Reading Notes: McNally 2002

McNally, Dennis. 2002. A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead. New York: Broadway Books.

What a book. This, and Jackson's Garcia: An American Life have set a bar that I can only see from far below.

Yes, my original copy is in six pieces, so well-loved has it been.

But you also see that I bought a second copy just to make sure. You're welcome, Dennis!

Obviously, Dennis's focus was the GD, while Blair's was to provide a biography of Garcia, while mine is even narrower, to account for his musical life beyond the GD. One of the things that this will allow me to address is the dramatic historical imbalance in many of the existing sources. Dennis, for example, clocks in at 479 pages up to the hiatus (a decade in GD life), 131 for the remaing 20+ years. This is not a criticism. The early stuff is interesting. It's important. It's when things were fluid and still taking shape. Once things become institutionalized (regularized, routinized, etc.), there's clearly less of interest to say (unless one's interest is precisely in institutionalization, heh heh). But I do hope to provide a balanced look at the whole arc of Garcia's musical life 1965-1995, because I think there's a lot that's of interest in the later years as we try to understand the arc of a man's time on Earth, the nature of "the good life" (and the tradeoffs involved in trying to live it), the different rhythms of young vs old.

As you might imagine, given the painstaking nature of my methodology with a book like Long Strange Trip, part of me has been resisting sitting down and executing this task. But it's obviously essential, and I have done it. I am tackling Jackson next. And what I know the exercise shows with respect to McNally, and what I know it will show with respect to Jackson, is that some huge percentage of what we know about all of this stuff comes from these guys, either originally or in codified / interpreted form. They faced different opportunities and challenges of course. Dennis had the benefit of inside access, and did amazing work in nevertheless giving an honest assessment of the thing, warts and all. Blair was able to strike a little more distance, but had less access to materials. And both are simply marvelous, incredible scholars in putting together what they did in a mostly pre-internet era. I may have the opposite problem - there is so much material now, and my OCD is so exacting, that I face the challenge of how to honor the embarassment of empirical riches while still writing a narrative that reads.

We shall see how I do. We know how Dennis did, and it gets five stars, my highest recommendation.

So, lots and lots and lots of reading notes - below the fold.

Reading Notes: McNally 2015

McNally, Dennis, ed. 2015. Jerry on Jerry: The Unpublished Jerry Garcia Interviews. New York: Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers.

I didn't quite know what to expect. On a read, it felt like this was all material that I already knew. From a strictly informational perspective I didn't feel like I got anything I didn't know out of Jerry's mouth. But when I went back to transcribe some key things, so engaged the book a second time, I felt like it really painted an intimate picture of Jerry by Jerry. McNally did a great job in using his own creative talent to let Jerry --a Jerry, a version of Jerry-- paint a lovely little posthumous self-portrait.

This is sort of like my "in praise of editorial judgment" thing --no reader here could possibly disagree-- Dennis McNally obviously knew Garcia well, was blessed to have spent a lot of time talking about everything under the sun with him, and he creatively arranges a lot of the material that I know (of), but hadn't really understood. It's nicely paced, a nice easy afternoon conversation, plenty of room to breathe, unlike so many of the Garcia interviews we get to hear. It's a nice piece of work, and it'll be on my shelf (or wherever I put it) for the long haul. (It's so nice that I won't even lament that absence of spatiotemporal identifiers for the quotes.)

A note on "reading notes": this is just my selective culling of quotes of particular interest to me. There's nothing representative about this stuff, I don't imagine. I pick up different stuff from LIA (who can remember it all without the contrivance of "reading notes"). The method is to sort these quotes into their respective topic buckets  (with little tags like #why and such), then put the book aside and move on to the next thing.

Raw notes below the fold. I lost steam with bolding the names at some point ...

