Legion of Mary: never meant to last? (duh?)

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)

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.

Jerry Week 2016

Commence Garcia Week!  There's another reason to celebrate Aug 1 as well:

Garcia: …And on my 15th birthday my mother gave me an accordion.  I looked at this accordion and I said, “God, I don’t want this accordion, I want an electric guitar.”  So we took it down to a pawn shop and I got this little Danelectro, an electric guitar with a tiny little amplifier and man, I was just in heaven.  Everything!  I stopped everything I was doing at the time[…]

Reich: Can I ask for the date?

 Garcia: August 1st — let’s see, I was born in ’42 — Christ, man, arithmetic, school, I was 15 — ’57.  Yeah, ’57, there you go, it was a good year, Chuck Berry, all that stuff.

Reich: I wanted to get an historic date like that.
 

Garcia: Yeah, well that’s what it was, August 1st, 1957, I got my first guitar.

- Garcia: A Signpost to New Space, 1971.

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!

Jerry Garcia + symphony orchestra

I'm not talking about that Warren Haynes + symphony tribute thing, and I'm not talking about the Dead Symphony #6 from a few years back.  It seems that Garcia himself was planning on performing orchestral pieces?  That was news to me when I stumbled upon this.  On 9/17/93 Garcia and David Grisman did an interview for NPR in New York to promote their new Not For Kids Only album -- the Dead were in the middle of their fall '93 Madison Square Garden run, and Garcia & Grisman had been on Letterman two nights before.  During the long interview, an orchestral project that was apparently in the works comes up twice in passing.  The recording circulates (here's the info file), although it's a pre-FM recording of their studio feed and not of the remote interviewer, so all you hear are their answers, not the questions. 

First, in response to a question about their arrangement of "Shenandoah" (track 8 @6:58):

Grisman: Jerry's commissioned me to write a guitar concerto for him, or some such orchestral piece of music.  I sort of thought that "Shenandoah" would sound good with a string section, so I thought I'd try and write a chart for it.

And again, in response to a question about the various styles that they play (track 12 @6:24):

Grisman: Well, we haven't played with orchestra -- I mean Jerry's about to do that --

Garcia: Yeah I'm about to break into that world… I'm doing this thing with a local symphony orchestra… I'm getting some things written, David's writing one of them, six or seven or eight pieces that are short pieces for me and a symphony orchestra.  They'll all be different, stylistically I mean, and I'm not sure what they're gonna be like, but that's the format, and the idea is just that I want to be able to play with a symphony orchestra.  Actually, the conductor of this symphony, the Redwood Symphony down the peninsula in San Francisco, asked me if I'd be interested in doing some collaboration of some kind.  I got thinking about it for a while and thought this'd be an interesting to do, so it's gained momentum and it's now the stage of the various composers who are involved are starting working on pieces.  They'd be short pieces like 5 to 7-8 minutes long, something along those lines.  But I'd like to be able to build up a repertoire of these things so I could do them with orchestras anywhere in the world… Well I don't know whether I'm gonna have white tie and tails or not.  I suppose if I really had to.

Grisman:  No, actually everyone in the orchestra is going to be given black t-shirts and sweat pants.

Whaaat?  Both of them had deadpan responses to spare that morning, but this doesn't sound like he's being sarcastic.  I don't remember seeing any mention of this anywhere before.  I wonder if any actual music was ever written and, if so, what happened to it.  Anyone?

This article on the Redwood Symphony from Sept 1995 mentions, "There had also been plans for a joint concert with the Grateful Dead until the death of Jerry Garcia.  Garcia's [first] daughter, Heather, is one of the symphony's violinists."  Fascinating. 

For now, though, this is what we've got.  If you haven't heard it in a while, it's a real beauty: