.e., Challenge!) drives up from way deep down, from primal places, and at least, because of the Booker experiment, it went out with a creative bang, ten days into the new year. Time undertakes fine needlework across our phony seams. Knowing that this is not a 12/31-is-black-and-1/1-is-white state-change invites me to get up a little closer to inspect the stitching. Hearing Garcia confirm "my band is in a state of flux right now", plus a productive research trip to the Grateful Dead Archives, supplies some concrete motivation and raw material. Accordingly, let's drill down to the literal meso-level, the month, for a granular look at a critical juncture.

III.                January 1976 and Its Legacy

In the challenge-comfort transition of 1975-1976, January 1976 is liminal, embodying massive challenge-seeking (hello, James Booker) and massive comfort-accepting (hello, Keith and Donna Jean). Within the span of a month, Side Trips Jerry of the 1968-1975 flavor (tastes like acid) gave way to a very different model, tasting more like cough syrup and one which, all cards on the table, I find rather less compelling than its predecessor. Don't get me wrong, Garcia was still doing amazing things, and working maniacally, on a day-in and day-out basis. But, as far as his musical life outside the Grateful Dead, his Side Trips, go, I will argue strongly that he "settled" when the Godchaux Era JGB was allowed to form. (Note the passive voice.) I don't know that the alternatives really were – laying at least some of them out will be a chunk of what I will do below. But the (non-) decision was not, to my taste, musically salubrious, the band trying to lumber through and around its members' various and sundry heavy loads. Though it has its moments, it took 18 months, the advent of great new material for Jerry's first Arista record (eventually, Cats Under The Stars) and the departure of stalwart Ronnie Tutt for the band to shake loose of its general torpor and find its groove, which it would then have about a year to really enjoy.

A.      Background: End of the Hopkins Era

Jerry Garcia's only New Year's Eve JGB show, beginning 12/31/75 and ending in the wee hours of 1/1/76, brought an appropriately shambolic curtain down on the Nicky Hopkins Era (ca. 9/1/75-12/31/75). We don't have a very precise operational understanding of how this went down – did Richard Loren call Nicky on the phone and tell him he was out? Did Big Steve Parish pay him a visit? We also don't know the precise timeline, except that Nicky played final notes as a member of the band early on the 1^st, on January 2^nd-3^rd he is billed as a featured player, with his buddy the great John Cipollina, with Terry and the Pirates at the Longbranch Saloon in Berkeley.

Most importantly, at least in terms of our innate desire not just to see variation (see above), but to account for it, we don't really know why it happened. The standard account has it that Nicky was just too out-of-control and had to go. Because I am not a big fan of the show, I have harbored the idea that 12/31/75 was just the straw that broke the camel's back. But I now believe that Nicky's tenure with the JGB, despite the existence of a formal business partnership (Jerry Garcia, John Kahn, Ron Tutt, Nicky Hopkins dba Jerry Garcia Band), was always probationary, at best, and perhaps even foreseen as temporary. I am elaborating the evidence in work in progress.

This preliminary view sheds new light, in my eyes, on the dawn of January 1976. If I am right, the unpleasantness of ending things is already at least several weeks back in the past; a reasonably fresh start is possible. Let's see how it went down. (I will be trying on some weird interweaving of headings and such here, not sure how success it will be.)

B.      Chronology

1. Welcome to 1976, the Bicentennial.

January 1, 1976 (Thursday)

Good morning, Belvedere! (Garcia has moved out of the Stinson place he shared with Mountain Girl and moved in with Debrorah Koons, apparently in Belvedere. And, no, I don't actually know where he woke up on 1/1/76, but if you do I certainly invite you to email me! ;-))

January 2-5, 1976 (Thursday-Monday)

No sign of our hero this weekend. Good – young man, not that young now at 34, is working very hard; he really has earned a break. I hope he took one.

2. Junco Partners

January 6, 1976 (Tuesday)

James Booker flies in on Delta 928, according to Steve Brown's notes.[1] I am not sure who paid for the ticket. Kahn:

He came to my house in Mill Valley a couple of days before the gigs. First he didn't show up until 5 in the morning. Me and Jerry were there and we're getting calls from his grandmother and his priest — Booker had gotten lost en route somehow; they'd lost track of him. Finally I got a call and it was Booker himself. He was calling from Dan's Greenhouse, a liquor store. He was in front of there at 5 in the morning with an overcoat and no socks and a hat bag; that was it — no clothes. He had about 30 eye patches and eight or nine wigs.

I am not 100% sure how to piece the airline info together with a) what we are told about Booker's arrival and b) the fact that during the 1/7/76 rehearsal Booker refers to stuff they worked up last night", i.e., January 6.[2] This could indicate that the 1/7/76 material is mis-dated, and is really, say, 1/8/76 (see below), or that Kahn is mis-remembering something.

January 7-8, 1976 (Wednesday-Thursday)

Rehearsals with James Booker.[3] shnid-28366 delivers 90 minutes of tape from a rehearsal, said to be at 20 Front Street ("Club Front") on January 7, 1976, of Garcia, Kahn, a drummer (presumably Tutt) and the great James Booker working up some material.[4] Corry is skeptical and thinks they might have taken place in John Kahn's living room, but I note that Steve Brown's papers locate 1/24-25 rehearsals at "Front Street" (see entry below), making it more likely that these were there, too. These rehearsals are well worth a listen (see my listening notes). Booker's mad brilliance, which I have parsed a little in "James Booker, Classified", fully displays itself; this is a great piece of tape in the too-sparse Booker record, to say nothing of the Garciaverse.

The following tunes appear:

Tico Tico

Don't Try To Be Your Brother's Keeper

Something You've Got

Just a Closer Walk With Thee

Goodnight Irene

United Our Thing Will Stand

Classified ->

Right Place, Wrong Time

Slowly But Surely

The Booker originals are pretty stunning (I especially love "United Our Thing Will Stand", "Classified", and "Slowly But Surely"), but the whole set is all Booker: his material, his direction, his hilarious banter. If I can sometimes hear the sounds of Garcia smiling behind his beard, maybe scratching his head, through his guitar playing, I definitely get that here. Fascinating. And not to be gainsaid, either – part of the "Burden of Being Jerry" (Gans and Greenfield 1996) -- is that, after about this time, he could no longer just be a guy in the band even as, in Reconstruction a few years later, he might have tried. Here he gets to back one of the true greats ever to grace a bench – the Bayou Maharajah, James fucking Booker.

January 8, 1976 is the contract date for the weekend's gigs, though the copy I saw was not signed.

January 9-10, 1976 (Friday-Saturday)

Newly rehearsed, the band plays weekend gigs at Sophie's, 260 S. California Avenue in Palo Alto (94306). The contract with impresario Ken Rominger (who also ran the Bodega at 30 South Central in Campbell) is $500 guaranteed against 90% of the gross total receipts. (Is that ticket sales only, or would it include bar?) I don't have ticket prices for the night, but they might have been $4.50 or 5 bucks. I have the room capacity at 420 as Keystone Palo Alto from 1977, though there's a sense it might have held fewer in this earlier incarnation. If we call it 400 and we assume they shows sold out (?), that would have been $4,000 gross for the weekend, so $3,600 for JGB.

Note that the paperwork shows Nicky Hopkins in the Garcia Band, which puzzles me a little bit, given that the paperwork is dated January 8^th. I presume there were no real plans that he should be there, that his name was there as a placeholder and/or boilerplate, but I don't quite know.

