Merl Saunders and Friends: May 31 – June 1, 1974, Inn of the Beginning, Cotati

Here is one of the tantalizing little performances that you come across and really, really want to know more about, while understanding how miraculous it is that you are able to know anything about it at all.

The Inn of theBeginning in Cotati hosted Merl Saunders and Friends, including Jerry Garcia, with Paul Pena opening, on Friday, May 31, 1974 and Saturday, June 1, 1974.

The May 1974 IOTB calendar had listed Friday, May 31 and Saturday, June 1 as TBA, supported by local folk artist Cris Williamson. The May ledger leaves the top of the bill a bit unclear, but the June calendar and ledger fill in the blanks. First, the calendar. It lists “Merl Saunders and Friends” for the weekend, with Paul Pena opening the evenings’ proceedings.

Inn of the Beginning calendar, June 1974. Courtesy of Mark Braunstein.

Paul Pena

Pena’s story seems an interesting one, just entering the GOTS narrative enough to warrant attention, but obscure enough to motivate some digging. I have talked about him a little in my 2/16/74 post.

A Boston native, blind from birth, the first trace of Paul Pena I can find in the Garcia nexus is as opener for the Grateful Dead at the Electric Factory in Philly on February 14-15, 1969. I’d guess he settles into the Bay Area around July 1973, since that’s when he starts showing up as the opener for Garcia/Saunders. He may even have been the single most frequent opener for these guys from 1973-1975, most often at the Keystone. On this evidence, we’d conclude that Keystone proprietor Freddie Herrera, Jerry and/or Merl liked him and/or his music enough to make him the “regular” opener where the three of them interfaced. Merl and Jerry also laid down some tracks for Pena’s New Train on October 4, 1973, though the album was not released, on CD, until 2000. It is most relevant here for Garcia’s pedal steel credits on “Venutian Lady” and “New Train”, tracks on which Merl is also credited. More broadly it’s just a pretty nice album (I like “Gotta Move”) and is noteworthy for Pena’s version of his “Jet Airliner”, later famously covered by a certain non-playin' motherfucker.

The IOTB materials, as rich as they have proven, again have interest, though I am not sure if this answers the question of how Pena came to be connected to these guys. On the back of the April 1974 ledger there’s a note to reach Pena through Annette [presumably Annette Flowers] at the GD offices. So, somehow, Paul Pena seems to have been in the GD orbit. Yet he was either also, or eventually became, close to Merl, for whom he’d continue to open shows at least into January 1976 (i.e., during the Merl-Jerry live performance interregnum beginning in ca. July 1975).

Anyway, the June 1974 calendar gives us a listing of Merl Saunders and Friends with Paul Pena opening for this weekend. The Inn of the Beginning Flyer gives its usual nice, informative, locally-contextualized blurb, which I reproduce with its surrounding nice, informative, locally-contextualized materials from the Flyer.

June 1974 Inn of the Beginning Flyer, first page. Courtesy of Mark Braunstein.

Jerry Garcia in the IOTB Ledger

As has been the case so often with these Inn of the Beginning materials, the ledger sheds new light, in this case about a heretofore unknown GOTS performance:

Excerpt of Inn of the Beginning June 1974 ledger. Courtesy of Mark Braunstein.

As I have elaborated over and over, I find these ledgers to be incredibly robust forms of evidence. The man who kept them kept (and retains) extremely accurate records, on my impression. So, to my satisfaction, this establishes that Jerry played on these nights.

So, eventually, The Jerry Site and anyone’s respective Garcia lists should be updated to reflect these dates:

• Merl Saunders and Friends (with Jerry Garcia), Friday, May 31, 1974, Inn of the Beginning, Cotati, CA
• Merl Saunders and Friends (with Jerry Garcia), Saturday, June 1, 1974, Inn of the Beginning, Cotati, CA

update: now at Jerrybase: May 31, 1974 | June 1, 1974

Some speculative and overdone reconstruction of these newly-discovered dates

How do I imagine this coming about? Clearly going too deeply into something that’s probably really simple, let me say a few things.

