Green Green Grass Of Home

This show (GD 5/31/69) is a maxed-out masterpiece. Mamma mia. Play it loud!
Random tape archaeology: this is shnid-76, very early in the shn game.

https://goo.gl/maps/T4udv2YuEAR2
44.0417292,-123.0763108

! Corry: "when the Dead headlined McArthur Court on May 31, 1969, it was one of the biggest rooms that they had headlined up until that time. The show appears to have been scheduled for the track stadium (Hayward Field) and moved indoors, but in any case it was a sign of the Dead's status in Oregon."

! ad: Oregon Daily Emerald, May 28, 1969, p. unk, via URL http://home.earthlink.net/~deadtraders/images/from_oregon/HAYWARD.JPG;

! Corry: Arnold, Corry. 2011. Grateful Dead Pac-10 Home Court Analysis. Lost Live Dead, February 15, URL http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2011/02/grateful-dead-pac-10-home-court.html, accessed 5/31/2016.


! song: Green Green Grass Of Home
Lyrics: Curly Putman
Music: Curly Putman
http://www.whitegum.com/~acsa/songfile/GREENGRS.HTM
http://www.deaddisc.com/songs/Green_Green_Grass_Of_Home.htm.  5/31/69 version struck me as a real Garcia masterpiece. He achieved that sound he was searching for quite nicely, thankyouverymuch (as Babbs might say). Weir sings it well - he had a great memory for these country tunes, and he "Bobby Ace" was stepping forward for the first time right in this period. He sounds great. Garcia's steel is getting "that sound" that you want from the steel, Ralph Mooney and Tom Brumley's sounds, for starters.

Fluent Guitar and Dissonant Vocals: JGB at Silva Concert Hall, Hult Center for the Performing Arts, Eugene, OR - December 5, 1984

Drummer David Kemper's laminate from the "1984 Winter Northwest Tour" of the JGB, December 5-8, 1984.

LN jg1984-12-05.jgb.s2.aud.79642.flac1644

I have been engaging this little mini-tour undertaken by the JGB in early December 1984 as a way to reflect on Garcia's Rock Bottom. I come away consistently impressed with his guitar playing and mortified by his singing.

12/6/84 listening notes;
12/7/84 listening notes.

The first night of the "tour", Silva Concert Hall in Eugene, is, as of this writing, only represented by a good aud of set II - if you have set I on tape, please consider having it digitized and circulated. It's utterly characteristic of the others. I absolutely love this "Dear Prudence", containing everything that was really special about JGB #21b, THE Jerry Garcia Band - tight players building strong scaffolding and Garcia clambering around like a Bay Bridge welder. But it also exemplifies, in particular in two clammy spots that I mark for reference, Garcia's inexcusably bad vocals during the period. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.

Random note about the venue: it apparently opened in 1982, and it's one of the rare rooms that Grateful Dead and Garcia Band played more or less contemporaneously, with the following Jerry sightings per JGBP:

8/29/83 Grateful Dead
8/30/83 Grateful Dead
8/31/83 Grateful Dead
1/16/84 Jerry Garcia Band
5/6/84 Grateful Dead
5/7/84 Grateful Dead
5/8/84 Grateful Dead
12/5/84 Jerry Garcia Band

Here's a broader post on venues played by both GD and a Garcia side operation.

Note the little "filler" on the end of this fileset, Garcia's birth control PSA, using tape of him talking about parenting that I have heard, I believe from somewhere on GDAO. I do miss tape filler.

Jerry Garcia Band
Silva Concert Hall, Hult Center for the Performing Arts
7th and Willamette
Eugene, OR 97401
December 5, 1984 (Wednesday) - 7 PM
s2 aud shnid-79642

--fileset (7 tracks, 48:31)--

--set II (6 tracks, 47:35)--
s2t01. crowd and tuning [0:31]
s2t02. I'll Take A Melody [12:39] [0:08]
s2t03. Get Out Of My Life Woman [8:57] [0:06] %
s2t04. Dear Prudence [12:39] ->
s2t05. Gomorrah [5:57] ->
s2t06. Midnight // Moonlight [6:#31] (1) [0:07]

--filler (1 track, 0:56)--
s1t07. Jerry's PSA for birth control [0:56]

! ACT1: Jerry Garcia Band #21b
! lineup: Jerry Garcia - el-g, vocals;
! lineup: John Kahn - el-b;
! lineup: Melvin Seals - organ;
! lineup: David Kemper - drums;
! lineup: Jacklyn LaBranch - vocals;
! lineup: Gloria Jones - vocals.