"The Little Cash Cow" - JGB, Early 1980

Last weekend's post "On the Bus with the Garcia Band" looked at the November-December 1983 JGB tour's extensive ground travel - everything was by bus, 3,000 miles on the road in a few weeks in the eastern time zone. Commenter Nick asked a great question comparing that tour with earlier ones, pointing out Ozzie Ahlers's recollections of limos and such on the early 1980 tour. In comments, I noted that that one had been a multimodal affair:

2/13 fly commercial DC-Albany
2/14 drive 165 mi. to Boston
2/16 drive 140 mi. to New Haven
2/17 charter plane to Syracuse
2/20 fly commercial to Hartford
2/21 fly commercial to Newark
2/23 drive 90 mi. to Philly
2/24 drive 110 mi. to Long Island
2/26 drive 180 mi. to Provy
2/27 drive 180 mi. back to NYC

Nick raises the question of whether the later tour maybe just wasn't generating the same amount of cash, so that the bus was a budget-conscious choice. (Corry offers an alternative hypothesis.)

I'd love to be able to compare the money on the two tours, but I lack the '83 piece. I can lay out the '80 piece, and it is quite impressive. Somewhere I have Dennis McNally calling the Garcia Band a "little cash cow", and the numbers affirm.

Table xxx. Jerry Garcia Band Touring Revenues, February-March 1980

In 2015 dollars, that's just over $571k for three weeks' work, not bad.

The last column may also be of interest. $19k (1980$) cash out on the road would have bought Our Hero a lot of cigarettes and chili dogs.

Bob Coburn Interviews Jerry Garcia, November 8, 1982

Garcia, Jerry, 1942-1995, “Bob Coburn with Jerry Garcia. "Rockline" radio show, hosted by Bob Coburn, broadcast on November 8, 1982. Includes an interview and phone calls from listeners [radio broadcast],” Grateful Dead Archive Online, accessed August 2, 2015, http://www.gdao.org/items/show/378595.

Garcia had two pretty good reasons to do a live national "Rockline" radio interview on Monday, November 8, 1982 with Bob Coburn.

The first was presumably to sell some tickets for the ongoing Fall 1982 Jerry Garcia Band tour (starting October 27 in SoCal, ending November 15th). From November 8th, the band still had shows in Worcester, Piscataway, New York City, Hartford, a college gig outside of Boston at Brandeis University, and a grand finale at Kean College in Union, NJ. The East Coast Deadhead paid a huge chunk of the Dead and Garcia's bills, better rally the troops.

The second is that Run for the Roses (Arista AL 9603, November 1982) had dropped, and for once Garcia was "touring behind an album" that people could buy from off the shelves of their local disc-O-mat on the way home from the show. For his last studio record, the 1978 masterpiece Cats Under the Stars (1978), work took so long that it remained undone during a putative promotional tour in March, probably not hitting shelves until a week or two after the tour ended. The Mystery Cats toured "in front of their" record, not your industry standard approach. Shocking that one sank like a stone despite representing some of Garcia's finest work, including in his songwriting collaboration with Hunter. Here, they're touring behind the record, but unfortunately, as one of Mike Myers's Scotsmen would say, "it's crap".

November 11^th would find the band playing for John Scher at The Felt Forum, part of an expansion push into the City itself, courtesy (or not) of Ron Delsener. Scher was going big in 1982,[1] and one of his early successes was Garcia and Kahn, in their first ever acoustic duet gig, at the Beacon Theatre, culminating with the good Dr. John sitting in with Jerry and John for some "Goodnight Irene", on April 21^st. That gig did so well (two 2,413 capacity sellouts, with gross $51,523)[2] that they made the same match in November. John Scher being John Scher --a multitalented guy who, from 1976, had basically taken over the GD's operations east of the Mississippi, and did lots more besides—he was fully locked into Garcianomics, on the recto and the verso.

John Scher Presents in New York City: Jerry Garcia Band at the Felt Foum, November 11, 1982.
John Scher Presents Program no. 270.

I don't know how many records they sold, but November 11^th grossed $107,661 on two sellouts @ 4,332 capacity.[3] Not bad – not bad at all. Biggest night of the tour.

