LN jg1989-05-19.jgb.all.aud-tfh.24537.flac1644
LN jg1989-05-20.jgb.all.sbd-miller.20679.shn2flac
LN jg1989-05-22.jgb.all.aud-ebay-liberation.150868.flac2448
The Jerry Band in SoCal
After the Jerry Band started in 1975, SoCal trips were mostly one, two- and few-offs - no real
tours as we define them at Jerrybase. Starting in spring 1983, the band started doing what were called "tours" in-house, but were typically just a couple days, couple of rooms:
- March 11-13, 1983: three nights, two rooms, five shows
- August 1983: a few canceled gigs, not sure how many nights/rooms/shows were ever totally solidified
- September 30 - October 4, 1983: makeups for the August gigs, five nights (one off), three rooms, four shows
- May 17-20, 1984: four nights, four rooms, four shows
- May 31, 1985: just the one night, two shows at the Beverley, fleecing the fans
These were all arranged between the Jerry folks (sometimes with John Scher brokering) and the local promoters. In 1986, Bill Graham took over Jerry's SoCal gigs, which for several years are Wiltern dominant. Here's the rest of the Garcia-in-SoCal story:
- May 23-24, 1986: two nights, two rooms, two gigs
- March 13-14: two nights at the Wiltern
- December 3-6, 1987: four nights at the Wiltern in the acoustic-electric format
- November 25-27, 1988: three nights at the Wiltern
- May 19-22, 1989: four nights, three gigs, three amphitheaters
- November 11-16, 1990: five nights out of six at the Wiltern
- July 29 - August 2, 1992: five nights, four gigs, four amphitheaters
- April 16-18, 1993: three nights, three gigs, two arenas
- May 13-19, 1994: seven nights, five-and-a-half gigs, five amphitheaters
As with everything else in the Garciaverse, institutionalization is more or less the story. Things went from pretty fly-by-night in the first half of the 80s to professional, streamlined in the last decade. Graham wanted it all, and the fact that Scher ran Jerry's SoCal stuff apparently irked him. I suppose that Bill getting the Wiltern was the real pivot - he had a great room for Jerry to play that was appropriately scaled. You might say the same thing up north, especially as Jerry got too big for Freddie's clubs. And once the Warfield was renovated (I still have never seen a perfectly clear timeline for that), certainly by late 1989 through to the end, it was probably most efficient to have Wolfgang run the whole west coast.
There's more to say about Jerry in SoCal, which I will try to get to in Fate Music. In short, a disproportionate number of negative things happened to Jerry, or involving Jerry, south of, let's say, Gaviota Point. He was a third-generation San Franciscan, and the antagonisms between SF and LA (north and south more broadly) make all kinds of sense, what with the whole good-and-evil dichotomy at work there (heh heh). It is just kind of funny that SoCal had more than its fair share of bullshit.
That's one set of background conditions, more just historical than anything.
Expectations
My expectations supply a second set of background conditions. Here, they were extremely high. Here's how I described my sense of the overall period writing
some eight years ago:
For my money, 1988-1989 is one of the great JGB periods, which a fresh and healthy Jerry (that's what starts to break down, for me, 1990-1991), solid band, some fresh material, rehearsed arrangements, and lots of classic American songs. Nothing too crazy, lots of good music.
In that same post, I had described spring '89 as "a peak period for me". All of that was based on the following, I think.
Another piece of the puzzle is instinctive contrarianism, and my long-held desire to assert the "year too late" hypothesis with respect to the 1991 Jerry Garcia Band double-live CD, which is pretty self-explanatory: they recorded it in 1990, but Jerry Band in 1990, I had in my mind, was not as good as Jerry Band in 1988-1989.
True, I found a couple of duds in that timeframe, such as
12/3/88, which I thought just kinda sucked. But even when we factor that in, I had high hopes. Whoever it was who said that "expectations are the enemy of happiness", or whatever the saying is, may have been onto something.
The Jerry Band SoCal May '89 "Tour"
The three shows in the mix here underwhelmed me.
True, "whelming" is a function of expectations, and I have already noted that mine were high.
True, the 5/19/89 Don't Let Go is one for the ages. It's right up there with some of the early '80s classics, or the shocking 2/6/94 masterpiece. Definitely top-10, maybe top-5.
True, there are some nice tapes here, including the Tapers From Hell pulling 5/19, and some rare late '80s sbds (albeit incomplete) for 5/20 and 5/22. (Where in the world did these come from??)
But the whole batch is quite uneven, in various ways.
5/19/89 may be the weakest of the bunch. The vocals are downright bad. As a newspaper reviewer put it, "Garcia's croaked singing ... has pretty much waned from endearing to abominable". WFAM and STOF exhibit some lyrical wobbles. Good hot guitar in "Deal", but the voice is just shot. The astonishingly great "Don't Let Go" may show the compensation effect at work, and of course could be said to redeem the show all on its own. I wouldn't argue. It's great.
I find 5/20/89 the strongest of the bunch. CUTS is clean and doesn't get caught cycling at the end. "Forever Young" has some great screaming and scrubbing, "Like A Road" is real sweet, "Sisters and Brothers" ditto, and "Deal" is shreddylicious - this "Deal" KILLS. "Think" has a nice edge. Things kind of fall off for me after that, though hard to say if the advent of the atmospheric Matt Xavier Nak 300s tape is driving this. (Note, too, young'uns - chomping is as old as the hills.) The second set clocks in at a pretty paltry 46 + minutes. Even with the between song stuff mostly edited out, I think a reasonable expectation in this period is a 55-60 minute set.
I characterize 5/22/89 as "below average for the period", but I think it's probably average, and "below my expectations" would be more accurate. The guitar work in "Deal" and "Think" comes in for more praise, but overall not much moves me here, and another sub-50-minute set II also takes it down a peg.
Let me make one final note: I do think drugs are playing a role here. Trying to pin down Garcia's opiate use is mostly a fool's errand. He seems to have been mostly clean in '87 and '88, though it seems he was probably chipping on and off (Jackson 1999, 406). If Browne's account is to be believe --and I absolutely believe it-- by the time the GD were really seriously recording
Built to Last, Jer was back in pretty deep. I have long felt that darkness around
8/26/89 and
10/31/89, both of which I plan to revisit soon. And the Dead's hair-raising "Dark Star" from Miami on
10/26/89 certainly earns its adjective. Finally, as noted above, I have long that that 1990 Jerry Band was overrated and exhibited some of the telltale signs that Jerry was making problematic pharmacological choices.
We are smack dab --see what I did there?-- in the middle of this window, and I think there are issues. The negative reviewer from 5/19 (Washburn 1989) didn't dig ol' Jer dealing "six-string sedatives", and he may have been closer to some truth than he knew. Colleague Mr. Completely rightly warns against "drug reductionism", and I don't intend to reduce the unevenness of these shows to drugs. But I can't shake the feeling that they are playing their part. *sigh*
Listening notes below the fold.
