Dawn of the NRPS

I am sure you have already pre-ordered, as I just did, but just in case, here's link to the upcoming Owsley Stanley Foundation (OSF) release called "Dawn of the New Riders of the Purple Sage". I cannot freaking wait to hear this!

https://owsleystanleyfoundation.org/bears-sonic-journals/dawn-of-the-new-riders-of-the-purple-sage/

GD Fillmore West April 9, 1970

https://archive.org/details/gd1970-04-09.137104.aud.cousinit.flac16/gd1970-04-09-d2t03.flac

What a hottie this Good Lovin' jam is!

These shows are only represented in imperfect audience tapes, but they are crucial documents from a period relatively underrepresented on soundboard tape. 7/12/70 at the Fillmore East is another one of these shows that has gotten too little attention because of soundboard snobbery. For this period, which rages, audience tapes are mostly all we have.

! R: Seeder cousinit provides these notes: "I believe this is a different AUD version compared to [Harry] Ely's master. An example is how Katie Mae differs (to me) in the way the guitar is captured. In the Ely version the guitar can barely be heard. This version has the guitar much more prominent."

! P: seeder notes: The Other One is a absolute monster ..."

This whole show just sizzles, and in all kinds of different ways. Pigpen shines, fronting one of the world's great electric backing band on "It's A Man's, Man's, Man's, Man's, Man's World," and feeling his solo acoustic country blues with "Katie Mae", who walks around "like she got oil wells in her back yard."

"Cowboy Song" is a true oddity. No-one seems entirely sure that it's David Bromberg, and perhaps feel it's not him at all? I wonder if this could have been not the folkie but that gentleman of the same name who wrote Guitar Player's Garcia feature in 1971? Often these music journalists did some picking (see the GPI Guitar Jam in whatever year that was). It might just be spurious, someone's wild guess.

Looking forward to hearing this Other One.

Altamont Dreams

I have so little time for this hobby these days. I have fallen way behind on my reading, but I really look forward to reading Joel Selvin's Altamont, among other things.

With that in mind, I did want to put down this little tidbit I found in the Grateful Dead Archive at UCSC concerning the December 4-7, 1969 Dead shows at Fillmore West (1). I can't remember if there are additional pages of this in the folder, but there's a handwritten page which looks basically to be a handwritten (not sure by whom - Lenny? Rock?) contract addendum, probably drafted early December sometime.

Condition. In the event of a free concert, it is agreed that the members of the Grateful Dead and the members of Fillmore West families will participate in said concert and hereby forego the Saturday evening [12/6] performance at the Fillmore West. The Grateful Dead will forego $2,000 - and no comps for Saturday nite.

Condition. Because of the extraordinary circumstances surrounding this coming weekend and the presence of the Rolling Stones, Terry Reid parties -- also the homecoming of the Jeff Plane -- it is hereby requested that the promoter provide the Grateful Dead 75 more comps.

Request. That in the event of a free concert, the Grateful Dead and the Rolling Stones hereby request permission to use the premises of Fillmore West Saturday nite for a private, by invite only party -- the most memorable evening in San Francisco ballroom history!!

Ahhhh, what might have been!

REFERENCE:
(1) Grateful Dead Archive, Special Collections, UC Santa Cruz, ms 332 Series 2: Business, Box 2, Folder "Contracts - Fillmore West, December 4-7, 1969 - Production".

GD: August 19, 1970 at the Fillmore West

! R: field recordist: Gene Taback

! R: field recording gear: Sony TC-124 with Sony stereo mic
! R: transfer: Master/1st generation cassettes played back on Nakamichi Dragon > Digital Audio Labs Card Deluxe soundcard (96Mhz/24 bit)> HD.

My goodness, I love love love love love this acoustic set. The recording really captures a feeling.

"How Long Blues" spinning now, very nice.

Here are Jim Powell's typically awesome acoustic set notes, from Deadlists:

David Nelson plays mandolin on Friend Of The Devil, Dark Hollow, Tell It To Me, Rosalie McFall, Cold Jordan and Swing Low. Pigpen plays piano on How Long Blues, Candyman, Ripple, Truckin', and New Speedway. There's a hint of harmonica at the beginning of Ripple; it seems too discreet to be Pigpen's. Jerry plays electric guitar on Cumberland and New Speedway while Bobby continues acoustic. Marmaduke provides bass vocal accompaniment on Cold Jordan and Swing Low. It seems probable that this set as listed is missing a tune from Pigpen (compare Operator the previous night). This set was preceded starting at 8:00 by an unbilled opening set from a bluegrass vocals quartet, possibly the Rowan Bros.

see also: "GD: August 17, 1970, Fillmore West, San Francisco, CA", with some setlist Reconstruction. Did my conjectures there make it into Deadbase 50, BTW?

