I don't know who the interviewer is, nor the radio station from which this particular recorded. It is the first track of
shnid-126296. This is the interview Jerry gave before the SNACK Benefit at Kezar Stadium. Sounds like reading the newspapers around the time of the show will prove interesting, mismanagement of budgets by bureaucrats probably a recurring theme. I can't talk about that now.
Instead, just a few quick thoughts, with link to audio and my reasonably full transcription below the fold.
1. Why Side Trips?
One of the theses I'll address in the book is that
Garcia's side projects were about more and different live gigging, relative to what he could get with the GD. It ain't earth-shattering to posit the primitives of quantity and quality of course. But the evolution over time is very interesting, how he interpreted and put into practice, these desiderata, is really rich. Indeed, it's what
Fate Music will be about, how Garcia navigated his life beyond the Grateful Dead. It's a nontrivial problem, and his solutions tell us a lot about him and, certainly for me, sheds light on the human condition, on how each and all of us must navigate our own lives "beyond the Grateful Dead".
On the quantity side, history's arc bends pretty straightforwardly: until mid-1975, "
more" meant "all the time". As time went on, it would this would diminish and become highly routinized, mostly through the Jerry Garcia Band. He'd play a weekend or two at a regular local haunt (the Keystone Family of venues until 1987, the Warfield after that, a weekend or two every few months, with the occasional off-weekend show thrown in. West coast trips to SoCal and up to the Pacific Northwest. Maybe an East Coast tour, eventually only in the fall.
A simple chart of the number of GOTS gigs over the years will nicely illustrate the point, but I don't want to go generate one right now. Soon enough.
The quality calculus, i.e., the evolving meaning and practice of "
different" on The Side, moves, over the years,
from challenge to comfort. The cut-point is 12/31/75-1/1/76. Prior to that point, the side projects involved more challenge than comfort. After that point, the curves cross and comfort starts trumping challenge.
I say all of this because there's a nice Q&A here on where Garcia's head was it, with respect to all of this, on March 23, 1975.
0018
interviewer You're an incredible guy, because with all the history of the GD
and the all the musical avenues that the Dead has explored, you also work with
Merl Saunders and the bluegrass thing OAITW… do you find that that is what you
need to keep stretching musically?
0044 Well
it’s just that I have a lot of different interests, and any one thing might not
take up … If I have space … for example, when the Grateful Dead were touring,
there would be times when we would be on the road for two weeks, three weeks,
and then off the road for two or three weeks. During that two or three week
interim period, I’d usually want to play some, y’know, play music somehow. And,
obviously the Grateful Dead can’t go out and play in clubs, without causing
some sort of amazing commotion … and so I started taking up my time about four
or five years ago jamming, just jamming, on Monday nights at the Matrix, and
started playing with Howard Wales and them, and later Merl, and John Kahn
played bass and stuff like that. But it started to be a more or less regular
thing, and I just got into feeling that, ‘yeah, when I’m not workin’, if I’m
not on the road or touring or something like that, there’s still a lot of room
for me to play and cha … and reach, y’know, out to a, … in a learning sort of
situation and all that.
2. Fate Music
There's a great little
Fate Music line here, too, where he talks about OAITW (@01:46)
Bluegrass music is something that’s a little different.
It’s something I’ve always loved. And mainly with bluegrass music, you sort of
have to wait for an opportunity to present itself, where there are musicians
around that understand the music and play it really well .. and Old And In The
Way was a result of that sort of coincidence, where suddenly there was [sic]
three or four of us around who knew the music and who enjoyed playin’ it. So we
started loosely, just getting together and playing for fun, and then got to be
more serious about it as time went on. But really those things sort of happen
accidentally in a way.
I like this for the Fate Music theme of these things coming together by happenstance. But this little synopsis also speaks to the process of institutionalization. It starts off a lark and ends up a job. That's one feature of the arc of Garcia on The Side that's essential to keep in mind.
3. GD and Side Trips
One of the key issues that I spend a lot of time thinking about (since my subtitle is
Jerry Garcia's Musical Life Outside the Grateful Dead) is how the side stuff and the GD interact. Here, Garcia is asked whether being so busy with side stuff undermines the Dead. His answer (@02:22): "No, I
don’t think so. I think it adds to it, just in terms of that
each thing stays
fresh if you’re not doin’ it all the time. You come back to it with new ideas
and new influences and stuff like that.
4. Record Companies
The interviewer asks Garcia to evaluate whether the record companies were a good idea,
in retrospect. This is really informative: in his mind, they were dead by 3/23/75. Here's Jerry's reply (@0427):
Well,
yeah. I think so. Certainly in our heads I think it was a good idea. It hasn't
been the world's most outrageously successful endeavor, but that's not the
focus, either. Again, that hasn't been the focus. Now that we're in the midst
of a bone-crushing economic slump, and all the rest of that stuff, our, we're
scuffling just like everybody else is, basically.
5. Film Company
Round Reels, the film company, remains almost totally opaque to me. Garcia mentions it here as if it's a relatively recent innovation. He mentions The Movie and also the company's involvement with what would become, in 1983 (!)
Hells Angels Forever [
imdb].
6. The First Pirates' Ball, JGMS, 9/5/73, S.S. Bay Belle, NYC Harbor
In that connection, he paints a great picture of the first Pirates' Ball show (
for the second, see my post on 9/15/76), September 5, 1973 (@0540). There was one
time that Merl and I and Bill Kreutzmann and John
Kahn played for the Hells Angels, for one of their parties, where they rented
sort of a ferry boat … the kind that go around Manhattan, y'know? They rented a
ferry boat and they had this blowout for all these Hells Angels. They came
from all over the United States, plus all kinds of New York weirdos and stuff
like that. We played on this boat, on the top deck of the boat, underneath the
Brooklyn Bridge, and went around the island a few times. The Jolly Roger was
flying, y'know? And we played out by the Statue of Liberty with all these crazy
Hells Angels and all this stuff. And they were filming it from all over, from perspective
points like the tops of buildings, in New York, looking down those long
canyons, and you could see this ferry boat go by with the Jolly Roger and that
kind of stuff. There's a lot of really … there's a lot of arresting … striking visual stuff in the movie.
7. Hiatus
"That's part of the reason
we stopped performing, was an effort to pursue completely new ideas and shake
loose the past, in terms of musical … stuff" (@0742, discussing the "Blues For Allah" stuff they're going to play in just a few minutes)
Anyway, loved this interview. Not sure if it has been transcribed before, but, anyway, here it is.
