The Wall Song: a short history

 

12/21/70, by Michael Parrish

David Crosby's wonderful, eerie tune "The Wall Song" is on my mind because of the forthcoming GarciaLive release of Garcia & Saunders at the Keystone Korner, 5/21/71, which you probably already know does not feature John Kahn or anyone else on bass.  [sorry, but: contrary to Rolling Stone's assessment, this has nothing to do with the freakin' Doors and everything to do with the fact that Saunders was adept at playing jazz basslines with his left hand, an innovation of Jimmy Smith's that was taken up by hundreds of organ players].  The Garcia folks have already shared the Wall Song from this show on Youtube, a surprising and unique performance by Garcia without Crosby.  So here is a stroll through the other known recordings of this song, from the small window of time that Garcia and Crosby were actively collaborating.

In 1989, Crosby recalled to David Gans that, during the 1970 sessions for his solo project If I Could Only Remember My Name (IICORMN), "the only time when we ever really got organized was on 'The Wall Song.' That was pretty organized, 'cause it goes through a lot of changes. And so we learned that and actually played it like an arrangement."  In addition to the changes, the song is structured two parts, the second of which (the "B" section or bridge, I guess) has a more syncopated "stop time" feel where the drums don't keep a steady groove, which probably required a little bit of work to lock into place (see the Matrix rehearsal below).

Like many of the songs on IICORMN, the Wall Song had been in the works for a couple of years already.  Steve Silberman tells of an unreleased solo Crosby session from 1968 that features the Wall Song as well as Tamalpais High, Laughing, and other future Cros classics.  But the IICORMN timeline is a little vague: according to pictures of the master reel boxes shared by Stephen Barncard, much of the material was originally tracked in Aug or Sept 1970, although the official project didn't begin until Nov 1970 (while Barncard was also mixing American Beauty).  It seems to have been wrapped up by December, but Crosby then booked Heider's again in January 1971 for sessions that apparently weren't intended for any album -- I need a citation, but I had the sense this was kind of an extended excuse to stay in the studio and avoid the outside world, since Crosby was still intensely grieving over his girlfriend's death.  These tapes were compiled and circulated in the early 90's, and have have since gone down in history as the PERRO (Planet Earth Rock & Roll Orchestra) tapes, named after a loose aggregation of musicians including the Jefferson Airplane and the Dead (here's one page with history; edit: here's a better one, with Barncard's annotations).  The earliest available Wall Song comes from that circulating PERRO collection.   According to Barncard's annotations, the full-band version on the PERRO tapes is from 12/13/70 -- after, it seems, the IICORMN material was in the can.

Dec 1970 (?) demo, PERRO tapes
The first of two takes on the PERRO set: Crosby alone with a 12-string acoustic and double-tracking his vocal.  Just what it says on the box.

[edit: This demo was released on the IICORMN 50th Anniversary edition; it's the same recording, but the official release fades about 15 seconds earlier than the version from the PERRO set.]
 

12/13/70, PERRO session
The rest of the PERRO material is from Jan 1971, but the date on the tape box for this performance is 12/13/70.  Although that dating doesn't quite jive with the IICORMN material, this track is clearly more than just a studio jam: it sounds like Crosby playing rhythm (right channel), Garcia, Lesh, Kreutzmann, plus what is either another rhythm guitar (or maybe a piano?) in the left channel and a tambourine, and I'll bet some of that is overdubbed.  Garcia doesn't sing harmony vocals, and I don't know if the harmony part here is Nash or Crosby overdubbed [edit: it's Crosby overdubbed].  The song itself ends at 4 minutes and Cros says "okay," and the jam begins.  Garcia gets in some nice licks, but the jam never catches flight and eventually trickles off.  Someone says, "can we do one more?" and another person (Nash?) responds something I can't make out.


12/15/70, The Matrix
If the studio version above is dated correctly, then only a few days later Crosby played the Wall Song live at a gig at the Matrix with Garcia, Lesh, and either Hart or Kreutzmann (I think it's Hart; more on that in a minute).  The tape has been in circulation for ages, but its origins are still murky.  The lineup is often referred to as "David and the Dorks," though it was billed as Jerry Garcia & Friends.  The date has been given variously as 12/15, 12/16, 12/17 (i.e. any of the three nights they were booked at the Matrix) or 12/20 (unlikely).  Lost Live Dead runs down the circumstances that are known.  The first half of the circulating tape is a rehearsal and the second half is live, although it's not clear if the rehearsal is from the same day.   The Wall Song is played twice at the rehearsal and then once at the Matrix performance. 