Kahn described the weekend's gigs to Blair Jackson:

The shows were really cool. But he wouldn't learn any of our songs. We tried to teach him songs and he refused. He was a little crazed, so we ended up doing mostly his songs. He did half a set of solo piano and it was great; you could hear a pin drop. And he played things like the "Minute Waltz"; it was incredible. He could still play great. He could switch between piano and organ really easily and it would sound amazing. But he was out of his mind. He was watching cars go by and was checking out license plates and talking about the CIA. He saw a Louisiana license plate and then John Kennedy's name somewhere and that freaked him out. He saw bad omens everywhere and he was getting really weird. I didn't know he was that crazy, so I might have had delusions that we'd stay together longer.

Cryptdev attended on Friday the 9^th and offers a convergent narrative:

It was one of the wildest and weirdest Garcia shows I ever saw. Basically Booker took over and the rest of the band was doing their best to keep up with whatever poured out of his keyboard. Booker was clearly very lubricated with something(s) and spent the break at the bar imbibing prodigiously. Jerry did get in a few tunes from his usual repertoire at the time, but clearly with some difficulty.

The first night circulates from soundboard tape derived from copies long in private hands in the East Bay (shnid-8386), as I understand things. Highlights for me include Garcia navigating some relatively unfamiliar classical and operatic terrain, as snippets of "Für Elise" and "Flight Of The Bumblebee" tumble from Booker's fingers and, especially, a nice wide version of his original "Classified", which finds some nice space and signposts what might have been, musically.

The second night circulates from an audience tape (shnid-8077 | listening notes), which includes more evocative nuggets of musical Americana (trifectal "Junco Partner" is in the road-, drug-, and prison-song halls of fame) than transcendent musical moments.

If you want to hear Garcia play New Orleans style, if you want to hear every note you can of the great James Booker on the keyboards, check them both out. They're a mess, but then again, aren't lots of the interesting things?

Corry sums: "The two-date James Booker experiment remains as a curiously forgotten fork in the Jerry Garcia Band, a final ride down the Genius Highway before a U-Turn back towards more conventional territory". The End Of A Very Brief Era.

3. Interregnum

January 11, 1976 (Sunday)

Grateful Dead band meeting.[5] Yes, they had those. Regularly.

January 13-14, 1976 (Tuesday-Wednesday)

Work at the "film house" (230 Eldridge Avenue, Mill Valley, CA, 94941) on what would materialize, 18 months later, as The Grateful Dead Movie.[6]

January 14, 1976

Noting they'd already spent $100,000 and needed $400,000 more, Ron Rakow sends a letter to United Artists asking the firm to back the film project.[7]

January 19, 1976

At 9 PM, Garcia goes to KPIX TV studios in San Francisco and sits down to chat with Father Miles Riley, for his groovy-priest show "I Believe", aimed especially at the youth crowd. (This becomes unfortunate once we learn that Fr. Riley apparently/allegedly fell from grace for sexual abuse of a 16 year old girl.) I had annotated an incomplete audio fragment from Hank Harrison's cassette in 2011, and in 2021 video emerged which is worth your time. Garcia is very relaxed and the conversation touches on some good terrain. It's especially interesting to hear him talk about his mother, Ruth, who passed in 1970. 

 

The program aired at 1 PM on January 31st.

January 20-22, 1976 (Tuesday-Thursday)

Film house.[8]

4. My band is in a state of flux right now

January 23, 1976 (Friday)

About midday, Garcia heads to the KSAN studios in the city and does a live interview with the delightful Bonnie Simmons (Simmons 1976, via GDAO), ostensibly to promote his forthcoming record Reflections (Round RX107, February 1976).[9] Her "tell me about your band" elicited the epigraphed response. I hate to treat him like an oracle, but for purposes of this blog, which focuses on Garcia's musical life outside the Grateful Dead, this is very important material – he was rarely asked and less often spoke about his side bands, let alone at such a fluid time. So I'll unpack it a little, representing in a way that's more narratively convenient for me.

5. "John Kahn and Ron Tutt and I are the main … are the nucleus of it, such as it is"

They seem to have formed this nucleus upon Tutt's arrival (with the formalization of a band name, Legion of Mary), and at this time the nucleus probably included Merl, who had been doing "Jerry and Merl" paperwork for sometime. When Nicky arrived he joined the core group, but when he spun out his name pretty quickly came off the fictitious business name statements. Garcia, Kahn and Tutt remained, dba Jerry Garcia Band.

Is Bonnie implicitly asking "Why did Nicky leave/Why was Nicky let go?" Given how big a name Nicky was and the utter absence of information about his abrupt departure, I have to think she is. Regardless, I'll proceed as if she is. The JGB's problem, Blair Jackson writes, "was Hopkins, who besides being a major cokehead -- not an issue where Garcia and Kahn were concerned-also had a severe drinking problem. This is why he occasionally rambled on incessantly between songs onstage, muttering incomprehensibly in his thick British accent, and why by year's end he was out of the group" (Jackson 1999, 270). Blair lays out John Kahn's elaboration for why "it didn't work out".

Tutt really didn't like Hopkins, and after a while he blew Jerry out, too, because he was just too over the edge; he was too fucked up to play music. That's the line where you've gone too far. At this Winterland show [in December 1975] he was on another planet, playing in the wrong key, and you just couldn't get to him. He sort of wrecked that whole gig. Tutt was really mad (Kahn in Jackson 1999, 271).

Thankfully, Jerry would never have narrowcast that sort of slight over the short wave of a conversation, less still broadcast it over KSAN's 35,000 watts. He keeps it simple:

6. "So far, the combinations that we’ve tried have been interesting, but not exactly where we’re trying to go musically"

On its face this could sound like the "irreconcilable differences" of the musical vocation, a catchall, a nostrum. But I find it an informative little kernel, consistent with what John told Blair. Musical problems, in the end, are the one thing that can't be overlooked. He could have said that Nicky was pursuing other opportunities – everyone would have been ready to hear that the Session Man had some big jobs lined up, whether that was true or not. Instead, hearing Garcia say it leads me to think that it "really" was so simple as that, by whatever means, stuff was getting in the way of the music.

I don't think of this question and answer in terms of James Booker, because no more than a few hundred people at most were aware of his connection to Garcia. But everything I said above Nicky above applies to Booker by analogy, each the driver of his particular rig down the "Genius Highway" (Corry). And the Booker experiment was certainly interesting, no doubt about that.

To what extent, if any, is Merl implied in this answer? I don't know. I don't get the sense that Jerry intends this explanation to go back that far. But then again, it's only been five months, so maybe it does cover Legion of Mary. Hell, maybe after playing almost five years together, "what happened with you and Merl?" might be the real $64,000 question. Toward the end of the interview, in a question put by a fan (via Ms. Simmons), Garcia is asked about playing again with Merl. He says "Yeah, if it's the right situation", without further elaboration. It must have been painful for him to be broadcasting his need for a keyboard player, while clearly not preferring this particular one that's ready-to-hand. Reconstruction would reconstruct their musical partnership, for a time, but that is almost three years in the future.

7. "we’re more or less auditioning keyboard players, playing with different people"

My initial reaction to this was something like "Well, you didn't try very hard", since only the Booker tryout has been known. Who else, I asked myself, did they bother trying out? How active a search was this? Did they "audition" anyone else?

Corry once wrote about a mysterious episode, October 11, 1975 in which a second pianist sits in and is introduced by Nicky Hopkins as "Tim Hensley", in his "first gig with the band"; he sticks around and plays again the next night. He offers various kinds of speculations about why the band would try out a second keyboardist while Nicky was apparently on board, and what might have gone down. Hell, until reading this you don't even know who "Tim Hensley" is, and that's because drunk Nicky mis-slurred Tim Henson's name. Corry has kindly shared some thoughts via email, including this link with more information about this very talented man, a member of the famed Muscle Shoals rhythm section, shot to death on Christmas Eve, 1977. I am not sure whether the fact that he didn't stick makes it more or less likely that he might have gotten a call in January. Either way, if we're drawing up a roster he might need to figure.