JGMF:

! Recording: symbols: % = recording discontinuity; / = clipped song; // = cut song; ... = fade in/out; # = truncated timing; [ ] = 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 [x:xx] 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/19841205-01

! db: http://etreedb.org/shn/79642 (this fileset).

! map: https://goo.gl/maps/V3uHA

! venue: http://jerrygarciasbrokendownpalaces.blogspot.com/2012/07/silva-concert-hall-hult-center-for.html

! band: http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2012/01/jerry-garcia-band-personnel-1975-1995.html.  #21b: THE Jerry Garcia Band.

! seealso: listening notes from 12/6/84 (http://jgmf.blogspot.com/2014/03/ln-jg1984-12-06jgbs1s2paud.html) and 12/7/84 (http://jgmf.blogspot.com/2014/03/ln-jg1984-12-07jgballaud.html)

! historical: Michael Hedges opened. Note that as of 3/24/2015 there is no recording of set I known to me.

! P: Overall, a perfect microcosm of the period. Some amazingly fluent guitar playing alongside occasionally cringeworthily dissonant singing.

! R: Source: AUD > ? > C > Sony TC-D5M > Realtek AC97 > Soundforge > CD-Wave > TLH v.1.0.0.72 (for SBE-OK, FLAC compression & checksums) > FLAC, October 2006 by Andrew F.

! R: seeder notes: "There's a cut (tape flip) at the start of Midnight Moonlight.  Soundforge was used to adjust levels, correct the pitch, and to make fades. THANKS to Jeff Harrison and Jake Feinberg for the tape. ENJOY!"

! R: overall, this is a totally pleasant tape. Love how it picks up John.

! P: s2t02 ITAM Mule is pulling some big fat bass strings during ITAM. Vocal troubles, not all the way to a clam, on "I understand | how the old fisherman" around 4:15. I have heard worse.

! P: s2t03 GOOMLW Garcia is croaking

! P: s2t04 DP horrible vocals. One of the things I love about how they did this song in this period is exemplified from about 5. They have run through the first hunk of the song, and now Garcia wants to play a lot of scales, spend maybe 3-4-5 minutes chasing Dear Prudence around with a good, tight band. John sounds very engaged and good, keys are not overcrowded, Kemper is metronomic. JGB #21b on Dear Prudence at a nice upbeat tempo with clarion-Jerry is playing guitar ... it's good. Melvin is right there late 5 so Jerry can start double-timing from 8 - very nice scaffolding by Melvin, and Jerry is make good use of it, fast parcour over, under, around, and through. At 9, he starts stretching and pulling instead. It's amazing how fluently his playing, given priors about the timeframe. The ending catches a few players by surprise, but they are quick to fall in, and then we drop into a nice Gomorrah. The vocals are rough, of course.

! P: s2t05 Gomorrah: OK, if you want to hear what it means to hit a vocal clam, listen to the first vocals here, maybe late 20 second range. I put this here as a marker, but I strongly discourage you from actually checking out what I mean. There would be no winners. (BTW, there's another s2t06 @ 5:24.)

! R: s2t06 Mid Moon quick tape flip (good job, taper!) at start of song, not much missing.

! s2t06 (1) JG: "Thanks a lot. See y'all later on."

! s2t07 I have heard this Garcia text before, I think it's one of the interviews at GDAO.

