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!

my sweet Clementine

Phil, Central Park 5/4/68

I’ve been beating myself up by listening extra-hard to the newly surfaced 9/12/68 rehearsal tape of Phil trying to teach the rest of the band how to play Clementine, or at least his latest arrangement of it.  Yowzers.  LIA has a comprehensive post on the brief history of this short-lived but very cool song and I’ve commented some down below.  There have been times when my inner air guitarist has fantasized about how cool it would be to play in the Grateful Dead, but this tape isn’t one of those times.  One thing worth saying, though, is how good Tom Constanten sounds on this.  And I appreciate how the band gamely chips away at it for a half hour before blowing off steam with a loud, noisy feedback jam complete with moans, groans, and howls.

I was fortunate to hear the 9/21/68 recording of them jamming on the Clementine vamp, with guitarist Vic Briggs (of the Animals) sharing lead with Garcia while David Crosby comps the rhythm (an interesting story: see here).  It’s very cool indeed, although too short to really make a deep impression -- and it's also telling that, almost a week after that 9/12 rehearsal session, they were grooving away just on the basic vamp without Lesh's challenging arrangement.  For my money, the version to get lost in is the 8/13/68 studio jam that was released only on the Aoxomoxoa expanded cd (ergo not at archive.org, but it's on youtube for now).  It’s still just that vamp, nearly 11 minutes of prime float time, and not as fiery or driven as the Dead’s usual ’68 fare, making it more akin (imho of course) to the jazz-rock driftings of Al Kooper & Mike Bloomfield and very much in thrall to My Favorite Things-era Coltrane — delicious stuff for this late summer afternoon while I think pensively about the coming fall.

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

(Finder(’)s) (Keepers)

scan courtesy 45cat.com

[update 7/16/2024: big update to this regarding the song's initial attribution on the original Keystone lp]

 I’ve been having myself a fine time digging into those newly circulating Garcia/Saunders shows from late 73.  The ‘new’ 11/5/73 has a stone-cold, stanky version of Finders Keepers that’s doing it for me, with some really outrageous keyboard from Merl.  Finders Keepers is a song that pretty much never fails me.

Finders Keepers also must be most misattributed song on official Garcia/Saunders releases.   correctly credits it to General Johnson and Jeffrey Bowen, of the soul group the Chairmen of the Board, who released it in April of 1973 as a vocal tune with an instrumental version on the single’s b-side.  It was one of the group’s biggest hits and Garcia/Saunders recorded it that July, making it one of the rare tunes in their repertoire that was a more-or-less current hit single.  [edit 2024] I only just realized that it's actually credited correctly on the original 1973 double-LP release of Live at Keystone as well, although there it's called "Finders Keepers, Losers Weepers":

But starting with the reissue of the album in 1988 as as Live at Keystone, Vol. 1 (on both CD and LP), the title is changed to just "Keepers" and credited to Merl Saunders & John Kahn. On Saunders' 1997 collection Keepers, it was changed to "Keepers (Finders)" and credited to Saunders alone. The song also appears on several of Saunders’ albums from the 1990’s-2000’s, but I don’t know how it’s credited on those. On 2004's Pure Jerry: Keystone 9/1/74 it's back to "Keepers" and Saunders/Kahn, which was repeated on the 2012 release of the Keystone Companions complete July 1973 recordings.  The most recent release with the song is GarciaLive Vol. 6: 7/5/73, released in 2016, which finally corrects the attribution to "Finders Keepers" by Johnson/Bowen.

So what the heck happened? How did they get it right the first time, then manage to repeatedly get it wrong for 18 years? I haven't dug into the many live performances, but I did find one example of Saunders claiming credit at a show on 11/10/91 where he introduces the song, "we wrote this song for the Live at Keystone album." Hmm. The changing title almost seems almost like a sly inside joke about the incorrect songwriting credit, but unless Saunders actually has some claim to the song, it just seems like a questionably shady move -- Saunders even named an album after it!  Deaddisc generously posits that perhaps the misattribution is because Saunders and/or Kahn rearranged the tune, but they didn’t really (besides slowing it down, which was pretty much SOP for Garcia).  Have a listen:

 Merl did overdub a cool, soaring ARP synth part on the original Live at Keystone recording, so there's that -- but, as far as I know, he never tried recreating that in performance.  He sure knew how to work the hell out of that clavinet though, as 11/5/73 and many other renditions show.  It turns out Merl was paying homage to one of the all-time greats: that’s Bernie Worrell (RIP) of Parliament/Funkadelic playing the clavinet part on the original.