 
The rehearsal takes are pretty skeletal and it doesn't sound like everyone knows the song yet.  Crosby is heard occasionally giving directions and someone else is counting the time out loud during the stop-time B section.  Garcia now adds some harmony vocals, which he does on every subsequent live version.  He sounds more comfortable in the jam, however, so that indicates that this is later than the PERRO studio version (above) -- but maybe Hart was learning it?  The first version cuts off during the jam at 7:37.  The second rehearsal take has more confident drumming, but someone is still counting the B-section out loud, and Cros is still giving verbal direction.  This jam also peters out when it seems like Garcia isn't sure whether or not to go back to the B-section, then Crosby starts singing wordlessly, and they go over the timing of the B-section again.  Lesh and Hart run through it on their own while Cros & Garcia discuss something else.

The kinks sound like they have been mostly ironed out for the live Matrix performance, and they all attack the jam with a little more feeling at first, and Garcia digs in with a little more bite.  But it seems like they pull back after a bit, sounding unsure about really opening up or not, and the jam only lasts 2 1/2 minutes.  Jerry's last note trails off in a smear of feedback, which is great.  The tempo is still way slow (I don't want to say plodding, but it's laaaid back) -- for what it's worth, I think the circulating tape is actually running too slow here. 

A word about the drummer: I do think it's Mickey Hart, although I think Kreutzmann played on the 12/13/70 recording.  There is photo evidence that Kreutzmann played with Crosby, Garcia, and Lesh on 12/21 at Pepperland (see Michael Parrish's amazing eyewitness account and also JGMF) and this fine Lost Live Dead post has a comment thread surmising that Kreutzmann is the most likely candidate for this Matrix gig.  But occam's razor aside, I still think it's Hart: the drumming is more basic than Kreutzmann's fluid cymbal work and fills, and also more like the drumming on the 8/21/71 jam, which is pretty much certainly also Hart.  Plus, if Kreutzmann had just laid down a serviceable take in the studio, why would they be relearning the song a few days later?  I would speculate that Hart was a last minute fill-in for Kreutzmann for whatever reason (Hart did play on Cowboy Movie on IICORMN, after all)

1/9/71 (?) - Graham Nash & David Crosby album version (uncut)
Crosby, Garcia, Lesh, Kreutzmann, and Graham Nash on piano.  Again, there is some confusion about the dating of this.  This is the full version of the track released on Nash & Crosby's 1972 album; the album cut fades before the jam.  David Gans broadcast this unedited version on the GDH twice (in 1989 and 2001, the latter a fantastic show on the Crosby/Garcia connection co-hosted with Steve Silberman) but gave two different dates, 11/11/71 and 11/9/71.  Other material for Nash/Crosby album (with different musicians) was recorded at a few sessions in Nov 1971, but JGMF thinks the date of this Wall Song is really 1/9/71, which locates it in the middle of the PERRO material.  Which makes sense to me.

From a Garciacentric perspective, I think this is the best performance.  The tempo is noticeably more brisk than the laid back live versions.  I also appreciate that Garcia plays with more interaction with the piano (Nash seems to know one lick, but it works well), whereas on every other version Garcia is pretty much out in the woods by himself.  He's playing his Strat here, so the sound is brighter and twangier.  Crosby's guitar is lower in the mix now.  They find a slightly higher cruising altitude for the jam, with a couple of changes in direction and a Crosby/Garcia driven peak that climaxes the jam before it quickly subsides: really this whole performance feels more like a group "jam" than Garcia soloing over a laid back groove.


