Setting Right What Was Rent Asunder

Or something like that.

Forgive me, for I have sinned. I have added entropy to the world. I am here to make amends.

When the Falanga-Menke Stash of Garcia-Saunders tapes from 1974 first came to me, one of them was labeled 8/14/74. I had what I thought was another recording of the show connected to Lou Tambakos. Somewhere along the line, in the first decade of the 21^st century, I decided that the correct date was 8/15/74. Because I was an early source of recording metadata, that dating has really stuck. I even wrote about it once because of a mystery trumpeter.

But I think I was wrong. I now believe that Wednesday, August 14, 1974 is the correct date of this mid-August 1974 JGMS show at the Great American Music Hall.

Three streams of evidence.

8/14/74 JGMS at GAMH has no contrary listings and these confirmatory ones: Bill Alex, "Around Town," San Francisco Examiner, August 9, 1974, p. 23; San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle Datebook, August 11, 1974, p. 4; Todd Tolces, "Out to Lunch," Berkeley Gazette, August 14, 1974, p. 11; San Francisco Examiner, August 14, 1974, p. 27.

8/15/74 JGMS at GAMH has no confirmatory listings and the following contrary listings: Hayward Daily Review, August 9, 1974, p. 40; Daily Independent Journal, August 9, 1974, p. 20; Bill Alex, "Around Town," San Francisco Examiner, August 9, 1974, p. 23; San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle Datebook, August 11, 1974, p. 4; Todd Tolces, "Out to Lunch," Berkeley Gazette, August 14, 1974, p. 11. All of these bill John Hartford at GAMH on this date.

Tapes: not only was the Falanga-Menke tape labeled 8/14/74, but so was a beat-up old dubbed cassette the Jerry had in his tape collection.

So, QED. Change your lists. Change your fileset info!

The still-unidentified funky instrumental from 8/20 and 8/30/75

UPDATE: researcher David Kramer-Smyth spoke with Hadi al-Saadoon, who identified David Kessner as the composer. David Kessner confirms he wrote it, but is not sure if it had a name.

At Jerrybase, we are now calling this "David's Tune (Gm)"

On August 20, 1975 at the Great American Music Hall, and again on August 30, 1975 at the Orphanage, both times with Garcia, the Keith and Donna Band played a funky instrumental number the title of which has eluded me for well over ten years.

Looks like I asked about it five years ago.

Someone must be able to identify this tune.

I post mp3s of the two versions here to aid in that identification.

Please help!

untitled-19750820 from 8/20/75

untitled-19750820 from 8/30/75

Two Sax Attack? JGMS at the GAMH, February 5, 1974

LN jg1974-02-05.jgms.all.sbd-ladner.32088.flac1644

I won't elaborate much. I have always held early '74 Garcia-Saunders in rather low esteem, despite my early familiarity with, place-based affinity toward --I attended Campolindo High School, just down the road-- and resulting inordinate love for the 2/9/74 Rheem Theater show. I was prompted to check-in with 2/5/74 by valued commenter runonguinness's observation that there appears to be a second sax present in set II, and esteemed fellow blogger nick's engagement with the issue, raising the possibility that it's Martin doing his best Rahsaan Roland Kirk and playing two horns at once. I was rather gobsmacked at either notion, having produced an earlier lossless fileset many years back from the same Ed Perlstein board patch (shnid-11254), and apparently not having noticed the second saxophone appearing throughout set II. What else have I been missing? God only knows.

Anyway, as you will see from my listening notes below, my method was to try to track moments where the saxes appear to diverge, and I find a number of them. I have posted my basic conclusions as comment at deadthinking, and if you have thoughts or comments on the key question please consider posting them over there, so we don't fragment "the literature" too much. I just have to post my own notes when I have them, because that's how I roll.

I enjoyed the show, a Tuesday at the amazing GAMH, very much. It's LONG, and quite good. I hated the overwrought vocals on Road Runner here in early '74, but there's a lot of good stuff here, including some nice melty stuff at the end of My Funny Valentine.

Listening notes below the jump.

Merl Saunders and the Rainforest Band, featuring Jerry Garcia

Here's a weird one bottom of column 1 to top of column 2:

"Merl Saunders and the Rainforest Band, featuring Jerry Garcia. Performing music from their album Blues From the Rainforest, July 26 at the Great American Music Hall and July 27 at the Cotati Cabaret"

Several possibilities.

