The New York Times reported, on April 4, 1975, on the Legion of Mary's arrival in New York:
[Garcia's and Saunders's] current quintet... is fixed enough to be considered a real unit, Mr. Garcia reported the other day from San Francisco.
Mr. Garcia is very pleased by the quality of the current group. “We're more on the relaxed than the hurried side of the metronome,” he said. “We get a real nice conversational quality in our music.”
The East Coast swing lasts only three weeks, but Mr. Garcia said that Legion of Mary would make a longer tour later on, and that there are “tentative plans” for a record.
Almost a year later to the day (April 1, 1976), Garcia gave an interview to The Music Gig magazine:
Garcia's association with Merle Saunders last year [1975] produced many a sloppy concert and severely tested the endurance of the audience. "Yeah, we burned out on it too," he allows. "That was a very weird band it was never meant to go out and tour" [sic].
(note that this 1976 interview is the same one where Garcia praises the JGB's harmonious consonance, as opposed to the Dead's dissonance and divergent viewpoints)
No big revelations here, I guess? The breakup of the Legion of Mary and the larger Garcia/Saunders partnership is still foggy (see JGMF on the precise-ish dating of their split and other thoughts), and it seems likely that the principals wouldn't necessarily agree on the real reason, even if we had firm statements on the record, which we mostly do not. I don't see any real mystery: it had run its course, and Garcia wasn't interested in moving further with a band that played this particular hodgepodge of music: contemporary soul and funk, extended jazz instrumentals, and Garcia's own bag of favored Americana. The comment about it being a band that "was never meant to go out and tour" belies his earlier 1975 plug for more touring and a record, but it is still probably true in the grander scheme of things: ultimately, it was the club band that was meant to work late at night in laid back local haunts, not up on big stages to crowds of hollering fans coast to coast. It seems impossible to overstate the influence that Saunders had on his playing, and Garcia clearly had a great time working out on some unfamiliar material (that eventually became familiar and then, maybe, overfamiliar) in his downtime away from the dissonance of the Grateful Dead. But that's not the same as making it a thing, as the kids say -- touring around, making records, all the attendant hassles. Keeping with that old wife/mistress metaphor (used by Garcia himself, somewhere), I wonder if the Legion of Mary wasn't the mistress that started making more serious moves into the master bedroom after the wife left town for a bit.
Obviously Saunders and Fierro wouldn't have seen it that way, and to be honest, one thing I enjoy about all their music from 1974-75 is that Garcia isn't always the most comfortable sounding guy onstage, and that there are times when Fierro and Saunders just smoke him. But no mystery why Garcia would at some point want to put that down, particularly when it became the Main Event.
But I do have to snicker at the idea that the JGB ca 1976 didn't indulge in a little bit of "severely testing the endurance of the audience" of its own (exhibit A).
Rockwell, John. "The Pop Life." The New York Times, April 4, 1975. Online.
Weitzman, Steve. (unknown title). The Music Gig, Aug 1976.
(clipping saved in Dick Latvala's scrapbook, Book 1, p. 31. A later revision of this piece -- without this quote -- is at Dead Sources)