We presume that Larry Knechtel could have been another candidate. Of course he appeared on Reflections, and a February ad for the record introduced him as a member of the Jerry Garcia Band (Village Voice, February 16, 1976, p. 117). My hunch is that this just reflects old, ambiguous, indifferent copy, possibly desperation (leveraging Bread!), and not any real information from inside Garcia HQ. But there must have been some chatter about Knechtel joining the band, maybe coming out on tour. Since he doesn't remember anything, and no-one else has ever said, this has to remain pure speculation.

There's one other name I can add to the mix, and as with the others I can only mostly speculate. Steve Brown noted Garcia Band gigs January 26-28 (see below) as "Keystone with Randy Wallace", with the latter name crossed out and Keith and Donna substituted.[10] Who is Randy Wallace? I have no idea. Did he ever play with Jerry (e.g., at the 1/24 rehearsal)? I don't know that, either. What happened to him? Your guess is as good as mine. But apparently things were far enough along with him that Garcia's business manager wrote down his name.

One final set of points for now from the Bonnie Simmons interview. The pretext for the visit is to promote the forthcoming Reflections (Round Records RX 107, February 1976). They play pretty much the whole record and talk about it. Again, that's why they are there. Bonnie's question "Do you have any upcoming gigs?" is supposed to elicit a response like "Well, yes, Bonnie, we'll be at the Keystone Berkeley next Monday through Wednesday, come check us out." But when Bonnie asks him about upcoming gigs, he either willfully or uncomprehendingly relates it to the Dead and the group's still nebulous plans to start playing live again.

Given that the historical record shows (see below) that the Jerry Garcia Band, whose leader Jerry Garcia was about to drop a new record, indeed did play locally three days after the interview, and given that they are together in a promotional context, why didn't Garcia mention the gigs?

One possibility is that he just forgot. Another is that they hadn't been booked yet, though I doubt that (see the next few days' entries). Still another is that, because this was basically an audition, he didn't want to bring out too many people, put that pressure on the new (presumed) guy. A fourth, not contradictory with the previous one, is that he didn't know who the new guy would be, and was hedging in case he had a dozen wigs, and maybe needed patches over both eyes, but, unlike Booker, couldn't play. Whatever the case may be, I entertain the idea that Bonnie's question, or rather his inability really to answer Bonnie's question about upcoming gigs, may have spurred what we see over the next few days.

8. State Change

January 24, 1976 (Saturday)

If forced to choose, I'd say the tide turned, and the switch from challenge to comfort was proximally effected (like very nearly in the "pulling the trigger" sense) on this date. See next entry.

January 24-25, 1976 (Saturday-Sunday)

Steve Brown's papers identify Front Street rehearsals on these dates.[11] Nothing else is known about the 24^th. Soundboard tape of 1/25/76 circulates,[12] and it finds Keith at the keys and Donna Jean singing harmonies, including quite nicely over multiple takes of the Porter Wagoner – Dolly Parton smash "Tomorrow Is Forever". (Dolly, by the way, was Jerry's "favorite girl singer", per McLanahan 1972).

But, uhh,– Keith and Donna? WTF? How did that happen?

More below, but first let me step back.

Also on Sunday 1/25, the Oakland Tribune runs listings for Garcia Band at Keystone starting the next day and running through Wednesday (i.e., January 26-28).[13] This must have been called in the day before at the latest, i.e., on Saturday 1/24. Again, this puts Garcia's non-response to the question about upcoming gigs in sharp relief. Speaking on Friday, he could have forgotten there were gigs coming up to start the next week. But I don't think so. It's also possible that the gig was not planned when Bonnie asked the question, but was spurred by it – signaling to Jerry that he needed to start shitting or getting off the pot when it comes to the band-in-flux. Somehow, though, I think it's that he wanted to keep a real quiet couple of nights in Berkeley, less pressure on whoever's auditioning. Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday shows? That's typically how they structured the first shows out for new (or temporary) players, especially if they didn't manage to book off the beaten path, in Cotati or somewhere.

Summarizing the arc of the weekend: On 1/23 Garcia either forgets the gigs or, perhaps because they haven't pinned down who will be on keys, he just doesn't mention them. By 1/25, they have advertised gigs starting the next day and they are rehearsing with Keith and Donna. 1/24 Looks like the inflection point to me.

January 26-28, 1976 (Monday-Wednesday)

The Garcia Band System, such as it was, involved breaking in new or temporary players on off-nights, off-the-beaten-path, or both. A Monday-Wednesday run at the Keystone fits the bill perfectly. Though the first night has been in some question,[14] I don't see any reason to doubt it, first because it's advertised in the Trib and second because (though this is not necessarily independent of the listing), it's in Steve Brown's notes. Originally noted by Steve Brown as "Keystone with Randy Wallace", he later crossed that out and substituted Keith and Donna.[15]

But what happened to …

"… we’re hoping to have a four-piece band that we all like, sometime"

That's what Jerry had said on 1/23. Somewhere in advance of that, Brown wrote that Randy Wallace was to be tried out. Yet, on 1/25 Garcia's doing his best Porter to Donna Jean's Dolly, in a five-piece band, 3/5 of the members of which are in the Grateful Dead. WTF? You're Jerry Garcia, you have most every keyboardist in the Bay Area at your disposal, and many beyond, you are looking to put together a quartet, in your project generally aimed to delivering things you can't get out of your playing with the Dead, and you end up with the Dead keyboardist, neighbor down the street, and, oh, by the way, you're a quintet because you got his old lady (again, Dead), in the deal. The Garcia Band is made more of a redundancy, the Italian Senate of the Garciaverse.

C.      JGB #2 Membership

But this gives me an opportunity to play with concepts and words that matter to me. Like all human scoeities, the Jerry Garcia Band was stratified. At the apex, of course, stood its namesake, a very consequential Head of State, with his Prime Minister John Kahn, his right-hand man, running the show day-to-day. Ron Tutt joined them in the ownership group. Nicky Hopkins had been, but eventually he buys or is bought out, and his name disappears from the papers. (I have never seen any contracts, fictitious business name statements, or anything else that might clarify the details of how, precisely, these gents were dba Jerry Garcia Band, despite years of searching. I know the formalities only through tax liens against the band and its members.)

Unlike the man he was replacing, Keith never joined the ownership group, and generally seems to be held at arm's-length, a hired player. Donna Jean, far from not being on the ownership group, is not even listed among gig personnel on the union contracts, which I gather would be something of a no-no for her and for the Garcia Band. She only led on one or two numbers a night, it's true, but she was onstage with the band, singing harmonies or just swaying around (to no small effect on anyone who could watch her, not least Jerry, as video from the period shows), more often than not. There's probably a technicality at the union about what percentage someone needs to play before they need to be listed. But it's also possible that everyone was just skirting whatever requirements there were. I am not even sure Donna Jean was in the union.

From Nicky to Keith, then, the JGB undergoes an organizational change – the keyboardist is no longer an owner, but a hired player.[16] The formal triumvirate endured beyond Tutt's participation in live gigging with the Jerry Garcia Band – it would take the late-1981 "Return of Ron Tutt" Tour to generate the cash needed to square everything away, I believe. After that, Jerry Garcia Band is, formally, what had long been germinating in practice: a Jerry Garcia-John Kahn joint.

January 29, 1976 (Thursday)

Maybe he rests a little, gets his haircut.

