Elizabeth Cotten

My heavens, this FolkSeattle fellow has some amazing videos on the ol' youtube.  Some of these I'd seen before (this Lightning Hopkins one in particular is a must), but somehow I only just stumbled upon this:

My god.  I don’t listen to as much of this kind of thing as I should.  Garcia was a devoted fan and played "Freight Train" with Grisman a few times over the years.  And "Oh Babe It Ain't No Lie," of course.  "Freight Train" also made one solitary surprise appearance at an electric JGB show to cover some time while Kahn changed a bass string.  Blah blah blah.  Just watch this.

Dark Star, Oct 1986

I finally got around to reading David Browne’s recent GD bio So Many Roads which, as you may have heard, freshens up the story by structuring it around a series of dates and events (shows, mainly) instead of the usual straight-through narrative.  It allows him to touch down in places that many other GD/JG books have glossed over (gasp, 1984!), and he’s a fine enough writer to pull it off, but he has this thing for always keeping one eye on the dark clouds gathering on the horizon.  The book starts in 1962, when Garcia and his girlfriend go for a walk to the beach at the height of the Cuban missile crisis to wait for the end of the world, and by the time they hit 1972 (and 5/26/72, no less), it’s mostly all strictly downhill.  Browne is able to maintain that balancing act between the perpetual troubles ahead and the perpetual "chance of redemption [that] still hung in the air" (which he says of Built to Last), but honestly it just gets a little exhausting after a while.  It's still a good book and deserves a spot on a discerning deadhead's bookshelf, but man, it was still a little bit of a downer.

Nevertheless, there are some gems.  One that I particularly liked was in his chapter on the post-coma Dead’s resurgence (with ominous shadows of In the Dark just around the next corner, naturally), as he reports on the Dead’s bumpy return to form.  After a frighteningly unencouraging start to rehearsals in October 1986, bandmembers and employees are left wondering if Garcia was ever really going to get it back (his coma was in July!).  However:

Finally in late October, Hart returned to the office again and was smiling.  "We just did a really good Dark Star," he told them, adding, "It's back."  The Dead's ticket office booked comeback shows that same day...

Whoa.  Dark Star.  This was the same guy who had to relearn the guitar chord by chord?   If it's true, then talk about a missed opportunity for a good study!  Mirror Flashes: Dark Star and the Rebuilding of Neural Pathways.  Too bad Dead scholarship was still in its embryonic stages in 1986.

post-script: Chronology is a bitch, but it's worth pointing out that Garcia had already been "back" enough to play at least five gigs with the JGB that same month, including one at the Kaiser on Halloween, which is a good show.  Then again, maybe we have that Dark Star to thank for the lightning recovery.

RIP Wilton Felder

RIP to Wilton Felder (Sept 27), who was a great saxophonist and a monster bass player.  How monstrous?

(and that’s Paul Humphrey on drums)

To name a few more: Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On (Paul Humphrey again!) and I Want You, Joni Mitchell (Court and Spark, Hissing of Summer Lawns), John Cale (Paris 1919), 70’s soft-rock staples like “Piano Man” and “Summer Breeze”, and a personal guilty pleasure fav of mine, Michael Franks’ The Art of Tea.  He’s on Grant Green’s wonderful Live at the Lighthouse, another funky jazz record that’s near to my heart.

But his main gig was playing tenor sax with the (Jazz) Crusaders.  I’ve heard that Felder wouldn’t play sax with anyone else, saving himself solely for the group’s sound — and they definitely had a sound, soulful and funky, that never endeared them to the jazz cognoscenti despite recording a load of successful albums.  I guess you'd call them underrated these days, but I’ve never heard a bad record of theirs (although, to be honest, I’m not crossing the 1974 line).  Scratch is a stone classic with at least one tune that may be of interest to JGBheads circa 1979-1980.  I contend that the Crusaders’ sound (and instrumentation) was a key influence on Kahn and Saunders as they created Reconstruction.  Phil Lesh was about as far from Wilton Felder as bass players got, but I'd bet you anything he was one of Kahn's favorites.

The Lion's Share, 1/20/72, and Beans

The Lion's Share, Dec 1972, courtesy Dave Tamarkin

Just some scattered thoughts here, since the Lion’s Share has swam into my ken a few times in so many days.  The Lion’s Share was a tiny little club up in San Anselmo that Garcia and others frequented in the early 70’s.  It’s a pretty tangential little venue in the arc of GD history, although they the Dead played a few very low-key acoustic gigs there in 1970 along with the New Riders.  Lost Live Dead investigated the rather remarkable wake for Janis Joplin that was held at the Lion’s Den, and JGMF has some listening notes on a few shows that are worth checking out.  Bill Vitt (Garcia/Saunders) appears to have drummed with the house band, and local musicians like Garcia, Phil Lesh, Janis, Van Morrison, Howard Wales, and the Sons of Champlin all hung out and played there.  According to Daoud Shaw, who drummed for the JGB in 1981, he crossed paths with John Kahn (and Garcia?) at the Lion’s Share in 1973-74.  A handful of great early Garcia/Saunders tapes were recorded there: notably 12/28/72 and 7/5/73 both feature guests, including the same mysteriously unknown trumpet player (worthy of another post someday), and seem to give a good sense of the extra laid back vibe of that particular scene.  Old & in the Way played (and rehearsed) there a few times in 1973, there’s another great Garcia/Saunders gig on 6/4/74 with Tony Saunders on bass and some unusual jazz material... I could go on, but here’s a more thorough breakdown, and some more local color here.