5/21/71, Garcia/Saunders at the Keystone Korner 

Back to the slower tempo.  With no Crosby in sight, Garcia sings lead this time!  He's pretty shaky compared with Cros, but soulful nevertheless ("such a great wiiide open door").  Saunders and Vitt sound excellent, as you'd expect, and though I can't imagine they must have rehearsed this much beyond running it down before the gig, both of them nail this.  In his earliest documented appearance with Garcia, Martin Fierro adds almost nothing to the song itself but comes in strong right at the jam and occupies centerstage for much of what follows.  He does get some skronk on, so be warned -- I know there are folks who don't like this side of his playing, and he does go a bit over the top here, but I can dig it.  Free jazz, man.  Garcia takes a short turn, with a nice raw, feedbacky sound.  Vitt and Saunders really give him a nice pocket to work with.  Then Fierro solos again, quoting "A Day in the Life" around 9:18 [thanks, Light Into Ashes]  The groove starts pulling apart and getting freeform around 10 min, then they pull back together and groove on, slowly.  At 11:45 Fierro quotes "A Day in the Life" again.  The jam ends dramatically after around 12 1/2 minutes.


8/21/71, jam at Mickey's barn 

I've already covered some specifics about this tape here.  On The Wall Song, I hear Garcia, Crosby, Lesh, one drummer (Hart, I presume), Ned Lagin on piano, someone else on organ (David Freiberg, I guess, since it seems too basic to be Saunders), and John Cipollina joins halfway through, playing mostly slide (and also wahwah later) but barely takes the spotlight.   This one is over a half hour long and is primarily a jam on the main vamp with occasional drops into the verses, which are mostly instrumental.  Crosby and Garcia sing parts wordlessly (da da da), but do sing bits of the third verse, then eventually circle back around to the first verse much later.  It's all a lazy afternoon jam, man, but unfortunately Garcia never finds much of a thread.  He regularly comes to the forefront with some tasty stuff, but never sustains any ideas into a longer solo.  There's a lot of vamping.  The organ takes a brief solo (about 13:40 on the sbd copy) and Lagin's piano adds some simple but colorful fills throughout.  At the 20 minute mark, the tempo kicks up a bit and they abandon the vamp for a one-chord groove (although nothing too different happens) for about 8 minutes, then return to the tune for the final 5 minutes of the jam.  Crosby cues up the B-section and signals the ending.  As the kids say, this has a vibe.  It seems appropriate that we go out on this lazy, jammy note, with our heroes going down that golden road on a late summer afternoon in the woods up in Marin.  Jerry announces "I gotta go play" (he had a gig that night with the NRPS) and that's that.

I don't know if Crosby played the Wall Song again in this period.  It doesn't seem like Crosby & Nash ever played it in their shows in the mid 70's (it's hard to tell, though, since the network of Crosby setlists is tough to search; I was not super thorough with this, so I hope someone proves me wrong!)

Crosby remained connected to the Dead behind the scenes through 1975.  He participated in Ned Lagin's Seastones project, and joined the Dead at Weir's studio to rehearse Blues for Allah and some of his own tunes for the 3/23/75 SNACK benefit show.  But Crosby missed the show itself for the birth of his daughter (thanks Grateful Seconds).  The last of his informal public collaborations with Garcia was at a Seastones performance on 9/19/75 (per Nedbase).  Then, as far as I know, they didn't cross paths again until Crosby (solo) opened for the Dead on New Years Eve 1986.

Side Trips vinyl

I am not usually one for vinyl fetish commodities (hey now), but I couldn't resist snagging a copy of this Garcia/Wales Side Trips 2LP Record Store Day special on a trip to NYC this weekend.  There's not one smidge extra that wasn't already on the old CD (released, um, 19 years ago).  Nevertheless, four long jams over four sides feels like a more satisfying vinyl recreation than most of the awkwardly lopsided LP reissues of archival live Dead releases.  I'm feeling pretty pleased with myself.  Shout-out to the cool dude at Academy Annex in Greenpoint who steered me to this pristine open copy instead of the sealed ones that apparently arrived heavily warped.

There's an interview with Howard Wales, incidentally, that was posted a couple weeks ago at Aquarium Drunkard.  No huge insights, but hey, you were there but only in the moment, right?  I appreciated getting some background info on his early days.  Also: he was invited to join the band for Europe '72?  Really?  I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around that one.

