The Muse

Thanks to Jim Powell for sending this my way. This aligns so well with my own experience of Her.

David Frawley, Hymns From The Golden Age:  Selected Hymns from the Rig Veda With Yogic Interpretation (Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass, 1986):

The Muse is the presence of the Goddess within us, the presence of the cosmic feminine power which is the true creative power in life, the cosmic masculine force being more properly supracosmic transcendent being.  To create we must have the favor of the Muse, the grace of the Goddess.  For all true creation is the unfoldment of the cosmic feminine energy, the release of the Goddess-energy of Life for the culmination of its evolutionary transformations.  The Muse is our faithfulness to the Divine, our faithfulness to the cosmic vision and the creative work; our creative being as human beings to bring the Divine creativity into the world for its deliverance.  The Muse is our love of nature that is our openness to the cosmic creative force.  She is the yearning of our life for the immortal life in which all is a play of harmony.  As with creative endeavors so with the spiritual life; for the spiritual life is the projection of our creative energies inwardly fo the transformation of consciousness.  [209]

It is only through the Goddess that one can know the Gods; for it is only by ourselves becoming inwardly receptive that there can be the matrix for their manifestation....  Our own soul, the receptive, devoted, intuitive feminine side of our nature is the high priestess of the inner art.  She has the intuitive knowledge, the spontaneous sense of it.  We have only to let her stream of transformations flow.  She will pour on us the great inner ocean of light.  All growth is not though our personal effort but through her aspiring force, through letting it gestate within us....  No artifice can aid it which is the labor of abandoning all artifice.  This inner purity not of cultivated virtue but of the receptive mind, the motiveless heart, is the beauty of the Muse and Goddess.  [210]

JGB Spring '93 SoCal

Preface: JGB in SoCal

Little springtime SoCal jaunts became a regular thing for JGB starting in 1983. (OK, that was very late winter, but March is generally pretty springy down there.) Some were one- or two-offs, others were a little more elaborate. Here's a sketch.

1983: 3/11a and 3/11b in Santa Barbara; 3/12a and 3/12b, 3/13 in Beverly Hills

1984: 5/17 Beverly Hills, 5/18 Irvine, 5/19 Santa Barbara, 5/20 Reseda

1985: Garcia-Kahn 5/31a and 5/31b in Beverly Hills

1986: 5/23 in San Diego, 5/24 in LA

1987: 3/13 and 3/14 in LA

1988: no SoCal

1989: 5/19 Irvine, 5/20 San Diego, 5/22 LA

1990: LA in November

1991: no SoCal

1992: summer dates

1993: 4/16 and 4/17 at UCLA, 4/18 in San Diego

1994: 5/13 San Bernardino, 5/14 Ventura, 5/15 Irvine, 5/17 and 5/18 San Diego + 5/19 Phoenix

So much to say, but so little time. Let me just foreshadow some of what might get some write up in Fate Music.

'83: Hell's Angel George Christie, Jr., a rather remarkable dude, promoting in Santa Barbara (again in '84). I have some super-sweet material here about how much better it was for Jerry working for an outlaw than it was for some of the "straight" promoters in the area.

'84: not sure yet, but definitely mention the killer music and DeeDee Dickerson's swan song.

'85: "Bullshit! Bullshit!" and all that

'86: Wolfgang trying to product-differentiate the "Band Electric" 10 months before the birth of the Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band. And one of the great sardonic review headlines of all time: "Band Electric Plays at Pace Languid".

'93: maybe some stuff based on this post

'94: "Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier!!"

Among the themes that will pop up are NorCal vs. SoCal, maybe some nods toward playing on John Kahn's home turf, and definitely the evolution of the SoCal jaunt as a commercial proposition: 1) from local promoters (with John Scher's help) to conceding Bill Graham the west coast monopoly he so badly wanted. (He wanted it all, but John Scher was simply too great to work with to give him up.) And 2) obvs., the switch from clubs and theaters to amphitheaters and basketball arenas. Of course, too, some great music.

JGB SoCal Spring 1993

So much for the long windup. I really just wanted to plop down some notes around a listen a month or two ago to the April 16-17, 1993 gigs in Pauley Pavilion and the 18th in the San Diego Sports Arena. I have listening-noted the Warfield 4/23/93 show on these pages, and found it somewhat low energy, though I abso-fucking-lutely love its version of "Señor" (released on Garcia Plays Dylan) and "The Hunter Gets Captured By The Game" (released on Shining Star). It seems like I haven't listened to the 4/24 or 4/25 Warfield shows, which I guess I will need to do at some point.

These three SoCal shows from the week before strike me as overall better than 4/23, generally strong, rarely really bad and occasionally fantastic. If forced to rank these three, I'd say 4/18 > 4/17 > 4/16. I note that The Powers That Were released 1 tune each from the 18th and 17th, but none from the 16th. That seems about right to me, and I have to say that they made fantastic choices. Despite its execrable cover art and (not unrelated) the fact that it was released under the reign of She Who Shall Not Be Named (whom I nevertheless name below), the Shining Star release contains some outstanding music, and the selections from this run of shows are top-shelf.

From the 17th, they selected "Everybody Needs Somebody To Love", which the Stones had covered soon after Solomon Burke's original 1964 version on Atlantic, and which was most successfully covered by Wilson Pickett. This Garcia Band version is absolutely killer, a truly fine late era performance ranging across some stanky pedal effects to some very spare sections, sung together and tenderly by Jerry and the ladies, but also across some growly exclamatory "I need it! I need it!" from ol 'Jer. More detailed notes, probably not all that illuminating, below.

From the 18th, they selected Dylan's "Positively 4th Street". (Happy belated 82nd birthday to Mr. Dylan, BTW!) What can I say about Garcia and 4th Street? Of all the Dylans he did, I think this one was the most special. It was almost never not amazing. It is one of those tunes that I still haven't found quite the right word for, which appeared across the decades, but typically in short spurts, which I think have a particular quality of Jerry loving them but finding them either challenging to do or too special to wear out. This is speculation, of course, but it's what my gut says. And none of these tunes --also including "Tough Mama", "Like A Road", a few others-- better captures that profile for me than "4th Street".

The great David Gans and Blair Jackson asked Garcia about the tune in a 1981 interview.

Q: Do you have any trouble singing a song as bitter as "Positively 4th Street"?

Garcia: Not at all. It's easy for me to cop that asshole space. I was that guy, too. For me, it occupies the same space as 'Ballad of a Thin Man'. It tells that person who's lame that they're lame, and why they're lame, which is a very satisfying thing to do. 'Positively 4th Street' has this way of doing it where it's beautiful, too. And 'It's All Over Now, Baby Blue' is basically a put-down, too. It's one of those things like, 'You're losing bad - dig yourself.' It was the beautiful sound of 'Positively 4th Street' that got to me, more than the bitterness of the lyric. The combination of the beauty and the bitterness, to me, is wonderful. ... That's something that only Dylan has been able to pull off in terms of modern songwriting, I think (Jackson and Gans 19810911, 29).

Jerry played it somewhat regularly with the Garcia-Saunders aggregation in 1973 (as represented, e.g., on the original Saunders-Garcia-Kahn-Vitt Live at Keystone, and re-released by Fantasy endlessly since then). He picked it back up for a month in 1975 in the first JGB with Nicky, then dropped it again until Ozzie Ahlers came on board in 1979 (check out the 12/21/79 version, one of the greatest single-song performances of Garcia's playing career). He dropped it again in the middle of the February 1980 tour for more than ten years, bringing it out staccato in the 90s. Here are the all of the post-1980 versions. Because I think the song held special meaning for Jerry, I offer up some conjecture as to what I think might have motivated the revival.

3/1/91, which I have called "Certainly One of the Best and Most Interesting Shows of the 90s" (which may be damning it with faint praise): I note that 4th Street is "just about perfect - I think he gets all of the lyrics, and he does it with the right degree of bitterness." What might have led Garcia to dust this gem off after 11 years, obviously rehearse it with the band, play it for this "just for this one moment", and drop it for two years again? Well, first we know that he was using again, and not just chipping but to the point that the GD would stage another intervention four months later, whereupon Jerry went onto a methadone program. (It didn't stick.) Second, we know from his September '91 interviews that he was wildly burned out on the Dead, and he explicitly said that it was during the spring that he was asking the band about chilling out for six months, only to be told that the show had to go on. *cough* Phillesh *cough* So, in this case, I blame the Grateful Dead. Does any of this have anything to do with why he played 4th Street? Neither you nor I has any idea. But, while it may  not have been carefully planned out, I think something definitely caused its appearance. What do you think?

4/18/93 (this version) and 4/23/93 (on Shining Star): Here, I primarily blame woman troubles (Jerry's, not necessarily the women's). Humiliatingly, San Francisco institution Herb Caen led a January 1993 column asking "would the beloved Jerry Garcia dump his longtime ladyfriend, Manasha (the mother of his 3-yr-old daughter), and take off for Hawaii with a new inamorata?" (Caen 19930112). I can't recall where this occured, but when People wrote about his personal life in 1976 Garcia lost his shit, and I can't imagine the isolated and private 1993 version of himself would have been happy about having his love-life laundry aired in public. The new inamorata in January was the sweet and lovely Brigid Meier, but he had already left her in March after a) running back into Deborah Koons (also involved the 1976 complications) in Mill Valley and b) Brigid finding out he was using and asking him to get clean (McNally 2002, 603). Her recollections of that encounter supply some of the darkest images we have of the man in the grip of his addiction. Maybe he had her in mind when singing about "what a drag it is to see you" and all that. After a little fling with one Shannon Jeske (ibid), it seems like by April he would have been back with Deborah. Indeed, having heard some of the inside skinny about how She worked, the fact that She and Jerry were back together right around this time may have motivated the selection of material from these very shows.

There were other things going on in this window, of course. The last time he had played the Warfield, in late February, there was a "mini riot" outside the venue, involving 20 cops, rock-and-bottle throwing, and a dozen arrests ("12 arrests at Garcia concert," Argus-Courier [Petaluma, CA], March 2, 1993, p. "Deadheads blame riot on S.F. Police," San Francisco Examiner, March 1, 1993, p. A-13). So, to whom, or about whom or what, would he be venting his spleen in April 1993, by again dusting off, rehearsing, performing, and again dropping 4th Street? I have no idea. But I will say that, as on 3/1/91, on 4/18/93 he dusted the tune off and played it nearly perfectly, as close to perfectly as he ever did any song. I think he nailed every single lyric. And, heart? What heart! My only note about the song is this: "this is stunningly good".

