The Bard on WLIR (Long Island), March 1978

http://tela.sugarmegs.org/_asxtela/asxcards/RobertHunter1978-03WLIRInterviewRoslynNY.html

Robert Hunter
1978-03-xx* Roslyn, New York unknown hotel (Hunter's room)
Interview by Denis McNamara for 92.7 WLIR-FM Garden City, New York (M?-FM)
"Sunday At 9:00" radio program -expanded edition- (3 shows/parts)
"A Conversation With Robert Hunter"

Not sure how close in time this was to the 3/12/78 Long Island show with JGB, NRPS, and Comfort (w/ Hunter). He says some interesting things about particular songs. I will just post annotations for the stuff that interests me.

2826 how about working for JG as a solo performer? Does that affect your writing?

2840 Sometimes. The best that can happen is that I'm just being prolific. some discussion

2915 first Garcia solo album related to the American Beauty and Workingmans field of material

3040 Deal is a reflection of what it's like to be in the rock and roll business

3815ff Bob Weir album

3916 CUTS a tune that I had been working on for years. I started working on it in London. ... a subterranean march of cats

4000 then there's a song which is my Orpheus it's called Reuben And Cérise which is one that I wrote several years ago for his second album Reflections but it just didn't around to gettin done until now. It's an Orpheic epic set in New Orleans ... he narrates this tune beautifully he recites it "her hair hung gently down" - "when Garcia sings this thing, it just brings goosebumps up my arm. It shivers up my spine - the full tragedy. I think we got Orpheus.

4213 record company stuff RH denies that it was economics. "I'll tell ya - I didn't give 'em the material. Here we were, all set up, ready to go, ready to rip, and if I had written albums like I've been writing ... it's just one of those situations where you get this nice snazzy Cadillac and the battery doesn't work for some reason. My streak ended. I don't know what it was. But ... WOTF I think has some excellent songs on it ... didn't grab [inaudible] exceedingly laid back, for one thing ... one of the problems was the choice of tempos on songs like Row Jimmy Row ... Stella Blue ... 1/2 Step ...

4418 first RH album Rum Runners I love the songs my singing is a little short of pathetic 4525

4610ff Blues for Allah 4646 people didn't take to it

4719 Crazy Fingers is his favorite from BFA

5320 JG wanted to do Tiger Rose!

5445 Tiger Rose

5515 "with Rum Runners, I didn't know [it would be released], and I don't think I could have sold that album if I didn't have my own record company, because it doesn't meet professional standards for recordings. It's quite dirty, in some respects."

5536 "Tiger Rose was produced by Garcia. ... I am afraid that the tracks sound more like Garcia music than mine, which may be good or bad. It has that mellowed out sound that he's into, whereas Rum Runners has this real rough-and-ready, which is my own style. ...Cruel White Water / Wild Bill

5652 excuse for TR vocals

5715 Mickey as anti-producer. Mickey Hart is the most wired cat you've ever met in your life. He has so many ideas, we had to like put em in a bag and tie it up and put em in the corner..... 5757 unsupressable ...

Twenty-Seven Performances in Twenty-Four Days: April 6-30, 1973

update 20240414: we now know that the Four Nights at the Boarding House were all two-show nights. Math may have to be updated. I am also dinging the uncertain 4/28 at the Plant, as recently discussed here. I now believe this was spurious.

Yup: I now count 27 performances in these 24 days. Edit title yet again.

update: commenter RoG has brought two more gigs to my attention, Wed-Thurs April 25-26 with JGMS at Keystone, so the title has changed from "Twenty-Two" to "Twenty-Four". All the more remarkable.

update2: oh yeah, I forget to mention another little detail from this period: on April 19th, the Dead decided to start up their own record label (Perry 1973, 50; Troy 1994, 155). Because Garcia didn't have enough going on.

I got to commune with more Chronicle microfilm a few days ago, and managed to spin through January 1, 1973 through August 10, 1973. I didn't gather every last listing, just too little time, but I gathered a bunch. These first eight months of 1973 yielded three New-to-The-List gigs, all Garcia-Saunders: April 10-11, 1973 at the Orphanage, and May 24, 1973 at the Keystone.

