Oscuro Action

Glad to see "Oscuro - February 2, 1975" getting some play.

Ateliers to Empereur

Les Sports Illustrés (Brussels, Belgium) moved from 3, rue des Ateliers to 12, rue de l'Empereur sometime between 1924 and 1926. Business must have been good.

Added bonus, the one from Workshop Street, no. 188, has a story about some 1924 New York Giants barnstorming outside of Paris.

Reading Notes: Signpost to a New Space and Stoned Sunday Rap

These are "reading notes" - little stuff I cull when I read. I copy and paste the quotes into thematic documents (e.g., drugs.docx), so all of this has been "processed" out of the book, and up one level, into thematic or other kinds of buckets.

You may not find the quotes of greatest interest to you. Obviously I am doing this for my own purposes.

Insomnia, anxiety, break-ups … musicians on the dark side of touring

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jun/25/musicians-touring-psychological-dangers-willis-earl-beal-kate-nash

Just Play

Going through some scratched up old CDs, I found a copy of the Crosby, Stills and Nash release Carry On (Atlantic 7567804872, 2006). Entering some dates to trace Croz's whereabouts in the various periods in which he frequented the Garciaverse (most intensely, fall 1969-fall 1971 and again March-September 1975), I am reminded that Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's "Ohio" was released as a single on June 4, 1970 [see also wiki].

Passing thought that Garcia could never have dropped a true protest song. On June 4, 1970, he played an amazing night of acoustic tunes (including two gospel numbers), country music on pedal steel guitar, and loud electric rock and blues.

Enjoy this incredible audience recording by Gerry Olsen (shnid-123798) that will put you into the comfy-as-home Fillmore West on a Thursday night. Yeah, "Darkness, Darkness", but sometimes it's better just to play.

 

Oscuro - February 2, 1975

(Editorial note: I debated whether to post this, for two reasons. First, these are people's lives. I will try to stick to the facts. Second, as an aesthetic proposition, obscurity needs to be done in moderation -- it isn't always fun to try to take in, in looking at a painting or in trying to do a little light reading around Jerry Garcia's Musical Life Outside the Grateful Dead. In the end, obviously, I decided to go with it, on chiaroscuro grounds.)

Monday morning coffee, February 3rd, 1975 Marin IJ, beneath the "Storm Rips Into Bay Area" headline and next to that seventies classic "Ford Sees Some Bad Times Ahead", we learn that "Wife Of Guitarist Bob Weir Reported Shot In Stomach". Sunday, February 2, Bob and Frankie Weir arrived back in Mill Valley at 5 a.m. after a Kingfish gig (at the Gold Rush in Walnut Creek), quarreling, and around 6:15 she shot herself in the stomach, Weir picked the gun up and threw it out the window; she's off to the hospital.

What a nightmare for all involved, to say the least. Thankfully, we learn the next day that Frankie is recovering, a graft of chiar into the oscuro, as there must be (conditional on not being at the center of a black hole).

That same Tuesday morning coffee finds Lenny Hart's obituary on the same page. Leonard, 55, former manager of the Grateful Dead, disappeared Sunday, February 2, after a long bout with cancer. Funeral is Wednesday, 2 o'clock at the Chapel of the Hills in San Anselmo, and his body will be put to rest in Mount Tamalpais Cemetery.

The curriculum vitae is worth posting for the record:

Hart, married and divorced five times, became the manager of the Grateful Dead in the 1960s after one of his seven children joined the group. He left the Marin-based rock group in 1970. In 1970, he went to San Diego, where he studied religion and became an ordained minister in the Assembly of God Church. After he returned to Marin, he worked as a part-time instructor in the Mill Valley School District’s music program. Last semester he taught a class in the education department at Dominican College in San Rafael. His home was at 10 Bayview Drive, Kentfield.

Hart was born and reared in New York City. He served with the Marine Corps during World War II and, after the war, worked in various capacities in the music business.

Astute readers will be aware that one of the capacities in which Lenny worked the music business was as convicted felonious thief from, among others, that one of his seven children. That was right before the God part, which was right before the (unmentioned) prison time. This is not speaking ill of the Dead. This is stating facts.

Mickey reminds us of some of the human cost of Lenny's Perfidy:

He robbed us blind.

One night in 1970 some guys came on stage after a show to reclaim Pigpen's organ. We were stunned. From our perspective we were doing really  well, playing nearly every night to one or two thousand people. The next day Phil and I went to see Lenny. Phil asked to see the books. Lenny refused in a suave, bankerly sort of way and at that instant I knew: he had stolen our money. While we had been struggling on this incredible adventure in sound sharing, my charrning dad had been skimming off everything. How much he took, we could never discover.

Lenny went to jail for it. I couldn't go anywhere near him or the trial. I didn't want to play, didn't want to go out on the road. Confused, unbalanced, I wanted to flee and hide, bury my head and cry. I stopped touring with the Grateful Dead in 1971 and went to ground at the Barn (Hart 1990, 144-145).