IV.                Garcia's Comfort: The Godchaux-Era JGB

The Godchaux Era JGB appears to have been born by default, for wont of a better option (or the time/energy/inclination to generate it). That's probably too harsh – Jerry and John did try to "drive the Genius Highway" with Booker even after co-genius Nicky Hopkins flamed out; playing with Booker, and working with him, would have been ... a challenge. But the only other known candidate is Randy Wallace, it's not clear to me who he is --though I suspect, based inter alia on the arcs of two careers and my own preconceived ideas, that he'd have had a hard time challenging Garcia in the latter's band—and it's not even clear that he ever played with these guys. No other players are known to have been engaged, and then, of a sudden, it's Keith and Donna.

LIA gets one great angle on this:

It's interesting to me how passive Garcia seems to have been about getting bandmembers - like whoever wound up there, 'OK, let's try it out. Kahn, this would sound nice with some pedal-steel ... or maybe another piano.' This might explain why some of these mid-'70s guests/members didn't last very long. And of course, when he was done with somebody, he wouldn't say a word himself but left it to a henchman. What a strange band-leader.

Indeed! He put his name on it, but, as Corry has said, it could also have been called the John Kahn Band, since Mule ran the thing.[17] And whether it was John's inertia, or Jerry's, or their co-dependent (or, hell, independent!) "both", it doesn't really matter. That inertia, or a lack of time or energy, should drop its leaden hand on the proceedings is fitting, since, like the new drug of choice, the band is all about the comfort. Musically, and not unrelated, it favored a super slow, super opiated groove. Check out the January 27 and 28 shows[18] for this in spades, or even worse, the Valentine's Day show, which … makes … me … sleepy even to contemplate. The January recordings sound incredible (made respectively by Betty Cantor-Jackson at the soundboard and Bob Menke and Louis Falanga from the crowd) – but this band utterly slogs. It's a matter of taste, of course, but I find the slow tempos of the 1976-1977 Garcia Band – Jerry's Comfort, though it was Robert Hunter who would, the next year, adopt a band of that name—I find the plodding dirges utterly exhausting and generally uninteresting. Keith Godchaux could play (especially when he could stay awake and upright at the keyboards), but whatever his native gifts he could never challenge Garcia the way Nicky or Booker could.

Inertia seems to have driven this outcome. When asked about Keith and Donna joining the JGB, Rock Scully (RIP) replied that they were just around - he mentioned Club Front as the center of gravity, that whoever was there was a live candidate, whoever wasn't, wasn't -- some auditioning process!. Keith and Donna were there, and they just sort of accreted into JGB membership by virtue of their sheer presence. Inertia is a powerful force, and the comfort of the tried-and-true is especially appealing when all else is askew. Garcia's personal life was in a shambles - he and MG had just broken up for good (sort of) around Christmastime, he had moved out of Sans Souci and was just moving in with Deborah right at this time. He was working like a maniac, starting to spend lots of time at the "film house" in Mill Valley, working on the movie that would consume two years of his life and leave him rather a smoking ruin, all Persian, Peruvian and Camel cigarettes (vaguely Ottoman, judging by the iconography).

We can't always do it all, sometimes we just have to cut the knot, and sometimes cut knots take on lives of their own. I think that's what happened here, and that's what happened on the Side Trips road from challenge to comfort.

V.                  Postscript

January 30-31, 1976 (Friday-Saturday)

The knot cut, Garcia kept on working, as the creatively-inspired and/or workaholic will do, whatever their drugs of choice and the other opportunity costs they pay. The last weekend of the month found our Leonardo mixing the Good Old Boys' forthcoming Pistol Packin' Mama at Ace's, at Bob Weir's house in Mill Valley.[19]

I love this as a postscript. After what seems like a very busy month full of other things, he has still other things to do, a hat he has been paid to wear --$2,100 and 10¢ a disc[20]– as a record producer, winding up the business of Round Records with its final release.

Because even if, as I suggest, the Garcia Band keyboard flux materialized with a thud in Keith Godchaux's heavily percussive hands, with consequences for the musical experience of the next 18 months, even if Jerry's personal life was in a shambles and his pharmacological choices becoming riskier, even if he is still scrambling around his record companies going bust, his pirate business partner is about to snatch back two hundred twenty-five thousand 1976 dollars, even if the GOB stuff had been recorded precisely a year before (January 27-29, 1975) and was probably way behind schedule -- well, there's no time like the present.

In other words, these last two dates remind me to give the guy a break, to set my own preference for other musical approaches aside, and understand that sometimes a piece has to be held back to move others forward. Let JGB coast for awhile, a very simple enterprise requiring effectively no adjustment to the status quo ante, almost certainly a net improvement in terms of hassles encountered and time to do other things. And he is doing other things: not least continuing to make records and, now becoming utterly consumed in a theatrical film project, for the first time. But maybe, too, if only momentarily, he's drawing back, if only a little, from some of the ambitions of a younger-man. Sometimes you have to just hunker down, and that's as good as a way as any of characterizing where his Side Trips find themselves as the January 1976 page turns.

REFERENCES:

! ref: Arnold, Corry. 1987. The Jerry Garcia Band: 11 years and still rockin'. Golden Road no. 13 (Winter): 22-26.

! ref: Arnold, Corry. 2010. October 11-12, 1975 Keystone Berkeley Jerry Garcia Band w/Nicky Hopkins--Tim Hensley, electric piano. Lost Live Dead, January 10, URL http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2010/01/october-11-12-1975-keystone-berkeley.html, consulted 12/21/2013.

! ref: Arnold, Corry. 2012. January 9-10, 1976: Sophie's, Palo Alto, CA: The Jerry Garcia Band with James Booker. Lost Live Dead, May 24, 2012, URL http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2012/05/january-9-10-1976-sophies-palo-alto-ca.html, consulted 12/31/2013.

! ref: Arnold, Corry. 2013. "Reflections" Reflections (Round Records RX-107). Lost Live Dead, August 1, URL http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2013/08/reflections-reflections-round-records.html, consulted 1/24/2014.

! McClanahan, Ed. 1972. Grateful Dead I Have Known. Playboy 19, 3 (March): 84-86, 108, 218-228.

! ref: Simmons, Bonnie. 1976. Bonnie Simmons with Jerry Garcia. Broadcast on KSAN in San Francisco on January 23, 1976 [radio broadcast]. Grateful Dead Archive Online, accessed November 10, 2013, http://www.gdao.org/items/show/379971.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Beyond the usual suspects, particular thanks to the Special Collections pros at McHenry Library, UC Santa Cruz, most obviously and especially Nicholas Meriwether, who expertly curates the amazing Grateful Dead Archive. It's a real pleasure to be able to dive into the Dead's papers, which hold a million answers to crucial questions we didn't know we had.

---

[1] Steve Brown Papers, MS338, Box 1, Folder 10: "[xxx-need label]." Special Collections, UC Santa Cruz.

[2] See my "'Gimme some chords, Jerry Garcia, gimme some chords' - LN jg1976-01-07.jgb-rehearsal.93mins.sbd-tjs.8385.shn2flac," http://jgmf.blogspot.com/2015/01/gimme-some-chords-jerry-garcia-gimme.html, at note 6.

[3] Steve Brown Papers, MS338, Box 1, Folder 4: "Calendars, 1974-76." Special Collections, UC Santa Cruz.

[4] Listening notes at URL http://jgmf.blogspot.com/2015/01/gimme-some-chords-jerry-garcia-gimme.html.

[5] Steve Brown Papers, MS338, Box 1, Folder 4: "Calendars, 1974-76." Special Collections, UC Santa Cruz.

[6] Steve Brown Papers, MS338, Box 1, Folder 4: "Calendars, 1974-76." Special Collections, UC Santa Cruz.

[7] Grateful Dead Archive, MS332, Ser. 2: Business, Second Accrual (preliminary), Box 1018, folder xxx [xxx]. Special Collections, UC Santa Cruz.