First, perhaps most likely (?), whoever called this in to the Petaluma Argus-Courier dropped Jerry's name in connection with Merl's 1990 Blues From the Rainforest release, and the person at the paper was somehow left with the impression that Jerry would play the listed gigs. It wouldn't be the first time that Garcia's name would pop up in unexpected ways in the promotion of a Saunders gig that Garcia really wasn't involved in. For example, almost a year after their last shared agglomeration had knocked off, a preview for an August 1980 Saunders gig in far northern California teased that Merle [sic] was "currently playing with Jerry Garcia under the name of 'Reconstruction'." (1)

Second, maybe Gar really was going to play these gigs, but, as with two other prospective July 1991 engagements (JGB on the Eel, 7/13/91 cum 8/10/91, at the Frost on 7/14/91, and at Telluride, 7/19/91), he ended up not doing them because he was in rehab (as I surmise about the other three dates), or just forgot.

update: heh heh, my own files would help me. I know he was scuba diving on 7/27/91 in Hawaii, which would likely involve flying out no later than 7/26. I don't know if that trip would have been planned by whenever the 7/19/91 item was called in, but I strongly suspect so. This makes Hypothesis 1, that the Saunders camp somehow, surely innocently, gave mistaken impression that Jerry would play, to the Petaluma paper, seem most likely.

Thoughts?

REFERENCE:
(1) "A weekend of jazz planned at the Back Door Aug. 8, 9," Ukiah Daily Journal, August 6, 1980, p. 10.

Dating the Legion’s Demise: A Revisionist Account

The demise of the Legion of Mary, Garcia’s principal side band from Ronnie Tutt’s arrival on December 6, 1974 until mid-1975, remains one of the enduring mysteries of the Garciaverse.

The “why” is the biggest mystery of all. After almost five years of steady gigging and recording Garcia is said to have walked away. I don’t have time to go to Sources, but there is verbiage from Martin Fierro about a “star trip” and a sense of hurt from Merl Saunders, implying that shadowy forces were at work to short-circuit the magical Jerry-and-Merl trip in favor of the Grateful Dead. A big part of the conventional psychology of Garcia, ascribing to him personal cowardice in saying hard things to loved ones, derives from the Saunders account of what went down with the Legion in 1975 and Reconstruction in 1979.

In this post, I want to say less about the “why” and more about the “when”, though I think a revised understanding of the temporal piece may raise new questions about the causal one. I will conclude that we should extend the known Legion timeline to the end, rather than the beginning, of July 1975. My best guess is that there were additional gigs at least on July 23-24, 1975 at the Lion’s Share and July 30, 1975 at the Great American Music Hall. Sometime between late July and early August, Jerry and Merl went their separate ways.

update: I am probably conflating two separate things here. First is the end of the actual Legion, and second is the Merl-Jerry 1975 parting-of-ways. /update

Conventional Datings

The canonical List is clear: according to Dennis McNally’s research, preserved and extended by Corry Arnold, Independence Day 1975 tolled the bell for the Legion of Mary. It’s all pretty symbolic, of course. The Great American Music Hall, site of Jerry and Merl’s final 4^th of July engagement, was a favorite of Garcia’s since they had first played it July 19, 1973. That gig, in turn, was not only with Merl, but was something of a Fantasy party to celebrate the canning of the July ’73 Keystone tapes, which would become the GSKV Live at Keystone, the fullest commercial expression of the Garcia-Saunders collaboration. Garcia suggested the Music Hall for the Dead’s highest-stakes gig of 1975, for FM radio executives on 8/13/75, in collaboration with new-boss-same-as-the-old-boss (since 6/11/75) United Artists (Selvin 197508xx). Oh yeah, one more thing – 7/19/73 was also Martin’s first known gig (update: since 1971) with these guys, and when Legion ended in the same room he’d wait 13 years to play again with Garcia (with Zero, 7/16/88 in Golden Gate Park). It all makes for a great story.

However poetic, the notion of a sudden rupture after the Fourth of July is incorrect. We now know of both a July 5^th Saturday night at the Music Hall (listed in the Oakland Tribune and the Marin Independent-Journal) and an anticlimactic Sunday night show at Jerry and Merl’s chasse gardée, the Keystone Berkeley, now documented by the house calendar, listings in the Chronicle and the Datebook, and, even better, tape by the ever-timely Robert Castelli (shnid-108018). The show has always struck me as a little lethargic, and I imagined in my mind not a sudden rupture but a cartoonish putt-putt-putt and plonk, out-of-gas kind of finish for the band.

