NRPS-Matrix-1970: a seven part series discussing New Riders of the Purple Sage (NRPS) gigs at the Matrix, 1970, including listening notes on the circulating tapes, speculation on dates, observations on playing, general pontificating.
- Introduction
- LN19700430: Thursday, April 30, 1970
- LN19700707: Tuesday, July 7, 1970
- LN19700729: Wednesday, July 29, 1970
- LN19700730: Thursday, July 30, 1970
- LN19700902: Wednesday, September 2, 1970
- Analysis and Conclusions
UPDATE: at Jerrybase, we have moved this material to
7/28/70. The NRPS were almost certainly not at the Matrix on 7/30, they were at the Share. I *know* (as definitively as one can in this fallen world) that
Acoustic GD played Matrix 7/28. I move the NRPS "7/30" material to that date on the logic that the format of that event was similar to the format of the
July 30 - August 1 run at the Share.
Tape Features
The tape identified as New Riders of the Purple Sage, Matrix, San Francisco, CA on Thursday, July 30, 1970 is a degraded bust listenable 98-minute soundboard recording. It came to me from an impeccable source, It is more tightly edited than either of the other July 1970 NRPS tapes,
7/7 and
7/29. To me this implies a different downstream lineage than those tapes. It is typically assumed that master reels would have been held by Peter Abrams, though I am not in a position to judge the accuracy of that assumption. But somewhere along the line this was edited down more tightly, and I doubt it was on the fly, at the show. So from the presumed common wellspring of Peter Abrams's tapes, this 7/30 and those other two seemed to have traveled different paths.
Overall Vibe of the Show
Sounds like just a good old time foolin' around at the bar. It seems to run quite late. Here's Cousin Ace regaling the sparse and shrinking crowd, sometime-late-a.m.: "Well the rats are desertin' the sinkin' ship. And, uhh, in the meanwhile we're gonna do a ... [interruption by Marmaduke: "Welcome to the campfire folks... "] ... hot lead and bloodshed ballad ... ["... this is story time ..."] ...sad story time ... ["... here on the plains"] and it goes like this." Gettin' late, boys.
Dating
Like 7/29 and
4/30, though, this tape is also inconsistent with other known streams of evidence.
LIA has already gone over this pretty exhaustively, but I it helps me to organize myself from the ground up. So let's look at the July 30th dating.
A line ad in
Good Times v3 n29 (July 24, 1970), p. 16 listed Harvey Mandel at the Matrix on 7/30.
 |
| Good Times v3 n29 (July 24, 1970), p. 16, courtesy of Ross Hannan. |
A calendar in the
Berkeley Tribe v3 n3 (issue 55) (July 24-31, 1970), p. 28) listed Smokestack Lightnin':
 |
| Berkeley Tribe v3 n3 (issue 55) (July 24-31, 1970), p. 28; courtesy of Ross Hannan. |
Ross Hannan argues authoritatively that line ads such as the one in
Good Times would have been submitted well in advance, while calendar items such as the one in the
Tribe would have been called in much closer to the publishing date. In case of conflict, we should give precedence to calendar listings over coeval published ads. In the case at hand, Hannan's method would list Smokestack Lightnin' for this date.
The only "evidence" for Garcia being at the Matrix on 7/30/70 takes the form of tape labels. In terms of NRPS gig being noted here, there are still further reasons to be suspicious. The tape now known as 7/29/70 used to be mislabeled 7/30/70, and set I from the former still travels as
"4/30/70, set I". (Aside: I believe the "4/30/70" dating is based entirely on this tape, which I believe I have conclusively determined is from after mid-June 1970. Is there any disagreement about this? I am hoping we can put that date into its proper category, a phantom gig based on a slip of the hand, '7'-->'4'.) This reduces our confidence even further that this is what it purports to be.
The GD acoustic set dated 7/30/70
There is also a
Grateful Dead acoustic set known as "7/30/70 Matrix" [
shnid 17077]. It is indeed plausible that these GD and NRPS sets belong together. The personnel is identical (at least in bits and pieces) except that Lesh is
presumably playing bass in the GD set and that David Torbert is
presumably playing bass in the NRPS set. I don't have ears to verify either of these claims. Given the
fluid history of NRPS bassists at least through the first quarter of 1970, it could be Lesh for both, Torbert for both, or someone else entirely. I can't tell. Weir sits in with NRPS, and Nelson and Dawson sit in with the GD. I do not know if Bill Kreutzmann or Pigpen is around in the GD set; I just can't hear things to that level of precision. But I'll go ahead and say that I don't think they're there -- at least not onstage.
Note that the first NRPS piece (I'll call it set I) runs only 23 minutes. Normally, we would conclude that it's incomplete (and probably missing the material at the start of the set, since there's a set break announcement over continuous tape after Lodi). I do think it's probably incomplete. But it could also be that this night was different, and ended up including the mini GD acoustic set. That might have substituted for at least some part of the expected additional NRPS material.
None of this tells us anything about the correct date of the material (NRPS, GD or both). LIA speculates that some of this stuff might be from the presently-open night of 7/27/70 at the Matrix. That makes sense to me. Maybe it's from the
newly-discovered July 31 - August 1, 1970 NRPS/GD shows at the Lion's Share, though that would raise the question of how we have tapes (another point that LIA has made). I am intrigued by the possibility that the order in which the acts are listed for those shows might reflect that NRPS was "first billed" over the GD, which might be consistent with NRPS doing two sets and GD just a little acoustic one. These might be from some other time altogether. I was hoping that the listens might shed some light, but unfortunately I don't think they do.