Just Play

Going through some scratched up old CDs, I found a copy of the Crosby, Stills and Nash release Carry On (Atlantic 7567804872, 2006). Entering some dates to trace Croz's whereabouts in the various periods in which he frequented the Garciaverse (most intensely, fall 1969-fall 1971 and again March-September 1975), I am reminded that Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's "Ohio" was released as a single on June 4, 1970 [see also wiki].

Passing thought that Garcia could never have dropped a true protest song. On June 4, 1970, he played an amazing night of acoustic tunes (including two gospel numbers), country music on pedal steel guitar, and loud electric rock and blues.

Enjoy this incredible audience recording by Gerry Olsen (shnid-123798) that will put you into the comfy-as-home Fillmore West on a Thursday night. Yeah, "Darkness, Darkness", but sometimes it's better just to play.

 

JGMS: Matrix, May 11-12, 1971

There is a great half-hour tape labeled as Garcia-Saunders at the Matrix, May 11, 1971. I had always thought it was a little suspect, as I had never seen any other corroborating information, though it is listed at the Chicken's Matrix List.

This calendar listing from the San Francisco Chronicle (May 10, 1971, p. 45) not only puts JGMS at Matrix on Tuesday, May 11, but also Wednesday, May 12 - a new show to The List.

For color, I have been entering most everything I come across for 660 Great Highway. In 1971, I track Keystone Korner listings, since Freddie was still running it. I have also been entering the Tuesday auditions at Fillmore West whenever I find them - they have historically been absent from the Chicken's Fillmore West List, which originated in posters (of which there were none for the auditions). See Corry and Ross's lists of Tuesday Fillmore auditions for 1968-69 and 1970-71 for what I think is a more updated take on all of that.

No, I don't know who titular Jack is. I assume it's related to the SF mayoral elections, as many benefits seem to have been held at Friends and Relations. I assume based on today's electoral calendars that these were primaries, to select party candidates for the ca. November elections, but I don't know that.

GD/NRPS: May 28, 1971, Fillmore West, San Francisco, CA (CANCELED)

In an earlier post I discussed the infamous May 29, 1971 Grateful Dead show at Winterland at which a large number of people reacted adversely to being dosed.

As Corry noted in comments, the Grateful Dead and New Riders of the Purple Sage show scheduled for the night before (May 28, 1971) was canceled due to Jerry Garcia being ill. It was apparently rescheduled for May 30, 1971.

The amazing Gary L. Jackson is having his massive personal archive of SF-related music stuff scanned and shared by "Strength N. Numbers" at Facebook. This includes his personal diaries, which are really quite wonderful.  Anyway, here's the entry for May 28, 1971:

I only post this because, well, I like it. And also because it seems like things just weren't going fantastically well right around that time in the Bill Graham enterprise. So much so that the Winterland dosing incident is discussed in contemporary news pieces (some of which were pasted into, and are thus now reproduced in, Gary's diary) as a contributing factor to Graham's seemingly abrupt decision to close the Fillmore West.

Lots of people presumably know lots about this, of course, but I just thought it was worth dropping this part of the picture onto the canvas.

GD: August 17, 1970, Fillmore West, San Francisco, CA

I am sure this has been gone over many, many times over the years. I imagine that in the days before ubiquitous tapes and information the Playboy article "Grateful Dead I Have Known" by Ed McClanahan (1) was probably scrutinized very closely, like some Rosetta Stone capable of unlocking the 1970-era GD. That it was published in the national and widely available and read (or, "read" -- tee hee) magazine makes it even more likely that people would have analyzed it. But I think we can get more out of it than what I have found, so at the risk of reinventing the wheel I am going to plough ahead.

As Deadlists notes, this is definitely written in Beat style and plays fast and loose with things like chronology (as befits the Prankster author, I guess). Yet it's reasonably clear from the context of the article that the specific show that is discussed throughout the article is August 17, 1970 at the Fillmore West. I argue that we should be confident enough in this that we should use information from the article to fill out the Grateful Dead setlist from this show along the lines laid out below.

I'll proceed in three parts. First, I'll discuss why we should think of the show detailed by McClanahan as 8/17/70. Second, I'll consider the countervailing evidence. Third, I'll lay out a more complete setlist than is presently available, based on McClanahan 1972.

1) Arguments for 8/17/70: four observations and an upshot.

First, the show was at the Fillmore West.

Second, it was billed as "An Evening With the Grateful Dead" and followed the three-set structure of that format: acoustic Dead, New Riders, electric Dead. Deadlists places the beginning of this format (among circulating tapes) as May 1970.

Third, McClanahan notes that the show he discusses will be followed by two more: "reworking my notes on last night's three sets at the Fillmore ... Jerry played all three sets ... and will do the same tonight and again tomorrow night." I don't think he explicitly says this is only a three-show run, but that's what I am inferring.

Fourth, partly based on this, the evidence points in favor of this being the August 1970 run at Fillmore West. Recall that the Grateful Dead played four stands at the Fillmore West in 1970: February 5-6-7-8; April 9-10-11-12; June 4-5-6-7; August 17-18-19.