So, as of now, I have considered that Legion of Mary ran from December 6, 1974, through July 6, 1975. But I want to suggest the addition of at least three new dates to the end of the band’s run.

Closing of the Lion’s Share: July 24-25, 1975

With the release of the Garcia-Saunders 7/5/73 Lion’s Share show as GarciaLive 6, the venue looms large in our immediate imaginations. And why not? It was a legendary little Marin room. But lost to history has been an apparent Saunders-Garcia gig (or two) two years later, as the Share was ending its run on the Miracle Mile in San Anselmo. In comments to a post which I’ll mention more below, JGBP quotes a public posting by ‘cabdriver’ at Deadnetcentral recounting such gigs:

This Lion's Share gig (their closing week) was the first week of July, 1975 [sic: incorrect – see below]. The Garcia-Saunders Band played two consecutive nights during closing week … There were not very many people there, that's the funny part. And I can't find any reference to them doing those gigs anywhere. But it did really happen!

Cabdriver expressed uncertainty about the week the Share went dark. The Lion’s Share’s closing week was July 23-29, 1975, and the schedule ran as follows:

• Wednesday 7/23 Commander Cody
• Thursday 7/24 Merl Saunders and Friends / Aunt Monk / Sweetmeat
• Friday 7/25 Merl Saunders and Friends / Sweetmeat
• Saturday 7/26 ???
• Sunday 7/27 Kathi McDonald
• Monday 7/28 Michael Bloomfield, Mark Naftalin, Roger “Jellyroll” Troy, Nick Gravenites / Allair and Mitchell
• Tuesday 7/29 Sons of Champlin / Michael Hunt

(Sources: Selvin 19750720 has the whole schedule. Listing in SFC19750723p47 supplies 7/23 and 7/24. Listing in Fremont Argus, July 25, 1975, p. 38 and “Lion’s Share Out With Flair,” Independent-Journal (San Rafael, CA), July 25, 1975, p. 20, both provide 7/25 and following.)

Those Thursday and Friday “Merl Saunders and Friends” gigs, which I took in my own notes to be Merl playing out quickly post-Jerry, certainly fit cabdriver’s description of back to back gigs during closing week at the Share. Somehow the fact that 7/24 bills Aunt Monk separately seems to make it more likely that Jerry was one of Merl’s Friends in a different configuration.

Summing here, we seem to have an eyewitness account of Jerry and Merl playing during the closing week at the Share, and this lines up with independent evidence from newspaper listings. I think those gigs happened and would propose adding them to the List.

update: To be clear, those gigs don't necessarily extend the LOM timeline. They only would if the band that played were Garcia-Saunders-Fierro-Kahn-Tutt. It doesn't sound necessarily like that's what these were. But ...

... July 30, 1975 at the GAMH

Remember when I found the “Latest Legion Listing”, for July 30, 1975 at the Great American Music Hall? I treated it as spurious because it didn’t fit my preconceived narrative. I even found a way to suggest that the very real professionalism of the GAMH made it more likely to find such a spurious listing. But beyond the idea that gigs to shut down the Share might extend the known timeline, I have found an additional piece of information that leads me to revise my earlier view. My first encounter with this possible gig came through the July 25 I-J, and I surmised that a lot could have changed in five days. But I have found a second listing for the gig, and this one is in the July 30^th Chronicle.

This makes the first-discovered listing feel less spurious, because the Datebook listings would be very up-to-date, I think, based on information not more than a few days old. The fact that the GAMH was professionally run only reinforces the idea that there really was, as of approximately the day before, a planned Legion of Mary gig at the Music Hall on Wednesday, July 30, 1975.

Did it really happen? I don’t know. It’s less certain than the Share shows. But this last piece makes it feel a bit more likely …

... August 5, 1975?

The McNally-Arnold list historically gave this as the Jerry Garcia Band’s first show. This is almost certainly incorrect, as gigs only got going with Nicky Hopkins and JGB #1 from September 18, to the best of our current reckoning. Corry now considers this a Keith and Donna show with Jerry, which is how I currently list it. But, check out this series:

Keystone Berkeley ad from the pink section, 7/27/75, billing Jerry Garcia & Merl Saunders 8/5/75

Keystone Berkeley August 1975 calendar, scan courtesy of Ed Perlstein

See that big blank spot over Merl’s name in the 8/5/75 box? “Jerry Garcia and” would fit perfectly in that spot. I raise this for two reasons. First, *this* looks to be where the rupture between Jerry and Merl could have happened, insofar as that’s the right conception of things. Gigs were advertised, nothing unusual about that, but then something changes. I think Corry’s reasoning that this was Keith and Donna is pretty sound, but that would mean Merl would have been bumped for it, potentially part of the story of Merl having the rug pulled out from under him. Second, whatever the deal with 8/5, the fact that there had been a JGMS billing this late in the game lends more credence to the idea of late-July gigs.