In my mind’s eye, this is Merl calling for a gig (or Mark Braunstein checking in with him), “I’ve got a bunch of guys together and am free that weekend”, kind of thing. The May-June gigs were booked late, since they didn’t make the May calendar, but the “TBA” listing suggests to me that the Inn was holding that weekend for something special. They usually had things fully calendared in time to go to print. My hunch is that Merl was trying to get Jerry to come up to Cotati on this free weekend and that this accounts both for the delay and for the slightly more tantalizing “and Friends’ formulation. Merl: “Hey Jerry, wanna come up to Cotati and jam this particular weekend?” Garcia: “Yeah, man. I gotta check.” Merl, next phone call: “Hey Mark, can you hold that weekend for me? I might be able to get Jerry.” Mark: “Hell yeah.”

It probably takes a while to get Garcia to (be able to) commit, what with Jerry being Jerry (overcommitted somewhere, on something). Indeed, the record shows that Garcia was at Heider’s on May 31^st. Shenk and Silberman (1) report that the “The Vault” (as of the mid-1990s, so presumably containing GD and JG material) holds some Garcia studio work such as “Some Enchanted Evening” (yes, the Rodgers and Hammerstein showtune from South Pacific) and “Cardiac Arrest”. This latter, a little jam really, was released as an outtake to Compliments on the All Good Things box set, and I presume that the released version is from this date. It may also shed some light. According to deaddisc, the players are Garcia, Michael Omartian on the piano, Merl Saunders on organ, John Kahn on bass, and Ronnie Tutt on drums. (I thought I heard some rhythm guitar, but what do I know?). So maybe Merl and Jer drove up to Cotati together, after playing around at Heider’s?

Win-win-win. The Inn is guaranteed a sellout at its standard mid-1974, strong-act-on-a-weekend-night rate of $2. Stuffing 250 people in, they gross $500 in tickets and pay out $400 to the talent (70% of the door for the band, blowing through the $150 guarantee, and $50 for Paul Pena), clear a C-note and then have a nice haul on beer and soda. Merl gets to keep playing with Jerry, which he obviously loves and which, crassly, is always in his pocketbook interest to keep doing. (Man was a cash cow, I tell ya.) Jerry, Being the May-June 1974 Vintage Jerry, The Youngish, Healthy-ish, I-Gotta-Jam-Somewhere-With-Someone Jerry, gets to play. Oh, and he leaves with $80 bucks in his pocket, which oughta keep him in smokes for a few days. Multiply all of this by two for the whole weekend, and we get these gigs.

What “Band” Played?

What should we call this collectivity that performed in Cotati? The listing itself –Merl Saunders and Friends—is interesting, insofar as I care about the formalities of band names, billings, and so on. And I care deeply about those things. When Merl played the Inn on Friday-Saturday April 5-6, 1974, he as just billed as Merl Saunders (note that Paul Pena opened). The “and Friends” formulation in May-June is probably not just an elaborated version of the same thing: it signals something that might interest the cognoscenti, i.e., that Jerry might be there. Just the name and the "and Friends" formulations suggest something looser and more ad hoc than a “band”. Merl Saunders and Friends is probably the best we can do. I would not call it a “band” at this point, just a picked-up group (though possibly with ideas about institutionalization, moving forward, at least on Merl’s part).

To get a sense of how fluid the billings were around Merl’s non-Garcia-related “bands”, I have just poked through some of my notes and listings for Merl’s bands without Jerry in the 1971-1975 period. Here are just some of the “bands” that I have seen mentioned or listed:

