Fate Music

  • Reading Notes: McNally 2015

    McNally, Dennis, ed. 2015. Jerry on Jerry: The Unpublished Jerry Garcia Interviews. New York: Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers. I didn’t quite know what to expect. On a read, it felt like this was all material that I already knew. From a strictly informational perspective I didn’t feel like I got anything I didn’t know…

  • Bobby Ace

    I was doing some thinking about Bob Weir’s musical journey, and what I view to be the pivotal “Bobby Ace” period, running most obviously from about mid-1969 through 1970. And, since we were just talking about Family Dog shows, I got to thinking about the April 1970 acoustic gigs. Long story short, I just did…

  • Lenny Hart’s term of employment

    I had never quite seen this much specificity on the dates around Lenny Hart, but in combination with some other factors (Gar talking about the situation with Rakow at the Family Dog, which the GD were playing through 3/1/70), this really seems pretty precise. Hart was arrested July 26 in San Diego on a Marin…

  • Old And In The Way at the Granada Theatre, Santa Barbara

    Several years ago, Richard Greene was kind enough to work through some of his old datebooks with me over the phone. He showed himself at the Granada Theatre in Santa Barbara on Thursday, April 12, 1973, a date for which no Old And In The Way (OAITW) gig has been listed. I thought it was…

  • UCLA Acid Test (CXL)

    ! ad: Daily Bruin, March 16, 1966, p. 2. Preface Suggested audio accompaniment for this post: http://tinyurl.com/hthnmgb, especially 30 minutes in when Ken Babbs is just raving, and things are just WILD. The UCLA Daily Bruin has been digitized, and is accessible via the Daily Bruin Print Archive at http://samhoff.github.io/archive/. The access is rather cumbersome,…

  • Dropping in Robertson Gym (gd1969-01-17)

    The Grateful Dead and Santa Barbara are two great things that go great together. One little mystery has always centered on the location of the January 17, 1969 gig. The gig was absent from Deadbase, is listed as Unknown Venue chez Deadlists, and circulates from Vault -> Latvala -> world tape as “Civic Auditorium, Santa…

  • Grateful Dead Co-Billings

    Based on a discussion at Lossless Legs, I generated my own list of openers for the GD. This isn’t really openers, so much as acts that were co-billed. In many cases, GD was opening for someone else. But given my Garciacentrism, and various technical limitations, this was the easiest way for me to generate a…

  • Red Rocks

    Saw something in some ca. ’84 GD band meeting minutes where Weir says they should move heaven and earth to play Red Rocks. Spent some time with one of the ’83 gigs, and now running 9/7/85, and boy oh boy are they good. I hadn’t recalled 9/7/85 being this good. Jerry sounds very together, his…

  • Garcia’s Early ’82 Tax Tour (Counterfactual)

    More counterfactual history from a document in the GD Archives (ms332, ser2, box5), though I have seen it through another means as well. This is a central piece of evidence, along with the Return of Ronnie Tutt tour in late ’81 and a few other things, showing that this period marks a real effort to…

  • Altamont Dreams

    I have so little time for this hobby these days. I have fallen way behind on my reading, but I really look forward to reading Joel Selvin’s Altamont, among other things. With that in mind, I did want to put down this little tidbit I found in the Grateful Dead Archive at UCSC concerning the…