"Beneficent, Raptured": JGB 4/4/76 Page Auditorium

**update: see Corry, of course.

This show has long been AWOL among collectors, but a nice 1st gen copy of an undetermined master audience tape has just come into the light (shnid-134922). Thanks to Alan Richman and dminches for getting it out there!

I decided to post a little miscellanea, maybe a few notes.

Listing for JGB at Page Auditorium, Duke University, April 4, 1976 (NC Anvil, April 3, 1976, p. 10)

8:30 PM (early) show ticket, via psilo.net

Listing for JGB 4/4/76, unknown (campus?) paper, p. 3.

The last is the cover of Carolina, April 8, 1976, which includes a great review by Richard McManus of the late show. These shows have a sweet energy that McManus captures nicely. Here are a few of the quotes I like from McManus (my copy is barely legible)

It was minutes before one o'clock on Monday morning when a filtered mist of white and blue light emptied onto the stage, where green monitors and yellow dots of light indicated that the show was tuned up, gassed, and ready to take off. A stubby man, his face shrouded with black, curly hair, straps on his specifically-made Doug Irwin-Alembic guitar, loiters in the electric silence for a moment, then steps into the light as he strums a beautiful introductory chord. The stage lights have found the rest of the band as the anxious crowd [illegible] a roar of anticipation and approval, and suddenly it's Jerry Garcia and Friends, lilting into a sexy 'Sugaree'.

• He describes Garcia's gaze as "beneficent, raptured". He continues "Garcia has a habit of gathering his enthralled audience within a web of gestures, emotions, spiralling guitar work and plaintive vocals that is nearly impossible to resist". NB gestures? In later years, he'd barely move.
• McManus loves "Duke's tasty little Page Auditorium, a room whose intimacy is inadvertently masked by the pretense of the surrounding architecture". On the tape, the room does sound good.
• Donna Jean's "harmonies with Garcia, particularly on Dylan's 'Knockin' on Heaven's Door', were sweet, sensual pieces that elevated, reassured, and satisfied", while the band overall generated a "Smooth, smile-inspiring warmth".

You get the idea. We have visuals from a few days earlier (4/2/76a and 4/2/76b - thank you, John Scher!), and though we can mostly only visualize 4/4, it all looks good from where I sit.

The references to "Jerry Garcia and Friends" are strange, given my own frame of reference, which is that the Jerry Garcia Band had been institutionalizing itself quite quickly since it formed a half-year prior to this show, and central to this, present in every contract that I have seen, is consistently "Billing the JGB". The Page Aud gig contract references Jerry Garcia Band on the front, it was a John Scher operation (partnering with the campus events outfit, DUU Attractions). I didn't get to see later pages of the contract, but I have to assume that the boilerplate for "Billing the JGB" was in there - they didn't vary much in any given period. Who knows? Crazy College Kids.

"Jerry Garcia and Friends" got $5k guaranteed, but did not earn the 60% top-up on revenue over $17k. Sunday night, or something.

Table xxx. Final Box Office Report - JGB at Page Auditorium, Duke University, April 4, 1976

Not that anyone but me cares, but let me come clean on Clio here. Note that I use 11:59. We know from McManus that the late show took place early morning of Monday April 5th. so I am not being strictly accurate, here, but I want people to be able to recognize what I am talking about, so convention must trump strict accuracy in this case. Too bad, not sure what the solution can be.

Last point: McManus captures something that I think was very fleeting - a period when sweetness and light really suffused the Garcia Band. It was all that, natch, this being planet Earth. But he really picked up on this, and I don't think he was just being googly-eyed. I think that it was true, sometime very early morning of Monday, April 5th. And that makes me happy. I am reminded of Ed Perlstein's amazing picture on the cover of the Don't Let Go CD release, soft blue light, the reflection off the white Travis Bean guitar, Jerry thin and reasonably groomed and dropping into a vocal or a lick - lovely.

Selected info and listening notes below.

My bottom line is that I *love* the early show and really like the late show - both are above average for the period, IMO, YMMV.

! seealso: http://jgmf.blogspot.com/2012/11/ln-jg1976-04-03jgbearlyaud.html

"Can't you all see how beautiful this is?" GD/NRPS: Saturday, April 24, 1971, Wallace Wade Stadium, Duke University, Durham, NC

I am intimately familiar with this show. It was in that first batch of ____________ [fill in blank: 10, 20, however many] great tapes I got from _____________ [fill in name, e.g., "John Smith" or other best description, e.g., "freak I met in the record store in Santa Barbara to whose Lompoc address I mailed two nice tight boxes of XLIIs from that place in Berkeley, never heard anything back, then received the tapes in a wrinkled paper bag left on the doorstep of my parents' house 250 miles away one day 9 months later")]. Every Deadhead who ever collected tapes has that story.

Anyway, some incredible photographic linkage of the New Riders and the Grateful Dead on this "Joe College Weekend." Truly glorious photographs of Garcia playing pedal steel in the bright spring sunshine (or does it look windy and a little overcast? anyway). Wow. Just take them in. Thank you to photographer Ric Carter for sharing these, and much more besides!

Coupla things to say about this show.

First, note that in the lossless realm, there is still only one source, shnid-2579, "ripped and seed by Mike Lai" and seeded to Lai's own FTP server within or affiliated with the etree.org domain (remember those?) in the first quarter of 2001. People who were early to the lossless thing will recognize that assignation: amazing sounding material, usually seeded with sector boundary errors (SBEs) ... the dreaded "sbefail" tag. But as has been argued to me, that was a strange obsession about glitches that were minor compared to, say, the wow, flutter, pitch, speed, degradation, flaking, sun-baking, splicing, recording-over and other problems with the source cassettes. And we should give this gentleman credit for sharing tremendous amounts of time, money, bandwidth (before it was so plentiful) and, of course, music with so many people. I have no idea if anyone will ever try to research and write histories of this sort of thing in a serious way, but some of these pioneers are at risk of getting glossed over in the record, as if the world jumped from CD to FLAC with no agency moving history.