There is lots of other really nice stuff in these shows, as my notes below narrate. The "Don't Let Go"s are too brief for my taste. But even tunes I don't generally love --I am looking at you, "Dixie Down"-- have a little extra something, again more on the 18th than the 17th and more on either of those than the first night. The Garcia Band at this point was running like a pretty well-oiled machine, putting plenty of bread in the breadbox --around $225,000 for these three nights!-- punching in solid 60-minute sets, and delivering good stuff to the faithful. They hold up well after 30 years, and I can recommend them to you --especially the 18th-- if you are searching for something to spin.

Oh yeah, what about the 1995 versions of 4th Street? On 1/13/95, he botches the words ("Jerry can't sing 4th Street if he can't remember the lyrics", I snipped). But I also note that he manages to remember more of them than I would, and as far as I know I am not on death's door. On 3/4/95 he says "I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes" no fewer than four times - so he does the "I could be you" and "what a drag it is to see you" responses twice. Not lyrically correct, I don't think (?), but could be (over-) interpreted as really feeling true to the man in that moment. By 4/15/95 he is running on fumes, though the version certainly makes up in feeling what it lacks in power. If my whole reasoning about the song's appearance reflecting a particularly embittered mindset is right, it certainly makes sense that it was around for these three months. He had crashed his car in January, canceled shows in February, and, not least, he was dying. So 4th Street certainly fit the Zeitgeist.

Listening Notes for April 16-18, 1993 below the fold.

The Hunter Gets Captured By The Game

My first working title for Fate Music was The Hunter Gets Captured By The Game. The THGCBTG framing, as I lovingly acronymized it, reflected a slightly darker view of Garcia's side trips than I presently hold, one in which his damned Midas Touch tainted even his silly bar band, which eventually had to play boomy Madison Square Garden in front of 15,000 whippeted, "Jerrrrrryyyyy!!!!!!"-screaming fans.

As of now, I hold a less tragic view of the whole arc. Yes, even the JGB came to carry Jerry's Burden, but to such a lesser extent that, relative to the GD, it formed a relative oasis where our hero could drink of some cool American (and other) musical water without too much hassle. He probably even took some pride in bringing Melvin, David and the ladies to the Garden, staying at the Ritz and playing the rest of the east coast gigs via day trips on private jets out of Teterboro, nothing but the best under the expert management of John Scher, all under his own name.

It's still a good theme, though. And what a song!

Everyday things change
And the world puts on a new face
Certain things re-arrange
And this old world seems like a new place

Secretly I've been trailing you
Like the fox that preys on the rabbit
I had to get you and so I knew
I had to learn your ways and habits

Ooh, you were the catch that I was after
But I looked up and I was in your arms
And I, I had been captured

What's this old world coming to
Things just ain't the same
Any time the hunter gets captured by the game

I had laid such a tender trap
Hoping that you might fall into it
Your love hit me like a sudden snap
One kiss and then I knew it

Ooh, my plan didn't work out
Like I thought
'Cause I had laid my trap for you
But it seems that I got caught

What's this old world coming to
Things just ain't the same
Any time the hunter gets captured by the game

If you aren't in love with Wanda Young after hearing this, you aren't paying attention. So, for me, the song speaks both to Garcia's love life and his musical life. Let's take a closer look.

THGCBTG first entered the observable Garciaverse in 1974, appearing on Jerry's second eponymous album, which we know as Compliments (Round Records RX 102). I don't know when/where the track was laid down, though, regarding the when, March 4, 1974 seems possible. The following are credited:

• Jerry Garcia - guitar, vocals
• Larry Carlton - guitar
• Michael Omartian - piano
• Merl Saunders - organ
• John Kahn - bass
• Ron Tutt - drums
• Bobbye Hall - congas 

John Kahn selected the material for Compliments, and his love of Motown, and not least the Funk Brothers' instrumentation, knew few bounds, so choosing this Smokey Robinson tune (one of many) made perfect sense. Compliments first brought Ronnie Tutt into Jerry's orbit, as he has recently noted, and they'd gig steadily together from December 6, 1974 through August 12, 1977. Among these hundreds of gigs, two from the winter of 1975 are known to have included THGCBTG:

Table xxx. Known live Jerry Garcia performances of "The Hunter Gets Captured By The Game"

The song is one of those handful of songs that Jerry seems to have picked up at occasionally long intervals. I have always interpreted songs with this pattern, such as Tough Mama, Like A Road, Let's Spend The Night Together, some others, as songs that he really liked. I don't have any basis for that, in particular, except that, especially from the turn of 1976 and the predominance of comfort over challenge in his side bands (Reconstruction being a notable exception), there just weren't that many setlist variations, not least because there wasn't always a lot of rehearsing. For a song to keep coming back, especially with different bands and their different players (and their different repertoires) suggests to me that they exercised a certain pull on our hero (and his musical director, John Kahn).

One of Jerry's sweeties told me she called this out at Keystone one time in the mid-70s to let him know she was in the room, and of course it's a song not about the pursuit of music without bullshit, but of a lover. The 2/27/75 version doesn't circulate and, AFAIK, is unheard outside the Garcia Vault. The 3/7 version does, and I am listening to it now. It's very, very nice, with a lot more development than the later versions.