All of which is to say, for JGMF purposes, that Sunday, February 2, 1975 can only have been a pretty shitty day. True, these clouds cover the Garciaverse less intensely, less ominously than they do, say, Bob Weir's and Mickey Hart's worlds. But perhaps nothing moves faster through strong-tie social networks such as these than the deathly things. And there were no ties, in the Garciaverse, stronger than the Dead ties. It's remarkable to reflect on how close these men were, forged together musically by the shared experience of playing together before a crowd while high on LSD, but also across all the other sinews that bind business partners, collaborators, friends, and loved ones together.

Bob and Jerry were like junior and elder brothers, and they spent lots of time together even during the Dead's touring hiatus. Over the course of February 1-2, Jerry did some jamming and recording with Bill Cutler and the band Heroes, which would appear in 2008 on a record called Crossing The Line (Magnatude, 2008).

At point, I thought those sessions might have happened at Mickey's place. They didn't, but here's my picture from the entry gate to what was once Hart's Barn from sometime in the 21st century:

Jerry and Mickey spent lots of time together at Hart's Barn in Novato during this period (see the Arnold references below), the former working and Mickey, the "ostensible host … allowed to live unhindered with [his] pain" (Hart 1990, 145). Just a few days before Lenny's death, Jerry spent January 27-29, there producing the Good Old Boys' Pistol Packin' Mama (Round Records RX-109, March 1976), probably picking a few tunes uncredited. These men were in the flow of each other's daily lives.

 

I try to keep a sharp focus on Garcia's Musical Life Outside the Grateful Dead, as the subtitle has it. But the surroundings define the shadings, like the customs house in Caravaggio's The Calling of Saint Matthew; the pieces of our lives "bleed together" in artistic and more literally sanguinous senses. Did these events affect Jerry Garcia? Surely, they did, though I can't say how. There's no passing unscathed through these kinds of storms, though, even toward the outer edges. Having brothers in pain, confronting the shit that a turbulent storm can lay bare as it strips away the silty protections of temporal distance (and the psychological armoring and good, old-fashioned capacities-to-forget that unfold across it), whether these be memories of Lenny's Perfidy or anything else, these things getting kicked up always matter, bedding back down onto a new floor, a course altered, if imperceptibly.

(Some things, of course, never change. The February 6 IJ runs a rather ignominious piece in the day's obituaries, again under the deceased's name: "Leonard B. Hart, onetime Grateful Dead rock group manager, was not an ordained minister of the Assembly of God church, according to Rev. Reuben J. Sequeira, pastor of the Assembly of God in San Rafael. … Sequeira said he checked with the national headquarters of the Assemblies of God and learned the office has no record of Hart ever being ordained with the church.")

REFERENCES:

! ref: "Obituaries: Leonard Hart," Independent Journal (San Rafael, CA), February 4, 1975, p. 4.

! ref: "Obituaries: Leonard Hart," Independent Journal (San Rafael, CA), February 6, 1975, p. 4.

! ref: "Frankie Weir Is Recovering," Independent Journal (San Rafael, CA), February 4, 1975, p. 4.

! ref: “Wife of Guitarist Bob Weir Reported Shot In Stomach,” Independent Journal (San Rafael, CA), February 3, 1975, p. 1.

! ref: Arnold 20110115. Grateful Dead Solo Album Contracts, 1970-73. Lost Live Dead, January 15, 2011, URL http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2011/01/grateful-dead-solo-album-contracts-1970.html, consulted 1/24/2014.

! ref: Arnold 20120824. Album Projects Recorded at Mickey Hart's Barn, Novato, CA 1971-76. Hooterollin' Around, August 24, 2012, URL http://hooterollin.blogspot.com/2012/08/album-projects-recorded-at-mickey-harts.html, consulted 1/24/2014.

! ref: Hart, Mickey, with Jay Stevens. 1990. Drumming at the Edge of Magic: A Journey Into the Spirit of Percussion. New York: HarperCollins.

OAITW at Homer's Warehouse - March 4, 1973

This started off, and can still function, as a post with the setlists for the 3/4/73 OAITW gigs at Homer's Warehouse. But now there are a few other fragmentary thoughts.

Jerry Garcia lived an idyll at Sans Souci (18 Avenida Farallone, Stinson Beach, CA, 94970, map). It was his most domestic period, living with MG and their daughters Sunshine Kesey and Garcias Annabelle (b. 2/2/70) and Trixie (b. 9/21/74). I have lots to say about Sans Souci, but not here/now. Idylls pool time up, and idyllic Sans Souci hearkened pretty deeply to the past, in some ways the counterbalance to the amazing professional growth Jerry was living with his side projects (the first big one of which, Garcia, had bought them the house) and, especially, the Dead.

Breaking out the old banjo, which he hadn't played in a sustained way since about 1963, is of course a throwback move, both in terms of Jerry's biography and, of course, in the tapestry of American music. With old and new musical friends David Grisman, Peter Rowan and often involving Chis Rowan and Lorin Rowan [a.k.a. "The Brothers"], OAITW formed a pretty pure roots project, a deep dig into rural white American musical canon, Garcia on 5-string banjo, an ancient African instrument which was one of so many to cross putative racial divides. The pull of the past is strong in OAITW.