Why do I get into the reasons for this interview? Because we find here yet another instance of Garcia being utterly incapable of marketing. In January 1976, he either forgot to announce a set of his band's gigs upcoming, chose not to, or else was reminded to book them when asked live, on the radio. I think there are a few other examples I can pin down of Garcia not really even swinging and missing on the tee'd up "new record" question, but kind of dodging it. And how's this for the soft sell, answer question of who's in the band:

I’ve had a band off and on for some time now, I guess about five years now … when you have musicians that you’re playing with on a regular basis, it’s easier to communicate with them, and they’re in the neighborhood, and things like that. Actually, the tracks on the record are recorded by parts of my band, as well as my current band, over the last, um, some of the tracks on the record were recorded as long as 4 years ago, 5 years ago.[4]

It’s a long slow process. See, when I make a solo record I have to make it in between the spaces, between Grateful Dead activity. So I have to do it as I can. Sometimes they accumulate, like a snowball rolling downhill.

Now, for someone like me, this is fascinating. First, "when you have musicians that you’re playing with on a regular basis, it’s easier to communicate with them, and they’re in the neighborhood, and things like that" could have come out of his mouth in January 1976 about Keith and Donna.[5] "I just picked whoever was around" isn't going to get me off the fence about these $11 tickets. Second, hearing that some of these tracks were recorded in 1977-1978 might signal to the discerning record buyer that they found at least some of this stuff sweeping up the cutting room floor. If they didn't buy Cats when it was released, why would they buy the lesser tracks now? Third, by interstitializing Garcia to the Grateful Dead, sublimating himself into the Borg, he gives further impression that the record might be rather second class.

Maybe he's just too honest, and can't shill the record that he may or may not feel good about. I guess I gotta respect that, even if it does thwart Global Corporation's master plan. Or maybe he just didn't get it. As McNally has recently said, "the celebrity interview, an opportunity for an artist to talk about himself and to pitch a current endeavor in as brief and efficient a manner as possible, was completely lost on Jerry".[i]

---

[i] McNally 2015, 9.

Other things I pull from this:

• Influences? Freddie King. Django, and he mentions Django's physical handicap – can there be any doubt but that Garcia felt a special kinship with Reinhardt?
• solo vs. GD: " When I compose a tune, I have a sense of what I want it to sound like. When I do ‘em for my own band, they sort of stay at that developmental level. But in the Grateful Dead, they have a tendency to keep moving. That’s true, I think, with Bob’s tunes, too."
• dodges a religion question
• Bashes Hank Harrison and his books; "wait for McNally's".
• a few other tidbits, depending on what interests you

Jerry on Jerry

http://www.kentucky.com/2015/06/23/3913570/book-of-jerry-garcia-interviews.html

A book of previously unreleased Jerry Garcia interviews is coming out this fall to mark the 20th anniversary of his death and the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Grateful Dead.
Hachette Book Group imprint Black Dog & Levanthal announced Tuesday that "Jerry on Jerry" will be published in November.
The book will be edited by Grateful Dead biographer Dennis McNally. The interviews range from Garcia's memories of childhood to his thoughts on drugs, songwriting and politics.

Looking forward to it!

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2015/06/23/3913570/book-of-jerry-garcia-interviews.html#storylink=cpy

Creative Destruction

Reminder of the state of my copy of McNally 2002 as of 3/6/2011, under heading "is it possible to love books too much?"

Also in the frame: papers, printer, CD Will The Circle Be Unbroken, CD The Jerry Garcia Collection, Vol. 1: Legion of Mary, Legion Of Mary (Rhino Records R2 74692, August 2005), a transistor radio, miscellanea.

The McNally-Arnold Jerry Garcia List

It's very meta, but I do have a lot to say about The List Tradition which I hope to get to. Let me just point out something that I think is interesting: The Garcia stuff on the typescript McNally-Arnold Jerry Garcia List (McNally and Arnold, ND), which became the Garcia list in Deadbase IX, entered the ether through The Jerry Site, and lives still at Jerrybase) derived from the same ur-source as the Soto-Arnold GD List, union gig contracts.

Working musicians pretty much have to join the American Federation of Musicians, AFM Local No. 6 in San Francisco, (previously?) at 116 Ninth Street, just a few blocks off Market. Every gig or session played by a union member has to be filed with the union. These union contracts were seemingly systematically kept by the GD organization. Don't want any trouble with the union, I guess. Anyway, these union contracts, held in GD/Garcia business files, were the basis for both Lists. I don't know whether Janet Soto also compiled the Garcia list, but I sure would like to know whom we have to thank for the bounty of data that we have so long enjoyed around Garcia On The Side!

