Monday, July 31, 2023

"the world’s most recorded musician in the world’s most famous arena"


The Red Light folks tagged GarciaLive 16 (MSG 11/15/91) with the subject line, and I have to say that it's badass. That crew does a good job, IMO. I am not kissing up. It's a hard job and they have released some amazing stuff. And that's just a good line. Tip o' the cap.


It contains some pretty good distillations about which you will read again in Fate Music.
The performance by the ... JGB at Madison Square Garden on November 15, 1991, represents the acme of Garcia’s solo career, the culmination of a nearly quarter-century name-claiming journey by which he established his identity as an individual American musician, Jerry-Garcia-full-stop, beyond and distinct from his wider fame as Jerry-Garcia-of-the-Grateful-Dead.

...

Jerry Garcia never planned a solo career; it just sort of happened as he sought more and different avenues for expression than the Dead allowed. Inchoate jams at the Carousel Ballroom became tempo études (“Mickey and the Hartbeats”) at the Matrix, which became regular but musically formless Monday night jams with Howard Wales, which morphed into ongoing and more musically grounded gigs with Merl Saunders. Even after four years, the amorphous aggregation resisted naming itself, going by “The Group” in the Bay Area, or just listing members’ names, before coalescing into “Legion of Mary” for its last eight months. The meantime saw numerous aggregations under other (and others’) names, playing diverse musics, cutting some records, running some drive-by tours, and banking an increasingly sizeable pile of accomplishments, including the country New Riders of the Purple Sage, the space-jazz Hooteroll? proj- ect with Wales, and the incandescent bluegrass all-stars Old and In The Way. Otherwise off-nights found Garcia making a singular solo record, engaging protean Dawg Music (David Grisman’s Great American Music/ String Band), renewing bluegrass ties with the Good Old Boys, vibrating electrons with Ned Lagin, and making time for a vast array of sessions, sit-ins, dalliances, and one- and few-offs.

But the Jerry Garcia Band (1975–1995) bore his name, and it played the music its eponym liked, the way he wanted to play it. Over the years the JGB, always featuring Garcia’s friend bassist John Kahn but with an evolving array of other musicians, grooved to soul, R&B, Motown, contemporary gospel, reggae, and other Black idioms that fit the band’s changing personnel, especially after the arrival of church organist Melvin Seals in 1981 and his handpicked backing vocalists starting the next year. A second tranche of cover tunes drew from the contemporary White Anglosphere, both the British Isles and North American settler colonies, heavy on the Americana. Garcia-Hunter originals, some shared with the Dead and others exclusive to the JGB, rounded out the repertoire. The six players integrate seamlessly. This is the canonical Jerry Garcia Band, a lineup that lasted 1984–1993, the core three plus steady David Kemper on drums and harmony vocals by Jackie LaBranch and Gloria Jones, Oakland church singers with day jobs who took to calling themselves the Jerryettes.
Read the whole thing as they say. I dig this show, and I dig imagining how this son of an immigrant musician might have felt seeing that family name in lights at the Garden.

Sunday, July 30, 2023

Great Moments in Taping History: Jim Durkin and Jim Wise @ Red Rocks, July 28, 1982



Setting 

Red Rocks Amphitheatre, Morrison, CO. Threatening midsummer Rocky Mountain rain clouds and all the rest; beautiful people everywhere.

Cast

Jim Wise (jimwise), a.k.a. aoxoa, a.k.a. tapersfriend, legendary East Coast taper, good friend of Dick Latvala's, all around good human

dude in the middle (DITM)

Jim Durkin (JD), who would go on to become sound engineer for Jose Feliciano and many other greats
nearby woman (NW)

the Grateful Dead (GD)


[crosstalk]

JD to DITM: I know. He can move over, too.

JD to jimwise: What are you doin' to my levels, man? [jimwise mumble] Don't put 'em up. Put it - dammit, Wise, I'm gonna fuckin' butcher -- [jim inaudible, crosstalk] Whaddya mean?!? You just put my fuckin' levels up! I'm gonna scream in the mics all night long if you fuckin' touch my levels, man. That fucking sucks!!"

DITM to jimwise: Calm down, Jim!

jimwise: OK. It's real good, now.

