My Europe 72 marathon hit a little snag (or rather, life failed to clear the wide path that listening to Europe 72 deserves), but writeups of all that stuff will be coming very soon. Sigh.
But in the meantime, here's one for the Garcia/Saunders setlist completists: I wrote up a lengthy review of 6/4/74 many years ago, but there's been a tiny piece of that show that's been nagging at me ever since: at the end of All Blues, Martin Fierro starts playing a blues lick that I could never quite place, and today it finally clicked: it's "One Mint Julep." Fierro tries it once at 20:13, then gets it right the second time, and Garcia picks up on it and joins in on third go-round. They riff on it for a few minutes until the song ends at 23:11 (times are for this transfer).
"One Mint Julep" (wiki), by Rudy Toombs, was an early Atlantic Records R&B hit for the Coasters and then found even greater fame as an instrumental when Ray Charles played it on his Genius + Soul = Jazz album in 1961. A quick look at discogs shows that a variety of folks recorded it after that: R&B instrumentalists like King Curtis and Booker T the MG's, but also more modern jazz players like Milt Jackson, Jimmy Smith, and Freddie Hubbard (Hubbard's version was the one I was listening to today when it clicked), and also Nashville guitarist Chet Atkins -- among certainly hundreds of others. It's hard to say which version Fierro et al were most influenced by here, since they're playing it over the same groove as All Blues rather than a more typical R&B rhythm. They also don't play the entire tune: they don't ever play the bridge, just the main blues lick, which was probably in the DNA of every working R&B or jazz musician of the era. So I don't know if the setlist keepers want to label this as All Blues > One Mint Julep, or just put the ol' asterisk in there with a little note about it.
Carry on. Or go listen to this show again! It's great.
Does anyone hear something different?