And, just for fun, here’s the original vocal version, which is giving no trouble to the Soul Train gang:

8/21/80: Uncle John's set

jam and Budweiser?  eww.

Time for a little anniversary shoutout to a favorite under-the-radar show: 8/21/80 at the Uptown Theatre in Chicago.  The acoustic-electric Warfield/Radio City runs define 1980 for many, but, for my money, the band’s best playing of the year happened on the August-September tour.  There are a lot of great shows from that stretch, and I wouldn’t claim that this one is the best, but it has a distinct flavor and a unique vibe that never fails to please me, particular in the dog days of August.

Take your pick between a nice sbd and an excellent aud.  I think the aud is the better bet:
https://archive.org/details/gd1980-08-21.sbd.miller.99034.sbeok.flac16
https://archive.org/details/gd1980-08-21.akg-beyer.stankiewicz.126369.flac1644

The first set is nothing to write home about: it has a fine setlist and nothing is really lacking, but there’s also nothing that ever much jumps out at me, beyond a nice Peggy-O and a rare late-set Shakedown.  But the second set is one of those magical performances where individual songs are all pieces of a very complete whole, emerging and sinking back into a tapestry that feels as unified as any symphony.  Shades of 7/17/76 perhaps?  I don’t want to get your hopes up, but this takes me to a similar headspace as that classic [disclaimer: 7/17/76 is a much better show].  Mickey and Billy take the stage to start things off unusually with a quiet duet on tar and talking drum for a few minutes before the rest of the band enters softly to join in for a prelude to a long and stunning Uncle John’s Band.  Not your usual opener, and not your usual Uncle John's either, as it jams its way into something that resembles more of a Playin’ jam.  It’s some of my favorite music from that year, and it’s all right there in the first 20 minutes of the set!

I don’t know if the rest of the set necessarily holds up to a blow-by-blow style of review.  There are no ups and downs: the enchantment has been cast masterfully, and the spell isn’t broken until the very end.  They come back to earth for Truckin’, dive back in the pool for the Other One, then the drummers take another turn, and the boys forego any spacey exploration and ease right into the Wheel, jam it back into the end of Uncle John’s in a most satisfyingly symmetrical close to a wonderful 45 minutes of uninterrupted music.  A mere 45 minutes?  Yeah, well, quality over quantity I say, and I’m happy to sacrifice the more standard combinations and set-closing standards for a jam as unique as this.

The whole Uptown run is worth a listen: 8/19 is more well known and probably the “best show” of the run from top to bottom: there's a dynamite Half Step > Franklin’s > Minglewood and a fine Stranger that bookend the first, and the second is a top-to-bottom heavyweight muscle set.  8/20 is rightfully lesser known, but anyone under the spell of the other two shows will appreciate the heavy Space > NFA > Dew at the end.

Have fun!

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.

2/15/87: Drums of Petaluma

This show had been languishing on my harddrive forever, and I finally gave it a close listen and enjoyed it quite a bit.  The occasion for the show and tape was a benefit performance by Babatunde Olatunji and his group Drums of Passion, with guest stars Jerry Garcia, Carlos Santana, and Mickey Hart.  Honestly, I can't say much about the music itself, but I've never seen much comment about this and most setlist information out there seems to be incorrect, so I figured I'd post a little something about it.

ticket pic courtesy Thomas Patrick

I won’t go much into Olatunji’s career here: the short version is that he was a pivotal figure in bringing African rhythm and culture to western awareness in the 1950’s, peaking with his landmark and extremely popular album Drums of Passion, released in 1960.  By the 1970’s, though, his career was in serious decline and was effectively on the skids until Mickey Hart approached him after a San Francisco club performance in 1985 with an offer to produce new recordings and, later, an invitation for him to open for the Dead on New Year’s Eve.  Those recordings, made in January 1986, yielded two albums: Dance to the Beat of My Drum (on the local San Francisco label Blue Heron, later reissued by Rykodisc as Drums of Passion: The Beat) was squarely aimed at a crossover comeback and prominently featured Santana’s guitar; the other, belatedly released in 1989 as Drums of Passion: The Invocation (also on Rykodisc), featured only his core drum ensemble.  Olatunji, who had prefigured the demand for “world music” by 25 years, was back in the public eye and had Mickey Hart and the Dead to thank for it.