GD:

chk-PHWAWWWW----  chk-PHWAWWWW ==== 

phwen-u-wamp phwen uwam phenu wamp when whow

DAWWWWWWHHH

["Shakedown Street" continues]

[more crosstalk @ ca. 5:15]

I >>FF to LL -> Supplication

Bob forgets lyrics.



Thursday, July 13, 2023

Three vast corpora, to start

As I am writing and looking at the things I may have to leave undone, it strikes me that we have some amazing sources of oral history, which can and should be systematically converted to text for close study by humans and pattern extraction by machines. I have in mind the following sources:

Jake Feinberg, The Jake Feinberg Show, various episodes.

David Gans and Gary Lambert, Tales From the Golden Road, Sirius XM Satellite Radio, Grateful Dead Channel, various episodes.

Steve Parrish, The Big Steve Show, Sirius XM Satellite Radio, Grateful Dead Channel, various episodes.

For both the Feinberg and Big Steve shows, I have played around with grabbing audio, converting to text using otter.ai, and editing in the otter.ai interface (which is quite good). These transcripts have much to teach us. 

Feinberg has interviewed literally several dozen Garcia collaborators, many on more than one occasion totally a few hours. He has a great jazz head and draws great stuff out of his guests.

Big Steve's is mostly his recollections, with interviews not uncommon. He has a very good memory, and some of these stories are pure gold. I have found many factual errors in them, but can you blame the guy for not getting 54 years of memories from roadying for the Dead and Garcia Just Exactly Perfect? There are absolute golden nuggets throughout the show.

But you have to pan for them.

In both cases, the transcriptions emerge from the machine *very rough*. A 45 minute Feinberg interview can take me 90 minutes or two hours to clean, maybe even more. And he's doing these for broadcast, so care is taken to speak somewhat clearly. Big Steve is talking around giant Grizzly Peak doobies and, for some reason, juggling a mouthful of rocks. Polishing these transcriptions is more like 3:1 time ratio. The machine isn't the first not to know what to make of Big Steve, and we humans just process too fucking slowly.

So, it hurts me to know how much I am probably missing from these and countless other sources. I am glad the Good Ol Grateful Deadcastis making transcriptions - awesome stuff.

But these three shows alone have been running for *years*, and have generated probably millions of words altogether. These currently exist as sound data, and we need to get them transcribed.

Bottom line: the voice-to-text process is where the time/energy bottleneck still is. Once we have text, the machines can do their things, and we can do ours, and there are many opportunities to apply digital humanities kinds of methods to our corpora. I think it will yield great results. But someone other than me is going to have to get that ball rolling!

Musician Children of Musician Fathers

I am identifying lots of musician children of musician fathers in the Garciaverse.

So, consider this a request: if you know someone with Spudfactor 1, who is male-identifying, and whose father was a musician, please post to comments. I will start the list here, alpha by last name but presented first-last.

  • Martin Fierro
  • Jerry Garcia [José or Joe Garcia]
  • Zakir Hussain [Alla Rakha]
  • Tony Saunders [Merl Saunders]
  • Bill Vitt

I have also bracketed father's name in cases where they are otherwise in or orbiting the Garciaverse.

Have at it!

Sunday, July 09, 2023

Setting Right What Was Rent Asunder

Or something like that.

Forgive me, for I have sinned. I have added entropy to the world. I am here to make amends.

When the Falanga-Menke Stash of Garcia-Saunders tapes from 1974 first came to me, one of them was labeled 8/14/74. I had what I thought was another recording of the show connected to Lou Tambakos. Somewhere along the line, in the first decade of the 21st century, I decided that the correct date was 8/15/74. Because I was an early source of recording metadata, that dating has really stuck. I even wrote about it once because of a mystery trumpeter.

But I think I was wrong. I now believe that Wednesday, August 14, 1974 is the correct date of this mid-August 1974 JGMS show at the Great American Music Hall.

Three streams of evidence.

8/14/74 JGMS at GAMH has no contrary listings and these confirmatory ones: Bill Alex, "Around Town," San Francisco Examiner, August 9, 1974, p. 23; San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle Datebook, August 11, 1974, p. 4; Todd Tolces, "Out to Lunch," Berkeley Gazette, August 14, 1974, p. 11; San Francisco Examiner, August 14, 1974, p. 27.

