Fey on Miles

Barry Fey on Miles Davis (Fey 2011, 243): "You didn't fuck with Miles."

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!

San Diego Public Library, and Public Libraries

I am in love with libraries. Is there a word for this? Someone has asked a Yahoo, but I am not sure I see an answer that works for me. So, as a book-lover is a bibliophile, as a word-lover is a philologist, what is a library-lover?

Anyway, San Diego Public Library, http://www.sandiego.gov/public-library/, stands as a great municipal institution, befitting this jewel of an American city, really just the perfect climate, shimmering water, profound historical Spanish, Mexican and Anglo historical crossings. To me it feels most like Santa Barbara and San Francisco in its coastal-and-Spanish vibe (less like newer LA, while the warm-and-Spanish thing makes it feel a little like Santa Fe).

As a municipal institution worthy of the name must, SDPL serves the public. Taxes are not tyranny when it comes to things like libraries. Stupidity is dangerous and bad for everyone, and warding it off through public investment is no less useful than warding off the fucking cholera, or paying skilled and strong people to exercise organized violence. San Diego is built and sustained on public dollars to this day, not least through its permanent militarization from Cabrillo in 1542 to the freshly-forged (and several more leathered) Marines et al. flying out last night. Safest place on earth last night, San Diego International airport, assuming you love 'Merca and aren't looking to fight.

I love that it remains the San Diego Public Library. It keeps a municipal name, though of course I reckon that a lot of private money has come in. Two-edged sword, that. The private money that can come in through a naming is huge, as it has been since probably well before the Medicis patronized Florentine artists, scholars and public works. I recently came across some neat pieces around the Garciaverse venue Avery Fisher Hall, i.e., the home of the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center. Avery Fisher's family, after resisting, is being paid to allow for an unnaming (see . The namesake bought cheap in the 80s, like $25 million, and the refresh the NY Phil wants and needs runs to the hundreds of millions. There are lots of prospective someone and something elses that might be interested in that particular emblazoning. There's a shitload of money sloshing around Gotham in the New Gilded Age.

Like my beloved San Francisco Public Library, and like every great public library in the world but with the higher relative frequency you see in temperate climates, homeless folks populate the SDPL, especially during the winter months. Fine. It's a true public institution. Everyone has a right to go there and spend the day hanging out and reading. And who doesn't like to drift off to sleep in a comfy chair over a good book? S'all good to me, good to give a hand to an American who's down on his or her luck, as the Looney Tunes used to say.

Here's my call to some would-be Medici Deadhead in the San Diego area: pay for some more state-of-the-art microfilm/form scanners. San Francisco Public Library's are terrific, and almost certainly not cheap. Someone's gift paid for those badboys, and SDPL could use a few more. And endow a little fund that can pay for printing paper from the old-style film scanners, as well. That's still useful, and I'd bet it doesn't run more than few thou a year. A little endowed gift of $50k to start would probably pay for it, in perpetuity. And it'd make the world a better place.


I already discussed a probable rainout of the putative JGMS show at San Diego State on 11/18/73. Next I'll write up a new-to-me canceled Dead gig with an interesting splash of color (update - done).

REFERENCES

! ref: Pogrebin, Robin. 2002. Avery Fisher Hall Forever, Heirs Say. New York Times, May 13, URL http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/13/arts/avery-fisher-hall-forever-heirs-say.html, consulted 11/28/2014. 

 ! ref: Pogrebin, Robin. 2014. Lincoln Center to Rename Avery Fisher Hall. New York Times, November 13, URL http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/14/arts/music/lincoln-center-to-rename-avery-fisher-hall.html, consulted 11/28/2014.

! ref: Roberts, Sam. 2014. With Naming Rights, Perpetuity has a Cutoff. New York Times, November 28, 2014, p. A26.

JGMS in San Diego 11/18/73 probably rained out

The List has long given Jerry Garcia and Merl Saunders at the Aztec Bowl, San Diego State College (I think it was still this C and not a U at the time), November 18, 1973. Because Garcia and Saunders had barely played out of the Bay Area by that time (Ash Grove in LA 5/29-30/73, the Hells Angels show on 9/5/73, John Scher's Passaic Capitol Theatre on 9/6/73), it would have been pretty noteworthy, had it happened.

