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| Grisman, Wakefield, Rowan, 7/4/76, by Les Kippel |
Nothing hugely significant about this, but worth putting a pin in, at least. This reemerged at Lossless Legs, an older source (transferred 2006, seeded 2009) of a tape labeled Old & In the Way 7/5/76 at the 6th Annual Green Mountain Country Banjo Festival in Castleton, VT, taped by Jerry Moore. Moore confirmed that "actually, THIS set was billed as 'Old and in the way.' The festival ran several days, and this was the final set. There were two other sets under the 'Good old boys' name." It's really three-fifths of OAITW: David Grisman, Peter Rowan, Vassar Clements (all of whom played with Frank Wakefield's Good Old Boys at this fest), plus Bill Keith on banjo and an unidentified bassist (maybe Rick Lindner, who also played with the GOB at the festival).
They run through some OAITW faves, clearly a little rough around the edges -- there's no third singer, for one thing, so some of the harmonies are a little off. Grisman takes the lead where Garcia used to sing. In between two such songs (Pig in a Pen and White Dove), there's this little exchange:
Grisman: We'll send this to Jerry, wherever he may be.
Rowan: We love that boy! We want to bring him home to bluegrass music!
Grisman: He's out there being Grateful, y'know. This is one he sang on the album, and we'll try and, uh, get by.
Rowan: It's called "I'm Grateful But I Sure Ain't Dead."
Haw haw. The album had been out for a year and a half at this point, and hadn't there been some issue over money? Paging JGMF. This comment isn't anything more than a data point, but it does take on a little extra edge if there was a fresh bruise on these men's relationship at this point.
Meanwhile, the Good Ol' Grateful Boys were booked to play Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City on July 2, but were postponed after local concerns about violence (a possible 7/4/76 JGB gig in San Francisco appears to be spurious). There can't be a snowball's chance in hell that Garcia was actually planning on performing at this festival -- a bluegrass reunion on the US bicentennial! -- is there? But I wonder if this was really advertised as an Old & In the Way reunion (as the final set of the festival) and if people were really expecting Garcia to show.
Later during this set, before Wild Horses, Grisman tells a little story about how the tape used on the live album was just being threaded into the tape deck at the song started, cutting off his mandolin intro. Sure enough, as you may remember, on the OAITW album, Wild Horses does cut in a second before the first line of the song. And now you know why. On the complete Boarding House set, the take from 10/1/73 is complete, whereas the take from 10/8 does cut in after the first couple seconds, which were edited to make a clean start with Rowan's vocal.
Dawg on his post-OAITW non-relationship w Jerry: "He and I were doing different things, but it also got into a space of, like, the Grateful Dead never paid me [emphasis added]. They had never paid me for American Beauty until I acquired a manager and happened to mention it. I mean, I didn't really care, I was like a hippie. And Jerry, he'd give me dope- he'd give me pot. He'd stop by my house and throw a quarter pound of pot on my bed. But that's just the way they were. In addition to everything else, they were kind of pirates, the Grateful Dead. I'm not saying it was Jerry personally, but, you know, there were like checks stuffed into the door of his car that he never cashed. I kept hearing that Old and In the Way was the biggest selling bluegrass record of all time, but I wasn't getting any money. I never said anything, but we just stopped communicating" (Grisman 2007, 101).
ReplyDeleteHmm. Totally understandable why they might be making low-grade passive-aggressive little snarks about him... but it was still a little weird to hear it. The fact that Grisman is compelled to point out that his mandolin intro for Wild Horses didn't make the record also adds to the sour milk whiff of all this. Ah well, so it goes.
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