Dec 1977: a long way from home

12/11/77?  credit unknown

 

The 1976-78 JGB had two "jamming" tunes, Don't Let Go and Lonesome and a Long Way From Home, that were both introduced on the road in March 1976.  Despite periods of hibernation, Don't Let Go remains the standard JGB "jam tune" for most folks.  Of course I love the song and have plenty to say about it, but I can't pretend that the jams in many Don't Let Go's don't follow a really simple formula: everyone lays down a steady one-chord groove while Garcia solos for a very long time.  Lonesome had a much more limited shelf-life: the first half of 1976, periodically throughout Buchanan's tenure in fall 1977 and 1978 (notably, they stopped playing Don't Let Go midway through this lineup's lifespan), then two out-of-the-blue performances in 1981 and a handful of shorter set-closers in 1989.  But a few versions of Lonesome featured improvisations that took far more chances and went to a greater variety of places than the usual Don't Let Go.  Beginning with the last three shows of the Nov-Dec 1977 east coast tour, Lonesome became a launchpad for some very interesting and very extended improvisations that dwarf nearly every other extended jam Garcia played in 1977-78, yet seem to remain relatively unheralded.

One earlier extended version of Lonesome, and likely the most well-known of all of them, is the 22 minute performance from 4/3/76 (you know, the one that ends in a magical burst of energy and furious fanning like a hundred birds bursting into the air all at once).  As great as that one is (and trust me, it's great), it still follows the same form as many of the shorter ones: the song ends, the band eases into a I-VII vamp (think Fire On the Mountain), and Garcia slowly cooks it up over a tasty but still fairly repetitive groove held down by Keith Godchaux, John Kahn, and Ron Tutt.  The approach didn't change when Buzz Buchanan took over for Tutt in Nov 1977.  They played it throughout the first week of that tour, then set it aside for a few shows.  Who knows what the catalyst was, but something serious happened when they decided to bring it back.


12/9/77  SUNY Stony Brook
(there are a few aud masters; imho Kathy Sublette's is the best)

Less than a minute into the jam, Kahn seems like he's trying to stir things up, throwing around some big notes that cut against the groove.  Garcia & Godchaux both keep on grooving as usual, and Buzz Buchanan seems to be audibly deciding whether to stick with Garcia & Godchaux or to follow Kahn's lead.  Kahn wins out, the groove begins to fall apar,t and no one seems real invested in keeping it together.  by 6:40ish they've all surrendered to whatever is going to happen.  At 7:07 Kahn and Godchaux play a little bit in the "Spanish" tonality that JGMF detects, another signpost towards someplace new.  Garcia still occasionally circles back to playing figures from his usual Lonesome vamp; but by 8 minutes in, freedom has won out.  Everyone is listening and responding to each other, but this is following a logic that is changing moment by moment with no predetermined direction or groove.  I hear Buchanan trying to reestablish a groove around 10:45, but the winds keep blowing this way and that.  By 16 minutes, things appear to have coalesced into a single train of thought and Garcia soon reasserts a clear tonality and is heading back in the direction of the song.  The second half of this jam is basically a long swim back to the song: they sure do take their time and build up a good head of steam on the way.  Around 22 minutes, Garcia starts playing the "and a long way from home" melody, tying everything together.  The final few minutes take it down low and quiet, and they groove in this zone for a while; at 23:40 Garcia brings it back into the song itself, but enters a couple beats too early.  Everyone covers for the fumble and no harm done.  Folks, that was just a hair under 27 minutes: by far the longest extended improv/jam on a single tune that Garcia played all year, either with the JGB or that other band.  You'd think just for that reason alone, this would be more widely heralded as a big one, but so it goes in the hinterlands of the JGB.  Tell your friends!  The aud tapes reveal that some of the Long Islanders in attendance tonight were audibly unimpressed with the band's laid back approach to time, and there are a few shouts during this jam for them to get it together and get on with things, but thankfully no one onstage was fazed.  I find more and more to appreciate about this jam with every new listen.

