Round Reels, Incorporated August 1, 1974

Round Reels is the company Ron Rakow created for film projects, not least the Grateful Dead Movie. As with many of Rakow's business activities, it's really hard to find any solid information about the company. So when the corporate stamp came up for auction over the summer, I was very excited to see it! This image was associated with the auction, but I guess the seal was pulled under threat of legal action, or at least in light of legal questions.

August 1, 1974. Happy Birthday, Jerry! I have always held that Garcia made the decision to Hiatus right in this time frame, August 1974. I imagine that The Movie, and thus Round Reels, was bound up with the Hiatus. If that's right, then the decision would have been at least a little bit before August. It could have been even earlier, but I don't think so. Thoughts?

March 23, 1975 - Jerry Garcia Interview

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.

RN Peter Simon 1975 New Age Journal

Simon, Peter. 1975. Making Musical Miracles: An Interview with Jerry Garcia. New Age Journal .5 (May 1975): 52-59.

This is a really neat piece, lots of great stuff.  Interview took place at the "film house"  (230 Eldridge Avenue, Mill Valley, CA, 94941), ca. the last week of March 1975.

Love his notion of "tight-loose" forms conducive to "orchestrated twists of fate". This is essential Garcia in a very fecund period.

Reading Notes

Interview took place at a film lab in Marin County #The Movie. Note took place after 3/23/75, but before whatever needed to happen for a May deadline. Because Jerry went on the road with Legion of Mary and was gone the first three weeks of April, I have to say that this was probably the last week in March 1975.

Garcia hopes to have The Movie “done and maybe out by around October, but it could go longer than that – there’s a lot of film” (Simon 1975, 52). He speaks more about the film, how they have to work through the dreaded middlemen, trying to do the distribution with integrity. Talks about the idea behind it, how it tries to capture the GD concert experience in part as a substitute for the band touring live.  He explicitly talks about this as an alternative to touring. It’d be less expensive, and you don’t have to expose fans to hassles, including the ultimate hassle, the police power (Simon 1975, 52-53). #The Movie

JG on The Movie: “On the level of ideas, and just in terms of something to do as an artist, it represents a new level of interest and development for me. I enjoy films. I’ve been a film buff for a long time and all that – it’s neat to be kind of forced into making a movie” (Simon 1975, 53). #The Movie

They are working on Blues For Allah, so this could be February-March. Not sure I know when film work starts? NB from below, this is after 3/23/75. Sometime between then and a deadline for May 1975 issue. I am not sure I knew when JG started working on The Movie. # The Movie

Workaholism, life balance: NAJ: You’re also doing a solo album and touring with Merl Saunders. In that you have so many projects at once, how do you channel your energy so productively? JG: “Well, things tend to work and overlap, generally speaking. I wouldn’t really be able to concentrate on sitting in front of a movie editing device for eight hours a day; I can do it pretty easily for six, though. I feel my attention is on it and I can do a good job keeping up with it. I like to play music in a studio situation – that can also hold attention for six or eight hours. If I’m on the road, I’m not doing anything during the day; I’m playing evenings. So during the day is a time which is convenient to compose. I might sit around an hour a day just playing the guitar and practicing and maybe learn something and maybe some ideas would come out that are like songs. That represents maybe two or three hours a day on the road where nothing else is happening but television and a gig that night. Usually a gig will take maybe four or five hours, total time actually playing maybe two of those or two-and-a-half. It may look like more, but it isn’t really that much” (Simon 1975, 54). This is a great #adayinthelife #1975

The interviewer is impressed with his productivity, which Garcia explains away: “I’m crazed. I’m obsessed.” “People see you as a musical junkie,” the interviewer continues. Garcia: “Yes, that’s as good a description as any” (Simon 1975, 54).

JG: “I prefer playing live for sure, just as an experience, it’s definitely richer, mainly because it’s continuous. You play a note and you can see where it goes, you can see what the response is, what the reaction is. It’s reciprocal”, and a different energy than you get back from fellow players, which is like “a room full of plumbers” (Simon 1975, 54).