May 5, 1982 should be June 5, 1982

Perhaps the most bootlegged Garcia-on-the-side gig is acoustic Garcia and Kahn, attributed as the Oregon State Penitentiary, 2575 Center St. NE, Salem, OR 97301, May 5, 1982 [JGC | JGBP | map | etree showid-48429] Lots of these have been liberated into freely-circulating lossless formats (shnid-4423, shnid-11463, shnid-17900), which are all pretty much the same source tape, as far as I can tell. It's a clean if overloaded soundboard recording, probably straight from a cassette master.

I will try as much as possible to leave aside all of the other interesting questions around this show, most important of which is how, for whom, by what artifice is it that Garcia came to be playing Oregon's maximum security prison in 1982? Now that is a story I'd like to hear told.

update: the story can now be told, and while it's interesting, it's not as interesting as Garcia coming in to help his dealer. A guy named Steve Stilling had been serving time in the OSP since 1974 for armed robbery, among other things (Cowan 19820725). A career criminal (he was arrested for armed robbery again less than six months after a December '83 parole, and I gather that he has recently been an unwilling guest of the great state of Colorado), he spent the early 1980s as a prison impresario, booking dozens of acts, including Garcia. /update

Because I obsess about dates, it's important to me to establish that the bootleggers, whomever they were --an interesting question in its own right-- misdated the gig. The Garcia-Kahn prison gig was not held on May 5, 1982, but on June 5, 1982. I first discovered this in an out-of-place folder in the amazing Grateful Dead Archive in the Special Collections and Archives at the McHenry Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I have since found independent confirmation, an expost report  noting the Garcia-Kahn prison show "last week", published on June 11th, 1982 (Cowan 19820611). So this is 100% confirmed at this point.

As far as I know, the only data in support of the current listing derive from the bootleg. There are no known pictures or audience recordings. update: there is a picture, in a newspaper (Kadel 1982). Naturally enough there are no tickets, handbills, bright posters or happy memories of hippies and hard-timers twirling together under strobified fluorescents. The Oregon State Penitentiary is the kind of place into but not out of which one checks, like the Hotel California or a Glade Roach Motel. Its colorful history as a maximum security lockup reaches back to territorial days, includes a long rogues' gallery of freaky frontier criminals, and gave birth to Warden J.C. Gardner's 1866 patented Gardner Shackle, a.k.a. the "Oregon Boot", consisting "of a heavy iron band that locked around one ankle [which] kept the inmate off balance and deprived him of agility," thwarting escapes into the Oregon wilderness. There have been and probably are some hardcore, toothless, violent motherfuckers in there.

Yet somehow, bootleggers would like us to believe, Garcia played a gig there on May 5, 1982. It has some verisimilitude, of course: Garcia is the kind of guy who might know the kind of guy doing time in the Oregon State Pen, maybe owe or just like to do him a favor. The Oregon node of Garcia's social network is old, deep and strong, dripping in the ancient acid of La Honda and the Kesey crew, the Dead's Oregon roadies (lots of folks from rough and ready Pendleton), Mountain Girl (who lived there after she and Jerry broke up big in 1976-1977) and so forth. Maybe it's overdetermined that Garcia would play there! Anyway, it's too crazy to make up, but, what can I say, I am a skeptic and it never felt quite right.

Turns out that, as they are wont to be, the bootleggers were half-right. Garcia and Kahn did play this gig, but not on May 5^th. It happened on June 5^th.

June 5^th makes logistical sense, insofar as sense has anything to do with it -- Jerry and John were undertaking an odd little road trip which someone in the Garcia office had the cheek to call, with daring high modern hubris, the "Northwest Acoustic Tour". The trip is known to have included a pair of Friday night shows in Portland (at the evocatively-named Neighbors of Woodcraft [wiki]) and Saturday and Sunday gigs in the South Eugene High School Auditorium, as far as I know Garcia’s final high school gigs. (JGC commenter Eric Blond says there were two Eugene shows on 6/5, which would make this a very rare three-show day for Our Hero.) All of this already feels rather improbable, but strange things happen when Keseys are involved, as I seem to recall they were with the Eugene shows, something about one of the family youngsters if I recall correctly. (A preview notes that tickets will be available not only at local record stores and at the U of O student union, but also at Springfield Creamery.)

