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 4th 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.