• Heavy Turbulence. A six-piece band which  released the single “Little Bit of Righteousness”, with “Iron Horse” on the B-side in ca. late November 1970 (2). I don’t know who the players were. Not Garcia. But maybe Kahn, Vitt, Fogerty. Matt Scofield’s Merl Saunders discography lists the band as Merl Saunders and Heavy Turbulence, with a catalog number Galaxy 776 (1970), but no players are listed. (As an aside, Heavy Turbulence was also the name of a Saunders record, probably released around mid-March 1972 (3). That album, of course, featured Garcia, Tom Fogerty, John Kahn and Bill Vitt.
• Merl Saunders Quartet. This was the listing at the Inn on December 14-15, 1973 at the Inn, with John Kahn apparently on bass.
• Merl Saunders Band. The Oakland Tribune published a piece on Martin in July 1974 using this name (4; see also my posts on July ’74 shows at Keystone and the Sand Dunes). In late August 1974 (5), the Trib reported that “The Merl Saunders Band, which featured Jerry Garcia on guitar and Martin Fierro on sax on alternating weeks at the Sand Dunes in San Francisco, has changed its name to” …
• … Aunt Monk. So we should date this from around late August 1974. The next usage of this name, which is seems to refer to a bona fide “band” (a name, a relatively fixed membership, a perceived “going concern”, an album) enters my data in September 1974 and continues sporadically for several years.
• Merl Saunders and Martin Fierro. What interests me about the previous little hints of institutionalization (for a “band” to change its “name” it had to be a band with a name in the first place, if you follow me) is that on the same date as the Fierro article (5) the Trib referred to the folks playing at the Sand Dunes as Merl Saunders and Martin Fierro, not Merl Saunders Band (6). No biggie, but just weird. Maybe they needed the extra letters for the type to set properly right-justified, who knows.
• plus lots of ad hoc listings of names, lots of interchange of nouns (band, group, aggregation), and every possible permutation of Merl/Merle [sic]/Mel [sic] Saunders/Sanders [sic]’s name.

It doesn’t really matter, of course. But I like that, in parallel with the Garcia/Saunders group itself, which didn’t have a name –about which I’ll have too much to say, at some point—things were just really, really fluid around all of this. Jerry and Merl would settle in with Legion of Mary for the first-half of 1975, and then, for Garcia, comes the crucial, fateful fall 1975 choice to put his name (and himself) out front in the Jerry Garcia Band, which would be the name of his “main” side band until his death twenty years later (except January-September 1979, with Reconstruction). It’s a terribly important inflection point. Putting his name on it, commodifying his name, professionalizing the band, institutionalizing it, all hearken to the end of a kind of dream of being able to jam anonymously, to play music without all the bullshit that attached to being Jerry Garcia Of The Grateful Dead. I suspect that Jerry would lament, in later years, his increasing inability (or unwillingness, or whatever) to just sit in anonymously in some small club with a band with no name, play some funk.

Who was in the What?

Who played? Well, we know Merl and Jerry played. Let’s assume there’s also bass, drums, and another instrument. We just really, really don’t know.

update 20210713: we pretty much do know. Tony Saunders has posted a pic of what he has said was one of his first gigs with Merl and Jer, from the Inn. Jerry is beardless and may even be wearing that black turtleneck he favored at this time. Tony identifies the players as Jerry, Merl, himself, Tom Donlinger on drums, Martin Fierro on sax, and Peter Welker on trumpet. And I am about 99% sure that the pic relates to these gigs.

What I had written is now greyed out some - I want the words to still be there, but they of course give way to the more solid information that has since arisen. Thanks to David Kramer-Smyth for the tip in comments.

Regarding bass, the December 1973 IOTB Flyer tells us that the Merl Saunders Quartet of December 14-15, 1973 featured John Kahn. By 1974 Merl’s son Tony Saunders, who would turn 18 in that year and who is a monster funky bassist, appeared more and more frequently and effectively supplanted John (insofar as John was ever implanted at all). But since John would appear to have been at Heider’s with these guys earlier in the day on May 31st, Occam’s Razor probably points to him, at least for that date. The truth is we just can’t know.

I would also suppose that Martin Fierro was there. He had been playing with Merl and Jerry pretty steadily for something like ten months by this time. We know from the band discussion above that he was playing in the Merl Saunders Band at the Sand Dunes in ca. the first half of 1974, apparently alternating Monday nights with Garcia. Of course, that’s right in this time period.  We don’t know he was there, but there are all kinds of reasons to think that he probably was.