12/10/77  Warner Theater, Washington, DC
(imho Gerry Moskal's aud tape is the best - no etree entry??)

A telling moment in this pleasant but imho not very interesting show is Kahn's solo feature in Russian Lullaby.  Say what you will about those bass solos, but the crowds usually cheered and hollered encouragement whenever Kahn went for it.  This particular solo, however, is five and a half minutes long, and Kahn bails on the chord changes after a couple go-rounds and wanders into the woods, with Buchanan right behind him.  It gets pretty spacey for Russian Lullaby!  Garcia's not interested and gets things back on track upon his return, although Kahn gets points for trying to nudge the boss off course a couple of times.  So it's not surprising that whatever mojo blessed last night's Lonesome jam is still plentiful tonight.  This one is a shorter trip at 19 minutes, but is a completely different excursion.  Godchaux was hanging with them every step of the way in last night's jam, exhibiting a side of his playing that rarely came out in his final years.  Tonight, though, he is nowhere to be found.  The jam begins with Garcia gently cruising through the usual 2-chord vamp, but when Kahn gets more assertive and suggests another course, Godchaux disappears and stays silent for almost the entire jam.  And to be honest, it doesn't sound like Kahn, Buchanan, or Garcia are missing him at all: the three of them are as locked in as they were the night before, but now with more space to try something that (onstage at least) they had never done before.  Donna Godchaux adds some wordless vocalization in a few spots.  In general, Kahn seems like the real driving force here; he really cranks it up and lets loose a couple volleys of buzzing, distorted notes, and more often than not it sounds to me like Garcia is following Kahn's lead, rather than vice versa.  The communication here is more like a jazz trio, inventive and intimate.  Like the night before, the latter portion of the jam is an extended swim back to the song itself, but is still just as compelling as the looser stuff that precedes it.  Around 13:50, Garcia starts playing arpeggios (much like in older Playin' or Dark Star jams when he was signaling a change in direction), then just after 15 minutes he starts playing a melodic figure that Kahn picks up and joins.  Around 16 minutes the pair lock into a descending scale that lands them precisely in the outro of the song.  Godchaux reappears immediately as they land back on solid ground.  Unlike last night's crowd, the audience tonight appears to be with them every step of the way; there's a nice touch at 9:12 when someone yells "beautiful!"


12/11/77 Penn State University
(a hissy sbd has been in circulation for a while; I listened to SirMICK's remaster)

This final show of the tour sounds, to my ears, a little punchier and a bit more inspired than the average.  Remarkably, for this third Lonesome jam in a row, they find yet another approach.  Godchaux sticks around for a little bit longer, but again vanishes as things get unusual.  Kahn isn't as assertive tonight, and Garcia seems to be the one who is taking the boat where he wants it to go.  They abandon the vamp for murkier waters, but this time the majority of the jam feels more like a Grateful Dead 'Space' ca. 1977-78 to me (particularly the May 77 varieties), with Garcia leading the charge and everyone following closely in his wake.  Around 10 minutes, Kahn and Buchanan kick into gear and start getting a bit pushier; Garcia returns the Lonesome vamp (prompting a brief cameo from Godchaux) but then playfully veers off again, as they pull in and out the groove.  They find their way back again, and Garcia drops a perfectly timed theme from Close Encounters into the ending as a little bow to tie everything up, then sails them back into the song.  Oh yes.  This is the shortest of the three at around 18:20.


I'd like to do a deep dive into the rest of the 1978 versions as well, but figured I would get the ball rolling with these three back-to-back jams that started it off.  Most of the Lonesome jams in 1978 keep this same freer, more conversational approach.  Stay tuned for more, hopefully.  But for now I encourage everyone to listen to these three in succession and marvel at what got into them at the end of (imho) a solid but not very adventurous tour -- and maybe give a little extra thanks to John Kahn for stepping out of bounds a bit and throwing a few elbows around.