[8] Steve Brown Papers, MS338, Box 1, Folder 4: "Calendars, 1974-76." Special Collections, UC Santa Cruz.

[9] See also Corry's "'Reflections' Reflections", URL http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2013/08/reflections-reflections-round-records.html.

[10] Steve Brown Papers, MS338, Box 1, Folder 4: "Calendars, 1974-76." Special Collections, UC Santa Cruz.

[11] Steve Brown Papers, MS338, Box 1, Folder 4: "Calendars, 1974-76." Special Collections, UC Santa Cruz.

[12] shnid-12504

[13] Oakland Tribune, January 25, 1976, p. 11-E.

[14] Arnold (1987, 23), places the birth of this incarnation of the JGB to the next night, but I think 1/26/76 is correct.

[15] Steve Brown Papers, MS338, Box 1, Folder 4: "Calendars, 1974-76." Special Collections, UC Santa Cruz.

[16] Corry probably first pointed the seed of this idea in my head, at http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2010/10/december-21-22-1976-keystone-berkeley.html?showComment=1287334532866#c44991062198337918.

[17] see also LIA at URL http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2010/10/december-21-22-1976-keystone-berkeley.html?showComment=1287551854169#c4173965395789718940.

[18] From shnid-17120 and shnid-17695 respectively, to my taste.

[19] Steve Brown Papers, MS338, Box 1, Folder 4: "Calendars, 1974-76." Special Collections, UC Santa Cruz.

[20] Grateful Dead Archive, MS332, Ser. 2: Business, Second Accrual (preliminary), Box 1006, folder 33: [Royalty of the Good Old Boys]. Special Collections, UC Santa Cruz.

Junco Partners - LN jg1976-01-10.jgb.all.aud-cook.8077.shn2flac

Down the road, came a junco partner (right now, wow-oh-wow)
He was loaded, he was loaded, he was loaded, as loaded as can be
Lord, he was knocked-out, knocked-out, knocked-out and loaded
And he was singing, he was singing, he was singing this song for me

Some great American music in this set, including several Garciaverse singletons and other rarities, but things never really achieve escape velocity to my ears. James sounds generally rather subdued, though the tape isn't picking him up well for whatever reason, and though he sounds open and hopeful toward the end:

I came way out here to California to tell you all how much I love ya. I'm gonna show ya how much I love ya. All the things that I looked forward to last year, for kicks, is just a thing of the past. All for you. So you can - slowly but surely - get it back together. Will you promise me that you'll do that? And love me? Do I hear 'Yeah'!?

Mostly posted as raw materials.

Jerry Garcia Band
Sophie's
260 S. California Avenue
Palo Alto, CA 94306
January 10, 1976 (Saturday)
David Cook aud shnid-8077 shn2flac

--set I (8 tracks, 62:47)--
s1t01. //All By Myself [#7:54] [0:09]
s1t02. (1)  Classified [2:08] ->
s1t03. Right Place Wrong Time [5:20] ->
s1t04. United Our Thing Will Stand [15:15] ->
s1t05. You Are My Sunshine [11:38] [0:02]
s1t06. Junco Partner [4:42] [0:02]
s1t07. Drown In My Own Tears [4:40] [0:05]
s1t08. Tore Up Over You [10:45] [0:06]

--set II (5 tracks, 61:27)--
s2t01. //It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry [8:34#] [0:24]
s2t02. //Goodnight Irene [9:35#] [0:04]
s2t03. Let It Rock [11:11] [0:07]
s2t04. //Slowly But Surely [17:27#] [0:27]
s2t05. (I'm A) Roadrunner [13:22] [0:14]

! ACT1: Jerry Garcia Band #2
! lineup: Jerry Garcia - el-g, vocals;
! lineup: James Booker - piano, vocals;
! lineup: John Kahn - el-b;
! lineup: Ron Tutt - drums.

JGMF:

! Recording: symbols: % = recording discontinuity; / = clipped song; // = cut song; ... = fade in/out; # = truncated timing; [m:ss] = 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 [m:ss] 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/19760110-01

! db: http://etreedb.org/shn/8077 (this fileset); https://etreedb.org/shn/151418 (s2p horrifying sbd, deprecated); http://etreedb.org/shn/155518 (MSC).

! map: https://goo.gl/maps/A20r6

! venue: http://jerrygarciasbrokendownpalaces.blogspot.com/2012/11/keystone-sophies-260-s-california-ave.html

! band: http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2012/01/jerry-garcia-band-personnel-1975-1995.html

! seealso: For more around this period, see JGMF, "Jerry's January 1976" (on 1/76 as *the* pivotal moment in Garcia's side projects), "James Booker, Classified" (general on Booker), "'Gimme Some Chords, Jerry Garcia, Gimme Some Chords!'" (1/7/76 rehearsal tape), "Flight Of The Bumblebee" (on the 1/9/76 gig tape), as well as Corry's "January 9-10, 1976: Sophie's, Palo Alto, CA: The Jerry Garcia Band with James Booker".

! R: field recordist: David Cook

! R: field recording gear: unknown mics > Sony TC-110 cassette?

! R: I used to call this a terrible tape, but it's not a terrible tape. It's a flawed tape, for sure, though how much is PA and how much is the challenge of encoding sound on oxide as it comes at you is an open question. All the vocals, Booker's and Jerry's, are too low, the piano is a little buried in the mix, and the crowd is superchatty around the mic. But the guitar, drums and bass sound clear, and good within the ample room feel the tape provides. We are lucky to have this tape to study.

! R: s1t01 All By Myself cuts in, not much missing

! P: s1t01 ABM of course it's nice to hear Jerry play ABM with the guy who, if he didn't lay down its original boogie-woogie Nawlins swing piano (he might have), ended up perfecting it.

! s1t02 (1) JG introduces James Booker, though I can't really make out what he says.

! s1t04 UOTWS "I wrote this song in the New Orleans Parish Prison".

! song: "You Are My Sunshine" (s1t05): #singleton, an American classic, associated especially with former Louisiana governor Jimmie Hood.

1 song: "Junco Partner" (s2t06): a classic American road, drug and prison song.

! song: "Drown In My Own Tears" (s1t07): This was previously unidentified, and it's true that the lyrics are devilishly hard to make out on this tape. But this is definitely what it is. Ray Charles made a Billboard R&B #1 hit out of it for Atlantic in 1956. #singleton

! R: s2t01 ITALTL, ITATTC cuts in, not much missing

! R: s2t02 Goodnight Irene cuts in, not much missing

! P: s2t03 LIR is somnambulent, I am 4 minutes in and I want it to end.

! R: s2t04 Slowly But Surely cuts in, not much missing

! P: s2t04 SBS 4 Jerry playing some nice stuff. James sounds really subdued this night. 9 Jerry is going minor key, and we are entering a stickier, deeper space, the improvisational room in the JGB-Booker show structure. These people chatting near the taper need to STFU and listen to what Booker is playing, as a few other audience members were doing; they yelp, fittingly, in 11 as Booker's strike-and-rebound fingering, finely tuned percussion, sounds through the space - wow. Around 11:30 he quotes "Flight Of The Bumblebee", and Garcia responds with some low, swarming, unmistakeably beelike buzzing notes - excellent. @ 14 James works the crowd: "All right. I know it might be kind of late to say it, but it come from the bottom of my heart: Happy New Year! Aww yeah! Swinging first. Frantic first and all that jazz. I came way out here to California to tell you all how much I love ya. I'm gonna show ya how much I love ya. All the things that I looked forward to last year, for kicks, is just a thing of the past. All for you. So you can - slowly but surely - get it back together. Will you promise me that you'll do that? And love me? Do I hear 'Yeah'!? Will you do it for me? Yeah! Everybody say yeah!"