Noteworthy Material
"
Kaw-Liga," Hank Williams's posthumous #1 hit about a star-crossed cigar store Indian and his beloved squaw, just dripping with insane rodeo-clown pathos, is only known from the earliest NRPS recording, August 7, 1969 at the Matrix. So it sort of surprised me to see it here, on a tape I think is approximately correctly dated to late July 1970. But there's just so little tape, we just don't know ... they might have always played it, or anyway always had it available in common and liked to play it on a lark. It is nothing short of fantastic, much slower than the '69 version and really wonderfully haunting.
The Everly Brothers' "
Cathy's Clown" is absolutely the best song of this recording and one of the fantastic little rarities out there. Typically, this song has only been associated with the "Bobby Ace and the Cards From the Bottom of the Deck" shows at
California Hall (SF, CA) on June 11, 1969 and at the
Matrix on April 17, 1970. (Given that Judy Dawson is the source for both of these lists, it sure seems odd that she caught both of these shows, and that there were two such similar shows 10 months apart ...) From a contemporary review I have also determined that the NRPS played it, with Bob Weir accompanying, at the
Hell's Angels benefit at the Anderson Theatre, NYC, on November 23, 1970. Because 7/30/70 falls within the range of time during which they were occasionally breaking out this song --seemingly only on special occasions, really loose nights-- "Cathy's Clown" seems at least straightforwardly consistent with the present 7/30/70 dating of this material. Like the other Everly Brothers tunes they occasionally busted out ("Wake Up Little Suzie", "Oh Boy!", "So Sad (To Watch Good Love Go Bad)") this one was probably just part of the common stock of songs that these guys all knew. This is the only NRPS recording of it of which I am aware.
"
Lady Came From Baltimore" is written by one tragic-sounding fella,
Tim Hardin, and features some beautifully mournful pedal steel work around maudlin lyrics. There are only two other versions known to me, in recordings identified as September 18, 1969 at the Inn of the Beginning in Cotati and September 2, 1970 at the Matrix.
Weir sitting in with NRPS
I started by thinking that Weir sitting in with NRPS was pretty rare, but it's not that rare. We now know it was a pretty regular thing. Here are the instances I can see from 1970 of Weir sitting in with the Riders:
- May 2, 1970: Harpur College, Binghamton, NY
- May 7, 1970: Dupont Gym, MIT, Cambridge, MA
- May 15, 1970: Fillmore East, New York, NY
- July 3, 1970: McMahon Stadium, Calgary, AB, Canada [source: Deadlists]
- July 30, 1970: Matrix, SF, CA [this tape]
- September 18, 1970: Fillmore East, New York, NY
- November 23, 1970: Anderson Theatre, New York, NY
There may well be others, and I haven't even thought about 1971.
Typically, Weir would be called on in his "Cousin Ace" persona to sing a bunch of hit country covers: "
The Race Is On", Marty Robbins's "
El Paso", Merle Haggard's "
Mama Tried", Kris Kristofferson's "
Me And Bobby McGee", the Mel Tillis hit "
Sawmill" (not to be confused with the George Jones's "
Seasons Of My Heart", what they drug out a time or two), and so forth. I don't usually have much to say about Weir, but this is a period of massive development for him as he evolved toward a much more front-and-forward role in the GD. With Pigpen withdrawing, and with the marked development of Weir's guitar-playing and singing relative to, say, 18 months earlier (
late 1968, ca. "The Firing"!), it was crucial in establishing the balance that Garcia seemed to need with that band.
NRPS -> GD Cross-Fertilization
The foregoing speaks to reverberations out to the GD, another topic that I rarely broach. But there are a couple examples that I see here of the NRPS doing just that.
First is the harmony vocals. Now I don't think Dawson is a great singer, but I think he's a very good songwriter and arranger. He sings some mighty nice harmony vocals on some of these Bobby-led tunes that sound a lot like what Garcia would do later. Now I suppose that whichever record they copped it from may well have had these arrangements, in which case Dawson would be epiphenomenal to the story. But I wonder if this isn't an example --a rare one, I'd say-- of how Dawson might have influenced Jerry.
Second, we can see some echoes into future Grateful Dead songs and setlists, many of which would endure a good long while. The final three numbers with Weir --"El Paso", "Mama Tried", and "Me And Bobby McGee" -- were or would become staples of the Bob Weir cowboy song slot in Grateful Dead setlists. "Mama Tried" was already established by 1970. "El Paso" is interesting in the context of the given date of July 30. Besides an eyewitness account from a
GD show at the Rock Pile in Toronto on July 8, 1969, there are no known GD versions until
July 11, 1970 (Fillmore East, New York, NY) and
July 14, 1970 (Euphoria Ballroom, San Rafael, CA). The next is the
Golden Hall (San Diego, CA) listing dated August 5, 1970. This seems to make a July 30 dating for this very plausible, indeed. "Me And Bobby McGee", finally, entered the GD repertoire in November 1970 and stayed there through 1974.
Oh yeah, third, one more thing: I swear I hear the "Here Comes Sunshine" melody in Garcia's pedal steel line to start d2t01, Dawson's "
Superman."
All right, how's that for anticlimax? Listening Notes follow below the jump.