Of these, I have also just revisited 4/23/93 (officially released on Shining Star), and raggedy old Jerry gives it a shopworn world weariness which suits it well. The 4/23/93 date, and the inclusion of this version on Shining Star, are both redolent of Deborah Koons, who would "officially" have become Jerry's main squeeze around this time, for the second time, apparently after some years of chasing. Shining Star, with its execrable cover art done by a friend of hers, was a DK joint all the way, so maybe she found special resonance with this tune, the flipside of her rumored aversion to "Reuben And Cherise".

So if the early and late versions may speak to romantic pursuits, for me the Reconstruction versions speak more to the theme of Jerry's Burden. He wanted to hide in Reconstruction, way back in the shadows just playing whatever weird stuff that band was putting out. It seems that he really didn't want to front that band, as evidenced by insisting on being listed as a "special guest" in the publicity. While I doubt it's true, and certainly doubt that it represented a conscious choice, for him to sing THGCBTG with Reconstruction expresses the impossibility of truly hiding; he's after a good time, playing music with good players and for an audience, with a minimum of hassle, but he finds himself straining for those high notes. "It seems like I got caught", indeed.

update: turns out this is my second post under this title.

Jerry Garcia and John Lennon, summarized by Dennis McNally

On December 8, Garcia was at Front Street working on Dead Set when get got a call that told him of the assassination of John Lennon. Work was impossible. He sat down at Keith Godchaux's old Steinway (more pain: Keith had died in a car accident that summer) and noodled for many hours, lost in thought.

But here's the analytical money shot:

Both had emerged from childhoods damaged by deeply flawed relationships with their mothers, and through their losses had found a stunning creativity which put them in the prison of celebrity.

Friends disagree about such psychological speculation (which can only be projection), but I think it's all a reasonable part of a serious analysis. I accept Dennis's Freudian piece, and I love the simple causal chain he forges. Quite right, IMO.

! ref: McNally 2002, 541.

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!

Jerry's New Year's Eve - LN jg1975-12-31.jgb.all.aud-Falanga-Menke-8664-retrack.noshnid.shn2flac

GarciaLive 5

GarciaLive, volume 5, December 31st 1975 Keystone Berkeley (2014) is out, available via jerrygarcia.com.

Let me start by expressing gratitude for these GarciaLive releases. Having been a massive outlier in my interest in Garcia on the side, having often expressed frustration at the paucity of Jerry shows released under the old regime, I am glad to see the music coming out and happy to buy these releases, not least because they are generally very, very well done.

The overall packaging is nice. I appreciate that the booklet picture of the Keystone is correctly placed from ca. 1981 - accuracy is important, and is very much appreciated by those of us who take our metadata like we take our coffee -- seriously. This is an improvement over the inclusion of a photo from 11/26/77, without identification, in a release of the show dated 3/22/78 (GarciaLive 4). I read David Gans's liner notes once quickly, and they look spot-on (more on that below), well-written, well-edited (I had complained about the editing on the killer 12/14-15/74 release), and informative. Good job, David. I haven't listened to it yet, but I have heard that it sounds nice and I fully expect the fat, full, Betty Cantor-Jackson sound. (I hope she is getting paid for these releases!)

Priors on this performance

But I have always disliked 12/31/75 as a Jerry Garcia Band performance and as a Jerry Garcia life event. The main billing for the show is that it's Jerry Band's only NYE show. That's true, but it doesn't go very far if the music isn't good.

I have known the performance from the tapes. I would have been listening to the very early shns of the soundboard (like this badboy) and, especially, the Louis Falanga-Bob Menke upfront (possibly onstage) ambient recording (shnid-8664), since these were fresh on the etree FTP sites. All told I probably listened to the Falanga-Menke tape a good 3 or 4 times through, the board once or twice. That's a lot for any single show.

People generally consider this a great one, but insofar as you'll indulge me in arguing about taste, I'll tell you that I think that's just flat wrong. My hypothesis here is that this is something like the "Cornell Effect" from Deaddom, in which great sounding tapes find mass-circulation relatively early, Patient Zero of the Betty Board contagion, and the show becomes legend. (Cornell is actually a great Dead show, but that doesn't preclude it being overrated.) JGB 12/31/75 at the Keystone has the added Dead appeal of guest shots by Bob Weir (very rare with JGB, only other times it happened were in June '82 and once on Broadway in '87, off the top of my head) and Mickey Hart. Nicky Hopkins draws lots of attention, it's New Year's Eve at the Keystone, and why shouldn't it be great?

But it isn't. As a musical performance, it has some OK moments, and it's rarely downright awful, but mostly it's just boring. That has always been my view.

Listening Preparation

But being a loyal customer, wanting to give the show a fair hearing, I decided to get the release, and to prepare my listen by revisiting the Falanga-Menke tape. Pin down the metadata if I could, just prepare the ground. Like a dog circling around a patch of lawn, if you know what I mean. And of course it became a rabbit hole, but I'll try to cover some ground and walk away from all the things that must be walked away from, conditional on the finity of our time here together. Anyway, I have some listening notes below the fold, but here are a few takeaways.

Players

Confusion bedeviled the sociometrics of this gig from the beginning. Les Kippel wrote in Dead Relix (1976) that

Contrary to advance rumors, the Grateful Dead did not play this past New Year’s Eve. However, Bob Weir and Chris Herold from Kingfish did show up to play at the Garcia Band’s show at the Berkeley Keystone that evening. Bob played rhythm guitar and sang backup vocals, and sang lead on “C.C. Rider.” Other material played at the show included “Catfish John,” “Road Runner,” and so forth. Rumor has it that that might have been the Garcia Band’s last performance.

