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!