Like the canceled show at the University of Iowa on 10/20/73, it would have made some logistical sense, dovetailing nicely with Grateful Dead gigging. Also like it (and another early out-of-town show, 2/16/74 in Passaic), however, it appears not to have happened.

Most importantly, despite this being a putative show in a football stadium, I have never seen any eyewitness accounts. Doggie no barkie.

It appears to have rained in San Diego on 11/18/73, less in town than the biblical 4.5" received in the Palomar Mountains, but having just seen S.D. responding to "rain" the last few days, even a half-inch or so may have been enough to scuttle the whole thing. I believe there may have been Aztecs soccer and/or football events planned for the turf, and maybe they didn't want a bunch of rock fans mucking it up.

That makes sense, but the weird thing is that, besides the door listing reproduced above, after a little poking around I have found no mention of the show in either the San Diego Union or, more problematically, in the SDSU Daily Aztec (digitized, albeit with a rather clunky interface, via the University library's digital collections). I do not understand why the show would have been listed in the door published on November 8th, but never mentioned or advertised in the campus paper.

Thoughts about this? Either way, I am about 99% confident that the show never happened, probably one to strike from The List (now, our individually-maintained lists) of Garcia shows.

How Sweet It Is

Risk and Challenge in the 1970s

Here's a back-of-the-napkin sketch, my subjective assessment, of the musical risks and challenges associated with Garcia's 1970s bands (qua personnel and repertoire) playing black and race-fusion music. So, this includes Wales-Garcia, all of the Jerry and Merl outfits, and all of the JGBs. It excludes NRPS, OAITW, GAMB/GASB (playing mostly white roots music), and the Lagin construct.

I intend this at some rather inchoate meso level. There are incendiary flashes and moments in every period. There are great shows. But that's micro level, and not what I am after here. This is intended as a map, if you will, of the structural constraints posed by players, their skills and shared repertoires.

Happy to receive questions, criticisms, etc.!

Rough chronology.

• HWJG and early JGMS = highest risk and challenge
• JGMS Forgerty era considerably lower. I didn't include the spring '73 influection Tickner and Sarah experiments, basically show it declining monotonically to July '73.
• JGMS Fierro era, an uptick.
• LOM, perhaps a slight downtick.
• An uptick with Nicky. This is mostly a personnel artifact, less so a repertoire one. Basically, I am saying that Nicky could challenge Garcia in ways that Merl could not (any longer?).
• The opiate-cushioned descent down down down, though 1978 is certainly better (and generally at a faster tempo) than the preceding two.
• Reconstruction uptick.

After that, things are fluid on the personnel front, but not so much in terms of risk and challenge. Garcia and Kahn are tweaking the JGB recipe until the advent of JGB #21b in July 1983, which basically endures until both of the principals are, generally, too sick and far gone to care.

Again, comments, criticisms, etc., most welcomed!

Reconstruction Pix by Chris Stone

Some rare, amazing Reconstruction pix from 4/23/79 and 5/18/79 by Chris Stone. This one Gaylord Birch at the Old Waldorf, May 18, 1979.

Major shoutout to the photographer, 1) for getting some stunning shots, and 2) for posting these freely to share. Please be sure to credit him if you archive a copy of this picture.

h/t JGBP

Color:
Arnold, Corry. 2011. Jerry Garcia Band Drummers Top 10 List. Lost Live Dead, November 10, 2011, http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2011/11/jerry-garcia-band-drummers-top-10-list.html, consulted 5/19/2013.
Arnold, Corry. 2011. Jerry Garcia Roots And Branches. Hooterollin' Around, December 23, http://hooterollin.blogspot.com/2011/12/jerry-garcia-roots-and-branches.html, consulted 11/15/2014.
Arnold, Corry. 2011. May 19, 1979: The Old Waldorf, San Francisco, CA: Reconstruction/Horslips. Lost Live Dead, January 6, http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2011/01/may-19-1979-old-waldorf-san-francisco.html, consulted 11/15/2014.
Arnold, Corry. 2012. Reconstructing Reconstruction, January-February and August-September 1979. Lost Live Dead, November 1, URL http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2012/11/reconstructing-reconstruction-january.html, consulted 11/15/2014.
JGBP. 2012. Old Waldorf, 444 Battery Street, San Francisco, CA. Jerry's Brokendown Palaces, June 24, 2012, URL http://jerrygarciasbrokendownpalaces.blogspot.com/2012/06/old-waldorf-444-battery-street-san.html, consulted 11/15/2014.