Love Saves the Day: 2/14/70

Deadheads love dates (remember this one? "you know you're a deadhead when your tapes have nothing written on them besides the date"), and we're never at a loss for anniversaries to use as excuses for celebrating the virtues of a particular show.  Maybe, given how insular this obsession can be, it comes as a surprise when some other musical anniversary overlaps on one of our own canonized dates.  Many rock fans have probably noted that the Dead's legendary 2/14/70 performance at the Fillmore East coincides with the Who's decimation of Leeds University 1000 miles away that same night, but how many deadheads know that the birth of American disco/dance music culture was also happening just across the Bowery, about six blocks away?

a classic by Amalie Rothschild, courtesy dead.net

I'm no big scholar of dance music or "club culture," but my understanding is that most of what we associate with those general terms -- and I mean everything from Saturday Night Fever, to frat bros throwing their hands in the air at spring break beach parties, to underground raves in abandoned warehouses -- has roots in the innovations and ideals of one particular DJ, a record collector and Buddhist acid cosmonaut named David Mancuso, who lived a few blocks west of the Fillmore East.  Right around the time that the Dead were probably plugging in for their late show at 2nd Ave & 6th St, the first guests were arriving at Mancuso's loft on 674 Broadway for a party that had been advertised only by a few hundred invitations with Love Saves the Day printed on them.  These parties would eventually become weekly events eventually known simply as "The Loft" and mark one of the beginnings of dance and club culture as we know it today, and Mancuso is regularly credited by pretty much everyone in that scene as the grandfather of the modern-day "underground" club DJ.  He still hosts the occasional Loft party, too.

Mancuso, c Allan Tannenbaum

There was, of course, plenty of nightlife where recorded music served as a soundtrack to sell drinks and allow people to seek people, to see and be seen.  Mancuso had a different idea: his goal was to create a safe, insulated scene where people could lose their inhibitions in music, immerse themselves in a community of like-minded people, and find a little lysergic transcendence while they did so.  As a devoted follower of Timothy Leary, Mancuso had already been hosting get-togethers with friends that were modeled after Leary's League for Spiritual Discovery events, and had been rebuilding his loft apartment into a space for "mixed-media" acid gatherings.  Initially, he created home-made 5+ hour tapes of music to accompany the arc of an acid trip, and these began evolving into more serious (and larger) dance parties, particularly as his sound system became more sophisticated.  A Buddhist soul-searching hiatus interrupted things for a few years, but when Mancuso returned to New York, he began planning  weekly Saturday night/Sunday morning house parties for a larger audience.  He mailed out invitations, charged two bucks, forbade alcohol and the sale (but not distribution) of drugs, served free organic food, and became default DJ as he created the soundtrack for the night's revelries, following the same psychedelic arc of slow liftoff > peaking > freakout > re-entry.  Or, in the words of Buddhism-via-Leary, “the first Bardo would be very smooth, perfect, calm. The second Bardo would be like a circus. And the third Bardo was about re-entry, so people would go back into the outside world relatively smoothly."  Sound familiar?  Garcia, in 1984, on the structure of a Dead show: "our second half definitely has a shape which...is partially inspired by the psychedelic experience, like as a waveform: [...] the thing of taking chances and going all to pieces, and then coming back and reassembling."

Another striking thing about Mancuso's parties was the sound.  His Klipsch sound system was state of the art and remains famous to this day for its clarity and depth -- apparently, circa 1975, devoted clubbers and fellow DJ's had even started referring to it as "the wall of sound."

disco? Mancuso's invitations always featured this image of Spanky & Our Gang -- seriously

The ballyhoo over disco in the 70's/80's has probably faded from many memories these days, but the word still conjures up a very specific image for most listeners of a certain age.  While being the grandfather of the disco DJ may seem a dubious honor to some, remember that in 1970, "disco" as we think of it barely existed.  Mancuso was playing a mix of R&B, rock, jazz, latin, African, anything with a beat that would keep the dancers moving.  His tastes ranged wide, and Mancuso was famous not only for discovering many records that went on to be classic dance singles, but also for making James Brown and The Beatles sound like a perfect match when played together in the same setting.  His Leary-inspired evening structure typically began with a gentle prelude session taking in everything from Tchaikovsky to Ravi Shankar, Sandy Bull, or Pink Floyd.  Mancuso stated that his intention was never to actually DJ, but to act as a kind of musical host, keep the vibes right, and establish communion with everyone else in the room.  The parties apparently attracted an extremely diverse group of both dancers and cosmonauts, from both gay/straight and male/female crowds and a wide variety of ethnic (predominantly black and hispanic) and socioeconomic backgrounds: Mancuso was committed to making sure cost wouldn't a barrier.  Far from the Studio 54 scenesters that we associate with disco now, Mancuso was seeking out his own subculture of fellow heads and creating a small world for them through music, and the world he created has been arguably as influential -- if not more -- than our band from San Francisco who had the same basic idea.

