Bill Cooper Interviews Jerry Garcia, May 1982

Here's a nice companion piece that really resonates with "Bob Coburn Interviews Jerry Garcia, November 8, 1982".

My notes/transcriptions are little sketchy, but here's what jumps out to me.

On Run for the Roses, with some anti-marketing:

I’ve been working on it for quite a long time. I’ve had to squeeze it in amongst and between lots of other projects. It’s been the project with the least [sic] priority of the things I’ve been working on, so I strung out the actual work on it over three years, which creates certain problems.” Does some work, comes back six months later, and thinks critically “I would just as soon do all of this over.” This project is one of those things that’s so far from what I originally started …
...
Select tunes, discarded them, I haven’t been working on it steadily. I’ve been working on it in an extremely fragmentary fashion. But it’s interesting for that, too. It hasn’t worked to the disadvantage of the music. On some levels it’s nice to be able to have the luxury to deal with something over a long period of time because your sense of perspective sometimes improves … So the record is pretty nice. … Because the tracks all come from different times and places … well, actually, they’re all from the same place, pretty much, but … that adds a certain textural variety to it which is, I think, OK. It has quite a range, from things that have an acoustic flavor, to … I have one thing that’s got a big massive horn piece, a big section of highly arranged sort of things. It has a lot of range as far as emotional content as well. To me that’s a nice quality for an album to have.

 On John Kahn: "All of the things that you hear of that are called the Jerry Garcia Band are, in reality, the John Kahn and Jerry Garcia Band” … simpatico, “with just enough difference to make it interesting”. That first line echoes something that Corry has said repeatedly - well done!

More on anti-marketing: "I’ll be coming east, and I’ll be promoting the album more or less incidentally, but not … I don’t really do the straight show biz formula, where you put out a record and then do a promotional tour"

Because of the priority of the GD over JG: "my solo career is not my primary thing. The GD is really the thing that I’m primarily involved in. My solo career is kind of like, it has to get what it can get. So, when time and space allow the opportunity, then I go out with whatever’s comfortable."

On the acoustic shows of the period:

I’ll also be doin’ some things that are solo concerts, just me and my friend John Kahn. 0550 I did a couple of them recently on the east coast, one at the Capitol Theatre and one at … [can’t remember the Beacon] the format was that the one at the Capital played all by myself, just me and my acoustic guitar. That’s a little too stark for me. I like the thing of having one other musician, at least. The bass gives me a little bit more room. But I had such a good time, and it’s something I’ve done very little. I’ve never really been a solo performer before. 0640 It’s something that’s exciting for me, and it’s challenging, and it’s also a chance to play around with acoustic guitar, which I’ve been doing at home a lot, but it hasn’t been my primary ... 0655 It’s really quite different from electric guitar, and so this is a chance to push off in that direction

Interesting contrast with how he'd feel about the GD nine years later: The Dead “hasn’t really affected my life in any negative way, to tell you the truth. It’s been really … It doesn’t impinge. I don’t feel in any way fettered or anything." 0955


Why? “Playing is my life. That’s what I want to do. If anything, I would play more. … It’s what I love to do. Personally, I can’t get enough of it.”

Listening notes, with other interesting tidbits, below the fold.

Bob Coburn Interviews Jerry Garcia, November 8, 1982

Garcia, Jerry, 1942-1995, “Bob Coburn with Jerry Garcia. "Rockline" radio show, hosted by Bob Coburn, broadcast on November 8, 1982. Includes an interview and phone calls from listeners [radio broadcast],” Grateful Dead Archive Online, accessed August 2, 2015, http://www.gdao.org/items/show/378595.

Garcia had two pretty good reasons to do a live national "Rockline" radio interview on Monday, November 8, 1982 with Bob Coburn.

The first was presumably to sell some tickets for the ongoing Fall 1982 Jerry Garcia Band tour (starting October 27 in SoCal, ending November 15th). From November 8th, the band still had shows in Worcester, Piscataway, New York City, Hartford, a college gig outside of Boston at Brandeis University, and a grand finale at Kean College in Union, NJ. The East Coast Deadhead paid a huge chunk of the Dead and Garcia's bills, better rally the troops.