On Feb 15, 1987, Olatunji’s group of percussionists and dancers played a benefit in Petaluma, CA for the local World Music in Schools foundation, augmented by Garcia, Santana, Hart, and bassist Bobby Vega.  Hart appears to have orchestrated the whole thing, and the 90 minute PBS special about the show (at youtube) credits the Dead’s crew with holding down most of the technical aspects.  Hamza el-Din opened the night with a beautiful 20 minute solo performance, then Olatunji’s group played for nearly two hours.  I presume Garcia must have rehearsed some for this, especially since he was the only one of the guests not involved with the 1986 recordings.  Although he and Santana clearly aren’t central to the music, they both fit in well and Garcia sounds comfortable and quite good when the spotlight falls on him.  Presumably in deference to him or (more likely) to the fans who were there because of him, the group plays "Fire On the Mountain," which comes off well enough — but for my money, Garcia’s best moment of the night is the solo he rips on “The Beat of My Drum” (d1t08).  Not bad, Jer!  He looks plenty happy in the video but, hey, playing on a stage packed full of master African drummers is probably harder than it looks.  The night belongs to Olatunji, of course, and the bulk of the show is heavy African percussion, which suits me just fine.

Santana, Garcia, and (I think) Sikiru Adepoju.  pic by Jay Blakesberg

From a Garcia-centric perspective, this appearance marks a start to his post-coma period of increased health and a much greater level of engagement with the musical world around him.  He returned to making appearances on friends’ studio projects (starting, probably around the time of this show, with the Neville Brothers), returned to his bluegrass roots with the JGAB, and showed more of a willingness to put himself in unfamiliar contexts, not least being his guest appearance with Ornette Coleman in 1988.  It was the start of the final golden phase of his career, and it’s neat that this one-off appearance with one of the most famous African musicians of the 20th century helped kick it off.  Maybe there are some comments to be made about Garcia's position in relation to the African musical diaspora, but right now it feels like a stretch and I'm tired.

Here’s the video.  Head to 47:50 for some heat:

Charlie Miller’s transfer of Dan Healy’s sbd sounds excellent, but the tracklist (and some of the tracking) is off.  They play all of the 1986 album material and I was able to get some other titles by googling, so here is the best I'm able to come up with:

d1t01 introductions
d1t02 ??? (Hamza el Din: oud + vocal)
d1t03 ??? (Hamza el Din: oud instrumental)
d1t04 ??? (Hamza el Din: oud + vocal)
d1t05 ??? (Hamza el Din: tar + vocal)
d1t06 intro parade/??? ; Akiwowo (acapella intro) ->
d1t07 Akiwowo *
d1t08 The Beat of My Drum *
d1t09 Loyin Loyin *
d1t10 Odun De
d2t01 Ife L'Oju L'Aiye * ->
d2t02 Ife L'Oju L'Aiye * (continued from d2t01)
d2t03 band intros, speaking
d2t04 Yambela
d2t05 Fire on the Mountain *
d2t06 ??? **
d2t07 Se Eni A Fe L'Amo - Kere Kere *
d2t08 Ilere *

notes:
Hamza el Din tracks are unaccompanied.
* with Jerry Garcia, Carlos Santana, Bobby Vega (bass), Mickey Hart (drum kit)
** d2t06 Olatunji introduces percussionist Kwaku Dadey, who sounds like a special guest.

Jay Blakesberg

PS.  During the introduction to the show, the foundation director mentions Garcia's recent appearance in Doonesbury.  If you're curious: http://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1987/02/05/