Quick meta, just can't avoid it: gotta love how modern bureaucratic organizations document themselves; indeed, it's almost redundant to point it out.

Arnold, Corry. 2012. The Janet Soto List Manuscript Tradition

The Janet Soto List Manuscript Tradition

By Corry Arnold

For some reason that is unknown to me, GDP employee Janet Soto made a typewritten list of every Grateful Dead performance from January 1, 1970 to December 31, 1980. I have no idea why this list was created, but I'm glad it was. I received my copy in early 1981 (thank you Mike N), as it was being Xeroxed and circulated amongst the taper types who had suddenly found a Rosetta Stone. The source of the list appeared to be band contracts. The list seems to have been largely complete, with a few exceptions:

• last minute cancellations and additions were sometimes missing (or added)
• Bay Area shows from the early 1970s, BGP included, were missing

I assumed that the missing Bay Area shows were because the Dead had a different contractual arrangement with Bill Graham, at least up through the early 70s. This was generally confirmed by Dennis McNally in the mid-80s. He said that for a long time, while the Dead always had some sort of agreement with Graham (both entities were professionals after all), the specific contracts were a lot simpler, as both sides knew what was expected in terms of contract riders, etc. This might explain why the BGP agreements were presumably not in the same file drawer as the other band performance contracts. I assume that one reason for the absence of pre-1970 shows was a paucity of contracts, but I also suspect there was some reason for the list that had a specific timeframe, like tax records or something like that.

I immediately set about updating and correcting the Soto list. So did everyone else who actually cared about what they wrote on the index cards to their cassette tapes. The Soto list was the starting point to all the Grateful Dead performance lists that were subsequently promulgated: the list in Paul Grushkin's Book Of The Deadheads (ca. '83, which I think was actually McNally's list) a list produced by John Dwork that circulated for a while and finally the list that became Deadbase I in 1987. Information about Grateful Dead shows prior to 1970 was initially sketchy and often wrong because there was no Soto list to begin from; the community had to piece together the entire sixties list one show at a time. For my own part, as I added, subtracted and corrected information to and from the Soto list, I eventually started re-typing the list (yes, on a typewriter). Since typing was time consuming, I would handwrite other changes in pencil, since I might erase them, until I felt it was worth the effort to retype the pages. As a result of my re-typing, I no longer have the first several pages of the original Soto list, as I replaced them with my own list.

Once I had the Soto list in my possession, I immediately decided to keep it up. As a result, every time I called the Grateful Dead Hot Line (415-457-6388) to see if any new Grateful Dead shows were advertised, I would write down whatever was being announced, whether the show was in Syracuse or San Rafael. More or less on a whim, I started writing down all the other shows being announced, whether for the Jerry Garcia Band, Robert Hunter, Mickey Hart, Bob Weir or anyone else. At the same time, I noticed that many Bay Area shows by Grateful Dead spinoffs were not listed on the Hot Line, so any time I saw a Grateful Dead related show advertised in the Bay Area, usually in the San Francisco Chronicle Sunday Datebook (the "Pink Section") or BAM, I wrote that down too. As a result, I had an extensive if not quite complete list of Jerry Garcia shows as well as all the other members' spinoff bands from January 1981 onwards. Soon I started calling the Hot Line every week or so, just to keep up my lists.

Within a year or so, despite the absence of an internet thingy, it was clear to me that I wasn't the only person trying to update the Soto list. I was very scrupulous about my own copy, but I considered it essentially for my own use. Since I hadn't met anyone making any kind of effort to track Garcia dates (much less Weir or anyone else in the band), I had an inkling that I had better do a good job of it, since it appeared that maybe no one else was doing it. As a result, as I accumulated information about Jerry Garcia Band performances, I typed them up in a facsimile of the Soto list. My one significant departure from the Soto list was that I would put the list of band members in the group as a header--they were usually announced on the Hot Line list--and insert a new header when the band members changed. Obviously, this wasn't necessary for the Grateful Dead since their membership was considerably more stable. At the end of each year, I would type up my list of Garcia Band shows for the year. I then did the same for Bob Weir, Robert Hunter, Mickey Hart and so on. If I learned about another date, or an opening act, or a different drummer, I would write it in pencil (because it might change), but the lists were basically fixed at the end of the year. I think that I typed them up when I had at least a page's worth of material, but it was more or less annual, although not exactly.

