1966: Darby Slick et al. "Jammin' With Garcia"

Chapter 5 of Darby Slick's autobiography, I guess (1), is entitled "Jammin' With Garcia" and recounts a Friday evening jam session, ca. 1966, in the Mission District. These one-offs are inherently interesting, of course, but especially interesting to me is the question of how often they occurred. I had always bought into the mythology that the GD (and its personnel, especially Jerry) were playing around pretty much all the time in the Halcyon days before the Summer of Love (TM). Corry Arnold has asserted that this probably happened a lot less than the mythology would have us believe, for example calling notions about frequent free concerts in Golden Gate Park "sadly wishful". Slick's vignette doesn't get at the question of frequency, but it does provide a first-person account of one free-form gig in these very early days of the hippie scene. The jam was apparently some sort of party to raise funds for something, perhaps the Mime Troupe. The crowd was SRO and flowing outside, where as many as 50 people were trying to get in.

I will just make a few notes about this as extracted from Slick's account. I'll focus especially on personnel, what they played, location, and date.

Personnel:

• Jerry Garcia: electric guitar;
• Bill Kreutzmann: drums;
• ?Peter Albin?: bass;
• ... joined by ...
• Jerry Slick: drums;
• Darby Slick: guitar.

Performance:

• "we all started to jam the blues, almost the only music we could launch into with no more discussion than 'It's in "A".'"
• ca. 45 minutes

Location:

• Mission District
• in a loft
• Slick parked three blocks away, across the driveway of a cement company
• MJB coffee plant nearby

Date: I have no idea; a Friday night ca. 1966.

I don't know much about Slick, but he certainly writes glowingly of this night and of Jerry: "There was magic in the room that night, and though I have played in many jam sessions over the years, that is the one I remember with the most love, the most respect. ... I was left with a conviction that Jerry Garcia is a man of great spirit."

REFERENCE:
(1) Slick, Darby. 1991. Don't You Want Somebody to Love: Reflections on the San Francisco Sound. Berkeley: SLG Books. {pdf of chapter 5}