But it also has a real fresh taste of ambition and hard work, even leaving aside stuff like starting a record company (which would happen on July 15, 1973). Just musically, picking up the banjo in ca. late 1972 and getting serious about it in 1973 is really grasping the nettle. Once before Garcia had walked away from banjo because it just demanded too much self-discipline, too much time to do right, an instrument which could only be attacked with a single-minded fury, rough on the dilettante. It posed a real challenge, he knew this, and he tackled it, again, practicing not only religiously at home, as Mountain Girl recounts, but bringing his banjo on tour with the Dead ("You know that banjos act funny at weird altitudes? Why, my banjo sounded just great in Salt Lake City" – Jerry ca. 3/13/73 [Tolces 1973]).

In Garcia's world, you know it's getting good when it goes public, from sitting on the edge of the bed to standing onstage, with an audience which may well be paying for the privilege. After a particularly tasty take of Grisman's "Old And In The Way" in a Stinson Beach living room, Garcia made these boys an offer they couldn't refuse. "Beautiful. We've got a full band. We can go down and take over Sweetwater. ... We'll just work up a few tunes and take it on down there. Kreutzmann owns the place."[1] The fly on the wall reports that this is the birth of the idea of taking the band out in public, gigging around. Playing Sweetwater is not getting paid, in all likelihood, maybe some beer and coffee. Playing the bar in Stinson Beach, maybe not any different. But when the curtain draws and things go public in the Garciaverse, Mr. Price Mechanism shows up soon enough, and these young go-getters tear out of the gates like bats out of hell, with six live gigs and a live radio broadcast in four days! They certainly didn't lack for energy.[2].

Table xxx. Old And In The Way but Fast Out Of The Gate.

The band's third night out found it the newly up-and-running and frequently rocking Homer's Warehouse in Palo Alto, at 79 Homer Avenue (map). This is a nicely burnished picture: Garcia hadn't played the banjo regularly in ten years, and he hadn't played Palo Alto regularly in a decade, either. Between times, there were a few visits to Stanford, with Jerry and Merl opening for Big Black at the Frost Amphitheatre on 10/3/71 (Grushkin 1971, JGMF), and the Dead playing Maples Pavilion on 2/9/73, but Garcia's last gig in a Palo Alto club had been a flurry of woodshedding arrangements at the Poppycock in late 1969. Before that was probably with the Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions and, as pre-Dead, falls beyond my scope. "This would be a homecoming of sorts for Jerry", Bernstein notes. "He'd not been around Palo Alto for a while, and we wanted him to feel comfortable. Perhaps he would return for more appearances if it felt right to him. We knew this was a great opportunity to make a splash. All fingers and toes were crossed" (Bernstein 2013, 114).

It sounds like Mr. Price and Ms. Vibe danced well together this night. Some color:

["Peruvian Marching Powder"] was making its way around the Purple Room-not copious amounts, just enough to keep things lively. The band all wanted coffee, no beer or anything stronger. Of course, there was always a joint going around. At the bar, we had sold more beer than anticipated and thought we'd run out of kegs because Lou, the driver, had not completely filled our order. I called the president of the Coors franchise, a nice Italian guy, and told him the driver cut me short on kegs. He apologized. He couldn't take a truck out of the yard, but he would leave his home, pick up six kegs with his Lincoln, and bring them over to us. Midway through the dynamite second show, he arrived with his son and brought all six kegs through the back door. He said the keg driver was cutting everyone short, just to make trouble in anticipation of a teamsters' strike in the Bay Area (Bernstein 2013, 116). 

Color is great, but we can also engage the subtleties of chiaroscuro,[3] maybe a sepiatone of a simple day-in-the-life of an ambitious, engaged, super-talented, successful thirtyish professional, Jerome John Garcia. He rolls up at 1 in the afternoon for two Sunday shows, smokes and picks some, plays protean video games for two hours while drinking black coffee, plays two sellout shows (three encore calls at the early show, "the audience went wild after the second" one), plays another hour of games and drives Pete Rowan and himself home (Bernstein 2013, 113-118). Not too bad, all told.[4]

Setlists follow.

Old And In The Way

Homer's Warehouse

79 Homer Avenue

Palo Alto, CA 94301

March 4, 1973 (Sunday) – 3 PM and 9 PM

no known recording

--3 PM early show (main set + encores) (10 songs, max 90 minutes)--

--main set (7 songs, ca. 60-75 minutes)--

The Willow Garden

Going To The Races

Wild Horses

Soldier's Joy

Land Of The Navajo

Lonesome L.A. Cowboy

Blue Mule

--encores (3 songs, ca. 15 minutes)--

Panama Red

Till The End Of The World Rolls 'Round

White Dove

! setlist: The set and encore structure are not made explicit on AB's setlist, but he recalls "After an hour and a half, the band finished [a] third encore to thunderous applause", and lays out this list (see Bernstein 2013, 116-117).

--9 PM late show (12 songs)--

Going to the Races

Katie Hill

Till the End of the World Rolls 'Round

Panama Red

White Dove

Knockin' on Your Door

Fanny Hill

Land of the Navajo

Wild Horses

Blue Mule

Lost

Hard Hearted

! ACT1: Old And In The Way

! lineup: Jerry Garcia - banjo, vocals;

! lineup: David Grisman - mandolin, vocals;

! lineup: John Kahn - bass;

! lineup: Peter Rowan - guitar, vocals.

