GD at Freeborn Hall: Friday, October 28, 1966

This is out of my wheelhouse, but since it brings together two loose ends for me I thought I'd post it here.

The Sacramento Bee of 10/23/66 p. W14 has a piece on upcoming homecoming events at Cal Aggie, i.e., UC Davis.

The Grateful Dead are scheduled to play Freeborn Hall Friday 10/28/66, Yellow Brick Road also on the bill.

This ties two things I have discussed here.

First, having gone to Campolindo HS in Moraga, I always wondered why the GD canceled their scheduled gig at little St. Mary's College on this Friday night (10/28/66). I still don't know why, but at least I see that the band played a different gig. Maybe the pay was better.

Second, years back I found a Dead gig at Freeborn on January 6, 1967 which said that the last time they played Freeborn, the GD played to a full house. But there was no "last time" in the record at that point. Now there is: 10/28/66. Add it to your lists.

Jerry Garcia playing bass behind Lightnin' Hopkins: Fillmore Aud, 10/23/66

In the Fillmore Poster Appreciation Society group page on Facebook, eyewitness comments under the poster for the Bill Graham shows on the weekend of 10/21-23-/66 indicate that Jerry Garcia played bass behind Lightnin' Hopkins. I don't think I knew that. Did you?

This would be Jerry's third non-GD performance within a week:
10/16/66 sit-in with Big Brother
10/16/66 New Peanut Butter Sandwich
10/23/66 backing Lightnin' Hopkins (on bass)

Strange things happening the month LSD became illegal in California.

Northridge Acid Test

What is the state of our knowledge on February 1966 acid test at a Unitarian Church in Northridge, CA?

I still show a gig 2/6/66 at "Northridge Unitarian Church", no notes or references.

And I also show a gig 2/19 at Valley Unitarian Universalist Church on 2/19.

Maybe we have  been discussing somewhere? Seems like I thought I had this pinned down, but I doubt both can be correct.

Anyway, if anyone has the goods please post in comments.

UCLA Acid Test (CXL)

! ad: Daily Bruin, March 16, 1966, p. 2.

Preface

Suggested audio accompaniment for this post: http://tinyurl.com/hthnmgb, especially 30 minutes in when Ken Babbs is just raving, and things are just WILD.

The UCLA Daily Bruin has been digitized, and is accessible via the Daily Bruin Print Archive at http://samhoff.github.io/archive/. The access is rather cumbersome, basically at the volume level, and this runs from spring to spring. I recommend 1) targeting a date and searching on it, 2) verifying the resulting date range, 3) clicking on "Back to Item Details" toward the top-left, 4) right-click-and-saving-file-as... (or whatever you Macs do), using either the PDF (quite large files) or, for a first sweep, text (much smaller). The text can be searched for your key terms. But I will say, just looking at the text, the OCR'ing appears highly imperfect. So you might need to try many different searching strategies to find anything. I had a pretty low yield rate on the things I was interested in.

Discovery

Since I didn't have a canceled UCLA Acid Test in my cxl spreadsheet field, it didn't exist for me, even though I guess your average w00k might know of it. So I got inordinately excited when I found stuff around it, until reality came around and burst my bubble.

Anyway, still fun.

Preview

I found the preview first, and it is just about the most distilled piece of Babbsiana you'll ever encounter.

Barring the apocalypse, GSA ASUCLA, will allow the Merry Pranksters of Intrepid Trips, Inc. to let loose their version of interpersonal nuclear fission. The Acid Test, from 8 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. March 19 in The Student Union Grand Ballroom. What is The Acid Test? Well, it is a sort of a happening, a very total happening. There is no audience, no group of performers; everyone comes and the thing happens. There is music — The Grateful Dead will play genuine rock-'n-roll for dancing. But anyone can play music — there will be mikes and amplifiers available — and any person or group is urged to bring their equipment. There will be movies, three or four at a time, of the Pranksters and others doing whatever they do. But anyone can bring their own films and/or equipment. There will be people in strange clothes; come as you will. There will be strange lights, strobes and color wheels; bring more if need be. There will be Neal Cassady of On The Road doing battle with the fabled Thunder Machine, Roy's Audioptics, the Electric Man, the Psychedelic Symphonette, assorted miracles and marvels, more noise and yet more music. Tickets ($1.50 for students) are on sale at the Kerckhoff Hall Ticket Office or can be purchased at the door.

