2/14/75: as sweet as a love note

Aunt Monk, 1975, courtesy bay-area-bands.com

No deep dive here, but I wanted to see how this next show compared with the previous ones: this is one of two circulating Aunt Monk gigs with Garcia sitting in.  Even though it's fully Merl's gig, Garcia is as prominent as he is on Garcia/Saunders shows, right down to the same typical order of solos (Fierro, Garcia, Saunders, and usually Garcia again).  JGMF has some context re: Aunt Monk in his post on the other circulating Generosity show.

In the interest of relative brevity:

• This is a lovely quality aud by Robert Castelli.  I am eternally grateful for his work here.  It's a little muffled, comparatively speaking, but with no crowd interference and excellent clarity, and I quite like the feel of it.  There's a nice moment of color just as the music is beginning when a female right next to him says, "just keep it low!" (the mics? the bowl?) and laughs.
• The Generosity was... a bar?  I am not finding any info.  But it was probably tiny.  There are no vocals, so maybe there wasn't even a PA system, and Merl only plays electric piano here, taking up far less space than a full Hammond B3 + Leslie speaker.
• This show is on par with the Jan 75 Keystone shows in terms of quality, although I personally prefer what Gaylord Birch brought to the mix at those shows.  But ye gods, they just bite down hard on just about everything here.  Merl's rarely played (as far as we know) original A Little Bit of Righteousness gets a high spirited run-through with the rhythm section lifting them all a few feet off the ground.
• Pennies From Heaven again!  The drummer, Bob Stellar, gives this more a straight-down-the-middle beat like a 6/8 R&B ballad.  Garcia is all over it and sounds more comfortable here than on 1/21/75, imho.  Incredible.
• When I Die also has a different feel than the Jan 75 versions, again largely due to Stellar at first.  But both Garcia and Saunders sound noticeably edgier in their attack here, and they're really both going off by the end of this.  Wow!  
• The most magical moment of the set, to my ears, is the verrry extended treatment of People Make the World Go Round, which Garcia/Saunders played only as a shorter instrumental without any solos, more like a kind of coda to another instrumental.  This one goes for 21 1/2 minutes, and the playing is the most interactive and "jammy" of the night.  There are still solos, but they seem to blend into each other more freely and there's a lot more interplay between Garcia, Fierro, and Saunders than in most other songs.  You'll have to hear it to believe it.
• Stevie Wonder's Creepin' sounds like it might be a new number for them (it's not an easy tune!), but Garcia does not sound like the weakest link.  He eats it up, and iirc this is better than any of the few later Legion of Mary versions.
• This show was Merl's 41st birthday.  Garcia was 32 and Fierro had just turned 33.

Simply amazing that this happened, that it sounds so goddamn good, and that we have a tape of it.