9/29/77: two things for your consideration

https://archive.org/details/gd1977-09-29.sbd.cantor.gmb.96027.flac16

…so, given what Garcia said in the interview about this show, of course I couldn’t resist checking it out: 9/29/77 at the Paramount Northwest in Seattle, a brokendown old 4000-seater that the Dead had also played in ’72.  What the bandmembers reportedly liked or didn’t like doesn’t usually line up with what I like or don’t like, but I can never resist checking out a left-field recommendation like this, particularly when its a show I had ignored in the past.  Overall, it’s a lovely Bettyboard tape of a solid ’77 stomper, nothing too fancy, save for two remarkable things:

The first set closes with an unusual powerhouse trio: Sugaree, Let it Grow, and Franklin’s Tower.  Um, whaat?  The Sugaree is marred by a nasty cut in the second jam which axes some prime moments of excitement, but there’s still plenty to enjoy.  Let it Grow is a nice exemplar of their fall ’77 strengths, and is remarkably good given that they hadn’t played it in almost a year (the last time was 10/2/76).  That's no small feat, but they must have been feeling good enough to roll out another 17 minutes of Franklin’s Tower!  It bounces and rolls along like the gentler ’76 versions rather than the raging spring ’77 ones, but it’s such a nice surprise and they sound so fully locked in that I loved every minute of it.  Despite some long cruising stretches, there are plenty of moments to treasure: try Jerry crooning around 13:30 over Donna’s and Bob’s soft backing vocals.

The first half of the second set is unremarkably well played, but the post-drums segment is worth a look and imho is the highlight of the show.  Truckin’ had recently returned to duty at Englishtown a couple of weeks prior, so it’s a little stiff at first, but they open it up into a strong jam with two nice peaks, then change gears and ease down into a great Stella Blue as smoothly as can be.  Stella is beautifully executed, with a gorgeous solo and a final jam that begins with Garcia on slide for a bit, then slowly brings up the intensity for another surprising yet silk-smooth transition into GDTRFB — the effect is similar to the more famous Stella>NFA from 12/19/78, if somewhat less powerful.  They’re flying high now, and after a satisfying AWBYGN coda they break off a final Johnny B. Goode and a sweet Uncle John’s encore, two songs that I hold to be signs that the band was acknowledging that something unusually special had just happened. 

There are plenty of ’77 shows that most anyone would understandably reach for before this.  But if — like me — it’s taken you this long to catch up with this one, you might find yourself pleasantly surprised by how sweet the band sounds during that last lap around.  According to Garcia, so was the band.

10/2/77: "I'd be back here talking to the walls"

I was checking out the recording of a backstage “interview” with Garcia from 10/2/77 (Portland, OR), looking for info about his guitar strings, and I wound up listening to the whole thing.  It's about 36 minutes and actually not much of an interview, more like Jerry waiting around and making small talk in his dressing room with a couple of guys and a woman, who sound maybe like they’re music students at Reed College.  They’re all doing coke and swapping stories about cops, travels abroad, food, and so on.  One of the guys wants to book the JGB at Reed but can’t get a hold of Richard Loren, which Garcia doesn’t bat an eye at: “He’s a lot like me, he doesn’t want to know about anything, he doesn’t want to work fundamentally.”  There’s some talk about the upcoming Egypt trip, which at that point sounds far from definite and seems to be kind of a finale to their planned European tour (also, “Bill Graham’s trying to hustle a scene where we’d play for free in Red Square in Moscow”!).  Garcia is dismissive of their rusty playing at Englishtown, but says that the band -- unusually -- loved their performance in Seattle on 9/29.

There were two things really stuck with me, though.  The first is some of the guitar talk.  Garcia says that he's playing his newly-returned Wolf guitar instead of his Travis Bean.  Deadbase notes that the last time Garcia played the TB was on 10/16/77, so I had always assumed that the Wolf came back into action for that final Oct-Nov leg (and may have been a contributing factor to those mostly particularly amazingly hot shows).  But apparently not.