I'd like to think that a few particularly hip heads left the Fillmore East in the wee hours and tumbled over to Mancuso's loft (grabbing some pizza in Cooper Union on the way), but I kind of doubt it.  Still, it says something that two epochal gatherings of freaks from very different sides of the streets was happening so closely and simultaneously -- at the very least, like Garcia said at the start of that very long evening, "nothing's weirder than coming to New York."

Nearly all this info comes from Tim Lawrence's great book on American dance/club culture, Love Saves the Day -- his page has some specific Mancuso info.  A lot of this information is also repeated here, with a particular emphasis on the link between Mancuso and 60's psychedelia: http://www.gregwilson.co.uk/2013/05/david-mancuso-and-the-art-of-deejaying-without-deejaying/

Here's Mancuso describing the Loft and his intentions in his own words: http://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2013/05/new-york-stories-david-mancuso

PS.  And, totally unrelated, but happy birthday to Merl Saunders! (b Feb 14, 1934).

Alan Douglas: a brief encounter

Ellington, Mingus, Alan Douglas: Money Jungle session, 1962

I'm interested, as always, in how context colors your perception of situations and people you're experiencing third-hand, years after the fact.  It's funny how these things start: lately I've been listening hard and frequently to Duke Ellington's classic Money Jungle (which has now been a 20-year endeavor: "don't understand it too fast") and just today I realized that it was produced by Alan Douglas.  Alan Douglas is an interesting guy with a very interesting discography, with some amazingly varied and fantastic albums to his credit -- more on that in a minute.  His connection to the Garciasphere is slight but significant: he produced Garcia's first non-GD side project, the enigmatic Hooteroll? album, originally credited to Howard Wales & Jerry Garcia.  As I made that connection, starting with Douglas rather than Garcia, it struck me as pretty interesting that a maverick jazz producer made a record with Garcia.  But that's probably not how most other folks think about the relationship, if they even think about it at all.  But I think it's worth thinking about.

Actually, most people probably associate Alan Douglas primarily with Jimi Hendrix's posthumous legacy: Douglas is the one who originally had control over Hendrix's unreleased recordings and, controversially, began issuing Hendrix albums in the 1970's that replaced some of the original tracks with overdubs by other musicians.  Douglas also brokered one of the biggest "what if's" in rock & roll, Hendrix's never-realized session with Miles Davis (who apparently demanded $50,000 at the last minute), as well as a planned live recording with Gil Evans (which Hendrix didn't live to see). This all makes sense, given Douglas' jazz pedigree.  He also produced John McLaughlin's remarkable Devotion album with Larry Young and Buddy Miles, made in Hendrix's orbit in early 1970.  Prior to that, Douglas had a decade's worth of top-drawer jazz under his belt.  He recorded a week's worth of Eric Dolphy sessions in 1963 that were boiled down to two great but relatively unheralded LP's, Iron Man and Jitterbug Waltz, and had worked as the head of the jazz division at United Artists, producing a number of significant records: my own personal favorites include Money Jungle, Bill Evans' & Jim Hall's Undercurrent (another all-timer in my book), Art Blakey's 3 Blind Mice (while chopping parsley, naturally), and Mingus' live Jazz Portaits (aka Mingus in Wonderland).   Later, in the mid-70's, he was also responsible for a seminal early documentation of New York's jazz loft scene on the Wildflowers series of records.  Douglas clearly had an ear for cutting edge, important black music: another accolade is that he had the foresight (and the guts) to record what was arguably the first "rap group," the Last Poets in 1969, and another important proto-rap album, Hustler's Convention by Lightnin' Rod.