A few issues later, attendee Jim Wasserman (1976) wrote a letter to the editor, correcting Kippel that the drummer was not Chris Herold, but, he thought, Bill Vitt. This is a great letter, which I reproduce in whole so Corry can read about Grayson Street (see Arnold 2009).

I was at the show, and some of the info you said about it was incorrect. Chris Herold of Kingfish was not there. Weir was there as you said, but I believe the drummer was Bill Vitt, sitting in for Ron Tut [sic]. Also, Mickey Hart showed with Weir for the second set - - and played a very primitive drumset used by the warm-up band (whom I didn't know).

The first band consisted of the drummer, (a bass, snare, tom tom, and two cymbals in the total set) and a slow blues slide guitarist who was pretty good, but generally a let-down for the opening of a New Year's show.

The Garcia Band was also joined by Matthew Kelly of Kingfish from very early in the show. The overall performance was quite good, once the boys got it underway, however. There was what seemed like hours of tuning up and the band took two very long breaks. The show was like a fine old' party, and I think that's just what Garcia was into -- partying on New Year's Eve.

So witness one says the non-Hart drummer was Chris Herold, witness two says it was Bill Vitt, and Corry (Arnold 2009) comes along and has it as Greg Errico. I become confused. (I knew it wasn't Tutt, who as drumming for  the Rainfall-besuited Elvis in the Pontiac Silverdome.)

But that's all over now, because now we have Official Documents, and it's Mr. Errico on the skins. (On the Falanga-Menke tape one can hear Nicky slurring "Thanks Greg" at note 3). Otherwise, it's as we have understood things: Matt Kelly on harmonica (throughout the show, as I hear it, should pin it all down), Bob Weir on guitar and Mickey Hart on drums (sets II and III).

Setlist

In putting together what I have around this show, I found a 5-minute fragment of tape that I remember some guy sending me some years ago, labeled 12/31/75 Nicky solo "Maple Leaf Rag", a tuneup from the start of the show. I had always vowed to give it some attention, and I did on this occasion. It is five minutes of tape from an alternative audience recording (i.e., not the Falanga-Menke tape). It's nowhere near as good as theirs, and it is degraded, but it is nevertheless revealing. First, the smaller point, I can hear taper talk where guy says "that looks like the guy from Kingfish". I wonder if Les Kippel was recording this, or if in some other way the taper's guess became Dead Relix's error?

Second, the tuning is not just Nicky, it's the whole band, as far as I can tell. And, it's not Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag", as advertised. It's Joplin's "The Entertainer". I can't tell you how much I love this little snippet. In terms of the American musical mosaic, it occupies the same part of the canon, just replacing one singleton, now a never-played (Maple Leaf Rag), with another (Entertainer). But I also love it because it's Nicky Hopkins playing "The Entertainer". He is so brilliant, and he can make even the most well-worn classic sound fresh as daylight; this is about as pure a piano tune as you can find, being played by about as pure a piano player as ever graced a bench.

Very cool. But also, tinged. Dawson's Hopkins biography (2011) shows clearly that Nicky was the ultimate sideman, lacking in any of the discernible talents and inclinations that might make one a successful front man, except his musical wizardry. He was shy and quiet and ill-suited to the role (see my "Bloody Hell"), and yet this seems to have been the role that the JGB (Garcia, Kahn and Tutt) and/or Nicky himself allowed to operate. There's just something desperately sad about Nicky playing "The Entertainer", with all of his (and its) beer hall authenticity, warming up for the big show. Later, sweetly optimistic about 1976: "It might even be good for me; you never know" (note 7). To your health, Nicky.

"Mother Nature's Son" is a Garcia singleton, part of the small, compact, tastefully curated set of Beatles material he played publicly.

Performance

You can see the listening notes, and I have already given my bottom line summary. It's OK in parts, it's bad in parts, but mostly it's just boring. It's a mehfest.

Other Context

Here is a little bit of color around this gig, which was contracted for the standard $500 JGB-at-Keystone rate (this would rise to $750 a night in 1977), but probably saw considerably more than that moving around.

1. Nicky is wasted. You knew this, but he's really, really wasted. He's at that horrible place (note 7), where he's both "pissed as a rat's nightmare" and "dry as a fuckin' boneyard". I believe him.
2. This is the last JGB #1 gig, as Nicky exits stage left. The conventional wisdom is that he was just too wasted and he had to go. I will argue in the book that he was never planned to last beyond the New Year. Either way, a few days later he'd be gigging a little with ol' pal John Cipollina, he never played with Garcia again, and he entered, from this night, perhaps the darkest period of a life too full of them.
3. Jerry and Mountain Girl are breaking up (Jackson 1999, 266-268). Right around this time Jerry deeds the Stinson house to MG and moves in with Deborah Koons in Belvedere.
4. Late 1975 has always been my guess for when the opiates become regularized. I don't know if the following refers to 1975 (it could be any year through 1975, really), but I have always thought it could have: "one Christmastime, on a whim, [Ron Rakow] took it upon himself to score some [China White] for himself and Garcia" (Jackson 1999, 289).
5. Money is tight, the Dead are going to have to start touring again, the Grateful Dead Movie is already an albatross that would hang around Garcia's neck until mid-1977, etc. etc.