Then they get on the subject of guitar strings.  For a good bit of the conversation, Garcia is restringing and tuning his guitar while he talks.  He tells them he's playing pure steel strings (Vinci’s), so they rust quickly and need to be changed every show, sometimes twice a show.  “Jeez, I hate this,” he gripes. “This is really the most miserable part of music, tuning.“  A few minutes later, while he’s still working at it: “I hate this, this is so fucking boring.”  I’m sure most every guitarist out there would agree with him.  But what rock star of Garcia’s caliber changes his own strings?  Isn’t that what guitar techs or roadies are for?  I’d think that would be the first thing you would hand off to a crewmember, but nope, here’s ol’ Jer twisting away and bitching about what a pain in the neck it is to change your strings.  Hmm.

The other thing is how casual Garcia is about the whole encounter.  Again, I don’t know who these folks were, but Jerry doesn’t seem to know them very well, yet is perfectly happy for the company.  This was a guy who, by all accounts, was pretty constantly swamped by hangers-on, friends-of-friends, and every other character who had something to get off his or her chest or needed something from him (remember the "do you give banjo lessons?" lady).  Eventually he’s summoned for the soundcheck, and his guests take their cue to leave.

JG: This has been great fun.
?: Thank you very much for your time.
JG: Yeah, it’s cool.  My time is not… I mean, y’know, I’d be back here talking to the walls if I wasn’t… you guys don’t have to leave if you don’t want.

He sounds completely genuine, and offers more than once to get all three of them on his guest list so that they can stick around backstage.  Between that and the guitar strings, he really comes across as the antithesis of any kind of celebrity or even professional musician.  That probably comes across as no surprise to anyone reading this blog, but still, it’s intriguing to hear it unfold in real time, particularly given what we know about the nature of band’s behind-the-scenes scene, what it had already resulted in, and where it would all lead him.

edit: jgmf once posted a comment made by Bob Weir about the nature of Garcia's life offstage w/r/t celebrity, ca 1980.  I assume it couldn't have been all that different three years earlier, yet Garcia doesn't seem guarded or even put-out in any way in this (admittedly maybe non-representative?) exchange with some fans.

7/3/77: throw the windows open wide

Jan 13 12, 1977, courtesy David Brady

While 1977 was a storied year for the Dead, the JGB wasn’t hitting the same stride.  There seems to have been some experimentation with personnel — pedal steel guitarist John Rich was apparently offered a spot in the band and played three gigs with them in Dec 1976 (he turned down the offer), and there is an unknown rhythm guitar player who plays at a few shows in early ’77.  Keith was also experimenting a bit with a Moog synthesizer, which didn’t last for long (he also played it intermittently on some of the earlier GD spring tour shows).  The Dead were working on Terrapin Station in Los Angeles and playing their typical amount of shows, and Ron Tutt was also on the road a lot with Elvis in the first half of ’77.  My guess is that they just weren’t in their usual groove, and I think this shows in a lot of earlier ’77 JGB shows, most of which leave me pretty cold.  Given how up in the air things seem to have been, I can see why there weren’t a lot of sweet spots.

Not that there aren’t any: the 6/23/77 benefit gig and the first Pure Jerry release from July 1977 have their moments, and I’ve always been partial to 8/7/77 (this older source).  For the past couple of days, I’ve been relistening to 7/3/77 at the Keystone Palo Alto, a wonderful Bettyboard tape of the second set, and it’s as sweet as can be.  It’s not perfect, but it’s got a lot going for it, particularly if your summer priorities are pretty modest.

It's five songs in just under 70 minutes.  The Harder They Come is a tune that doesn’t always do it for me — more than other songs, it often seems to reveal the weaknesses of whatever lineup was playing it — but this one is, oh yes, just exactly perfect to my ears.  Ron Tutt must been brushing up on his reggae chops and sounds excellent here, throwing down like, well, not like Kingston’s finest, but about as well as a first-call Nashville session guy in 1977 was going to sound on this stuff.  Jerry and Keith are both in top form, and, unusually, Maria Muldaur appears to be providing the sole backing vocal.  I believe Donna was recovering from an illness and didn’t make the band's brief east coast trip a few days later, and she appears to have skipped these two Palo Alto gigs as well (July 2 and 3).   Muldaur was no stranger, of course, but I don't think she had sang onstage with Garcia since '74.  She was still involved with John Kahn, but maybe she was also returning the favor for the band's appearance at her recent benefit?  I wonder if her presence did something to inspire them tonight.  Simple Twist is also a cut above: again, Tutt rises above his usual excellence, keeping things dynamic and interesting, and Jerry gives it his all vocally (check the “he woke up, the room was bare” verse).  Mystery Train chugs and simmers like the best ’77 GD Big Rivers in slow motion.  Knockin’ is the only blemish: it sounds like they were still ironing out the kinks in the newer arrangement that the JGB played for the rest of their career (straight tempo verses > reggae chorus), and, like most other versions, it doesn’t really need to be 16 minutes long, but all is forgiven when Jerry starts pouring out his heart in those solos.  An early Tangled closes the night, with a much lighter feel than later versions, and some quietly strong solos that are hitting the spot for me today.  Three Dylan tunes out of five?  That may be some kind of record.

Did I mention that this tape sounds fantastic?  Thanks again, Betty!

Muldaur's then current album

the periodic and/or prodigal blogger

Yowzers, last August was a long time ago.  My excuse?  Work, kids, post-election ennui re: blogging, playing music, reading books, new dogs, new house, work, kids, etc.  But I'm getting back in the saddle.  Big post following momentarily, but I thought I'd just say hey and not just dive back in like it was no big thing.

PS.  I live in Ithaca, NY and I know it's too late to shout out May 8, and I know everyone's probably a little 77'ed out with the new box set at this point, but a tip of the hat to the good folks who threw a great party at Ithaca's lovely State Theater on the anniversary last week.  With all due respect to the band and the guest speakers, the highlight was dancing my troubles away with a thousand fellow heads to the newly remastered 5/8/77 Dancin' and Scarlet>Fire played over a big PA system.  That Betty Cantor-Jackson sure knew how to tape 'em.  Fun!

PPS.  I do hope, however, that all you citizens of Tuscaloosa, AL are having a fine time at this very moment celebrating your own local Grateful Dead Day, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of this smokin' May 77 monster.  Keep on truckin', Tuscaloosans!

4/29/77 Help>Slip>Frank

I was playing with Audacity to patch a sbd of one of my favorite ‘unknown’ jams, a forgotten moment from spring 77: the Help>Slip>Franklins from 4/29/77 at the Palladium in NYC.  The show is deservedly overlooked: it’s fine, but nothing to write home about, especially by 1977 standards, and Jerry Moore’s aud tape is still the only circulating recording.  Sbd tape of bits and pieces of the show have trickled out, but really the only must-hear thing is this titanic HSF.  It’s not quite as good as the ones from May or June, but those are the very best of the best.  This one is a major high-steppin’ version and one of my very favorites, and I’m posting it here mostly just as an excuse to gush about how good it is and maybe win some new converts.

An mp3 was posted at the dead.net Tapers Section many moons ago, but the first 3 1/2 min are apparently missing from the vault tape.  So after years of bemoaning this to myself, I finally just patched in the aud for my listening pleasure.  It ain’t perfect: the dead.net mp3 was @192 kbps and sounds a little thin next to the oversaturated aud, but it blends okay.  Just for fun, I also matrixed a few seconds in Franklin's when Jerry sings “God save the child who rings that bell,” and some dude on the aud tape rings a little bell, which has always cracked me up, and I threw in a few seconds of crowd cheering at the end in honor of this monster version.

Enjoy:
http://www41.zippyshare.com/v/LgozpS7e/file.html