There was also presumably a drummer. Bill Vitt thinks he was out of the Saunders/Garcia scene by mid-1974, so we should probably rule him out. Bill Kreutzmann is possible, but we just can’t know. It seems unlikely to me, since Merl’s “friends” could easily have included some other drummer. My bet, based on a thin scrap of evidence (his credited presence on the 5/31/74 “Cardiac Arrest” jam) would be Ronnie Tutt. This is presently the earliest direct Garcia-Tutt connection known to me, and given that he’d be around from 1975-1977, a live gig this early would be of particular historical note. But, as with all of this, I am speculating. It could just as well have been that guy from Cotati. You know—that guy. Whatshisname.

What did the Who/What Play?

In terms of the repertoire (i.e., the what that the What and Whom played), again, no specific idea. I imagine that these kinds of gigs, where it’s really Jerry sitting in with Merl, are the ones that turned out to be all-instrumental, such as the “7/21/74” or "7/22/74" Keystone stuff, which is actually 1/21/75 and 1/22/75 (for analysis, see nick, or me, or me again), or the 2/14/75 and 5/9/75 (May 9^th) gigs from The Generosity in San Francisco. (As an aside, Merl Jr.’s first reaction to the 2/14/75 Generosity gig is that it would have been Aunt Monk, with Tony Saunders on bass.) I thus imagine “When I Die”, “Ain’t No Woman (Like The One I’ve Got)”, “Little Bit Of Righteousness”, “Valdez In The Country”, etc. Maybe a Stevie Wonder number. I doubt they even had a vocal mic set up. Anyway, that’s all speculation. We just don’t know.

Summary

So, my initial goal was just to establish the evidentiary basis for adding these two gigs to our Garcia lists (i.e., The Garcia List). But the post turned into a little discussion of Paul Pena and some broader historical context, including Merl’s (Jerryless) bands around this time and some possible players and songs. Lots of wild speculation, once I left the fact of the gigs themselves, but fun stuff to think about. May-June in Sonoma, jamming with friends (or strangers). Not too bad.

REFERENCES

(1)  Shenk, David, and Steve Silberman. 1994. Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads, s.v. “The Vault”, p. 301. New York: Doubleday.
(2)  Gene Robertson, “On the Beam,” Sun Reporter (San Francisco), November 28, 1970, p. 29.
(3)  Dennis Hunt, “Playing Small Rock Clubs is a ‘Release From the Dead’.” San Francisco Chronicle Datebook, April 9, 1972, p. 8, notes that HT was “released a few weeks ago”.
(4)  R.B. Ragg, “Life Out on the Side,” Oakland Tribune, July 21, 1974, p. 3-RAP.

(5)  "Rap-Up's Wrap Up," Oakland Tribune, August 25, 1974, p. 2-RAP. 

(6)  "Rap-Up's Wrap Up," Oakland Tribune, July 21, 1974, p. 2-RAP.

Righteousness, and Two Guests: JGMS, Keystone Berkeley, February 16, 1974

LN jg1974-02-16.jgms.all.sbd-alligator.91471.flac1644

A few days ago I posted about an advertised but canceled Jerry Garcia and Merl Saunders band gig (Kahn and Kreutzmann rounding things out) scheduled for 2/16/74 at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, NJ. I irresponsibly dropped a few notes about the replacement show for the night, and here I follow up on those bits and pieces. It'll be a little repetitive vis-a-vis the first post, but I want to round out the picture more satisfactorily. So, I'll (I) go again through the date context (including why an east coast gig would have been especially interesting), (II) run through some of the empirical terrain around the Berkeley gig, (III) give the key points I extract from my listen, and (IV) post my listening notes.

I.  Date context: why an east coast gig on 2/16/74 would have been noteworthy

What's noteworthy about this canceled gig, I think, is that the Jerry Garcia/Merl Saunders group was not touring much beyond the Bay Area, and not at all off the west coast, at this point. Beyond the Bay Area, they had done the May 29-30, 1973 shows at the Ash Grove in Santa Monica, CA and the September 5-6 Hells Angels and Cap Theatre shows, before canceling gigs at the University of Iowa (10/20/73) and San Diego State (11/18/73).