I guess my point is that this is a pretty dark time in the Garciaverse. I would hate to extrapolate from that to this particular performance (the Winterland shows from a week and a half prior are actually quite good). And it's possible I am letting that darkness shade my listening, though I don't think so.

The Show as a Release

So, I find this release a little problematic insofar as it's not a great performance, and it's got all kinds of darkness around it. I understand the marketing appeal of the Dead guys' presence and the fact that it's Garcia's only New Year's Eve with the JGB. I also understand that quality tape is probably in sparer supply than one might wish. I am not going to be too hard on The Powers That Be, but would certainly argue for "great performance" as the first criterion of interest to this particular paying customer.

Anyway, references below, then listening notes below the fold.

REFERENCES

Arnold, Corry. 2009. December 31, 1975 Keystone Berkeley Jerry Garcia Band. Lost Live Dead, December 13, 2009, URL http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2009/12/december-31-1975-keystone-berkeley.html, consulted 12/31/2013.

Arnold, Corry. 2010. 2119 University Avenue, Berkeley, CA: The Keystone Berkeley. Lost Live Dead, December 31, 2010, URL http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2010/12/2119-university-avenue-berkeley-ca.html, consulted 4/22/2012.

Arnold, Corry. 2011. Jerry Garcia and Keystone Shows Overview. Lost Live Dead, January 2, 2011, URL http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2011/01/jerry-garcia-and-keystone-shows.html, accessed 7/23/2012.

Dawson, Julian. 2011. And On Piano ... Nicky Hopkins: The Extraordinary Life of Rock's Greatest Session Man. Foreword by Klaus Voormann. San Francisco: Backstage Press.

Jackson, Blair. 1999. Garcia: An American Life. New York: Penguin Books.

JGMF. 2010. JGB: December 31, 1975, Keystone, Berkeley: who was drumming?.

JGMF. 2014. "Bloody Hell".

JGMF. 2014. Nicky after JGB.

JGMF. 2014. Grateful Dead Three Ways: December 20, 1975.

Kippel, Les. 1976. Bits. Dead Relix 3, 2 (March-April), p. 19.

Wasserman, Jim. 1976. [Letter to the editor.] Dead Relix 3, 4 (July-August), p. 2.

Mahalo, Jer: JGB, January 27, 1989 at the Orpheum

 LN jg1989-01-27.jgb.all.sbd-moses.84866.flac1644

Can't believe I haven't annotated any 1989 Garcia Band. For my money, 1988-1989 is one of the great JGB periods, which a fresh and healthy Jerry (that's what starts to break down, for me, 1990-1991), solid band, some fresh material, rehearsed arrangements, and lots of classic American songs. Nothing too crazy, lots of good music.

Friday, January 27, 1989 finds Garcia healthy and frisky after, I believe, an extended Maui scuba vacation. This is his first public appearance since the New Year's Eve Dead show, and the first Garcia Band gig since early December (2-3), also at the Orpheum. The Dead would play four shambolic Chinese New Year shows at Oakland's Henry J. Kaiser Auditorium starting a week from this night, so 1/27 really does feel like warming up.

It's hard to listen to any show in isolation, which is what I'd really like to do here - put some fresh ears on a show that has a positive connotation in my head, just listen to it on its own terms. But I can't. I know I am a fan of the next night, and the next Orpheum weekend (March 3-4), which I also really like, and the rest of the spring, which is a peak period for me.

But I can't hear this one out of its context, and the greatness of the context leads me to sympathize with this show. Where vocals are flubbed (as they really are throughout the night), I hear Jerry shaking out the cobwebs. Where things are a little brief, I call them "tight". When entropy strikes arrangement, I give them unearned credit for how they meant it to sound. I try not to beat myself up about it - it probably is a good show. But I also think it's true that I am looking ahead to what's coming.

Setlist Notes

It's certainly an interesting show. Here's the setlist with some notes. 

JGB setlist 1/27/89 Orpheum Theatre

"Let's Spend The Night Together" (Jerrybase) is a great song on any measure, and most every Garcia version is excellent. The fact that he played this so well and often with Nicky Hopkins gives it special resonance. In the Hopkins era it served as a "jam vehicle", stretching out and thus not usually played on a night with another long number such as "Don't Let Go". This night we get both, but LSTNT, coming out of 13 years of mothballs (last played 1/28/76), clocks in at a brisk 6:47. This resurrected version stayed much tighter, usually clocking in 10 minutes, I'd estimate. This was the first time Jerry ever opened a show with it, and he'd only do that one more time, five weeks later on 3/3/89. It's still a work in progress, but I have always argued that toying with the repertoire is an unalloyed good - when he's working up new material, Garcia is engaged. (The version from the next night, 1/28/89, is much hotter and is overall outstanding.)

"Waiting For A Miracle" (Allan | deaddisc | JB): Canadian singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn penned this lovely paean to popular hope amidst war and poverty in Managua, Nicaragua in winter 1986. Jackie LaBranch heard it on the radio and brought it to the Garcia Band (Jackson 1989, 44), which sandpapered it a little, roughened it up some, and put a radio-worthy version on the double-disc live Jerry Garcia Band (Arista 18690, August 1991). This is a great example of the idea that fresh repertoire reflects fresh Jerry - here, he not only agreed to tackle a new number, but Garcia -I presume, since he's the one who has to sing 'em- made some lyrical edits that really worked, scuffling for a nickel and struggling for a dime instead of struggling for a dollar and scuffling for a dime, looking more toward the future than toward the past, standing up tall instead of proud. This is probably just driven by how singable the different sounds could be for this particular singer, but Garcia certainly made the song his own.