Anyway, I was relistening to some of the Jan 1972 Garcia/Saunders shows — unlike the scattershot nature of early G/S tapes, we're lucky to have a pretty unique slice of Garcia’s non-GD life from Jan 1972 represented here, three shows from the same week (1/15, 1/19, and 1/20), two of which appear complete.  1/19 and 1/20 are from the Lion’s Share, and of course they’re worth a listen: Paul Butterfield shows up for a bit on 1/19 and sounds incredible, and 1/20 has a great, after hours kind of feel with some pretty expansive jamming in spots.

Then just now, I’m looking through this 2003 radio interview with Steve Parish, and one caller brings up hanging with Steve one night at the Lion’s Share

Parish: […] the Lion's Share sort of fell off the map. A lot people don't know about it. It was our little local hangout in Marin, there. We had some great gigs -- […] Jerry loved playing  there because it was a nice little low-key place and it was not too hard to do a  show there. We always had some wild rollicking times at that place. Thanks for reminding about that place -- 

Caller: It's a wonder more people didn't come to those things.

Parish: There wasn't anybody really recording them.  I think there's one or two recordings.  One night the Beans opened up for the Garcia Band. Now, the Beans were the first incarnation of the Tubes -- 

Caller: Vince [Welnick], huh?

Parish: Yeah, Vince was there. That was a crazy night.

Gans: That was right after they moved out here from [Arizona] -- 

Caller: A lot of good music came out of the that place.

Parish: Yes, it did.

And, lo and behold, Garcia announces at the end of the 1st set on 1/20/72:

"Thanks a lot, we're gonna take a break and Beans is gonna come and play and we'll be back later on."  

I always just figured Beans was a he, not a they.  No big thing, really — Garcia plays a set, some other dude plays a solo set (Garcia gets a long break, and no need for Parish & co. to move any gear around), then Garcia comes back.  But [the] Beans was a band (wiki) with Vince Welnick?  opening for Garcia in 1972?  Cool.

Welnick said, much later, “I was into all of [the Dead’s] ‘60s stuff; it was imprinted on me.  I knew the harmonies instinctively.  They were already shot in my brain.  In the ‘70s, when the Tubes started playing 200 nights a year, all I heard of the Dead was what I got on the radio.”  I wonder if he even remembered this?  Given the “wild rollicking times” at the Lion’s Share, ya gotta wonder.

courtesy Musoscribe: Bill Kopp's Music Magazine

9/10/72 Hollywood

I may downshift into brief(er) show reviews just to keep my momentum going. September = school (both dayjob and night school) = considerable readjustment of priorities, but then again, more work = more reason to procrastinate.  At any rate, my TDIH radar noticed that it’s almost the anniversary of 9/10/72 at the Hollywood Palladium, a lesser known show in a great era, but a personal favorite.

https://archive.org/details/gd72-09-10.sbd.patched.greenberg-powell.22793.sbeok.shnf

If I need to sell you on listening to a September ’72 show, then you need to find a different GD blog — but while this one doesn’t burn as brightly as many of the highlights of this venerable month, there is still a lot to recommend here. A 35+ minute Dark Star of this vintage would probably be the biggest one of those recommendations (with David Crosby sitting in, no less), but there are plenty of other gems. Apart from the standard 72 fare (a 20 min Playing in the Band, sure sure), this Bird Song is up there with 8/27/72, 6/22/73, and 9/7/73 as one of the best 70’s performances, and Sing Me Back Home ranks as my personal favorite ever (sorry, 8/27). Plus there’s a long, leisurely He’s Gone>Truckin’ (almost 27 minutes total!) to open the 2nd set and a rare-for-the-time Black Peter, too.  In the following weeks, they barnstormed the east coast with some of the best shows they ever played, but something about this night feels like the hell-for-leather energy of later ’72 was softened with a starlit Pacific breeze.  I love it.

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!

Ain't Got You > U.S. Blues?

Apropos of just posting a review of a July 4th show: the other night I'm sitting on the porch with a good friend and "U.S. Blues" comes on.  He casually remarks, "you know they totally stole this from Jimmy Reed?"  Oh really?  See what you think:

For you non-blues fans, Jimmy Reed's the guy who wrote "Baby, What You Want Me To Do," "Big Boss Man," and "It's a Sin."  Pretty foundational stuff for the Dead and for rock & roll in general.