Studio vs. live: “Because we play music, one of the forms that music can go out in is the  record, but it’s a distinct form and not necessarily a reflection of what we do, so we just treat it for what it is. If you’re an artist, you might prefer to work in lithographs, … though sometimes you do a water color [despite the fact that] lithographs still might be what you get off on the most. But if you have to do a water color, you do a water color” (Simon 1975, 54). #official releases

Why did GD stop touring. The amount of gig money was not enough to move the band around, develop what they wanted to develop, and pay everybody. “We had a huge organization with a colossal overhead on a weekly [54-55] basis. So, past a certain point, we were really working to keep the thing going, rather than working to improve it or working because it was joyful. … We were interested in doing stuff that’s joyful or fun, y’know, then how could we reconcile that with economic survival, how could we work and have a good time and also pay the bills? We didn’t have that together.” Also the remoteness and anomie of playing large venues, “creating an unpleasant situation for the audience” … “We don’t want people to be busted at our concerts, we don’t want them to be uncomfortable or any of those things …” “Also, it’s basically sort of de-humanizing to travel [jgmf yes! air travel dessicates the human soul] the way you have to travel in a rock-and-roll band, and the quality of life on the road is pretty slim.” (Simon 1975, 55). #hiatus

More on hiatus: “Mainly, however, , it has to do with economics and the fact that we’ve been doing it for ten years, and we haven’t spent any time away from it. That’s a long time to do anything. So we’ve just decided to stop before it overwhelms us. Now we’re trying to consciously see what the next step is for us. We don’t want to go into the success cul-de-sac … we don’t like that place. Yet, it’s not possible for us to really do something that would be totally altruistic, like going and playing free everywhere. What we really need is a subsidy.  The government should subsidize us and we should be like a national resources” (Simon 1975, 55). #hiatus

Refers to Kezar benefit “recently”, so after 3/23/75 (p.55).

GD wants to play live again, but trying to figure the format. “One possible fantasy that we’ve thought of is moving toward playing at a more or less permanent musical fixture with the possibility of eventually building a place that could be like a permanent performance center that could be designed around us and our specific ideas” (Simon 1975, 55). Maybe do it two months out of the year. Prefiguring “Terrapin Station” and, now, Leshtopia.

Again mentions filming in Deadtopia and selling canned concerts (Simon 1975, 55) #The Movie

These ideas of a fixed venue, filming, etc. might let everyone “live comparatively normal lives”, touring selectively. “It would be good for the music” (Simon 1975, 55).

Do you feel ripped off by tapers? JG: “Not particularly. I think it’s OK, if people like it, they can certainly keep doing it. I don’t have any desire to control people as to what they are doing, or what they have … there’s something to be said for being able to record an experience that you’ve liked, or being able to obtain a recording of it. Actually, we all have that stuff, too, in our own collection of tapes. My responsibility to the notes is over after I’ve played them; at that point, I don’t care where they go [laughs], they’ve left home, y’know?” (Simon 1975, 56) #tapers

Asked a question about signaling musical intuitions within the group, he offers a beautiful interpretation of creative collective action: “A lot of it is miracles and that’s part of what creating new forms has to do with; it has to do with creating a situation where miracles can happen, in which amazing coincidences can happen, so that all of a sudden you’re in a new musical space. That’s the challenge of coming up with structures that are loose-tight, you know what I mean?” [JGMF my goodness … Garcia is a sophisticated institutional theorist!] They have an element of looseness to them which means they can expand in any direction or go anywhere from anywhere, or come from anywhere, but they also have enough form so that we can lock back into something. It really has to do with the element of what’s knowable and known and what isn’t known and what isn’t knowable and what can be invented on the spot. There’s a delicate balance in there and since we’re dealing with several consciousnesses at the same time, everybody goes through their individual changes, that those times when everybody is up for it and everybody feels right about it and the form provides openings, then miracles can happen, amazing miracles. That’s what we’re in it for, that’s one of the reasons that we do it is for those moments of ahhh … unexpected joy, just amazing stuff. … Orchestrated twists of fate” (Simon 1975, 56) #creation #institutions #dualities #collective improvisation

