Gettin' Churchy: JGB at the Stone, Sunday, November 30, 1986

LN jg1986-11-30.jgb.all.aud-corley.21301.shn2flac

Spun on its 34th anniversary yesterday, this show supplied me with a delightful hour and a half of easy-feeling post-coma Jerry Band. "Stop That Train" opens the show for the second and final time ever (also 1/29/77), and returns to the lineup after nine years away (11/26/77a). "My Sisters And Brothers" also returns after a long hiatus (7/30/77, when it showed up as the encore). Twitter commentator @Fireonshakedwn1 pointed out that these songs formed staples of the post-coma Jerry Church vibe, and I agree. Fitting for them to come back on a Sunday night.

As ever, it's hard not to read back from what I know of this historical period into what I am hearing, but Jerry certainly sounds sprightly out of the gate. A crowd member shouts a "welcome back, Jerry!" and the big fella thanks him. Even something as mundane as "you got the do re | I got the mi" gets a little juice. The seeder of this fileset (the only one in circ), Chris Ladner, refers to the "Van Moondance themed comaback", referencing the advent of both "And It Stoned Me" and "Crazy Love" in the JGB repertoire, and coining a term about late '86. Again, these tunes are just pleasant. The filth and grunge of the pre-coma are washed off -- "Oh, the water | let it run all over me" -- and Jer's just playin some old favorites in the city he loved for the fans who showed him so much love and support while he was sick. It's really sweet stuff.

Some of the arrangements aren't quite where they'd end up, and that's fun, too. I'd like to trace the evolution of the start of "Stoned Me", for example. David Kemper does some super-interesting hard syncopations during "Forever Young" which I don't recall hearing much of. It's like he's trying to put some more bounce into it, while Jerry wants to keep it slow and soft, a classic Garcia Band scenario that Kemper (I think - probably in the Barry Smolin interview) described as having his foot on the gas and the brakes at the same time. I do like this version of "Forever Young" a lot - it presents a little burn later on that works.

As ever, the amazing John Corley pulled a killer tape. If you know John Corley, please ask him if he'd be willing to have his masters redone - they are very much worthy of more optimal, high res treatment than they got 20 years ago. (I am NOT complaining.) Since I was there, I'd also like to pin down some tape archaeology, as I recall it. Corley apparently broke down his Nak 700s for stealth and put them in a silly hat. He hit the Stone a lot, and his tapes are pretty uniformly killer. I am fuzzy on the details, but when Bob Menke and Jim Powell were still friendly, one of them either transferred DATs (that would have been Bob) or acquired them from a third party and got them onto CD. Ladner and jjoops had formed the "misSHN in the Rain" offshoot of "The Music Never Stopped Project (TMNSP)", which was mostly working from CDs, ripping them, shn'ing them, and getting them to the tol.etree.org FTP server as a single integral collection. This collection ultimately provided the main foundation for what when to archive.org. The GD stuff went live, the Jerry stuff never could (not through the front door, anyway). But I digress. The misSHN guys were trading with Powell, and that's how most of the Corley tapes went from CD to the Lossless realm.

Listening notes below the fold, nothing major in there that I don't report above. But I do recommend this show if you are looking to chill.

Last Freddie-ish Gig on Tape: JGB at the Stone, May 28, 1987

update: I can't believe I didn't know that Freddie didn't actually run the Stone and KPA. I knew the Coronas were involved, but Corry informs me in comments that they actually ran the KPA and the Stone, and Freddie really only had the Berkeley club. Learn something new everyday. I will still refer to this as Freddie-affiliated, since the "Keystone Family" as a real concept, whatever its substance. /update

As I just noted, the last Freddie  Herrera-affiliated room, The Stone on Broadway, couldn't hold the post-Touch of Grey Garcia Band. Two and a half weeks after filming the TOG video at Laguna Seca in Monterey, Jerry put a bow on his professional relationship with Freddie -- their friendship continued unaffected, as far as I know -- with four gigs in five nights starting May 27, 1987 and ending on May 31 a pair of midweek gigs on May 27-28, 1987. No tapes circulate for the last two nights, though one imagines they might have been recorded. Consider this a "bleg" for those tapes, because I dream that there was some special energy as the intimate, decade and a half relationship comes to a close.

No special energy is apparent in this May 28th gig. There are some good moments, and it's fine, but there's not much that especially lights me up. I enjoyed the relative rarity "Crazy Love", another Moondance track Jerry added to his post-coma repertoire (along with the much longer-lived "And It Stoned Me"). For my taste, 1987 Jerry Band falls at least a notch below the 1988 and 1989 versions, which I am having a hard time ranking. I need to think more about the decade as a whole, but I guess I do think that the post-coma shows ending 1986 and well into 1987 still find our boy re-establishing his footing.

Listening notes below. John Corley was an amazing taper. If you know how to reach him, please put him in touch with me!