For example, one “Reverend Chumleigh” opened the Friday night shows in Portland and recalls the following (from a source that I can’t seem to put my finger on):

My opening performance for the Garcia solo tour … was at the Woodsmans hall in Portland, on the third floor. There was a Mormon wedding one floor below us. Kesey was NOT there. There were two shows both two hours late, but luckily for the crowd waiting outside there was a liquor store on the corner. Roberto Morganti, an incredible unibrow juggler, was to do five minutes, Moz Wright, sword swallower/fire breather was to do five minutes, and I was to do 45 minutes. It all went horribly wrong because no one producing the show cared about anything but Garcia, who remained in hiding ... We didn't actually see him except on stage for the whole tour. Opening night, a very scary guy jumped up on stage and acted in a threatening manner despite Garcia's large Gorilla Biker bodyguard who just let him do it. My first words to him (the guy who jumped on stage) was "Full moon tonight, isn't it?" (and it was). He grew angry, and I said "You're lucky I'm not Jerry Garcia because you'd be dead by now, and not grateful". He advanced on me and I kept beseeching the bodyguard who was standing at the foot of the stage to do something, and he didn't, so I picked up my brass goose head walking stick and began to do my Kindo exercises with it and the guy backed off and left the stage. I was to put it mildly, fucking furious.

Anyway, there in the Archives, in a folder in a box in the Grateful Dead Archives, is a little set of documents around the “Northwest Acoustic Tour”, and there it shows the Oregon State Pen gig, 12-2 on Saturday the 5^th, then an hour drive south to Eugene for the evening show or shows. If there were still a Jerry Site, I’d update it, but, alas – instead, I have made the change in my spreadsheet, and suggest you do the same.

REFERENCES:

! ref: Cowan, Ron. 19820611. Elsinore 'sequel' casts Moyer in catbird's seat. Statesman-Journal (Salem, OR), June 11, 1982, p. 10D.

! ref: Cowan, Ron. 19820725. Inmate brings showbiz to prison. Statesman-Journal (Salem, OR), July 25, 1982, p. 3E.

! ref: "OSP Parolee Arrested," Statesman-Journal (Salem, OR), April 26, 1984, p. 3B.

! ref: "Grateful Dead leader to play this weekend," Eugene Register-Guard, June 3, 1982, p. 5D.

! ref: Grateful Dead Archive, MS332, Business Papers, Second Accrual (preliminary), Box 1008.

! Jerrybase: https://jerrybase.com/events/19820604-01, https://jerrybase.com/events/19820604-02, https://jerrybase.com/events/19820605-01, https://jerrybase.com/events/19820605-02, https://jerrybase.com/events/19820605-03, https://jerrybase.com/events/19820606-01

! JGC: http://jerrygarcia.com/show/1982-06-04-neighbors-of-woodcraft-portland-or/

! JGC: http://jerrygarcia.com/show/1982-06-04-neighbors-of-woodcraft-portland-or-2/

! JGC: http://jerrygarcia.com/show/1982-06-05-auditorium-south-eugene-high-school-eugene-or/

! JGC: http://jerrygarcia.com/show/1982-06-06-auditorium-south-eugene-high-school-eugene-or/

! ref: images of the 6/5/82 concert program can be found via URL http://home.earthlink.net/~deadtraders/South_Eugene.htm.

Review of Legion of Mary 12/15/74 EMU Ballroom

With the release of this show, thought I'd post the review that I have in my collection. The release sounds fantastic, and I am loving it so far. If I had time to blog, I'd analyze the liner notes and the music and the gigs and all that. But, no time. Deaddisc has an entry up.

Darryl Norsen wrote the liner notes, a version of which appears online at http://www.aquariumdrunkard.com/2013/10/15/legion-of-mary-december-14-15-1974-northwest-tour/. The booklet looks nice, but the liner notes are horrifically edited, with numerous grammatical errors. Oh well.

Anyway, here's the review:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7TAYus5LRzuelZJUmhORzNmYUk/edit?usp=sharing

Lee, Greg. 1975. One of the best shows ever. Oregon Daily Emerald, January 9, 1975, p. 9.