! preview: “Acid Test to Happen Here,” Daily Bruin, March 11, 1966, p. 14

In my recent post on the 1/17/69 UCSB show I posted about the winky-winky LSD references. Three years earlier, before acid was illegalized, there is no winking, there is just straight-up "come drink some acid punch with us and trip your _____ off right here on campus", presumably decodeable by enough Initiates to make it a happening.

I love the thought of Cassady ("of On The Road") doing battle with Babbs's Thunder Machine, the soundimage of whatever Roy's Audioptics was capable of laying down, "mindless chaos" as Garcia says in the late 33 minute of the audio accompaniment - the whole scene, naturally enough. Is "the Electric Man" anyone special? I'll leave this mostly to the commentariate to have at. Links to existing work will be gratefully received.

Ad

The ad mentions Tiny Tim and Paul Butterfield, whom we were just discussing in a comment thread, coincidentally enough, and drops the canonical name for the liquid medium of choice. Uncle Sam is in the house. Good stuff.

Furthur

Universities document themselves religiously, full of their own senses of historical importance, and so I imagine that there might be materials in the University Archives about this. I didn't know of this cancellation, and even a closer scan of the Daily Bruin and probably the LA Free Press would reveal more. Perhaps Ross has already gone through it all and already knows everything I am saying! I thought it was fun.

Lurid Nightclub Atmosphere

https://archive.org/details/gd66-12-01.sbd.sirmick.26968.sbeok.shnf

Garcia, after Minglewood:

Welcome to another evening of confusion and high frequency stimulation. And, Sucrets, cold beer on tap, lurid nightclub atmosphere, and Beatniks … more Beatniks than you can count on two hands.

Elves, Gnomes, Leprechauns and Little People’s Chowder and Marching Society Volunteer Fire Brigade and Ladies Auxiliary String Band

I cannot make any representation for the accuracy of any of this. It's a fascinating piece, of course. Dister was a famous French rock journalist (wiki) who spent ca. 1966-early 1968 in San Francisco, apparently spending a ton of time with the Dead, if the narratives are to be believed. I am sure it is perfectly well based in actual events. My sense is that he's more accurate on the early days (which I focus on here), when he was around, than later stuff, which he gleaned secondarily and in which I have found lots of mistakes on the particulars. Read it like you read Rock Scully's book (1996).

There are some new-to-me band names and such that are more up LIA's alley than mine. There are pre-GD bands and lots of little vignettes. It's a loose participant observation study. Fascinating.

This is an entry in the Reading Notes series, in which I just leave quotes and little annotations of stuff I have read. I make no representation of completeness, it's just whatever catches my eye. Aren't stochastics fun?!? As Ishmael said:

I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty.

Reading Notes:

Dister, Alain. 2007. Grateful Dead: Une légende californienne. Paris: Le Castor Astral. ISBN 9782859207298, 254 pp.

Dister 2007, 22: Jerry’s “beau-père” was Wally Matusiewicz ... was that Ruth’s husband? Says he taught Jerry the rudiments of the guitar, don’t remember that elsewhere. “Wally was not a drinker, but he didn’t disdain the good Lord’s herb, which he considered less dangerous than alcohol.” #family, #Wally Matusiewicz, #Ruth Garcia

Dister 2007, 22: his teacher at the California School of Fine Arts was named Wally Hedrick, who was close to the Beat poets. (?), #Wally Hedrick, #Beats

Dister 2007, 24: after taking a joyride, he was offered a choice between prison and the Army. #Army

Dister 2007, 24: his Army drill sergeant “initiated him in the delicate art of finger picking on an acoustic guitar”. “Certain of his comrades were part of the Kingston Trio” (?) #acoustic, #folk

Dister 2007, 24: before the joyride and the military, Jerry “briefly took part in a jazzy group, The Chords, in the little Northern California town where his mother placed him” #pre-GD