JGMF:

! JGC: none as of 12/28/2014.

! db: none as of 12/28/2014.

! map: https://goo.gl/maps/vR7s7

! metadata: solid as a rock, via Bernstein 2013, 113-118, ads in the Stanford Daily.

! ad: Stanford Daily, February 23, 1973, p. 6; bills"Bluegrass music with Old And In The Way featuring Jerry Garcia [name was larger, prominent] plus the Rowan Bros." This ad also had some other gigs, Nick Gravenites and whatnot.

! ad: Stanford Daily, February 27, 1973, p. 6; this one is just OAITW. "The New Homer's Warehouse ... presents Old And In The Way featuring Jerry Garcia formerly with The Warlocks, David Diadem formerly with Earth Opera, Peter Rowan, formerly lead guitar with Sea Train. Special guests The Rowan Brothers."

! ref: Arnold, Corry. 2013. February 1973, unnamed bar, Stinson Beach, CA: Old And In The Way. Lost Live Dead, June 6, URL http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2013/06/february-1973-unnamed-bar-stinson-beach.html, consulted 12/28/2014.

! ref: Bernstein, Andrew J. 2013. California Slim: The Music, the Magic, and the Madness. Xlibris LLC.

! ref: Grissim, John. 1973. Garcia Returns to Banjo: Splendor in the Bluegrass. Rolling Stone, April 26, 1973, p. 14.

! ref: Grushkin, Paul D. 1971. Garcia, Saunders Impressive at Frost. Stanford Daily, October 5, 1971, unknown page [JGMF].

! ref: McNally, Dennis. 2002. A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead. New York: Broadway Books.

! ref: Tolces, Todd. 1973. Jerry's Bluegrass Boys. Melody Maker 48 (April 28): 35. [JGMF reading notes].

! seealso: JGMF: URL http://jgmf.blogspot.com/2011/07/oaitw-19730305-inn-of-beginning-cotati.html.

! seealso: JGMF: URL http://jgmf.blogspot.com/2012/04/ln-jg1973-05-04jgmsallsbd.html

---

[1] "Bluegrass at Grisman's" (sound recording).

[2] Note another pattern that we have often had occasion to observe: new band = off-the-beaten path, smaller, and/or off-night gigs. The Share in San Anselmo, Homer's in Palo Alto, and the Inn in Cotati certainly qualify.

[3] As, e.g., on display at http://jgmf.blogspot.com/2014/12/free-caravaggio.html.

[4] Morbidly, contrast with Pigpen, who is on his deathbed and would pass away on Thursday, March 8^th (McNally 2002, 447).

Free Caravaggio

There are a bunch of Caravaggios in Rome, but the stunning thing is that four of them can be seen for free. I am certainly no art critic, but I don't let that stop me, strolling from north to south.

On the Piazza del Popolo is Santa Maria del Popolo, which is just bursting at the seams with great stuff - I need to spend more time there. On the subject at hand, the Cerasi Chapel contains two Caravaggios. The Crucifixion of Saint Peter has unbelievable heft, as the linked wiki entry notes, and Peter is a full-on badass oldster -- this is a painting more about man than God.

 

Conversion on the Way to Damascus is another chiaroscuro knockout, on the right side of the little chapel. I couldn't quite figure out the horse, but Paul's open, heavenward reach, his stunned amazement at the revelation he's experiencing, the simultaneity of his swooshing movement and his knocked-the-wind-out-of-me frozenness, groundedness and transcendence ... it totally transfixed me.

(Bernini's sculpture The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa was also recommended to me as one not to miss on this ecstatic theme - I hope/plan to see it.)

Heading south, and quite close to the Piazza Navona, is the unassuming Sant' Agostino is Caravaggio's Madonna di Loreto. It probably impressed me least of the four I am including here, though there were two things that I really pondered over. The first is that the Madonna's toenails were dirty, or so it seemed to me. No biggie, I know, but I just don't recall this kind of utter humanization of the subject to quite this extent before. Second, while I am not impressed by the proportioning of the young God, still his head and face struck me as improbably photographic. Just looking at that, I would have been hard pressed to say this was a painting and not any, say, late 19th - early 20th c. snapshot bimbo. So I guess it's the realism of this one, in the details, that really spoke to me.

Finally, right around the corner in San Luigi dei Francesi/Saint Louis des Français, the whole of which I find quite striking, is the amazing The Calling of Saint Matthew in the Contarelli Chapel.

This is probably my favorite of the bunch. Customs houses get at the intersection of money and the state that always interests me, and the sacred graft --to say nothing of the breathtaking quality of the work, the sheer depth of each character, the shading and the lighting-- just knocks my socks off. As I might say here over a particularly hot Garcia solo - WOW. Two snaps up.

Of course, each of these churches holds countless other masterpieces of canvas, plaster, marble and all the rest. It always feels a little strange to me to crowd around the Caravaggio when there's a neglected Raphael a few apses down. But why overthink it, especially at a first go? The Eternal City, God willing, always be, and once you're there, a lot of its treasures are there for the mere walking-to and taking-in.