UMass 'Master of the Fretboard': JGB, February 20, 1980 (late show)

LN jg1980-02-20.jgb.late.aud-Sony_23F-Nak_550.131018.flac2448

The Jerry Garcia Band (JGB #11a) played 22 shows in the 29 days of February 1980, warming up locally and then touring college and off-campus theaters, reportedly to help pay for the film rights to Kurt Vonnegut's "Sirens of Titan". I have all kinds of information about John and Jerry's quest for those rights, and their ultimately fruitless efforts to make a movie, just need to find time to write it all up.

While some dislike the sound of this band, often because of Ozzie Ahlers' electric keyboard and synthesizer tones, I have big love for its, and especially Garcia's, playing during this period. The After Midnight release of the Kean College shows on 2/28/80 give an excellent representation of what the group was all about. Lots of very expressive Garcia guitar playing, by turns fast, fluid, cogent, energetic, inventive, plucky, pensive, burning and corrosive. His voice generally sounds pretty good, the repertoire mixes things up nicely, and everything cooks about as it should. I like lots of shows from the tour, with 2/15/80 (Orpheum Theatre in Boston) and 2/17/80 (SUNY Oswego) maybe topping the list, though they're pretty much all good. And, to repeat, it's mostly about energy and guitar playing.

The early (7 PM) show at UMass Amherst on Wednesday, February 20th has only a rotten multigenerated cassette tape in circulation. I must have listened to it at some point, but maybe not. Anyway, the 10 PM show is much better represented, by a recently-polished 1st gen cassette dubbed from an unknown taper's 2x Sony ECM-23f > Nakamichi 550 setup. It's a good tape. It's not great, cut up a little bit and with some overloading.

But it's worth a listen because it's a good show. I don't have a ton of specifics, see my listening notes below the fold.

I found archives for the UMass Amherst Daily Collegian, which naturally held a few ads, such as this one:

Garcia had his hair long like that during the Reconstruction era, in 1979. The picture is almost certainly from the Dead's May 12, 1979 gig in the UMass campus stadium. Ex-post, one of staff photog Wayne Rosenberg's Jerry snaps appeared the next day, and then there was a review the next week.

In addition to confirming that Robert Hunter opened (which I did not have pinned down), and though not a Dead/Garcia fan, the reviewer (Alvord 1980) is mostly pretty impressed. Garcia is a

master of the fretboard … mesmerizing … Garcia did not get involved at all with the audience, although there was dynamic interaction on the stage between the band members, trading off exquisite solos and jovial expressions of delight and amusement between Garcia and the keyboardist, blank expression by the bassist, and multiple expressions of estranged nature by the percussionist. The bass solo was the only low point of the concert ... it sucked!

I assume he saw the early show, since the bass solo in "Simple Twist" is presumably even more feathery and fluttery than the one in the late show's "Russian Lullaby" (which is, perhaps suspiciously, cut out of the tape under consideration). It is nice to hear that Jerry and Ozzie seemed to be having a good time, anyway.

Anyway, good show. "Sugaree", "Tore Up Over You", and even "Midnight Moonlight," which is too often Jerry starting to pack it in, especially impress me.


REFERENCE:

Alvord, Rick. 1980. The Dead's head plays it true to form. Daily Collegian (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), February 25, 1980, p. 7; via URL https://archive.org/details/massachuse19791980univ, accessed 11/9/2014.

Daily Collegians

https://archive.org/search.php?query=%22daily%20collegian%22%20AND%20collection%3Aamericana

That'll get you to scans of the Daily Collegian (University of Massachusetts, Amherst). I gathered up the stuff around 2/20/80, which I have also listened to. The search function seems a little slow - these are some pretty huge files. The pdf of 1979-1980 weighs in at 2GB. Beautiful images, and the scrolling interface seems to work well.