Quick note about that nice line “orchestrated twists of fate”: Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks had some out January 1975, I think, so “Simple Twist Of Fate” seems to have entered Jerry’s consciousness right away. He’d start playing it xxx TJS. #songs-S

They took 19 or 20 days to complete Workingman’s, but that has been their most “significant” album, scare quotes Jerry’s (Simon 1975, 57). That was going on while the New Orleans bust scene was “hanging over our heads”. “With American Beauty there was a rash of parent deaths where everybody’s parents croaked in the space of about two or three months. We were working on that and it was just incredible. It was just like tragedy-city --  bad news every day, really” (Simon 1975, 57). #official releases, #GD #dualities

Working with Hunter. Garcia’s a better editor than writer. Hunter finds the words for Garcia. “We don’t clash in terms of our egos and we both tend to focus on our work rather than on ourselves so it works out to be very comfortable.” #Robert Hunter

“I have this hangup about songs. I’m fascinated by fragments because of my involvement in traditional music – there’s a lot of things around that are fragments of songs, and they’ll be this tantalizing glimpse of two or three verses of what was originally a thirty-verse extravaganza, and there will be two or three remaining stanzas in the tradition and you read them or hear them and they’re just utterly mysterious and evocative for odd reasons at different times” (Simon 1975, 57) [jgmf think Whiskey In The Jar] #songs

What musical influences interests? “Everyone, everything, all music. I’m not particularly attached to any one idea or format, I just appreciate whatever is good. It’s whatever I hear, endless numbers of anonymous musicians whom I don’t know on the radio and stuff have influenced me, not to mention all the people who are well known whose names I do now. They’ve influenced me, too. I listen to everything” (Simon 1975, 57). Such a sponge.

In his playing, there’s a sound he is wishing he could hear, a sound he is searching form, “maybe just a little snatch of a guitar player on some record or just a moment … and there’s something about it that says ‘that is a door to something’ – I can’t really explain it, it’s emotional and it goes back to my earliest years, it’s that deep. It just is me really selecting out of the Universe stuff that’s part of that sound. It’s a thing that sometimes I hear very clearly and sometimes I Don’t hear at all, but it has produced by whole development” (Simon 1975, 58). #sounds

Early musical learning: I think Troy 1994 is wrong when he says Garcia had piano lessons, but I need to double-check. Here Garcia responds to a question about early picking up a guitar: “No, I didn’t, unfortunately; I wish I had. I got my first guitar when I was fifteen” (Simon 1975, 58).

“I didn’t really start .. working at the guitar until I was about twenty-three” (Simon 1975, 58). This dates it to electric period, ca. 1965.

“Feel that I’m a person that doesn’t have a great amount of talent. What I’ve learned, I’ve had to really work at learning. It’s been a hassle, basically. That’s one of the reasons I play a lot. I need to play a lot just to keep myself together, just to keep my chops together” (Simon 1975, 58). #workaholism

Question about channeling the Universe. Garcia: “I can’t say that there’s a certain sense when I am transformed, you know, in the sense that all of a sudden God is speaking through my strings … It’s more like if you’re real lucky, and practice and play a lot and try to feel right and everybody wants for it to happen, then there’s a possibility that special things will happen” (Simon 1975, 58). #workaholism

NAJ: “Do you have much ego identification with Jerry Garcia as a rock star or is music your main form of meditation?” Garcia: “Music is my yoga. If there is a yoga, that’s it. Practicing and keeping my muscles together, that is like what I would relate to a physical yoga, a certain amount of hours every day. Life is my yoga, too, but I’ve been a spiritual dilettante off and on through the years, trying various things at various times, and I firmly believe that every avenue that leads to higher consciousness does lead to higher consciousness. If you think it does, it does. If you put energy into it on a daily basis, no matter what it is, some discipline … I believe it will work. I believe that it’s within the power of the mind and consciousness to do that” (Simon 1975, 59).

Question about interviewing: “I can’t really do anything but lie, all talking is lying, and I’m lying now, and that’s true, too. … go and hear me play, that’s me, that’s what I have to say, that’s the form my thoughts have taken, so I haven’t put that much energy into really communicating verbally. It’s all open to misinterpretation” (Simon 1975, 59).