Dister 2007, p. 27: Robert Burns, dit Hunter, born June 23, 1941 in San Luis Obispo. #Robert Hunter

Dister 2007 p. 36: “One can get nothing from the banjo if one does not have an innate taste for a job well done” ... JG as workaholic. “The rest, love, family, hanging out with friends, and the corresponding substances, those were always a sacré foutoir, the uncontrollable part of his existence” ... suggests that music was the one thing Jerry could really exercise some control over. #workaholism, #drugs

Dister 2007, p. 44: ca. 1963, while married to Sara and working at Morgan’s, in a band as follows. Garcia on banjo. Hunter on guitar. NB NRPS parallel: “Hunter was the first victim [of Garcia’s expectation of virtuosity]: he was thanked and thrown out of the group ... An enthusiastic player but with little talent, he gave way to Eric Thompson.” Also Pigpen, Kreutzmann. Name of the band? “Elves, Gnomes, Leprechauns and Little People’s Chowder and Marching Society Volunteer Fire Brigade and Ladies Auxiliary String Band” ... became Black Mountain Boys. #pre-GD, #Eric Thompson, #Bill Kreutzmann, #Pigpen

Dister 2007, 44: autumn 1963, Garcia and Hunter are in the Badwater Valley Boys and meet Bill Monroe at the Ash Grove in Los Angeles. Implies that this was before 11/22/63, JFK assassination. #bluegrass, #Ash Grove

Dister 2007, 44: Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions gig played the Tangent on 1/25/64. #pre-GD

Dister 2007, p. 61: after Frenchy’s, they spent three nights in a row at a Broadway strip joint, Pierre’s, autumn 1965. #pre-GD

Dister 2007, 66: had to change from Warlocks because there were bands by this name in England, Florida, Texas (including future members of ZZ TOP) and a NY-based quartet comprising Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Mo Tucker, the future Velvet Underground. #pre-GD

Dister 2007, 74: GD in LA from February-May 1966 #GD

Dister 2007, p. 78: Olompali ca. June 1966. #Olompali

Dister 2007, 90: “Jamming together, or sitting in with each other’s bands, is what fundamentally distinguished San Francisco’s music scene from LA’s.” #collective improvisation

Dister 2007, p. 91: Bay Area rockers grew out of the folk scene, especially in Berkeley and Palo Alto. “Ces habitués des hootenannies sont également rompus à l’exercise de la jam-session” #collective improvisation, i.e., #jam

JGMF: The hoot and the open jam session spontaneously evolved in many different contexts. Multiple discovery is common in science (wiki), biologists see tons of convergent evolution (wiki), and even some anthropologists talk about cultural universals (Brown 1991). Anything that has this quality of coming up again and again in the human condition is, in brief, probably really important. And playing music together is one of these kinds of things, really down to the root of our natures. I am talking shelter, warmth, maybe some food and drink, some good old goddamned human company. Get a room for the sex if you can, but the drugs and rock 'n roll are never far from the fire, and that's true for white folks in Appalachia and black folks in the Mississippi delta. Beat a drum, pluck a string, sing a little. In the American context, hollers, Gospels-spirituals, blues, jazz, soul, R&B, funk, and any other "black music" you can think of, whether South, North, Midwest, Great Migration, or wherever, has its improvisational tradition, and this is no less true of your old-timey, folk, Gospels-spirituals, bluegrass, country, rockabilly, rock or heavy metal. It's a people thing, painted in the riotous colors of every other kind of earthly variation.

Dister 2007, p. 103: GD were evicted from Olompali and refuged at Camp Lagunitas in ca. August 1966. Moved to 710 Ashbury in September 1966. #Olompali, #Camp Lagunitas, #houses

Dister 2007, 126-127: story of stealing the equipment from Monterey Pop. P. 127 equipment (le matos) “duly returned eight days later [6/26/67], after having been put to use during a free concert in the Panhandle, a concert in which both Eric Burdon and Jimi Hendrix participated (but where are the tapes?)”

