“Jerry Garcia & Merl Saunders & Tom Fogerty Sat-Sun, New Monk”

SFC 7/2/71 p. 52

Last year I spun some 1970 and early 1971 microfilm of the San Francisco Chronicle, and found seven new-to-The-List shows in a three-month span. If you follow the blog or scroll down a bit chronologically, you’ll see that I have continued to discover more in the 1971-1972 period, and even as far out as 1974. I hope they are all tagged TJS-addition; that’s my code for stuff that’s new to The List, newly discovered Garcia shows. So long as there is nothing that fills the function of the much-missed Jerry Site, allowing updates from fan research, first-hand accounts, materials, etc., all in a classic List format, it will be especially important to track the bread crumbs that pop up along the way.

So, obviously I am searching these calendar listings and such because I believe there are still shows out there to discover, hiding in plain site on microfilm.

But, this, I never expected to find.

On Friday, July 2, the Grateful Dead played the Closing of the Fillmore West run, Garcia pulling off the rare trifecta of playing with three bands in the same day – the Rowan Brothers, the New Riders of the Purple Sage (NRPS), and the Dead. I need to think hard about when this might ever have happened again; maybe it never did. This night he played from 8:30 p.m. – 3 a.m. (Wasserman 1971).

The Fillmore West events would continue through the Fourth of July. Yet the 7/2 music listings show that Garcia would be otherwise occupied.

“Jerry Garcia & Merl Saunders & Tom Fogerty Sat-Sun, New Monk”

It would appear that on July 3-4, 1971, while Fillmore West drew most of the eyes and ears, Garcia-Saunders-Kahn-Vitt and new arrival Tom Fogerty, did some tunes. Without elaborating all of the evidence here, I think Fogerty came in only mid-1971, and maybe as recently as the week before this (i.e., around 6/25/71 or 6/26/71). Fogerty lived in a big ol’ Tudor or something in Berkeley, and the New Monk specifically, and working for Freddie Herrera generally (i.e., also at Keystone Korner) seemed to be working out really well. Fogerty would inhabit the Garciaverse for 18 months. The New Monk would become Keystone Berkeley, Garcia’s musical home base for more than a decade (see also data).

The Sunday night July 4th show, especially, appeals to my aesthetic – a hot summer night (I haven’t actually checked that – could have been cold and foggy) in Berkeley, friends and music for the 4th.  There’s something very picturesque to me, very resonant with a une certaine idée de Garcia, about him finding a way, while he could, to take advantage of the fact that the spotlight was elsewhere to just play to the beer and sawdust set. Sign me up!

REFERENCE

Wasserman,
John L. 1971. When the Music Finally Stopped. San Francisco Chronicle, July 5, 1971, p. 37.