SFC19730409p45, listing for 4/10/73 JGMS at the Orphanage

SFC19730410p36, Datebook listing for 4/10/73 JGMS at the Orphanage

SFC19730411p41, listing for 4/11/73 JGMS at Orphanage

SFC19730523p58, listing for 5/24/73 JGMS at Keystone

Ah, Garcia, you amaze me.

The last entry lets us see that Jerry played with three bands, three different styles, over three days in May '73: Jerry and Merl on the 24th, plus already-known shows with Old And In The Way at Bimbo's on the 25th, and of course the Dead, with NRPS and Waylon Jennings also playing, at Kezar Stadium on the 26th.

Even more strikingly, these new-to-The-List April shows, Tuesday-Wednesday gigs, fill in a remarkable run from that month. I have already written about OAITW in Santa Barbara on the 12th, a four night run at the Boarding House right after these gigs, two with Merl playing inter alia black contemporary, and two with Dawg and Pete Rowan and the rest playing white roots music, taking a deep dive into Friday the 13th, which got a review in the Stanford Daily (Harlow 1973), and also some listening notes from the 16th. But with these shows, we see a truly insane month of shows once the Dead got back from the east coast.

April 6-8: JGMS at Keystone

April 9: off night (Monday - slacker)

April 10-11: JGMS at Orphanage

April 12: OAITW at the Granada in Santa Barbara (2 shows)

April 13-14: JGMS at Boarding House (4 shows)

April 15-16: OAITW at Boarding House (4 shows)

April 17: off night (Tuesday)

April 18: OAITW session at the Record Plant (uncertain)

April 19-21: OAITW at Lion's Share

April 21: afternoon FM broadcast live from the Record Plant

April 22: off night (Sunday)

April 23: OAITW at Orphanage

April 24: OAITW at the Inn of the Beginning

April 25-26: JGMS at Keystone off nights, only consecutive nights off since this run started, and since 3-4-5 after Dead flew back home

April 27-28: OAITW at Keystone

April 29: night off (Sunday)

April 30: OAITW at Orphanage

Now, there are a few uncertain dates in there. But if my reckoning is correct, and without counting thigh dubious 4/18 session in Sausailo, this is 272422 performances in 24 days, 

I note that Selvin referred to the Orphanage as a "cocaine speakeasy" (Selvin 1996, 37). This which might have come in handy given the unprecedentedly hectic pace of the month's musical pursuits.

On lead guitar and vocals, Mr. Jerry Garcia

Bill Graham:

Good evening. We welcome you, on behalf of the group. We should introduce ... We should thank United Artists and Mr. Ron Rakow. I should make it official. Mr. Rakow is the President of Round Records. He asked if I could be here this evening, and I said 'I'd like twelve dollars and fifty cents', which he paid me at the door, and we flipped double or nothing, and I won, and he wanted to flip again, so I'm being paid fifty dollars for being here. I want to thank him very much.

On the piano we have Mr. Keith Godchaux [electric piano] ... on the drums, on stage left, Mr. Mickey Hart [drums begin] ... on bass and vocals, Mr. Philip Lesh [bah-doomp-bah-doomp bah-doohhhom] ... on rhythm guitar and vocals, Mr. Bob Weir [Bob filligrees a little top knot] ... on the drums on stage right, Mr. Bill Kreutzmann [tss-ts-tss, tss-ts-tss] ... on the vocals Mrs. Donna Jean Godchaux ... on lead guitar and vocals, Mr. Jerry Garcia ... will you welcome, please, the Grateful Dead!

Update: Jesse Jarnow and I are on the same wavelength!

Reading Notes: Dupree 1974

Zoo World, January 31, 1974. "Cover photo captured by Mario Algaze the afternoon of a Leas Campbell presentation of the Grateful Dead at Curtis Hixon Hall in Tampa, Fla.", December 18 or 19, 1973.

A clean-shaven Jerry Garcia in Tampa, Florida, December 18 or 19, 1973. Photograph by Mario Algaze, published in Zoo World, January 31, 1974, p. 12.