JGMF: I list 6/21/67 at the Polo Grounds (no source, not in Deadlists) and 6/24 at El Camino Park in Palo Alto (http://rockprosopography101.blogspot.com/2009/07/june-24-1967-el-camino-park-palo-alto.html, last consulted 3/28/2011), but nothing from the Panhandle.

Dister 2007, 134: the 10/2/67 bust and subsequent police harassment “ended the [MG-JG] dream of living in the middle of the cauldron” of 710 Ashbury, with the baby and all that, living in the attic. “They would first move near the Palace of the Legion of Honor, not far from the Presidio where Jerry did his brief military service. A little later, they’d cross the Golden Gate Bridge for Larkspur bungalow rented out by John Cipollina’s father.” MG in Greenfield says they lived there six months. #houses

Dister 2007, 141. This is interesting about early GD musical interactions. “Early in November 1967, Pigpen (or maybe Garcia) allows me to accompany him into the recording studio.” Anthem of the Sun ... “The little studio is somewhere downtown. Everyone’s there, squeezed around the console. Garcia’s listening to live tapes, pushing buttons, switching from one solo to another, juggling the mix, barely taking the time to the others what he had in mind. Weir s’emporte, he’s like that, rock ‘n roll energy, shooting nasty looks when he didn’t agree. The exchanges are pretty sharp, one could think that these guys aren’t on the same wavelength, that the group is at risk of imploding at any moment. Several alternative musical conceptions, as many different ways of engaging them ...” #Bob Weir 

JGMF that's a cool little piece of color right there.

Dister 2007, p. 143. Says that TC came into the GD at the time they were working on Anthem ... it comes into the narrative before a discussion of November 1967 ... #Tom Constanten

Dister 2007, 146: first live Dark Star was 12/xx/67.

Dister 2007, 147: Ramrod, first roadie, arrives late December 1967. Rex Jackson came next?

Dister 2007, 150-151. Description of a February 1968 gig at San Quentin. He says “I believe that the day of the concert, or the day before, they found Neal’s body on the side of a railroad track somewhere just outside of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.” That was February 4, 1968. Later below, he says that “Phil Lesh had stayed in Oregon after a series of concerts in Portland and in the colleges and universities in that neck of the woods. So Bob Weir played bass.” I think he is conflating some stuff here. The correct date, based on contemporary ex post reports (the best kind of data) clearly confirm Thursday, 2/15/68 as the date of this event (UPI 1968; Torgerson 1968; see also Hannan 2009 SQ LLD post).

Contrasts 5/8/69 People's Park with 5/7/69 GGP show. "A distillation of the ending Sixties: a few show in Golden Gate Park, with Bear at the audio console, while ten miles away as the crow flies, tear gas is still sticking to the trees on the Berkeley campus" (Dister 2007, 158). #jerry and the Jeffersons

 

GD in Walnut Creek; East Bay Psychedelic Scene?

Can anyone anywhere add anything about these three Grateful Dead shows in Walnut Creek, CA? Little is known about the first, and next-to-nothing about the second two.

**update 20150905: the 1968 shows have been demystified**

1. Grateful Dead, Sunday, October 23, 1966: Gymnasium, Las Lomas High School, 1460 South Main Street,Walnut Creek, CA 94596-5383.

• Deadlists: http://www.deadlists.com/deadlists/showresults.asp?KEY=10/23/66.
• Deadlists notes: "Originally scheduled for Walnut Creek Library, showtime 3 PM." 
• JGMF: I have elaborated the venue as "Gymnasium" based on the ads below.
• JGMF: Not sure where the "originally scheduled" information comes from. Below is a mention and calendar listing for the show from the Contra Costa Times, October 20, 1966, p. 12:

The "Coming Attractions" listing for the GD show ("Coming Attractions," Contra Costa Times, October 20, 1966, p. 12) reads as follows:

"The Grateful Dead, rock-and-roll quintet, Art Forum Series, Walnut Creek Civic Arts Center, 3 p.m., Las Lomas High School gymnasium.