The second is that Run for the Roses (Arista AL 9603, November 1982) had dropped, and for once Garcia was "touring behind an album" that people could buy from off the shelves of their local disc-O-mat on the way home from the show. For his last studio record, the 1978 masterpiece Cats Under the Stars (1978), work took so long that it remained undone during a putative promotional tour in March, probably not hitting shelves until a week or two after the tour ended. The Mystery Cats toured "in front of their" record, not your industry standard approach. Shocking that one sank like a stone despite representing some of Garcia's finest work, including in his songwriting collaboration with Hunter. Here, they're touring behind the record, but unfortunately, as one of Mike Myers's Scotsmen would say, "it's crap".

November 11^th would find the band playing for John Scher at The Felt Forum, part of an expansion push into the City itself, courtesy (or not) of Ron Delsener. Scher was going big in 1982,[1] and one of his early successes was Garcia and Kahn, in their first ever acoustic duet gig, at the Beacon Theatre, culminating with the good Dr. John sitting in with Jerry and John for some "Goodnight Irene", on April 21^st. That gig did so well (two 2,413 capacity sellouts, with gross $51,523)[2] that they made the same match in November. John Scher being John Scher --a multitalented guy who, from 1976, had basically taken over the GD's operations east of the Mississippi, and did lots more besides—he was fully locked into Garcianomics, on the recto and the verso.

John Scher Presents in New York City: Jerry Garcia Band at the Felt Foum, November 11, 1982.
John Scher Presents Program no. 270.

I don't know how many records they sold, but November 11^th grossed $107,661 on two sellouts @ 4,332 capacity.[3] Not bad – not bad at all. Biggest night of the tour.

Why do I get into the reasons for this interview? Because we find here yet another instance of Garcia being utterly incapable of marketing. In January 1976, he either forgot to announce a set of his band's gigs upcoming, chose not to, or else was reminded to book them when asked live, on the radio. I think there are a few other examples I can pin down of Garcia not really even swinging and missing on the tee'd up "new record" question, but kind of dodging it. And how's this for the soft sell, answer question of who's in the band:

I’ve had a band off and on for some time now, I guess about five years now … when you have musicians that you’re playing with on a regular basis, it’s easier to communicate with them, and they’re in the neighborhood, and things like that. Actually, the tracks on the record are recorded by parts of my band, as well as my current band, over the last, um, some of the tracks on the record were recorded as long as 4 years ago, 5 years ago.[4]

It’s a long slow process. See, when I make a solo record I have to make it in between the spaces, between Grateful Dead activity. So I have to do it as I can. Sometimes they accumulate, like a snowball rolling downhill.

Now, for someone like me, this is fascinating. First, "when you have musicians that you’re playing with on a regular basis, it’s easier to communicate with them, and they’re in the neighborhood, and things like that" could have come out of his mouth in January 1976 about Keith and Donna.[5] "I just picked whoever was around" isn't going to get me off the fence about these $11 tickets. Second, hearing that some of these tracks were recorded in 1977-1978 might signal to the discerning record buyer that they found at least some of this stuff sweeping up the cutting room floor. If they didn't buy Cats when it was released, why would they buy the lesser tracks now? Third, by interstitializing Garcia to the Grateful Dead, sublimating himself into the Borg, he gives further impression that the record might be rather second class.

Maybe he's just too honest, and can't shill the record that he may or may not feel good about. I guess I gotta respect that, even if it does thwart Global Corporation's master plan. Or maybe he just didn't get it. As McNally has recently said, "the celebrity interview, an opportunity for an artist to talk about himself and to pitch a current endeavor in as brief and efficient a manner as possible, was completely lost on Jerry".[i]

---

[i] McNally 2015, 9.

Other things I pull from this:

• Influences? Freddie King. Django, and he mentions Django's physical handicap – can there be any doubt but that Garcia felt a special kinship with Reinhardt?
• solo vs. GD: " When I compose a tune, I have a sense of what I want it to sound like. When I do ‘em for my own band, they sort of stay at that developmental level. But in the Grateful Dead, they have a tendency to keep moving. That’s true, I think, with Bob’s tunes, too."
• dodges a religion question
• Bashes Hank Harrison and his books; "wait for McNally's".
• a few other tidbits, depending on what interests you