Dupree, Tom. 1974. Grateful Dead: Hipper Than the Average Corporation. Zoo World, January 31, pp. 12-13.

The pictures are from Tampa. As the Thoughts On The Dead guy might say, Billy looks like he wants to kick punch some dicks. Anyway, Donna Jean was back home giving birth, and the band played two kickass shows December 18-19, 1973, really great.

The article draws from December 12th in Atlanta, meetings and interviews with band members, a few expost reax to the show. As the title implies, the main topic of discussion is Grateful Dead Records, and business matters (this appears to have been an industry paper based in Nashville, I should probably know that).

p. 12

booking firm: Out Of Town Tours

Dead inspired travel agency Fly By Night

"Garcia's country group Old And In The Way"

Sparky And The Ass-Bites From Hell

Weir interview

Meeting in the Regency Hyatt House Hotel, not where band is staying. Bob is there to sightsee the tony hotel's glass elevator, architectural emanation of American opulence, on the side of a newspaper interview downtown. Pull-quote paints picture of a wine-snobby Bobby, which is partly true but pretty unfair for a guy who has worked hard for fifty years despite probably sitting on a pile of family money (the Atherton house he grew up in alone would make quite an inheritance). In his seventies as I type this, tonight he's playing the second night of GD50 in Santa Clara.

Weir: the hippie thing was a good time, but we've moved on.

Record company: "the Dead organization picked a network of conventional distribution firms" to get the Wake of the Flood into the stores.

p. 13

Rock Scully is current road manager – when did Cutler leave the road?

Weir says they have reduced their risk by having a less diversified portfolio than most record companies. They don't have to pay for the 6 or 7 Donnie and the Doughnuts records that lose money. They have just the 1 GD record, which they have some idea can sell. "Any fears about the company's success in its initial stages have been quieted: the album is about to go gold, with RIAA certification expected to come in January, just about two months after release" (Dupree 1974, 13).

"The Dead organization … is hoping the LP will provide capital to bolster and expand other aspects of its operation" (Dupree 1974, 13). Interesting – note that at this early stage, no mention of Round Records, Round Reels, etc. I want to triangulate to when we get the first mention of the Round stable of shell corporations.

Ever the anti-businessmen, Rock and others say the album kind of sucks! (Dupree 1974, 13).

"I like it," Garcia says of Wake of the Flood. "I thought the material was very good. And there's no question that we were rushed on it. We did that to ourselves, really, by leaving ourselves too short off time. But, considering, I think it turned out pretty well" (12/12/73, Dupree 1974, 13).

JG: "Phonograph records are misleading … First of all, there's an artificial start and stop, the physical dimensions of an album. … There's only, what, 22 minutes to an album side, and our thoughts are much longer than that" (12/12/73, Dupree 1974, 13).

Odd moment 12/12/73 Garcia to say they now like big rooms because of the WOS: "If we couldn't get off in them, we wouldn't play big halls. But now we understand them about as well as we understood theaters when we were playing them" (Dupree 1974, 13).

Rock 12/12/73 says the band will take five days off, play the Florida gigs, then take a month or two off. "That's the whole band I'm talking about. Garcia has never taken a moment off since he picked up his first guitar. He is playing somewhere every night" (Dupree 1974, 13).

Keith speaks! 4^th column, p. 13 "I'm sure there are a lot of relatively honest ways of calling attention to yourself, as long as it's not hype. We are not in a position to be ripped off. We can't afford yet to give $3,000 to a local distributor and then have him forge newspaper receipts on us. Where we're at right now is, we have people on the inside we can trust. Now we're trying to find the people on the outside that we can feel the same way about. But with this operation, we're gonna be honest if we have to beat some ass."

"Or take it in the ass," Weir says. "We've done both. We just are trying to take some of the sleaze out of it, and say that things should be done in an above-board manner or not at all."

At the end of the interview, Keith "Godchaux drags on his cigarette, then leans over purposefully: 'I'm not averse to hustling, either'" (12/12/73, Dupree 1974, 13).