In 1967, Douglas founded his own eponymous multimedia imprint and released recordings and books by Lenny Bruce, Malcolm X, Timothy Leary, John Sinclair, and Allen Ginsberg, as well an early anthology of writing on gay liberation.  In the days before the infinite discography of the internet, I remember discovering more and more albums with Douglas' name on the back: I didn't really know what his story was, but he seemed to be an indicator of good quality, and I formed a composite picture in my mind of a messily eclectic label with a hodgepodge of artists and styles.  Not everyone saw it that way, though: Bill Laswell, another maverick and wildly eclectic producer from the next generation, said:

"I recognized that [Douglas Records] was a very consciously radical label.  Of course, there was a lot of radical music going on at that time, but Douglas had a wide range of releases that were all linked by the fact that they were pretty extreme or political, things that would wake people up.  It was probably one of the most creative labels from that period." (The Wire)

I realize all of this seems very far removed from Jerry Garcia, but Douglas was clearly a mover in the industry with a maverick spirit and an ear for the underground, so it's not all that surprising that at some point in 1970, he was hanging out in the Bay Area and met Garcia via Ron Rakow.  The story goes that Garcia invited Douglas down the Matrix to catch his gig with Howard Wales, and Douglas checked it out and immediately offered to record them, with the okay of Joe Smith from Warner Bros (who had the Dead under contract).  I find this particularly striking, given the company Douglas was keeping -- Hendrix, Miles, McLaughlin -- and his relatively high ratio of important recordings to forgettable ones.  He must have heard something in Wales & Garcia that put them in that league -- and, judging from the live Side Trips release, I wouldn't disagree!  Hooteroll? doesn't seem to warrant much more than a footnote in Douglas' legacy, which may be understandable given the foggy circumstances around it.  Joe, Corry, and lightintoashes have done admirable work parsing out the knowns and unknowns (links to various blog posts collected here at jgmf), but the full picture is still a little blurry.  Interestingly, jgmf also details another GD connection involving Douglas (again via Joe Smith) installing the recording studio in Mickey Hart's Barn, apparently with plans to record a Hart/Kreutzmann project that ultimately became Hart's Rolling Thunder album, though Douglas isn't mentioned at all on the release.
[edit: or maybe not? once again, lightintoashes is on the case]

Given Garcia's insularity and the Dead's famously thorny resistance to working with outside producers (with the sole exception Keith Olsen in 1977, who was about as far from Alan Douglas as one would think), it's intriguing that one of Garcia's few productive meetings with anyone so far removed from his circle was with Douglas, as brief as it was (and, technically, it was Wales' deal anyway).  Contextually, of course, we tend to situate everything around Garcia and the Dead and view outsiders' involvement through that lens.  In the case of someone like Alan Douglas, I think it's both interesting and informative to treat Garcia as the footnote, rather than the other way around.

from 1973 Jimi Hendrix documentary

Alan Douglas died in 2014.  Some more reading material on his career:

an excellent article/overview from The Wire, 1997:  

http://www.douglasrecords.com/bio.htm 

a fine obituary by the great Richard Williams: 
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/jun/18/alan-douglas

a New Yorker piece focusing on his earlier jazz recordings (and source of the above Ellington pic): 
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/postscript-alan-douglas

another thorough career overview, ca 2011: 
http://www.densesignals.com/2011/08/11/alan-douglas-by-john-masouri/

a 1995 interview, mostly re: Hendrix and the Last Poets: 
http://www.me.umn.edu/~kgeisler/ad.html 

see also Douglas' own website (not as complete as you'd think) and his discogs page (which also appears to be missing some things).

the burdens of being an usher

https://archive.org/details/gd1970-11-07.134083.aud.weinberg.parish.flac16


(third track in)

There's a new transfer at LMA of one of the legendary Marty Weinberg’s recordings from the Capitol Theater on 11/7/70.  It's just the tail end of the 2nd set and all of the (short) 3rd set.  In my (and most everybody else’s) opinion, the 7th is the weakest show from this famous run (lightintoashes is on the case as always!), but this fragment is worth a listen for a little impromptu "interview" with an extremely laid back usher (not Ken Lee, I presume).  Nefarious fire chiefs and undercover cops notwithstanding, being an user apparently isn’t a bad job at all — if you don’t have to hassle anybody.  “The Dead is the worst one [concert] for hassling people… everybody smokes.”  Then we get a demonstration of said hassling: “Don’t smoke that joint!  Pass it around!”  Everyone's gotta make a living, I guess.

After some talk about police busts, plus an argument about which night has been the best so far, the interview closes with the revelation that the usher is sporting a bootleg Dead t-shirt (two bucks, “go to Flushing, Union Street”).  He refuses Marty's offer to buy any Dead tapes, though.  Professional!