James Booker, Classified

'Cause I know

I think I know

How everything is classified

That ain't no lie

I'm so glad someone told me

How everything is classified

That ain't no lie

-- James Booker, "Classified"

Let me pass some light through the social prism of James Carroll Booker III (December 17, 1939 – November 8, 1983) performing his fonky original "Classified" (first released on The Piano Prince From New Orleans, Aves, 1976), and investigate how it projects onto the wall of mostly-postwar mostly-American music.

Relentless Taxonomy

Our poor puny brains do the best they can to handle everything, but cognitive limitation is axiomatic. The supply of environmental stimulus far exceeds, to put it lightly, and all the time (which is to say even under the best of circumstances), our capacity to process it. This particular manifestation of Original Sin –I once heard it gently poetized as "traces of Eve"-- means we're drinking out of a sensory fire hose, and making sense presses into service, at best, a bucket brigade. Cognitive resources being scarce, we strive to use them efficiently. Among many other tricks of the human trade, we taxonomize relentlessly, constructing mental categories around environmental stimuli or sorting them into available baskets, hastily sketching targets around hits, arranging pots and pans under the leaks, and re-dealing life's cards into the billions of conceptual containers strewn across the mindscape. As one scholar has put it, "to cognize is to categorize" (Harnad 2005). All of this occurs preconsciously, the first link in lots of long and interesting causal chains. (I have been reading a number of brain and language books, but I should certainly cite at least Kahneman 2011 here.)

Categories help us make our way in the world, and are thus highly adaptive artifacts. In the ancestral environment it would have been useful to know whether that flash of movement you see on the path back from a constitutional is just a moonlit leaf shaking a little in the wind, or a pouncing big cat. It remains useful as ever, wherever people are found, to parse the intent of shadowy men in dark places. And there's the good stuff, too, a little farther up Maslow's (1943) hierarchy – clean water, ripe fruit, sexual attraction, random consonance or a beautiful view. We have all kinds of reasons to take stuff in; we just have to do it efficiently as possible, aware of the tradeoffs forced on us by our quivering grey matter.

Categorization doesn't just operate at the interface of nature and individual, of course – it's a profoundly social enterprise. I have no idea what convention dictates, but I'll try to reserve use of the term "classification" to refer to social categorization. My thin understanding sees it bound up irreducibly with language (Searle 2009), with concept, language and meaning all co-constituted with and by the other, but I can't go down that rabbit hole. Because through classification society normalizes, it defines what is to be taken-for-granted (sparing cognitive resources) and what problematic (and thus attended to). It sorts and processes us into buckets and baskets and demographics and statistical groupings. In the aggregate society benefits tremendously from the smooth routing of environmental stimuli out, around and through our brains and out, around, into and through the less tangible but no less real body social.

How we are classified has major distributional consequences, both reflecting and contributing to stratified systems of privilege and power. Probabilistically speaking, you reading this are likely to be white, male, intelligent, educated (not the same thing), relatively affluent and straight, among other things. Think about what all of that has meant and means for your life! If privilege is a measure of hassle and anguish averted as much as of opportunity presented, we are a lucky bunch indeed. How many legal hassles have our race and class inoculated us against, where a white guy toodling a late model around American suburbs gets a pass from the local forces of order, while a black or brown guy, and/or a beat-up car, might have earned a flashlight in the eyes, an already confirmed suspicion that something's a little fishy, a little suspect? Smarts help, too. And this is to say nothing on the torture inflicted on those hit by the business end of, say, the sexuality stick, or women who never, in the aggregate, enjoy anything close to an equal shot at the good life.

Finally, as our artifact, classification can never be perfected, and in consequence some folks are always falling through the cracks, obscured by conceptual shadow (a "grey area"), spinning toward taxonomical limine, running along interstitial lines, and flat out, hold-the-barbwire crossing boundaries. If conceptually induced negative distributional consequences might be called "disfit", these might be referred to as "misfit", between square individual pegs and round social holes. Being a misfit can be massively beneficial in certain times and places, with respect to certain categories, and all that. It can also be a huge bummer, as mis-fitting stuff draws society's not-always-tender gaze, which prefigures its inevitable effort to bring the wayward unit into conformity. Across this distributional span, marginality can just be a flat out wild and combustible ride.

Why don't we play Everybody's Favorite Fun-Game – "Let's … Classify!"

James Booker, Classified

Society classified James Carroll Booker III (December 17, 1939 –November 8, 1983), as it does everyone, in myriad ways. Let's start with an area in which, given the alternatives, Booker won the stratification lottery: gender. Being classified "male" confers privilege in every known human society (Brown 1991).

Socioeconomics is a rather mixed bag. His father was a Baptist minister, a gig which, while far from lucrative, could probably in principle sustain a family in the 1940s. So much for the "objective" class situation into which James was born – what else do we know? We know his sister had a music teacher (All About Jazz), a whiff of the middle class. Not much to go on here.

Domestic Circumstances. Whatever his "objective" employment status, James's father didn't keep his family intact: "Papa Was A Rascal".

There was a sweet white woman down in Savanna GA 

She made love to my daddy in front of the KKK. 

She made love to my daddy ya know in front of the KKK. 

... 

She made my papa move to Boston 

He took a gangster gal 

She stole away with my papa 

The whole Italian affair. 

She stole away with my papa, a way the Italian affair. Yeah

A recent report says merely that "his childhood was troubled [and he was] raised by an aunt in the Mississippi town of Bay St. Louis" (O'Hagan 2013). (In rehearsals with the Jerry Garcia Band on1/7/76, Booker dedicates "Slowly But Surely" to his "Aunt Bessie down in Bay St. Louis", attributing that song's words to her.) From reading around it seems he spent a chunk of his childhood down there, returning to New Orleans maybe as a young teen. Again, though, things are a little blurry. If he came from a somewhat "broken home", he seems to have had plenty of church time, which can sometimes help compensate homelife difficulties, and he enjoyed access to elite cultural materials, such as Rachmaninoff, Bach, Chopin, Liszt and untold other composers' scores. The fact that he was a classical music prodigy just smacks of access to relatively rarefied air, though whether it was as more than just the entertainment I can't really say. Overall, here, another rather mixed bag, but shaded toward disadvantage, once we control for the door-opening effects of Booker's musical talents.

Education is the social sorter par excellence (Domina, Penner and Penner 2017), and young James seems to have steady access to what appears to have been a good education. To take one indicator, documentarian Lily Keber posted some of Booker's handwritten lyrics, and his penmanship is delightful. He speaks with great fluency, and just gives evidence of a certain level of schooled refinement. I read something about him attending catholic school as a kid, implying in his early child, but in any event at some point he attends Xavier Academy, a black catholic college preparatory school. He later matriculated at Southern University before dropping out in order to go pro (and thus be able to pay for drugs) (McDermott 2013). Overall, and controlling for the fact that he had faced some domestic instability, Booker seems to have had considerable access to educational opportunity, almost certainly driven by his prodigious talent.

So much for relative privilege. Let me move to Mac Rebennack, a.k.a. Dr. John, a.k.a. The Night Tripper as his canonical praise for James Booker as "the best black, gay, one-eyed junkie piano genius New Orleans has ever produced."

Race: James Booker was born black in New Orleans, Louisiana in a dangerously martial year, 1939, and he grew up in coastal Mississippi. Discrimination is expected, and alluded to in materials around the documentary Bayou Maharajah, though I know of no specific instances. Let's just say I feel safe in asserting that he would have faced a great deal of racism, structural, behavioral, and every other kind, visible and invisible, in this place and time (a characterization which includes not just the deep south, but "mostly-postwar America" more broadly).