So, in summing up on this one, I am not prepared to say there was a JGMS/Legion gig on August 5, 1975. I am prepared to say that it was planned as JGMS, and then morphed into something else (either Merl without Jerry, or Keith and Donna). In that sense, it arguably sets the new outer limit to our understanding of the tenure of the Jerry-Merl and Legion of Mary aggregations.

Conclusion

Putting this all together might merely push the end of Legion back to the end of July, rather than to the beginning. In that sense, it’s a purely quantitative addition to our understanding. But, I don’t know, somehow the boys jamming together at the Share (as they did so well on 7/5/73, GarciaLive 6), casts a whole new light on the demise of the Legion, making it feel less like an opiated Sunday-night anticlimax and more like a couple of good gigs to wrap things up. It may still be the case that Jerry ducked out after 7/30 with just as much cowardice as we have always thought, but this is softened in my mental palette just a little bit if there was good, joyful gigging for a little longer than has previously been recognized.

untitled 19750820b

UPDATE: researcher David Kramer-Smyth spoke with Hadi al-Saadoon, who identified David Kessner as the composer. David Kessner confirms he wrote it, but is not sure if it had a name.

Anyone know the funk-fusion instrumental that ends set I of 8/20/75, Keith and Donna Band at the Great American Music Hall, a week after the Dead's picture-perfect performance in the same hall, a personal favorite space of Jerry's from playing it with Merl? On the much-appreciated Reinhart Holwein tape (shnid-107746), it is d1t08.

JGC doesn't seem to know either, but rather than laying out there as an unknown, they just excise it, leaving the poor unsuspecting fan to imagine that "Sweet Baby" ended the set, which it patently did not.

! JGC: http://jerrygarcia.com/show/1975-08-20-great-american-music-hall-san-francisco-ca/

This track is hot as hell in lots of places. What is it?

update
 
Commenter Nick offers this:

I have it labeled "David's tune (Gm)" in my notes.  If you strain your ears, you can hear someone on the sbd recording saying, “David’s tune… David’s tune… G minor” (this is d2t06 @1:26 on shnid=21672).  And, indeed, the funk instrumental (d2t07) is in G minor (the circulating sbd runs a half-step sharp, but it's definitely in Gm on the pitch-corrected MOTB aud).  There was no one named David in the band, though (??), and I've never bothered to dig around as to who David might be.  Any ideas?

Based on this, I think "David's tune (Gm)" is a great working title, or maybe for now I'll just keep both names, i.e., untitled 19750820b - "David's tune (Gm)".

update2: still searching for the ID five years later.

Recall that Corry has written up this night's version of Freddie Hubbard's "Straight Life" through the lenses of, variously, Art Pepper and Jerry Garcia in the summer of 1975.

! ref: Arnold, Corry. 2012. August 20, 1975 Great American Music Hall, San Francisco: Keith And Donna with Jerry Garcia ('Straight Life"). Lost Live Dead, March 29, 2012, URL http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2012/03/august-20-1975-great-american-music.html, consulted 12/27/2013.

It looks like that will be "the book" on this gig.

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!

Latest Legion Listing

Funny the things that pop up. Here's a listing from the Marin Independent-Journal of July 25, 1975 for Legion of Mary at the Great American Music Hall on Wednesday, July 30, 1975.

Of course, the last known Legion gig having been on July 6th, this listing caught my eye. What does it mean? I don't know. Maybe this had been booked long in advance (the GAMH seemed to roll that way, very professional), but it's really quite a surprising listing.

Notice that this listing comes in the I-J's regular Friday "Rock Billboard" column, titled this week "Lion's Share Out With Flair", which notes the imminent closing of that great Marin room, with the last few days including a 7/25/75 gig by Merl Saunders and Friends. Nice to see Merl getting right back in the saddle after parting company (the first time) with Jerry, but that late Legion listing is a head-scratcher.

update: See my 2016 post "Dating the Legion's Demise: A Revisionist Account", which puts this listing into the context of a proposed new understanding that LOM held on in some shape or fashion until the end of July 1975.