Then there's a little article ("'The Grateful Dead' Ducats Still Available," Contra Costa Times, October 20, 1966, p. 12) pimping the tickets:

The Civic Arts Center, City of Walnut Creek, advises that tickets for the concert, "The Grateful Dead", are still available. This rock 'n roll, second in the series of the Art Forum events, will take place at the Las Lomas High School gymnasium, Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are now on sale at $2 each at the Civic Arts Center, 1445 Civic Drive, Walnut Creek.

 I'll leave it to the GD historians to see if we learn anything from that. From a "Walnut Creek" (or a "1960s East Bay Psychedelia") perspective, it's just a little splash of color on a phenomenon that is very obscure (or penumbral, with your --ch-ching!!-- $5 word of the day).



Over at dead.net, meanwhile, user 'oakland dupree' gives an attendee's view [lightly edited]:

This was my first Grateful Dead show. There were maybe 50 -100 curiosity seekers. Very few teens like me. It was a free "arts and lectures" - type concert in the afternoon. Jerry wore a yellow Pigpen t-shirt. They were eating cookies and offered them to the audience. No takers. LOUD and good! Life changing concert for me. ... Someone passed out Golden Road to Unlimited Devotion fliers. A week or so later, I journeyed to 710 Ashbury and purchased a Pigpen long sleeve olive green polo shirt with turtle neck from MG. A few years later I gifted it to Debbie, background singer on Aoxomoxoa.

Sounds amazing. I wish I had a "Pigpen long sleeve olive green polo shirt with turtle neck [bought from Mountain Girl]". You get your sweet pippy I do. The fliers sound interesting too, natch ...

• As an aside, not sure if Jefferson Airplane people would learn anything from the 10/28/66 Saint Mary's College, Moraga, CA listing in the "Coming Attractions" calendar "Coming Attractions," Contra Costa Times, October 20, 1966, p. 12):

The "Jefferson Airplane" with Patty Phillips "The Chosen For," concert sponsored by the Associated Students of Saint Mary's College, 7:30 p.m., Slip Madigan Memorial Gymnasium.

The SMC website doesn't really do the school's very interesting history justice. That said, let me just keep "Slip Madigan" in my head as the "Rudy" of this little college (with a $111 million endowment ... not bad!) in the gorgeous rolling hills of the east bay. Mmm mmm mmm.

• As a second aside, I see from a Santana performance list of undetermined veracity that they are listed for Las Lomas High School in Walnut Creek on April 1, 1969. 
• As an aside to the aside, not that that same site has Santana at Gymnasium, Diablo Valley College, Pleasant Hill, CA. Corry or Ross or LIA or Bruno or anyone, how much stuff is "out there" on the East Bay?

Anyway, just hoping to learn more!

2. Grateful Dead, Friday, March 1, 1968: The Looking Glass, 1300 Boulevard Way, Walnut Creek, CA, 94595.

• Deadlists: http://www.deadlists.com/default.asp?http://www.deadlists.com/deadlists/showresults.asp?KEY=3/1/68
• dead.net, March 1: http://www.dead.net/show/march-1-1968: no attendees.

3. Grateful Dead, Saturday, March 2, 1968: The Looking Glass, 1300 Boulevard Way, Walnut Creek, CA, 94595.

• Deadlists:http://www.deadlists.com/default.asp?http://www.deadlists.com/deadlists/showresults.asp?KEY=3/2/68
• dead.net, March 2: http://www.dead.net/show/march-2-1968: no attendees.

update: see http://jgmf.blogspot.com/2015/09/grateful-dead-at-cliffords-catering.html for more on these 1968 shows, including proper venue, etc. etc. What follows is just kept for the record.

I'll just discuss these together, naturally enough. Scattershot style, unfortunately, but IIWII.

dead.net lists "Looking Glass" as another billed band, not as the venue name. No venue name, just address. Funny. Given what I observe about the location below, I have a hunch that this was not a club at all, but a house party.

There is almost no information anywhere about these shows. I looked in the CC Times for evidence of this gig or, poking around this time period, listings for this venue. I found nothing. Google really turns up nothing. Corry's "Grateful Dead Tour Itinerary March-April 1968" avers that "this event and venue are the most mysterious of this time period". Neither LIA nor Ross has much to add in comments.

