I am a stickler for accuracy with things like band names, and yet, given what we know, you would think that the words in my title, “Jerry Garcia Band at Keystone Korner“, could not be strictly accurate. Garcia stopped playing Keystone Korner in 1972, three years before the Jerry Garcia Band existed, the stickler would say.
That’s true, but, imagine my surprise when, in spinning through some more BAM listings that I gathered this summer, I find the following.
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| BAM no. 9 (December 1976), p. 34. (Sorry about the obnoxious watermark over it.) |
Did These Shows Happen?
12/21/76 almost definitely seems not to have happened, since JGB played Keystone Berkeley (1st of three nights just before Christmas). The show was reviewed (Kelp 1976), there’s tape (shnid-20474), and there was a listing in the Oakland Tribune based on considerably fresher information than BAM, still a monthly at this time, could have had.
What about Sunday-Monday, December 19-20? My hunch is that they did not happen, confident to maybe 75%. I couldn’t tell you how I come to that assessment so, again, a hunch. Maybe the note to call to confirm the dates plants an extra seed of doubt about it in my mind.
The Listings Themselves Are The Point
Even if the shows did not happen, the listing is fascinating. Someone with calendaring knowledge at Keystone Korner conveyed to someone at BAM that JGB would play Todd Barkan’s Keystone Korner in December 1976. Beyond merely stretching the period of known Garcia-Barkan engagement by four years, it ties back into a legendary jazz room. Garcia wasn’t playing very jazzily at this time, so bringing him in would have been an exception to the regularity that, after the first six months or so of Barkan’s proprietorship (let’s say, starting January 1, 1973) it was strictly jazz.
I have a sneaking suspicion the shows never materialized, but either way I am fascinated to contemplate the possibility.
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