 After 9/6/73, JGMS wouldn't get back out of state (and to the core northeast) until July 1-3, 1974. So finding a listed gig in the middle of this range is pretty interesting, all the more so since, unlike those shows, there was no (planned) GD activity out east around the same time.

September 5, 1973 is the gig on the S.S. Bay Belle in NYC Harbor, immortalized in the film "Hells Angels Forever". Who knows the story behind that one? I haven't checked The Sources, but it's got to be interesting. Then the September 6, 1973 gig at John Scher's Capitol Theatre in Passaic, NJ the next night in front of the GD tour starting in Nassau on September 7th. To my knowledge this would be the second John Scher-produced GOTS show, after the Old And In The Way gig in Passaic on June 6, 1973. (As an aside, I have more or less ruled out the possibility of OAITW gigs in Camp Springs, NC on September 1-2, 1973 and the even less-likely Harpers Ferry, WV on September 7th.) I can only conclude that the planned gig 1) had some record company money behind it, and/or 2) related, reflected Jerry's desire further to build his non-GD audience base out east.

That's it beyond the Bay Area for this band during this timeframe. And instead of a 2/16/74 show in Passaic, we instead find the Jerry Garcia/Merl Saunders band, as so many Saturdays before and following, at the Keystone, 2119 University Avenue in Berkeley, CA, 94704.

II. The Empirical Terrain of the 2/16/74 Berkeley show

The ever-reliable listings in the Hayward Daily Review --and, BTW, if anyone knows Kathie Staska and/or George Mangrum, who wrote the amazing "Rock Talk by KG" column for many years for that paper, please send them over here!-- from the February 15th edition (p. 51) list Jerry Garcia and Merl Saunders for February 16th-17th, with Paul Pena billed for the second night as well. I am trying to determine if there's anything odd about the listings that might suggest that they were booked late, after an east coast gig had been canceled, but I find nothing unusual. I wonder if the Passaic show was canceled early enough that the Keystone was still free? Or if Freddie held it open for them "just in case"? Or if someone had been planned and got bumped ... or none of the above. We'll probably never know. There's nothing in the record available to me that points toward any of these. Anyway, Jerry Garcia and Merl Saunders are listed for Saturday 2/16 and Sunday 2/17, the second night also billing Paul Pena (Hayward Daily Review, February 15, 1974, p. 51).

Unlike so many other shows from this time period, we have three other data sources on the 2/16/74 Berkeley show. To quote myself, this is "maybe the only show from this time period represented by an audience recording (made by Louis Falanga, shnid-8063, missing the last two songs), a soundboard recording (shnid-91471, complete), and an ex post review." The review (1) is brief, but informative: we are told there is a conguero in the band, and we are treated to some nice color, the audience "packed into a crowded, smoke-filled room for three dollars a head", shoeohorned into the club "like cattle in a packing house", but grooving to good music.

Two absolutely fantastic tapes round out the record of this show. I'll probably note the Falanga aud separately, so I won't go into it here. I'll report next on what the board tape reveals for me.

III. Analysis

(a) The Tape

This board tape entered general circulation maybe three years ago from a mysterious, generous Garcia-vault-connected source named alligator. The tapes he/she dropped were all beautiful Betty Boards, from the "missing 3rd batch" that never made it into general circulation. Full, nice tapes. This tape is missing about 7 minutes at the start, which are, happily, available from the aud recording. So I'd guess that the total show time, with cross-patches, is probably 150 minutes.

(b) The Show

The performance is mediocre, to my ears. "More interesting than good", as I say below. Why interesting? Mostly because of personnel, also for a setlist rarity.

(c) Personnel

First, we assume that Bill Kreutzmann is drumming, though it's possible it was someone else. We believe that he was drumming with JGMS around this time, and of course he was identified for the abortive Passaic show for this date. We also assume Kahn is playing bass. Seems pretty safe.