"I Hope It Won't Be This Way Always" (Allan | deaddisc | JB): The canonical version is from the Angelic Gospel Singers' 1968 Nashboro release Jesus Paid It All (deaddisc). Founded in 1944 by Margaret Wells Allison and her sister, adopting its first male member in 1961, and performing and touring about sixty years, the Angelic Gospel Singers are dubbed by the Encyclopedia of American Gospel Music "the longest consistently selling female gospel group in African American history" (via wiki). A staple in observant African American households, they're probably rare in white homes and largely silent in white cultural accounts. John Kahn's place was an exception – he loved and curated a huge record collection around inter alia every black American musical idiom, including church music, and brought this one to the Band from the likely-sounding compilation All Time Gospel Hits (perhaps Nashboro LP 7034, 1966) (Jackson 1989, 44).

As is so often the case, Blair Jackson was on the job, reporting on "Waiting For A Miracle" and "I Hope It Won't Be This Way Always" in the Golden Road, along with another new-to-the-Garcia-Band-repertoire number, "Throw Out The Lifeline", again brought in by Kahn from all-male North Carolina gospel group the Sensational Nightingales.

Race, Class, Gender, and JGB #21b

If I were feeling expansive, I'd add to Blair's characteristically excellent account a little analysis of the race, gender and class contours laid bare by the advent of these songs to the JGB repertoire.

On race, I have argued (WIP) that THE Jerry Garcia Band, #21b, the one that ran almost continuously for over a decade from summer 1983, integrated two of the three musics that formed the core of Garcia's musical life: white and black American roots and rootsy contemporary music. (The third, electronica, was supplied by the contemporary Grateful Dead.) In the past, Garcia had maintained different bands for these purposes, playing lots of contemporary (and some older) black music with Merl and white roots music in his country and bluegrass side projects. After the mid-1970s, the he starts bringing in more Dylan and Garcia-Hunter material, i.e., rootsy white contemporary Americana, refines the (white) bluegrass offerings to a few Peter Rowan originals (Mississippi Moon and Midnight Moonlight), and leavens everything with a big dose of R&B. JGB #21b was a racially integrated American musical act. It's hard for me to overstate the importance of this as a statement about Garcia's musical interests and commitments. I am fascinated that Kahn brought in the black church number while Jackie LaBranch brought in the deeply white and Canadian Cockburn's tune.

I am also fascinated by the gender and "class" contours of the fresh material. Jackie LaBranch brought "Waiting For A Miracle" to the group, a black woman who was definitely part of the band rather than its leadership (the Garcia-Kahn duopoly). Maybe every band (and leadership) worth its salt alights to a good song when it comes along – that'd be the hope. But I think that there are loads of bandleaders who weren't really looking for suggestions from the backup singers. The whole jazz band leader trip, show business itself, cuts against that kind of democracy. The Garcia Band has often been lauded for its relatively egalitarian ethos, especially early on and especially when it came to divvying up receipts from a bar gig. But as it got more lucrative, this has to have given way – does anyone really think that the band got the same amount as Jerry for a 1990s gig at the Warfield? I don't think so. But it probably wasn't a straight line, and I conjecture that it was down as much, at times, to Garcia's level of engagement as to the bottom line. In late 1988, Garcia is healthy, open, thriving, engaged. "Jackie's got a song? Let's try it." As either Jackie or Gloria can be heard repeatedly on this and other contemporary Garcia Band tapes, I'd give that a "Yeah, Jerry!"

Misc.

Why did Garcia play the Orpheum for Bill Graham six times in four months in late 1988-early 1989 (December 2-3, January 27-28 and March 3-4), and then never again? I assume the Warfield was being renovated, but I just don't know. In 1990, the Garcia-Graham partnership would move a quarter mile down Market and would never leave.

The poster advertises a special guest. Was this meant to be Clarence Clemons, or was there an opener? I don't know.

Anyway, I love this period. The next night is better than 1/27, but this show has its moments.

Jerry Garcia Band

Orpheum Theatre
1192 Market Street
San Francisco, CA 94102

January 27, 1989 (Friday) - 8 PM

sbd-moses flac1644 shnid-84866

--set I (8 tracks, 52:04)--

s1t01. Let's Spend The Night Together [6:47] [0:41]

s1t02. Stop That Train [6:40] [0:25]

s1t03. Someday Baby [5:34] [0:50]

s1t04. Run For The Roses [5:22] [0:20]

s1t05. Mississippi Moon [7:41] (1) [0:49]

s1t06. Waiting For A Miracle [5:05] [0:03] %

s1t07. I Hope It Won't Be This Way, Always [4:35] ->

s1t08. Deal [7:07] (2) [0:07] %

--set II (7 tracks, 62:53)--

s2t01. The Harder They Come [10:14] [0:20]

s2t02. And It Stoned Me [5:52] [0:14] % [0:02]

s2t03. Knockin' On Heaven's Door [8:19] [0:37]

s2t04. Think [5:57] [0:06] %

s2t05. Don't Let Go// [14:36] %

s2t06. That Lucky Old Sun (Just Rolls Around Heaven All Day) [9:18] [0:09]

s2t07. Midnight Moonlight [7:05] (3) [0:04] %

! ACT1: Jerry Garcia Band #21b

! lineup: Jerry Garcia - guitar, vocals;

! lineup: John Kahn - bass;

! lineup: Melvin Seals - keyboards;

! lineup: Jacklyn LaBranch - backing vocals;

! lineup: Gloria Jones - backing vocals;

! lineup: David Kemper - drums.