Jerry Garcia Band
The Stone
412 Broadway
San Francisco, CA 94133
May 28, 1987 (Wednesday) - 9 PM
Corley shnid-20587 tagged flacs

--set I (6 tracks, 55:26)--
s1t01. Cats Under The Stars [8:46] [1:19]
s1t02. Mission In The Rain [9:58] [0:26]
s1t03. Think [6:52] [0:57]
s1t04. Let It Rock [06:52] [0:23]
s1t05. Night They Drove Old Dixie Down [9:14] % [0:39]
s1t06. Tangled Up In Blue [9:53] [0:08] %

--set II (7 tracks, 59:17)--
s2t01. //I'll Take A Melody [#11:54] [0:56]
s2t02. Stop That Train [8:05] [0:17]
s2t03. I Shall Be Released [6:40] [0:03] % [0:13]
s2t04. Love In The Afternoon [8:01] [0:29]
s2t05. Crazy Love [5:05] [0:19]
s2t06. That Lucky Old Sun [10:20] ->
s2t07. Midnight Moonlight [6:49] [0:07]

! ACT1: JGB #21b (THE Jerry Garcia Band)
! lineup: Jerry Garcia - guitar, vocals;
! lineup: John Kahn - bass;
! lineup: Melvin Seals - keyboards;
! lineup: David Kemper - drums;
! lineup: Jacklyn LaBranch - backing vocals;
! lineup: Gloria Jones - backing vocals.

JGMF:

! Recording: symbols: % = recording discontinuity; / = clipped song; // = cut song; ... = fade in/out; # = truncated timing; [ ] = recorded event time. The recorded event time immediately after the song or item name is an attempt at getting the "real" time of the event. So, a timing of [x:xx] right after a song title is an attempt to say how long the song really was, as represented on this recording.

! Jerrybase: https://jerrybase.com/events/19870528-01

! JGC: jerrygarcia.com/1987-05-28

! db: https://etreedb.org/shn/20587 (this source)

! band: http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2012/01/jerry-garcia-band-personnel-1975-1995.html

! map: https://goo.gl/maps/Vr6EBXU6KvA2

! JGBP: http://jerrygarciasbrokendownpalaces.blogspot.com/2012/07/stone-mothers-412-broadway-san.html

! historical: After 16 years of collaboration, from a New Riders gig the night before Thanksgiving 1970 to this four show JGB run May 27-28 and 30-31, 1987, Jerry had to walk away from Freddie Herrera as host of his local side gigs in favor of Bill Graham, who could offer rooms, and especially, eventually, the 3,000 seat Warfield, more commensurate with Garcia's post-In The Dark needs.

! R: field recordist: John Corley

! R: field recording gear: 2x Nakamichi 700 > unknown cassette deck

! R: lineage: MAC > ? > DAT > CDR >  DAE (EAC0.9b4, offset corrected, secure mode) > removal of some silent gaps (SF6) > tracking (cdwav editor) > sector boundaries confirmed (shntool) > SHN(shorten 3.4) via C.Ladner - "another installment of the misSHN in the rain TMNSP offshoot, 11/03".

! R: seeder Comments:  Couple of tape pauses/flips in between some tracks. Thanks to J.Powell for the CDR source."

! R: Flac encoding notes: All processing with Trader's Little Helper; Shn - st5 generated; Shn > Flac (level 8); Flac - st5 generated and matched to Shn st5.

! R: Tagging notes: Show information is embedded within the header of each flac file. It will display on any player capable of directly playing flac files. If converted to wav during processing, all tags will be stripped, however audio data will remain unaffected. If you must transcode to a lossy format, do so directly Flac > Lossy. Use st5 to validate audio integrity. Md5 values will change if tagging is altered. A Mills 12/5/14"

! R: muffled out of the gate.

! P: s1t01 CUTS Garcia some nice grungy guitar tone 5, unusual pulls. JG tries to draw it back to the tune out of the jam late 6, rest of the band needs another measure to get with it, he deftly works it back around. This is a nice version of CUTS.

! P: s1t03 Think very late 2 JG hits some killer blues notes. Very strong.

! P: s1t04 LIR more nice blues sustains late 2.

! R: s2t01 ITAM cuts in

! song: "Crazy Love" (s2t05): Post-coma, Jerry picked up two tunes from Van Morrison's 1970 classic Moondance. "And It Stoned Me" me stuck around until the end, but "Crazy Love" only lasted a year, making 15 appearances between 10/19/86 and 10/31/87. It strained his vocals a little bit, which might have contributed to its demise. It's a nice tune.

NGC: Van Morrison and Toulouse Ta Truck

Via the Facebook page of the amazing Jake Feinberg, which is a treasure trove of text snippets from Jake's radio show, which you should listen to and support.

Too Loose to Truck, By Steve Mitchell

I was playing with a piano player 4 nights a week at a club called "Shipwreck Pete's." It was John Allair and myself, we were playing duo gigs. John sang and played piano and a B-3 organ at the same time.

We're playing one night and this fella comes in with his saxophone and he's dressed all in black and he's got a black hat on and nobody knows who he is and he's standing there in the middle of the dance floor getting knocked around and he could play pretty good - it turned out to be Van Morrison.

Van liked what we were doing so he played with us. He came to our gigs and played with us cause he enjoyed playing and he wanted to develop his saxophone chops.

I had run into Phil Lesh at one of Mickey Hart's gatherings and we talked and he said he wanted to be able to play when the Dead weren't on the road.
It was all the Marin County guys, John Allair, Terry Haggerty from the Sons of Champlin and Van and Phil Lesh. There was a revolving door of people who were in and out of the band. Most of the time it was Phil, Allair, Haggerty and myself.
https://www.facebook.com/jake.feinbergshow/posts/1199080536835142

I don't think I ever knew of a Van Morrison connection in Toulouse Ta Truck (aka Too Loose To Truck, etc.). Did you?