Gender and sexuality: If James won the gender stratification sweepstakes, his homosexuality probably wiped out any most of the masculinity premium. Society demands and subsidizes conformity, while deviance is generally taxed. Now, insofar as the prices line up right in general equilibrium, when people are willing to pay more to engage the artist's art than it costs to supply that commodity, net of the nonconformity penalty and the transaction costs and all the rest of it, then to that extent deviance can be tolerated. The "Black Liberace" was flamboyant and outlandish, even by the standard of land's end New Orleans, represented in some iconographic, Village People style, leather and briefs 1970s imagery, all wigs and hairpins.

Physical disability: Booker had one eye, though how this came about seems lost in the mists of time, something about a drug deal gone bad, selling it to a tourist, other vague and perhaps mobbish criminality, Jackie Kennedy, or maybe a simple infection (Rubien 2006; Chilton 2013; van Syckle 2013). When, in "Classified" Booker sings "I know it's real | what this one light lets me see" he alternately owns his incomplete fenestration and, courageously, minimizes it as a limitation. Adorned in a dashing array of eye patches, James Booker's problems had little to do with a physical disability, though it seems unlikely that it could have helped.

"Junkie": James Booker was a heroin addict. Filmmaker Lily Keber discovered that "when Booker was a kid, he was hit by an ambulance and dragged down the street; he broke his leg. They gave him morphine for the pain, and he always pointed to that to being the beginning of his addiction". Now, personal responsibility is a linchpin of society, but a little kid getting hooked on opiates via the medical system of the late 1940s doesn't sound implausible to me, and if true would represent just one of those lovely random fuckings over that life administers. Bad luck, kid.

I was a young boy about the age of 9. 

I found a sweet russin' woman. 

You know I made her mine. 

I found a sweet russin' woman, you know that I made her mine. 

-- James Booker, "Papa Was A Rascal"

If he had a particular taste for heroin, Booker's embrace of the old New Orleans roller "Junco Partner" -- a prize contender in the long line of great American drug songs – allowed him to testify to a broadminded pharmacological ecumenicism. Anything that'd twist him up a little bit, or rather as much as possible, suited his taste and appetite – liquid, pill or powder; by no account was he choosy. Unsurprisingly, this all didn't play out very well, with James all too frequently not "making good choices", as the euphemism has it. David Torkanowsky:

I remember there was a regular Tuesday night Booker solo at Tipitina's. Finally, the lights dim and Booker walks out to the middle microphone on stage. He was wearing nothing but a huge diaper with a huge gold pin holding up the diaper, and from behind the diaper he pulls out a .357 magnum, puts it to his own head and announces to the audience, 'If somebody doesn't give me some [expletive] cocaine right now, I'm going to [expletive] pull the trigger'.

"His addictions — heroin, cocaine, alcohol — got the better of him" (NPR 2012). Promoters would "book him, shovel cocaine up his noise, feed him Crème de Cacao or Seagrams 7, and make money off his performance" (O'Hagan 2013). Booker recorded his final album –Classified xxx—in a single troubled four-hour session.[1]  "By that point drugs and alcohol had taken over his life. After downing a mixture of Antabuse and gin, he had a seizure during the photo session for the album, which was recorded in his home town of New Orleans in October 1982" (Chilton 2013). Just over a year later, on November 8, 1983, James Booker "died alone of renal failure in a wheelchair waiting for help at Charity Hospital in New Orleans" (Chilton 2013), done in, proximately, by drugs and alcohol.

Bonus Round! Topic: Stigmas and the Institutions that Wield Them.

Here are a few that Dr. John neglected to enumerate.

Mental Health: Booker strikes an exasperated, sarcastic, slightly indignant tone in expressing how glad he is to be informed of how things are classified. He's clearly had this conversation before, and society, or rather society's minions, definers and defenders of the normal, were his interlocutors. Booker was arguably mad (bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, depression, manic depression and paranoia have all been advanced), and I presume (only!) that at some point he brushed against normality's A-Team, the psychology profession, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) of which is a crowning achievement of taxonomy. "Classified" progresses interestingly on this dimension. Booker first asserts his sanity ("I know it's real | What my mind is telling me"), but later he allows as how "I may be crazy" and, later in the song, having been classified ("Some say I'm crazy"), he seems to accept the premise, but plead for compassion: "it [his premised craziness] doesn't mean | that you know where I'm coming from".

There's little doubt the man was troubled. Charles Neville "links his mental decline to the deaths of his mother and sister in 1970, and remembers Booker becoming increasingly obsessed with "plots" and "threats" against him at that time" (Chilton 2013). (Note that this would be a pretty direct read of Booker's "Papa Was A Rascal": "You know my sister and my momma | They both begin to say | You know we all better watch out | for the CIA | I said we all gotta watch out | watch out for the CIA | We all better watch out | watch out for the CIA." [Speaking of things being classified ...]) John Parsons, who employed Booker at the Maple Leaf bar in the last several years of his life recalls "One person once asked me if James Booker was crazy. I thought about the question for awhile and I couldn't think of any way he wasn't crazy" (O'Hagan 2013).

Criminal Record: And the cherry on top: as his mental health teetered, struggling emotionally over the recent loss of his mother and sister (Chilton 2013), in 1970 "Booker was arrested for possession of heroin outside of New Orleans’s famed Dew Drop Inn and was sentenced to serve two years at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola." Angola is a terrible hard place full of meanness, fear and sweat --the Central Convict Sugar Plantation kept slavery alive in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana (Szwed 2010, 44) long after the Emancipation Proclamation. Booker was there during a more recent bad spell, just before the federally-mandated reforms took shape, a time when it "garnered the reputation for being the 'bloodiest prison in the South'. Stabbings were common: forty inmates were murdered between 1972 and 1975. In the early 1970s, four inmates sued the state for violation of their civil rights due to the barbaric conditions and poor supervision of the inmates and facilities" (Tolino 2013). Men still cut sugar cane on the prison grounds at this time (van Syckle 2013), though Booker apparently "worked in the prison’s library and developed a musical program for inmates" (McDermott 2013) – hopefully he worked up some killer renditions of "Junco Partner" for his "boys in Angola" (wiki). It was fitting work -- Leadbelly himself had done time there.

Having put himself to good use, and on good behavior, he was paroled after six months – "ain't no sentence", he sang in "Junco Partner", but of course it was. In all of society's taxonomical arsenal, few things classify quite with quite the overt violence of the penal system, and he said he was locked up "long enough to feel the iron in the bars getting into my head" (O'Hagan 2013). This is some of society's most aggressive institutional work, a special alchemy by which it seeks to transfigure its most disfit and misfit subjects. The experience permanently marks the institutionalized brain, and worst of all, conviction often begets further criminality. Upon his release Booker couldn't find enough work in bust-cycle New Orleans; "he violated his parole by leaving the state" (McDermott 2013).  I don't know what other run-ins with the law he might have faced, though in his work with Garcia he says he wrote "United Our Things Will Stand" in the New Orleans Parish Prison, Angola's municipal cousin. Either way, and above and the damage done by doing time, "convict" is one of those classifications that you really, really, really don't want - it hurts, and it sticks.

Social Transgressiveness, Musical Transcendence

The most consistent observation from the foregoing is how socially transgressive James Booker was and this, like that flash of light-in-shadow, draws our attention.

Piano Genius: But it's because of how we must classify him musically, where transgression refines to transcendence, that he keeps our attention. And, in this bucket, the Piano Prince of New Orleans scores as one of the finest who ever lived. I could multiply the testimonials ad nauseum, but let me just drop a few.