JGMF:

! Recording: symbols: % = recording discontinuity; / = clipped song; // = cut song; ... = fade in/out; # = truncated timing; [x:xx] = recorded event time. The recorded event time immediately after the song or item name is an attempt at getting the "real" time of the event. So, a timing of [x:xx] right after a song title is an attempt to say how long the song really was, as represented on this recording.

! Jerrybase: https://jerrybase.com/events/19890127-01.  On poster there is a special guest listed. Was that supposed to have been Clarence Clemons (sp?), or was there an opener?

! JGC: http://jerrygarcia.com/show/1989-01-27-orpheum-theatre-san-francisco-ca/

! db: http://etreedb.org/shn/14015 (Dan Cole MAC shnf SBEs, deprecated); http://etreedb.org/shn/16577 (Dan Cole MAC shnf); http://etreedb.org/shn/84866 (sbd flac1644, this fileset).

! venue: http://jerrygarciasbrokendownpalaces.blogspot.com/2012/08/orpheum-theatre-1192-market-street.html

! map: https://goo.gl/maps/J6txb

! band: JGB #21b, THE Jerry Garcia Band (http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2012/01/jerry-garcia-band-personnel-1975-1995.html).

! historical: the "year too late" thesis. Sounds to me like they are thinking about recordable arrangements. Also of note, a few things. First JGB of 1989, and first JGB gig in almost two months! The prior shows (December 2-3, 1988) were also at the Orpheum, as were the next two (March 3-4, 1989). That's six gigs in a three month span at the same room, which he'd never play again, and which he had only played a few times in the previous 15 years (twice, to be exact - 5/21/76 and 5/7/88). What gives? I wonder if the Warfield was being renovated?

! R: main source (through s2t04): unknown soundboard tape > ? > A (big) cardboard box, maxell XL2S90 cassette dolby B > Nakamichi CR3A,(Dolby B) eq out  > hp computer > Sound Forge (vol@5.5db) > CD wave >  Flac > you!

! R: "Guessing 2nd or 3rd gen SBD", to which I'd say, "at most". This is a nice tape.

! R: second source (s2t05-s2t07): MAC (Sony D6C w/Sony stereo mic) > 1 cassette > Nakamichi CR3A playback onto HP Computer (no dolby) > Sound Forge Vol@ 5.5DB > CD Wave > Flac7.

! R: transferred by John Moses 5-7-07.

! R: s1t01 maybe fast? Jerry's guitar is buried in the mix, organ very prominent.

! P: s1t01 LSTNT Too bad the guitar is so low in the mix, because Jerry sounds on his game. @ 3:15 this is a very well rehearsed-sounding return from the break. Jerry's soloing 5-min mark sounds great. I want to check out an audience recording. Tight stop.

! P: s1t03 Someday Baby JG flubs the first verse. But after that he is singing very nicely, sounds great on this soundboard tape! Melvin big lead late 2, very forward in the mix and sounding strong. Arrangement gets a little squirrely again later, and Jerry just closes up shop.

! P: s1t04 RFTR this sounds great. Jerry sounds amazing here.

! s1t05 (1) after MM, as after several other tracks, one can hear the ladies talking. Here, one of them says "That was real good", and I can't disagree with her.

! P: s1t06 vocal flubs on WFAM, but he's giving it his all. Seems like a bunch of songs have that profile this night. I think Gar is performing courageously, with great ease and fluidity. @ 3:12 someone misses the change, things get a little loose in the cage for a bit. Extra vocal effort 3:30, "like the ones that DIE, tryin' to set the ay ay ayngels in us free"! Gar is extemporizing vocally, in lieu of remembering the words. But they hadn't been playing this long.

! song: WFAM (s1t06): hadn't been played much. xxx

! song: IHIWBTWA first time played. Next night maybe second, and maybe that's it?

! setlist: do a setlist analysis. xxx

! s1t08 (2) JG: "We'll be back in a few minutes."

! P: s1 gets good points for energy, but it's a little sloppy. First show of the year, first show in xxx weeks! I have in my mind that Garcia had probably just been scuba diving in Hawaii before this. He sounds clean as a whistle. And to those who don't like such speculation, to heck with ya. s2 is good. This is probably an average show from an above-average period, really showing Jerry rested, relaxed, and playing well.

! P: s2t04 Think some very heavy guitar work in the 2-min range. Melvin steps up 2:49, playing nicely. More very heavy guitar 4:45 forward, "give up my woman!" over 5 mark.

! P: s2t05 DLG more vocal flubbing at the start of the song. Garcia's shaking the cobwebs out. Very exceptional work on DLG, using his voice to push his guitar, as if by extending his diaphgram he's just moving his guitar grasp just a little bit.

! R: s2t05 DLG cuts out, not much missing

! R: s2t06 TLOS level adjustment early on

! s2t07 (3) JG: "Thanks a lot, we'll see ya later."

REFERENCES:

Jackson, Blair. 1989. Roots. Golden Road no. 19 (Spring): 44.