As part of my recognition that no one seemed to be collecting dates for Garcia or any of the spinoffs, I started to write down dates prior to 1981 for any Garcia Band, Garcia-Saunders, Kingfish or any other tape, or any time I found a poster or old advertisement. This was rather scattered, but it was better than nothing. I did fairly well with late 1980, since there will still hard copy sources laying around (literally--probably in my room) but before that it was kind of random.

Cut to about 1984. By a chain of events I no longer recall, I was in touch with Blair Jackson (I had probably sent a letter to the Golden Road). Through Blair, I met Dick Latvala and Dennis McNally. McNally at the time was the official Grateful Dead Historian, but he was working for Bill Graham Presents on cataloging the BGP Archive. Dennis was great, as I was just some nobody, but he was incredibly nice to me. About the second time we met--possibly the last, I don't recall--Dennis gave me his own extensive Jerry Garcia list. This was a byproduct of his research into the Grateful Dead, but I think he was discovering that chronicling the Grateful Dead was an impossible task, so he was simply passing on trying to do Garcia as well. As a result of Dennis's research--which was a great list, but did not have specific sources--I interpolated his information into my sketchy pre-1981 data, and then I had a kind of working Jerry Garcia list.

Cut to the early 1990s. In late 1985, I had started a job that would consume me for the next 15 years, and my life changed in many ways. I was as big a music fan as ever, but work was so self-enveloping that I generally only talked about music with people I worked with. Although I continued calling the Hot Line and writing down dates from the Pink Section, it was a kind of solitary activity. I had let all my nascent Grateful Dead contacts, like Blair Jackson, Dennis McNally and Dick Latvala, slide away. Nonetheless, when Deadbase had come out in 1987, I was as thrilled as anyone. The Soto list was one thing, but here was a performance list complete with songlists to boot--wow! At some point, I wrote Deadbase a letter with some bits and pieces about dates and venues, which was my area of expertise. I was in some kind of correspondence with Stu Nixon in New England, but remember this wasn't email--we probably exchanged a letter a year or something. At some point, probably around 1992, Stu Nixon called me. I think I had said in some letter that I had a list of Garcia shows, and I think Stu was in touch with Blair, who had presumably confirmed that I was linear (in late 80s Deadhead world, this was a more crucial question than it might appear today).

Anyway, Stu Nixon called me and said they were planning to introduce a "GarciaBase" and maybe a "WeirBase" into the next edition of Deadbase, and asked me what I had to offer. I don't know what he was expecting, but I suspect he was pretty surprised when I told him I had a list of every Garcia show from 1981 onwards, a lot of them before that, and every Weir show from 1981 as well. Plus they were typed and mostly legible. Now, Stu's thing was Setlists, and I don't do setlists, so I couldn't help him there, but I gave him a baseline for Garcia and Weir from 1981 onwards, and thanks to McNally and some of my own work I had a pretty good taste of the Garcia 70s as well. Stu and his co-editors did a great job editing in all the setlists that were floating around from tapes and reviews and other sources, but the core list of Garcia dates was mine, including the format where the band iterations have their own paragraphs. All the mistakes were mine, too.

The Jerry Site built its original core list on the GarciaBase list from Deadbase IX, and replicated the process. This is why I'm so confident in rejecting or correcting TJS info when it says "Deadbase lists such and such" as the only source--that's me, and I can see through many of my own blind spots as more information comes to light. Conversely, if there's some information about bandmembers, like Gaylord Birch playing drums, its because I wrote it down when it was on the taped message of the Grateful Dead Hot Line, so I don't wonder about the provenance of the information.