Second, it has long been noted that there is a conguero sitting in the whole show. The contemporary review mentions it and the tapes reveal that this guy is very good. I have traditionally assumed that this was Armando Peraza. Not sure if that's documented somewhere or if it was my guess, based on his reported presence on February 11, 1972 and a published characterization of him as a "recently added member" of the group from around that same time (2).

Third, most interestingly, a second guitarist comes in for the second number. After a nice, hot "Soul Roach" he (presumably, with possible apologies to Alice Stuart) plugs in, tunes up and bends a few nice notes in the first couple of minutes of "La-La" [Allan | Scofield], not to be heard from again. Someone comes in and does some "la-la" vocalizing a few minutes later (ca. 6 minutes into the song). Sounds very Santana-ish to me. This might mean it's Peraza vocalizing while playing the congas, or it's the mystery guitarist. And maybe the Santana-ish vocals imply the second guitarist is a Santana guy? It's definitely not Carlos. It's someone who's not playing real loud, more of a rhythm guy to my ears. Thoughts?

My second guess about the second guitarist is Paul Pena. He was listed as opening on 2/17/74, though not on this night. But he was around a ton during this period. Either Freddie or Merl or Jerry or some/all of the above or someone else liked the pairing, because it was a very frequent combination. I have a studio date of October 4, 1973 for (some of) Garcia's work on Pena's New Train (not released until 2000). I know of no live performances together, but the back of my mind has always told me that it had to have happened a time or two. This could be one of them.

Anyway, anytime we get an episode of Garcia hosting someone onstage, it's worth noting. His willingness to do this sort of thing is a proxy for (if not effect of) his health: they are positively correlated. It also makes one wonder how much more of this there is. We know of a bunch of sit-ins from this period (that should be a post), including July 12, 1974 at Keystone by a second guitarist that I reckon to be David Nelson. More and better tapes, and lots of close listening, will likely reveal more of this sort of thing.

(d) Setlist

As I noted in the first post, the setlist rarity here is the Merl Saunders composition "Little Bit Of Righteousness" (also published as "Righteousness"). Regarding the name, the vinyl release Merl Saunders (Fantasy F-9460, 1974) gave the shortened title, while the 1997 reissue CD Keepers (Fantasy FCD-7712)  gave the longer title. On the intuition behind lex posterior derogat priori, I will go with the longer (later "officialized") title. It has sort of a CTI feel, with Martin doing a Stanley Turrentine thing. Another analogy might be a Zawinul composition from ca. '69 Cannonball Adderley Quintet. It's slower and darker, not the same pop of "Mercy Mercy Mercy" or anything like that, but some of the same swing. It's an awfully nice composition - bravo, Merl! This is the third of five known Garcia-Saunders live renditions of the song between 1971 and 1975. (It also appeared, improbably enough, in a Keith and Donna setlist from 8/20/75.) It was probably played many more times that are unknown for lack of tapes/setlists.

The other relative rarity is "Soul Roach", an instrumental credited to Merl Saunders and Ray Shanklin [Allan] and inspired, Scofield tells us, by "a swinging family in Denver". It looks like it was on Merl's first album (Merl Saunders Trio and Big Band, Soul Groovin' (Galaxy Records, 1968) as well as on the Garcia-relevant Fire Up (Fantasy 9421, 1973; re-released on CD, with different material, as Fire Up Plus [Fantasy FCD 7711-2, 1992].) It showed up at least twenty times, so it's not that rare. But it's good and interesting, generally speaking.

References for the post above, then listening notes below the fold.

REFERENCES:
(1) Beard, Micahel. 1974. Rock Notes: Garcia at Keystone. Daily Californian Arts Magazine no. 16 (February 22, 1974), p. 7.
(2) Hunt, Dennis. 1972b. Playing Small Rock Clubs is a ‘Release From the Dead’. San Francisco Chronicle Datebook, April 9, 1972, p. 8.

IV. Listening Notes