That's not to be confused with the Daily Collegian (Pennsylvania State University): http://digitalnewspapers.libraries.psu.edu/Default/Skins/collegian/Client.asp?skin=collegian&AW=1415545206513&AppName=2

Here are a few other "daily [or otherwise] collegians," college papers that have been archived back in time, sufficient to be useful for GD/Garcia research. Universities are among our greatest assets, and they often do a great job of documenting and archiving themselves. I would gratefully receive links to more sources, or, even better, the best comprehensive link for this sort of thing, because as I inspect this rabbit hole it goes quite deep.

American University:
Bard College: http://inside.bard.edu/campus/publications/archive/
Boston College Heights: http://newspapers.bc.edu/

Cornell: http://guides.library.cornell.edu/c.php?g=30982&p=198784
The Five Colleges of Ohio: http://dcollections.oberlin.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/p15963coll9 
University of Washington Daily from 9/67-2/68 (interesting dates!): http://content.lib.washington.edu/dailyweb/
Vassar College: http://newspaperarchives.vassar.edu/

etc. etc.

I wish Cal would do the Daily Californian ... the present archives are only 1999-2011.

Lots of Dead and Garcia shows at colleges. At some point I'll be able to give more precise numbers. Lots of ads, previews, reviews, listings, mentions, exposts. Lots of money issues, needless controversies, etc. There are universes of material in the college papers.

Grateful Dead Studies

So Many Roads : The World in the Grateful Dead, A Conference & Symposium; Date: November 5-8, 2014; Location: SJSU Student Union.

Krieger, Lisa M. 2014. Grateful Dead: An early Silicon Valley startup. San Jose Mercury-News, November 7, 2014, URL http://www.mercurynews.com/education/ci_26894788/grateful-dead-an-early-silicon-valley-startup, accessed 11/9/2014.

Sounds like a great event. Congratulations to Michael Parrish, Nicholas Meriwether, and all involved in putting this on and participating.

I hope the folks on the commercial end of the Grateful Dead universe continue to step up and fund the Grateful Dead Archive, patronize the arts and letters more generally. The public sector support for that stuff is disappearing, the rich-getting-richer are going to have to do it. C'mon, hippies, step up to the plate!

Dead in the Panhandle - Sunday, April 9, 1967

Video! (Reminder: Jerrybase benefits from the work of Gordon the Drummer, who maintains the state-of-the-art list of GD and JG videos for us. Thank you, GTD!)

http://stock.mrfootage.com/pages/assets_clip/popup_play.php?session_numb=80572&language_numb=1&business_numb=1004&shot_numb=407764

http://vimeo.com/97755921

http://vimeo.com/97755927

The 921 link has two minutes of pure gold, starting with the Grateful Dead playing "Caution", high quality color and sound, a bit distant (but correspondingly atmospheric)  in the Panhandle. Wow.

GtD says "In these clips I'm hearing bits of Caution, King Bee, Viola Lee Blues, and an unfamiliar blues shuffle tune sung by Garcia". The last piece sounds pretty interesting to me, would love to hear what others hear.

The link ending 927 is mostly atmosphere, but it's fascinating. A lost child is named - it'd be interesting to interview all of those kids that are announced as lost at Dead shows, "Frank" and all those people. I don't quite catch the name on my one pass-through.

More on this show:

See also http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2010/01/january-april-1967-grateful-dead.html;

posters: URL http://www.deadlists.com/posters/1960s/19670409b.html;

Yellow Shark:

The Longshoremen's Hall and Panhandle performances are well documented - The Panhandle sometime in the afternoon (plenty of photographs exist) and Longshoremen's late in the evening. However, there was planned a 2PM Haight-Ashbury "Street Dance" show organised by The Diggers (for one hour). I have always separated this from the Panhandle event as it followed a street theatre event at Haight & Ashbury - and it was called "Street Dance" - which would be inappropriate for Speedway Meadows.

Anyway, again, very cool to be able to see and hear even tiny snippets of this. My thanks to all involved in making that possible!

Prosopography

“the investigation of the common background characteristics of a group of actors in
history by means of a collective study of their lives” (Stone, 1971: 46).

Stone, L. (1971). “Prosopography,” Daedalus 100(1): 46–79.

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.