Google Arts & Culture offers even more Free Caravaggio!

Darkness, Darkness

**Fulsomely updated, 11/28/2014 at 12:34 PM, GMT -0700)**
**update2: Blogger is making me crazy. Sorry for poor formatting**

This post now needs to be completely reconstituted.

1. San Diego papers 

I mentioned in my 11/18/73 post that the San Diego State Daily Aztec is digitized and online. Bravo, and thank you, librarians! They have also, with the support of taxpayers and/or donors, produced scans of some alternative campus newspapers. These are not generally found in the wonderful UMI Underground Press Collection, so there is real value-added here. I had been unaware of these particular San Diego State papers. There's lots of great Latino, Chicano, and indigenous material, as befits the college's long status (like, late 19th century which, in the Anglo West, is old) as a pillar of a very diverse community. The library also appears to have digitized the San Diego Union, the San Diego Tribune, and the San Diego Union-Tribune, but those collections seem to be onsite access only, and I didn't have time to go to campus. I need to investigate a bit more.

2. Fragments

Most relevant to this blog, they did a little hippie paper called Sunrise, and it popped up with the following result, dated 10/7/70, to a search on "Grateful Dead" (which is either my first or second filter, depending on how much stuff I expect to return on it and "Jerry Garcia"):

Thought I would turn you on to a little info on how promoter Jim Pagni makes his money - based on the Grateful Dead concert he was forced to cancel because of Jerry Garcia's illness. When the Sports Arena is filled it holds 15,000 people. At Jim's prices, he would have grossed $60,000. Expenses of $12,000 for groups, approx. $6,000 for the facility, $3,000 for advertising, and $1,000 for miscellaneous would have left J.P. with a new profit of $35,000 of the people's money. No wonder J.P. can afford his Mercedes Benz and $100 suits.

3. This is a canceled GD gig previously unknown to me.

I implicitly keep what I think of as the Provisional Definitive List of Canceled Grateful Dead Concerts. update: now you can just go to Jerrybase and filter on canceled stuff.  Favoring the appropriate precision, and since Olsen mentions no date, I investigated further. I found a listing in the 9/21 Aztec for a Dead show in San Diego on Sunday, September 27, 1970: "The Grateful Dead, a San Francisco rock group, are back in San Diego, this time at the Sports Arena."

Naturally, I have added it to my spreadsheet. Canceled gigs can be just as important as consummated shows. The lengths to which I find myself going below at least signal my own belief in that proposition, if not its general truth.

4. The Dead and Garcia in San Diego

My fragmentary research reminds me that the Dead were never that big in San Diego. Here's what I come up with for area Dead and Garcia gigs through the 70s:

• 8/2/68 GD Hippodrome
• 8/3/68 GD Hippodrome
• 5/11/69 GD San Diego State Aztec Bowl. Here is some SDSU eyecandy from the show. There are great Rosie McGee and other color pictures from this gig and surrounding stuff, Garcia sporting a very Chicano looking mustache, some gaudy orange stripy clothes, etc. The eyecandy I linked shows a rather empty looking facility.
• 1/10/70 GD Golden Hall
• 8/5/70 Acoustic GD Golden Hall. Uncertain, see especially here.
• 8/7/71 NRPS-GD Community Concourse
• 11/14/73 GD Sports Arena
• 11/18/73 JGMS San Diego State Aztec Bowl [canceled]
• 12/27-28/75 JGB La Paloma Thater in Del Encinitas [corry]
• 2-21/22/76 JGB La Paloma Theater
• 1/7/78 GD Golden Hall
• 12/27/78 GD I show "Community Concourse Golden Hall"
• 7/28/79 Reconstruction Roxy Theater
• 11/23-24/79 GD Community Concourse Golden Hall

For some reason I felt like there was a Garcia Band show on 5/24/76, but I must be imaging that.

Anyway, they weren't that big in SD. There's something about the tone of the Aztec item – "The Grateful Dead, a San Francisco rock group, are back in San Diego, this time at the Sports Arena" – that feels a little cold. Odds are it's a single copywriter (if it's anything at all), but it just feels to me like things didn't always resonate between the Dead and San Diego. And another sign of San Diego's relative diffidence: there is not a single audience tape among the Garcia shows. December 1975, February 1976, a totally unheard-since-7/28/79 Reconstruction show on a Saturday night ... not a scrap of tape for most of this, and not a scrap of audience tape from San Diego, full stop, in the Garciaverse. San Diegans, please issue a call to arms to send me your old reels and cassettes – I'll see what's there and what might be worth the archival treatment. Please email me at jgmfblog@gmail.com!

5. The business information

The columnist obviously holds no love for promoter Jim Pagni. His position on capitalism in general is more ambiguous (though writing about "the people" in the Sunrise in fall 1970 probably indicates something). But this is great info, and I agree with him that paying the act $12k and profiting three times that sounds a little excessive.

I do wonder where the contractual information came from. Certainly the promoter wouldn't reveal it.