The location, 1300 Boulevard Way, Walnut Creek, CA, 94595, is an odd one and would have been much odder in 1968, when this area probably still had walnut trees. Boulevard Way has always been an odd little corridor in a little town that has a few of them (despite now being extreme shi-shi). It runs southwest from the shadows of the I-680 / US-24 interchange. It was an odd little no-man's land in the 1970s. Even presently, it features mixed light industrial / commercial (though not much retail) and multifamily residential. It gets a little leafier and turns due south through more single family type homes, ending at Olympic Boulevard. As I recall, that street parallels the old train tracks. Coming in off of Boulevard Way, to the right Olympic runs due west toward where Reliez Station would have been (in Lafayette). The left it runs northeast and takes you toward the southern edge of Walnut Creek.

From the street view of 1300 Boulevard Way, you get a sense of the neighborhood as it exists in my mind. Not the Nieman Marcus side of town, though presumably, now, expensive by any sane measure. It would not have been expensive in 1968. This is a pretty obscure place to have a night club, I can tell you that. I am not surprised that it (presumably!) wasn't around for very long, if it really was a nightclub. Ross speculates that it might have been a rehearsal or something. I'd guess it was a house party, or damn close to it. Maybe some kids rented a warehouse space and threw a party. Las Lomas is not that far, and the old Del Valle High School (closed 1979, thank you Proposition 13) was even closer. The absence of attendees listed at dead.net makes me very, very suspicious, and I think the dead.net notation (which probably derives from Deadbase) listing "Looking Glass" as a band and not a venue provides an important clue.

Surely if there were a psychedelic club in Walnut Creek in winter-spring 1968, even if only briefly, there would be some memory of it. Was there any psychedelic scene in the East Bay to speak of? Here's hoping one or two recllections might be jogged by this post.

Garcia on Jefferson Airplane, Surrealistic Pillow

Was just pointed to this early 1967 interview (audio only) with Garcia posted at youtube. Not sure I had heard it before, but I think it contains a tidbit or two that are not pinned down yet regarding Garcia's contributions to the Jefferson Airplane blockbuster Surrealistic Pillow. So this is sort of of a piece with my post on Garcia's involvement on Stephen Stills albums.

I am not going to rehearse the whole story of Garcia's involvement in the album. Matt Scofield does an amazing job of it at deaddisc, and I am sure that Jackson and McNally would shed additional light. (I should just make it a practice to refer to them before ever posting on anything.) Let me just summarize what Scofield says we know and what we don't with a few bullet points, some of them direct quotes from deaddisc.

• Garcia plays guitar on Today and Comin' Back To Me. 
• Some sources suggest that Garcia also played acoustic guitar on Plastic Fantastic Lover and My Best Friend.  
• Garcia's contribution to Surrealistic Pillow is not easy to define exactly.
• His playing contribution is partly documented.
• Some sources suggest that Garcia was also played on Plastic Fantastic Lover and My Best Friend. To date this remains speculation - any information about documented sources describing other Garcia involvement on this album would be most welcome. 

Well, in this youtube interview we learn the following bits of JG involvement that were unknown (apparently) or in need of confirmation:

• JG played flattop (presumably acoustic steel) guitar on How Do You Feel (@ ca. 0:58).
• JG did not play on My Best Friend; Skip Spence did. (@ ca. 1:05)
• JG's playing on Today and Comin' Back To Me are confirmed (@ ca. 1:09)
• JG played flattop guitar on Plastic Fantastic Lover (@ ca. 1:11) 
• re: Someone to Love JG says "The arrangement on the album is more or less my arrangement. I kinda rewrote it."

From the horse's mouth, so to speak.

Now, of course, it's not certain that his parts appeared on the final product or if, as the lack of credits would imply, they ended up on the cutting room floor. But it may well be him, and in any case we might be able to circle in on some more dates when he was in LA with the Airplane if we know the dates on which the numbers including him were recorded.