This source sounds absolutely fantastic, even better than my beloved, crusty old cassette tape. I would also note the name in that source of Michael K. Weise, who wrote the first program (mkwACT) that made it easy to losslessly encode wav files. This was part of a technological revolution that revolutionized music sharing. From that whole thing we have the archive, probably the most amazing collectively fan assembled music resource in the history of the world. (How's that for hyperbole!)

Second, this is a classic Grateful Dead show.  Truckin' is a trainwreck ... Bobby changes keys midway through, and Jerry and Phil are really straining to hit the harmony notes. Cumberland Blues false starts, with Weir explaining that "All this fuckin' around has put our instruments out of tune".

"Hard to Handle" remains my favorite version (yes, 4/28/71 and 8/6/71, I'm talking to you). It's not perfect, but listen to what Mr. Philip Lesh is doing to that bass guitar of his. He is playing that nice '71 bass with the crisp sound, which is audible on all of the officially released 1971 GD material (e.g., the fantastic summer '71 Road Trips.  @ 6:19, pounding out the notes to grab Garcia from where he is soaring and snap him into the one on time and in key. Fantastic.

The whole show is just classic April '71. Pretty good Pigpen, also featuring "Next Time You See Me" and a long, April '71 (need I say more, one week to the day after Princeton and the "Brooklyn Bridge rap"?) Good Lovin'. No far out jams, which is true of the whole month (I think the 4/28 and 4/29 material is egregiously overrated, not least from Cornell Syndrome -- tape circulation with three features: widely spread, good performance, fantastic sounding). "Sing Me Back Home" is a transcendent masterpiece until it sort of thuds at the end.  And who is that playing organ so delicately behind SMBH, Pigpen?

Check it out from archive.org.




One archive.org patron says this:

I was at this show -- it ran about 12 hours, starting with Mountain, then the Dead, and finally the Beach Boys. Either Phil or Jerry told the crowd that they'd never been on the same bill with the Beach Boys although both were huge California bands. Just three days later, on April 27, the Beach Boys joined the Dead onstage at the Fillmore East during the Dead's 5-day run there, and they played 6 or 7 songs together. I guess that makes the show at Duke somewhat historic.

Absolutely. The 4/27/71 GD/Beach Boys thing is a classic. Having read Corry for a few years now, I am guessing there was a record company aspect to that? Anyway, this is a great college gig from a fantastic month of college (and other!) gigs which, while capitalizing on the success of 1970, was probably the inflection point in cementing the Dead's viability as a national touring act for the next, oh, 24 years. This is true not only in terms of popularity, but also professionalism. There were a lot of glitches leading into this tour, as there had been of every GD tour previously. But from this point forward, tours would happen with fewer and fewer problems, much greater predictability.

Third, just a little piece of arcania, but I absolutely love it. At least twice a fantastically blissed out young lady, 17 year-old Barbara Harlan, who was wandering topless onstage, gets ahold of a microphone and makes herself heard. I cannot believe it, but I can't remember in which track she makes her first appearance. I am listening now and will try to edit post once I have it. But the second one is at @ 1:09 of track 14, "Sing Me Back Home." Here our blissed-out friend poses the titular question, with a real (and appropriate-seeming) sense of urgency. Can't you all see how beautiful this is?

Fourth, alas no, I can't see it directly, though my mind's eye sure can! But I'd note that another archive.org patron says there is video of this show. Since video at Duke has come up in a few threads on various blogs, and I can't remember if this one has been mentioned, I thought I'd just make note, also as a pretext to discuss a show I like and link up those fantastic photographs.

OAITW: September 1-2, 1973, Blue Grass Park, Camp Springs (?), North Carolina

This is why I pick up old copies of Muleskinner News and such whenever I can.

It appears based on the image below that Old and in the Way played the "9th Labor Day Weekend Original Blue Grass Music Festival" in Camp Springs (?), North Carolina on September 1-2, 1973.

The only thing standing in the way of this possibility as things currently stand is the Garcia/Saunders outing dated September 2, 1973. I have long held that this date is erroneous. If you look at the liner notes to Merl Saunder's Keepers, it dates "Georgia on My Mind" and "Keepers (Finders)" as from The Record Plant on this date. Yet those tracks are identical to what circulates as a KSAN Broadcast (from ... you guess it ... the Record Plant in Sausalito) dated July 8, 1973. Now, I have no idea if the material was broadcast on September 2, re-broadcast on that date, or if there's just some error that led to this dating in the Keepers liner notes. But either way, I always had pre-existing doubts about this date.

Now comes some evidence that OAITW played a bluegrass festival in North Carolina over Labor Day weeked. It makes sense from a money perspective (I assume that as the "special guest" OAITW got well-paid,  relatively speaking). It makes sense from a logistical perspective: barring the 9/2/73 Record Plant thing, I have Garcia/Saunders at the Keystone on 8/31 and then in New York City Harbor for the Hell's Angels gig on September 5th. Heading east anyway for the GD tour, we know that Jerry did the SS. Bay Belle and the Capitol Theater on September 6th ... why not start a bit farther south, do a gig on Labor Day, have a good time, and then go up to the city?

Makes sense to me.

Any thoughts on the town name?