6. Something's not quite right ...

Maybe columnist Dave Olsen is just the suspicious kind, but he doesn't quite seem to buy that Garcia was sick, which is the given reason for the cancellation. He makes special note that Garcia played the weekend in LA (I assume referring to the Dead's attendee-confirmed Pasadena gig on Friday 9/25 [deadlists]) over the weekend. But Pasadena was before the canceled Sunday gig in San Diego, and between them was a little jaunt out to Salt Lake City for a Saturday show (deadlists, which gives a setlist). This is the schedule of a band that needed the money - SF to LA to SLC to SD to SF don' make no sense at all, unless you are just taking whatever check won't bounce.

I don't think the Dead would have walked away from $12 grand to fuck over the capitalist pig, which Olsen seems to imply. My first guess was that, y'know, Garcia really was sick. Maybe they brought the contract terms to light as a PR move, vilify the capitalist a little bit. "Sorry for the last minute cancellation. By that way, that guy is really fleecing the San Diego hip community …" But they could not have afforded to refuse the gig to make a political statement. Circumstances must have been exigent.

8. But here's what it might be?

Ruth Clifford Garcia Matusiewicz (née Ruth Marie Clifford, b. June 1910 [Jackson 1999, 5]), mother to 28 year-old Jerry Garcia, passed away on the afternoon of Tuesday, September 29th, 1970 – two days after this canceled Dead show. I no longer think, as I initially did, that her imminent failure formed the proximate cause for the 9/27/70 San Diego cancellation. That was probably, as Corry argues and I elaborate below in the "No Shit, Sherlock" section, just plain old poor ticket sales. But I still have to think that Ruth's demise played a role.

9. O Death

Ruth Garcia had been gravely busted up in a gruesome-sounding car wreck on September 8, in which her dog got mixed up in the car pedals and sent them careening off a cliff. Technically speaking, she survived the accident – but not dying is not the same as really living. Brother Tiff paints the grim picture: "It just mangled my mom. She had broken bones all over her body and internal injuries. She wasn't in a coma but she was in traction and she was in intensive care at San Francisco General for nearly a month. … She couldn't talk. She had to write things. It was hard for her to breathe …" (Jackson 1999, 198).

Over the course of the prior decade, Jerry and Ruth had rarely seen each other, but he visited her nearly every day after her accident. He even belatedly introduced Mountain Girl to his mom, probably crossed paths with ex Sara Ruppenthal and daughter Heather. As I'll say below, Garcia was surrounded by the love of a lot of empathetic musical family. But it was tough. Tiff: xxx quote got cannibalized somehow

Look, Jerry was never one for the paperwork, never would be, and it sounds like on some wavelengths he shorted out a little bit, suffered, as all who lose –i.e., we all—must. But he didn't go totally off the rails, or anything, drowning in drink, or whatever. His response –as ours—exhibits characteristic complexity. Dichotomies can be clarifying, but we generally indulge them at the cost of verisimilitude, because life is full of highly textured choices. The branches growing forth from the critical junctures of our lives, like all the rest of them (i.e., the non-critical ones), are always a little crooked. So, while Garcia may have screwed the paperwork pooch, he responded reasonably healthily and astonishingly productively to losing his mom.

10. Darkness, Darkness – and Light

In 1970 the Dead took to jamming on Bay Area compatriot Jesse Colin Young's "Darkness, Darkness", from The Youngbloods' 1969 record Elephant Mountain [LIA | wiki]. Not just a great jam, it tracks some of the year's emotional timbre. Discovery (and/or acceptance of the fact) of Lenny's Perfidy hit everyone hard, and there's a lot to say about that – but that is mere betrayal and threatened financial ruin. Bear (Augustus Owsley Stanley III, b. d.) went to prison on some of his many drug charges. But the loss of a friend's liberty is a trifle next to the Big Kahuna of pain, the death of a family member/loved one. As sometimes is somewheres and somewheres its wont, death pervaded the Garciaverse in 1970.

By summer, Crosby was starting to feel his way "homeward through the haze." He was still fragile: "unresolved grief over Christine's absence could still move David to sudden tears and he'd be plagued by bouts of melancholy and depression for the rest of the decade," his autobiography reads (Crosby and Gottlieb 1988, 195). And he continued to make bad pharmacological choices, we might say now, around various things, but most dangerously a certain expensive and eventually devastating white power. But he also used the occasion of his grief to put his nose to the grindstone professionally. He "negotiated a solo album deal with Atlantic and began to work on the first fully produced expression of his musical self in his career" (Crosby and Gottlieb 1988, 195, one of the most well-realized artistic achievements of the Bay Area scene, his xxx 1971 IICORMN (xxx).

Dead bassist Phil Lesh's father was diagnosed in early 1970 with prostate cancer and had had the battery of 1970 surgical and other medical technique thrown at him, with all of the pain and challenge and, apparently, little of the avail. He passed on a September day (the 2nd), with a dying exhortation to listeners unknown: "What are we waiting for -let's get this show on the road!" (Lesh 2005, 189). Paul Kantner, Grace Slick and various other Jeffersons had come into Wally Heider's San Francisco Studios in July. The Dead showed up August 6th, and Crosby was omnipresent –he'd get serious about his own record November 1970 – January 1971.