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

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

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

Personnel:

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

Performance:

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

Location:

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

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

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

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

The New Peanut Butter Sandwich: October 16, 1966, Avalon Ballroom, San Francisco, CA

Having just posted about Garcia's October 1966 sit-in with Big Brother and the Holding Company, I'll follow on with what is even more interesting-sounding (though it apparently didn't come off that well).

Mojo Navigator R&R News no. 9 (October 17, 1966) gives a brief account of the evening, which apparently included a configuration ("One Night Only!", I assume) called The New Peanut Butter Sandwich, composed of the following (instruments are mostly presumed):

Ron "Pigpen" McKernan (GD): ?organ?
Jerry Garcia (GD): guitar;
David Getz (BBHC): drums;
David Freiberg (QMS): bass;
?? (Sir Douglas Quintet): rhythm guitar;
Gary Duncan (QMS): guitar;
John Cipollina (QMS): guitar;
?? ("negro blues singer"): ??.

The only other detail is that "They did a very long and boring pseudo-Butterfield blues instrumental." Not clear what the blues singer was doing sitting in on an instrumental, but anyway ... sounds interesting!

Jerry sitting in with Big Brother, October 1966: which date?

Lost Live Dead posted about a Garcia sit-in with Big Brother and the Holding Company on October 15, 1966. Based on the context of an account in Mojo Navigator no. 9 (October 17, 1966), I am going to argue that this is incorrect. According to MN, this all happened on a Sunday, while 10/15 was a Saturday.

The actual date is probably October 16th, though October 9th deserves some consideration.

Here's the operative part of the MN account:

On the 6th of October there was a rally in the Golden Gate Park Panhandle with the Grateful Dead, Big Brother & the Holding Co., and the Wildflower, followed last Sunday by another Panhandle festival, the Artists [sic?] Liberation Front's Free Fair. Bands appearing were the Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Grateful Dead, Country Joe and the Fish. ... After the Fair the Family Dog held its first anniversary dance at Avalon, with Big Brother & the Holding Company, sounding great, the Sir Douglas Quintet, sounding terrible, the Oxford Circle, the 13th Floor Elevators, and a couple of jam groups. Jerry Garcia played one song with the Holding Company, which came off extremely well ...

My first thought was that this was October 9th, not October 16th. Here's why.


In American English (unlike, say, French), we usually reserve a phrase like "last Sunday" for something that was more than a day ago. If Sunday was the day prior, we'd just say "yesterday", with "last Sunday" being 8 days prior. Even out 2-3 days I would refer to "this past Sunday" rather than "last Sunday", though this may be my own idiosyncracy.

Sorry to be pedantic (but I'll continue, anyway). Th context of the quote above could be taken to imply October 9th, for two reasons. First, the linkage of the ALFFF event to the October 6th event with the "followed" formulation implies to me that they were closer in time than ten days. Second is the "last Sunday" formulation. This MN was published on Monday, October 17, 1966, and therefore probably written on 10/16. Even if it was written during the day on 10/17, I find the "last Sunday" formulation unlikely to refer to the previous day.

I was originally leaning toward October 9th, but two things militate strongly against (and/or in favor of 10/16).

First, there is the GD date at the Fillmore Auditorium on October 9th. I don't know what evidence there is for this, but I assume it's strong given how impressively things tend to be nailed down for the main ballroom gigs. The logistics also seem to militate against all of these things having happened on the same day. Hard to imagine they could do the Golden Gate Park thing, the Fillmore thing, and the Avalon thing in the same day, unless this was a morning-afternoon-night arrangement. The context given in MN makes this less likely ... in the quote's ellipsis is reference to the fact that it was a warm afternoon. I take all of this as pretty strong against 10/9.

Second, Chicken on a Unicycle shows Big Brother at the Avalon on 10/15-16, but not on 10/9. Having recently spent a lot of time with Ross and Corry's careful research, I have great faith that all of this is correct.

In short, despite the fact that I find the construction of the account to be strange, I think I have to go with 10/16.  I'll post shortly about the next Jerry-on-the-side (JOTS, interchangeable with GOTS when I am in a last-name mood) thing from this same night.

Microphonicus Rex

Tasting, Tasting.

https://archive.org/details/gd1966-07-29.sbd.2243.sbeok.shnf