8/15/74 JGMS at GAMH has no confirmatory listings and the following contrary listings: Hayward Daily Review, August 9, 1974, p. 40; Daily Independent Journal, August 9, 1974, p. 20; Bill Alex, "Around Town," San Francisco Examiner, August 9, 1974, p. 23; San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle Datebook, August 11, 1974, p. 4; Todd Tolces, "Out to Lunch," Berkeley Gazette, August 14, 1974, p. 11. All of these bill John Hartford at GAMH on this date.

Tapes: not only was the Falanga-Menke tape labeled 8/14/74, but so was a beat-up old dubbed cassette the Jerry had in his tape collection.

So, QED. Change your lists. Change your fileset info!

Tuesday, July 04, 2023

About Last Night

Hell may freeze over, but here I am. A new man. (Call it my epitaph for JGMF.) But I am going to post about the Post-Jerry-Garcia-Grateful-Dead-Cinematic-Universe (PJGGDCU). Just read Selvin 2018 for a sense of things. I think Thoughts On The Dead coined an acronym for this which is of course canon. I am just goofin'.

I have been mostly lukewarm, and so not paid much attention, to all of the members' doings since 1995. Phil in April 2000 from the 3rd row was utterly antiseptic, all brain and no soul. Ratdog in whatever year I went to the Tower Theater, we left at setbreak. Man needs his sleep. I never saw any of the others, I don't think, until Dead & Co., which I have seen a number of times because they come to me at Folsom Field. I have enjoyed those days in Colorado and grooving around, but the music was mostly incidental.

All that said, last night at Folsom Field was the first time I have felt the magic since I was in the same space as Jerry, that being:

GD August 14, 1991 at Cal Expo in Sacramento; and
GD December 28, 1991 in the Coliseum Arena in Oakland

Both were good, though I am not a fan of Vince's sound. The main thing was that I had to shift my energy to new things.

32 years later, I felt just a little bit, a flash, of that same ol' magic. I did the whole weekend volunteering with campus Guest Relations to wristband folks with floor seats for the first set, then free to roam in the second.

It was absolutely wonderful. If you have talked to me for 1 minute, you know I love Colorado with all my heard. I love Boulder. You know I love the University of Colorado Boulder. You know I love My People: Scholars, Students, Staff, Heads and Other! And you know I LOVE music.

It was all that! I think I may now be up to the mountains for some backpacking.

From JGMF to Fate Music

What you see happening is that I can't really blog much anymore. I think.

The communication medium known as blogging mostly invites me to express paragraph- subheading- and heading-level ideas. All of that now needs to go into the Fate Music manuscript. At least, that's what I expect.

It's certainly not over. Hell, it may thrive. But thanks to all of you reading this for all your support. Please follow me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/FateMusicJG AND on Mastodon at https://heads.social/@FateMusic. I can spin off sentence there to clear my mind and then focus on the task at hand.

"I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all" -- unk

Sunday, July 02, 2023

Fate Music in a Nutshell: JGB at MSG: November 15, 1991

I just changed the name at the top of the blog from Jerry Garcia's Middle Finger to reflect the progress I am making on Fate Music: Jerry Garcia's Name-Claiming Journey Beyond the Grateful Dead. That subtitle subject to change, that lead title not.

The best summary narrative is in my review of Jerry Garcia Band. Garcia Live volume 16: Madison Square Garden, November 15th, 1991 (Round Records JGFRR1037, 2021) in Grateful Dead Studies volume 5 (2021/2022): 228-234 [pdf].

If Carousel and Matrix jams present the uhr moment for Jerry Garcia Beyond the Dead, this musician's son's first time headlining Madison Square Garden under his own name supply the acme.

Anyway, read the whole thing if you are so inclined. And, of course, stay tuned!

Thank you all for reading Jerry Garcia's Middle Finger, commenting, correcting, all the rest. The function of this bit of cyberspace will remain mostly unchanged, maybe a bit more pimping. But this will still capture whatever random slop I can generate in the meager time I have.

If you are a lurker - come on out and play! "We're trying to have a reasonably good time here", and all that. I know the partly depends on me generating posts. I wouldn't hold my breat, but, either way, gimme a shout here, email, or if you find yourself in Colorful Colorado.