Lesh elaborates how music –and, specifically, playing with compadres in the Planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra (PERRO), in the face of deeply shared loss—can warm up what the reaper done chilled.

"Might as well work" – that's how McNally (2002, ch. 32) brilliantly essentializes the Dead's response to the discovery/acceptance of Lenny's Perfidy, which left them more or less in financial ruin and utterly betrayed by not just a father figure, but Mickey Hart's actual father. Pain, pressure, diamonds: the band produced its American masterpiece, Workingman's Dead (Warner Bros. WS-1869, June 1970), and took a huge step toward building the ship of the Grateful Dead, the brand that launched a thousand Volkswagens. The summer sessions at Heider's culminated in that record's shimmering sequel, the timeless American Beauty. 1970 was a huge year, professionally, "the year the Dead finally broke through to a wider audience and established themselves as the quintessential American rock 'n' roll band" (Jackson 1999, 207).

"It was raining down hard on us while that record was going on," Garcia said of American Beauty (Garcia, Reich and Wenner 2003/1972, 71), but his and his friends' life tragedies begat both growing artistic and burgeoning professional success. The Dead's little San Diego cancellation speaks to this dance in the Garciaverse, the creative tensions inherent in living life on multiple tracks –redundancy alert, since that's just living life-- on being the son of parents who die, Jerry Garcia with his own life's dreams and ambitions, and "Jer-Jer-Jer-Jer ee-ee-ee-ee GARCIA! ah ah ah" Dead guitarslinger. It's all of a piece.

6. And one more thing—

Sorry, but this is JGMF: Olsen has heard that Garcia played San Francisco over the weekend, all while allegedly too sick to play San Diego. What might this be? I would not be the least bit surprised if Jerry, having canceled his Sunday out-of-towner to be close to the hospital, didn't nevertheless play closer to home. Why not? It's his favorite way to spend an evening (this would presumably be at the Matrix, presumably with Merl Saunders), he's not doing anything else, and playing is always the order of the Garcia day, even when it might not help, even just a little, to take the mind off its troubles.

Conjecture upon conjecture upon conjecture, of course. But there's nothing wrong with trying to do some groutwork, filling in some interstices, so long as it's labeled as such. As always, caveat lector.

7. No Shit, Sherlock

Update: Corry, from whom I appear to have learned little (an inapt pupil), finds Occam's Razor and slices through to the probable proximate cause of the Dead's San Diego cancellation. Funny how little fragments can turn out to be small, rippling echoes at the outer edges of the bigger game. Whatever the circumstances, as it happens Garcia was able to fly back a day early and be closer to home when his mom died. I don't think it's coincidental that 1970 and the next several years would find him scaling newfound professional and musical heights, in many ways the most productive years of his life. Trouble would come, as it will, but most of that came later. For now it would be taking the lumps but also stepping up to the plate, making his way –truly, for the first time, his own way, in the sense of lacking even implicit parenting—in the world.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

! ack: thanks to anonymous commenter for correcting me in re Phil's parent who passed away in 1970 – it was his father, not his mother. And, inspired by anonymous taking the time to comment, I have been spinning American Beauty [24/96 vinyl rip – wow] and doing due diligence on the very weight matters of Deaddom's family losses in 1970 – re-reading McNally, Jackson and Lesh on the period. It's Thanksgiving, and I am grateful for the ongoing collaboration of everyone who reads and helps with the blog – thank you! ! listing: Daily Aztec (San Diego State College), September 21, 1970, p. 5, accessed via SDSU digital collections, URL http://library.sdsu.edu/find/digital-collections, consulted 11/21/2014. ! expost: Olsen, Dave. 1970. Metacoustics. Sunrise (San Diego State College), October 7, 1970, p. 13, accessed via SDSU digital collections, URL http://library.sdsu.edu/find/digital-collections, consulted 11/21/2014. ! ref: Jackson, Blair. 1999. Garcia: An American Life. New York: Penguin Books. ! ref: Lesh, Phil. 2005. Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company. ! ref: LIA. 2010. The Dead's Early Thematic Jams. Grateful Dead Guide, January 8, URL http://deadessays.blogspot.com/2010/01/deads-early-thematic-jams.html, consulted 11/28/2014. ! ref: McNally, Dennis. 2002. A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead. New York: Boadway Books. ! ref: Terkel, Studs. 1970 [1986]. Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression. Pantheon Books.


**updated title and added "Darkness, Darkness" data 1/5/2015**






Most relevant to this blog, they did a little hippie paper called Sunrise, and it popped up with the following result, dated 10/7/70, to a search on "Grateful Dead" (which is either my first or second filter, depending on how much stuff I expect to return on it and "Jerry Garcia")


Thought I would turn you on to a little info on how promoter Jim Pagni makes his money - based on the Grateful Dead concert he was forced to cancel because of Jerry Garcia's illness. When the Sports Arena is filled it holds 15,000 people. At Jim's prices, he would have grossed $60,000. Expenses of $12,000 for groups, approx. $6,000 for the facility, $3,000 for advertising, and $1,000 for miscellaneous would have left J.P. with a new profit of $35,000 of the people's money. No wonder J.P. can afford his Mercedes Benz and $100 suits.
This fragment, about a previously unknown canceled Grateful Dead / Leon Russell concert in San Diego in ca. September-October 1970, really struck me. This post has resulted.