Pianist Jon Cleary: "He had grounding and fingering techniques that he got as a kid from classical music. Coming from rhythm and blues and soul music and blues and jazz … gave him a style that was very distinctive. It’s hard to play. Very clever. Very clean. He could get great chords and tones, but he also could really hammer it out too” (Kunian 2013). "Sometimes," the same article continues, "Booker sounds like he has three hands", a theme that arises frequently in evaluations of Booker's brilliance.

Musicologist Josh Paxton, whose painstaking transcriptions provided keys to unlock many of the mysteries of Booker's music:

He figured out how to do things no one had ever done before, at least in a rhythm-and-blues context. The way that he played derives from classical music and other things and techniques that he picked up from playing the organ that he used on the piano. Basically he figured out ways to do a lot of stuff at the same time and make the piano sound like an entire band. To me that’s his major contribution, making it sound like there is so much going on with just one person doing it that he is turning the piano into a one-man band (Kunian 2013).

As another player and Booker collaborator, bassist Reggie Scanlan put it, notes flowed "like gems dropping off his hands faster than you could pick them up" (Rubien 2006).

That technique is best which expresses most, and Booker's dripped with powerful emotion. Rubien (2006) saw him play a few times:

With a left hand like a piston with a heart and brain in each finger, Booker more or less hypnotized me. His right hand, fanning runs that didn't seem humanly possible, engendered a feeling I'd never experienced. I can't really explain it, but it was as if he cracked open a portal in my soul and poured all his world of pain and wisdom directly in. I looked around the room, and people were weeping.

“It’s Ray Charles on the level of Chopin," elaborates musicologist Paxton, continuing,

It’s all the soul, all the groove, and all the technique in the universe packed into one unbelievable player. It’s like playing Liszt and Professor Longhair at the same time. I can now say with certainty that it’s a pianistic experience unlike any other. He invented an entirely new way of playing blues and roots-based music on the piano, and it was mind-blowingly brilliant and beautiful.

The legendary Allen Toussaint, who knew and played with Booker in childhood, strongly concurs:

There are some instances in his playing that are very unusual and highly complex, but the groove is never sacrificed. Within all the romping and stomping in his music, there were complexities in it that, if one tried to emulate it, what you heard and what excited you on the surface was supported by some extreme technical acrobatics finger-wise that made his music extraordinary as far as I’m concerned. And most of all, it always felt wonderful. If it was a slow piece, it wasn’t just a slow piece as opposed to a fast piece; it has all the meaning that it should have instead of being a slow piece that just went by. When he played the romping, stomping stuff, it had all the funk that it should have but with those intricacies that Booker invented for them. He was an extraordinary musician, both soul wise and groove wise (Kurian 2013).

James Booker, Sui Generis

The Latin phrase sui generis means "of its own kind", and connotes that the generic set is really a singleton, Pop. 1. Colloquially, we'd say "one of a kind", and if it's true for everyone to some degree, that we are each square individual pegs confronting round social holes, it's manifestly true for James Booker, transgressive in life and transcendent in music.

The hardest parts of Booker's classified life hang together as a syndrome – being black, from a broken home, gay, disabled, crazy, (heroin-, cocaine-, alcohol-, and whatchoogot-) addicted, penalized– a lot of this stuff is of a piece, a tightly woven tapestry of dis advantage. But what about the good stuff, the irresistible, undeniable brilliance of Booker's artistry, his genius – is that of a piece, too? It's an age-old question are genius and madness to some extent co-constituted?

Very, very tough question. I don't know the science here – I have heard skepticism expressed, but plan to read around it a little more myself – but, in Booker, they certainly coincide, and it’s hard not to think the tonic of his musical brilliance and the demonic poisons that did him in were fruit of the same tree. Socially transgressive and musically transcendent, Booker demands his own classification. If he thereby deprives us of cognitively efficient inferential leverage, he more than compensates us with the sheer sensory exhilaration he provides, well outside the standard channels and utterly impossible to take for granted.

See Also

"Jerry's January 1976" (on 1/76 as *the* key GOTS pivot)
"Gimme some chords, Jerry Garcia, gimme some chords!" (JGB w/ JB, 1/7/76 rehearsal)
Flight of the Bumblebee (JGB w/ JB, 1/9/76, live at Sophie's)
Junco Partners (JGB w/ JB, 1/10/76, live at Sophie's)

 REFERENCES

"James Booker," All About Jazz, URL https://web.archive.org/web/20080223150929/http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/musician.php?id=5177, consulted 1/17/2015.

"Reviving James Booker, The 'Piano Prince Of New Orleans'," National Public Radio, March 30, 2012, URL http://www.npr.org/2012/03/31/149689793/reviving-james-booker-the-piano-prince-of-new-orleans, consulted 1/17/2015.

Chilton, Martin. 2013. James Booker: revival of a genius. Telegraph, November 30, URL http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/worldfolkandjazz/10481332/James-Booker-revival-of-a-genius.html, consulted 1/17/2015.

Domina, Thurston, Andrew Penner, and Emily Penner. 2017. Categorical Inequality: Schools As Sorting Machines. Annual Review of Sociology 43: 311-330.
Green, Paul E. 2014. African-American Catholic Schools: An Enduring Legacy of Faith, Leadership and Literacy for Freedom. In Catholic Schools and the Public Interest: Past, Present, and Future Directions, edited by Patricia A. Bauch, 21-43. Information Age Publishing, accessed via Google Books at URL https://books.google.com/books?id=vQ63AgAAQBAJ&lpg=PA29&ots=O2qPI60dVA&dq=%22xavier%20academy%22%20%22new%20orleans%22&pg=PA29#v=onepage&q=%22xavier%20academy%22%20%22new%20orleans%22&f=false, accessed 1/17/2015.

Maslow, A.H. 1943. A Theory of Human Motivation. Psychological Review 50, 4 (July): 370-396.

McDermott, Tom. 2013. James Booker. In KnowLA Encyclopedia of Louisiana, edited by David Johnson. Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, 2010–. Article published June 21, 2013. http://www.knowla.org/entry/1080/.

O'Hagan, Sean. 2013.  2013. Cocaine boogie: James Booker, the tragic piano genius of New Orleans. Guardian, November 20, URL http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/nov/20/james-booker-tragic-piano-genius, consulted 1/17/2015.

Paxton, Joshua. 1997. James Booker: A Pianist’s Perspective. Offbeat, May 1, URL http://www.offbeat.com/articles/james-booker-a-pianists-perspective/, consulted 1/17/2015.

Rubien, David. 2006. Booker's Mad Muse. SF Gate, URL http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/BOOKER-S-MAD-MUSE-2536600.php, consulted 1/17/2015.

Searle, John R. 2009. Making the Social World: the Structure of Human Civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tolino, Vanessa. 2013. Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. In KnowLA Encyclopedia of Louisiana, edited by David Johnson. Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, 2010–. Article published July 30, 2013. http://www.knowla.org/entry/768/.

van Syckle, Katie. 2013. James Booker, the 'Black Liberace,' Celebrated in New Doc. Rolling Stone, March 21, http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/james-booker-the-black-liberace-celebrated-in-new-doc-20130321, consulted 1/17/2015.

Votaw, Melanie. 2013. Exclusive Interview: Director Lily Keber On Her Documentary ‘Bayou Maharajah: The Tragic Genius of James Booker’. reel life with jane, August 14, URL http://www.reellifewithjane.com/2013/08/exclusive-interview-director-lily-keber-on-her-documentary-bayou-maharajah-the-tragic-genius-of-james-booker/, consulted 1/17/2015.

---

[1] "James Booker," All About Jazz, URL https://web.archive.org/web/20080223150929/http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/musician.php?id=5177, consulted 1/17/2015.