We can rule out the February and April runs because they didn't follow the "Evening With ..." format.

The June shows can't be ruled out with 100% confidence, but I see three reasons that cut against this run: 1) setlists McLanahan describes don't match setlists from the June '70 shows; 2) McLanahan (per point #3 above) seems to be referring to a three-night stand, while the June run is four nights; 3) he references songs from Workingman's Dead, which wouldn't be released until later in the month. (True, he could be looking back from the perspective of what he knew when writing the article, but from the context he seems to be speaking from the perspective of his contemporary notebook.) #1 is probably most important, and it's where I am at greatest risk of being infected by material outside the article (e.g., Deadlists).

The upshot is this: in order to think that we are in the realm of a specific, coherent show, we have to trust a Prankster. On this score, I don't doubt the utility of McClanahan's account as much as Deadlists seems to. Here's what Deadlists says:

He doesn't get all the details right (or necessarily mean to -- he doesn't aim to publish a setlist) and it's definitely self-indulgent writing in the manner of Hunter Thompson & Tom Wolfe, but he does catch a hint of the flavor of the venue and the event, if from a tourist's point of view.

I think it's actually much more precise than that *on the particular issue of the setlist for a specific show*. McClanahan makes a point of saying that he is carefully noting the shows in his "Official Accuracy Reporter's Notebooks". He is very precise in describing the components of the "Evening With ..." format and in enumerating the songs that go with each part.

Finally, what he describes makes *perfect* sense based on what we know about setlist structures from the era.

Putting all that together, I believe that the show in question is the first show of the August 1970 "Evening with the Grateful Dead" run at the Fillmore West in San Francisco, i.e., August 17, 1970.

2) Counterarguments/evidence

First, McClanahan says "tonight's the first time the Dead have tried a strictly acoustic set on the Fillmore Audience." I don't believe this is true, for I believe that they did this during the June 1970 run. So this line would point in the direction of the June shows. But, again, we have reasonably complete setlists of the June 1970 GD sets, and what McClanahan describes isn't one of them.

Second, there is the issue of the tape that Deadlists (and thereby the LMA) associates with this date:



It is an 11-minute audience-recorded fragment that includes "Let Me In (83968's My Dad)," "Attics of My Life," and "Friend of the Devil". Deadlists points out that Teddy Goodbear and Dave Tamarkin both feel this is from an east coast show, and leaves this an open question. I have no view on this. If the material is from this show, it does not support the 8/17/70-as-described-by-McClanahan thesis, since none of these songs are from Workingman's Dead. (Though it is possible that McClanahan is trustworthy as far as he goes, but just incomplete, thus making room for these songs in the acoustic GD set he describes.)

Third is the issue of the Michael Lydon piece in Rolling Stone # 66 (2), which Deadlists ascribes to this show. The Lydon account is less complete than the McClanahan one, but they correlate nearly perfectly. There are two discrepancies, only one of which is particularly troubling. The first, minor one is that Lydon notes that David Nelson joins the acoustic Dead on mandolin about halfway through that set. McClanahan says nothing: let's just assume that he didn't notice. The second, more important, is that Lydon is quite specific in saying that the acoustic GD set begins with "Juggin'", i.e., Truckin', while McClanahan is quite specific in saying that it begins with Cumberland Blues and places Truckin' in the electric set. I can't reconcile this. I would be more inclined to buy that the show began with Truckin', or anyway that Truckin' was played acoustic rather than electric, but I honestly don't know. At this point it's just evidence contrary to my hypothesis.

Upshot: there is some evidence pointing away from my hypothesis, but on balance I'd say it is supported.

3) setlist as reconstructed from McClanahan 1972.

Anyway, I have gone too long already, so here's what I have come up with:

Acoustic Dead (Garcia, Weir, Lesh, Pigpen, Kreutzmann)
Cumberland Blues (opener)
New Speedway Boogie
Dire Wolf
Candyman
"two or three others, mostly from the Workingman's Dead album"
Swing Low Sweet Chariot (last song)

New Riders of the Purple Sage (Garcia, Torbert, Nelson, Hart, Marmaduke)
Six Days on the Road (opener)
Connection
Henry
Dirty Business
Last Lonely Eagle
a Marmaduke "yodeler"
Honkey Tonk Women (last song)

Electric GD (as GD acoustic, plus Hart)
Dancing in the Streets
Mama Tried
It's a Man's World
Not Fade Away
Truckin'
Uncle John's Band
Casey Jones ->
Turn on Your Lovelight

REFERENCES:
(1) McClanahan, Ed. 1972. Grateful Dead I Have Known. Playboy 19, 3 (March): 84-86, 108, 218-228.
(2) Lydon, Michael. 1970. An Evening with the Grateful Dead. Rolling Stone no. 66 (September 17, 1970), pp. 22-23.