For some reason I felt like there was a Garcia Band show on 5/24/76, but I must be imaging that.




"I was living at my grandmother's house [on Harrington Street] and Jerry was in Larkspur. He'd pick me up every day and we'd go over to see her. She was conscious but you could sort of feel her fading away. Imagine seeing your mom in intensive care every day. To see one of your parents in that kind of condition makes you feel so powerless. You have tears in your eyes when you get in the elevator before you get there; then when you leave, shit, you're emotionally broken. I'm surprised Jerry got any recording done at that time. But maybe he needed to keep busy. I know I felt that way. But there was nothing we could do. It was awful. I think I lost about fifteen pounds. Jerry lost a bunch of weight, too (Jackson 1999, 199).
Both Sara and Mountain Girl confirm that Ruth's passing hit him really hard (Jackson 1999, 199-200). At some levels he couldn't deal with it. Tiff and Sara made all of the arrangements and took care of all of the paperwork, which was probably already voluminous in 1970, and especially a Depression survivor, likely to put bank accounts all over town –see some of the stories in Terkel (1970) – to hold all kinds of weird government paper, and to be plentifully insured, guarantied, and otherwise papered with the wall hangings of the Administrative State. And all of this before the internet.


Pal David Crosby had lost his love Christine Hinton on September 30, 1969 (RS 11/1/69), in a manner eerily prefiguring Ruth's demise -- both involved carbound pets causing horrific wrecks. David and Christine had just moved north from LA, and the Dead, ensconced at Mickey Hart's Novato ranch, had warmed their new house (with Debbie Donovan) with a horse for Christine – this on the very day she died. Kevin Ryan ran over after getting the horrible news: "I walk in the house and there are already a dozen people there. [Bill] Graham and a lot of the Grateful Dead people and David, who's sitting on the edge of his bed crying" (Crosby and Gottlieb 1988, 171-172). Debbie Donovan: "It was just a devastating, devastating time. Everyone gathered" (Crosby and Gottlieb 1988, 171).


The magnetism of the scene at Wally Heider's recording studio made it a lot easier for me to deal with Dad's loss and my new responsibilities. Some of the best musicians around were hanging there during that period; with Paul and Grace from the Airplane, the Dead, Santana, Crosby, Nash, and Neil Young working there, the studio (with its three main recording rooms) became jammer heaven. When you'd finished up your work on one track, you only needed to stick your head into the next room to find some outrageous collaboration wailing away. At the same time as I was arranging to take over my mom's support, I was playing on albums made by David Crosby (If I Could Only Remember My Name) and Graham Nash (Songs for Beginners); I was also making music with artists like Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Paul Kantner, David Freiberg, and Mike Shrieve, and working on American Beauty with the Dead. Thank the Lord for music; it's a healing force beyond words to describe (Lesh 2005, 190).
"It's always something," as Roseann Roseannadanna used to remind us. Jimi Hendrix (b. November 27, 1942), checked out on September 18th. Five days after Ruth and in some ways closer to home, Janis Joplin (January 19, 1943 – October 4, 1970), dear friend to all of the people I have been writing about, died of a heroin overdose in a Los Angeles motel. What are you gonna do? You have a whole range of choices, sons and daughters.


I think the explanation for the canceled concert is simple: they didn't sell enough tickets. The Sports Arena was a big place, and the Dead were not particularly big in San Diego. Leon Russell had only released one album (if you don't count Asylum Choir), and while there was a big buzz about him he was not really a hit act yet either. I think Pagni overreached [especially for a Sunday night show, Corry later notes], and it was easier to cancel the show.
I had it right there in front of me to see, and I missed it. But as he further points out, this, too, is of a piece with my darker interpretation. Here's how it might have been:


If ticket sales were low, the promoter probably called up the bands and tried to renegotiate the deal to a lower fee for the Dead. If Jerry was looking to get home, he might have given an indication to Sam Cutler (who likely would have been working the deal) that walking away was preferable. Since there had to have been a signed contract, an official excuse from the Dead may have been seen as a safety valve for everyone involved, even if it wasn't true [Corry].
6. In closing

! ref: "Tragedy Strikes David Crosby," Rolling Stone, November 1, 1969, p. 8. ! ref: Crosby, David, and Carl Gottlieb. 1988. Long Time Gone: The Autobiography of David Crosby. New York: Doubleday.

! tags: 1970, business, CA, canceled gigs, death, GD, Ruth Garcia, San Diego, San Diego Sports Arena, Sara Ruppenthal Garcia, David Crosby, Phil Lesh, PERRO,
! p.s. Bonus content for Ross, from Olsen (1970): "Country Joe and the Fish have finally split completely. Joe is doing an acoustic thing and Barry Melton and the rest are putting their own thing together." I am sure you knew that, but maybe knowing that they talk to a guy in San Diego is the key to unlock some deep mystery … cheers!