Fate Music

  • Oscuro – February 2, 1975

    (Editorial note: I debated whether to post this, for two reasons. First, these are people’s lives. I will try to stick to the facts. Second, as an aesthetic proposition, obscurity needs to be done in moderation — it isn’t always fun to try to take in, in looking at a painting or in trying to…

  • Compensation on TDIH

    I have explored, mentally more than online, the hypothesis that when Jerry’s vocals were especially, noteworthily bad, he compensated with his guitar playing, really concentrating on it and giving it extra “oomph”. If we could gather all the data (like continuous measures of the quality of singing and guitar playing), the compensation hypothesis might be…

  • Jerry Band at the Pismo Theatre

    On Friday-Saturday, November 19-20, 1976, the Jerry Garcia Band played four improbable gigs at the stunning Pismo Theatre in foggy, salty, sandy, lovely little Pismo Beach, California. If you only know it from Bugs Bunny, I urge you to pass through it some time (though I have not done so in more than twenty years).…

  • Musicological Methods question

    Is there a convention about the order in which to list performers in, e.g., jazz performance? It looks like Corry’s Garcia Band Personnel page goes 1) leader and then 2) others in alpha order by last name. I have been all over the map with this, and the above method seems sound, but I thought…

  • Jerry Garcia Band at Keystone Korner, December 19-21, 1976 (UNCERTAIN)

    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…

  • The vocals are as bad as Garcia ever inflicted on a paying audience: August 26, 1984

    LN jg1984-08-26.jgb.all.aud-dearth.84568.flac1644 OK, turns out I was most of the way through a listen to this, so I finished it. On the one hand, that wasn’t so bad. I don’t feel too unclean. On the other hand, as Jimmy Fallon’s teenaged character Sara might say — “Ew”. First, tip o’ the cap to Mr. Don…

  • Lost Your Voice? Play a Monster “Don’t Let Go” (8/27/84)

    LN jg1984-08-27.jgb.all.aud-corley.15029.shn2flac I have sometimes joked, half-seriously, that 8/26/84 may be Garcia’s most wasted performance, but I just do that to embody a feeling about the period as a whole. At some point I’ll bring myself to revisit it. I like listening around such things, as much as listening directly to them. Hence the JGB…

  • updated – OAITW at Homer’s 7/24/73

    I have updated my post on OAITW at Homer’s Warehouse, 7/24/73.

  • OAITW at Homer’s Warehouse – March 4, 1973

    This started off, and can still function, as a post with the setlists for the 3/4/73 OAITW gigs at Homer’s Warehouse. But now there are a few other fragmentary thoughts. Jerry Garcia lived an idyll at Sans Souci (18 Avenida Farallone, Stinson Beach, CA, 94970, map). It was his most domestic period, living with MG…

  • Books

    2015, being the 50th anniversary of the birth of the Grateful Dead and the 20th anniversary of the death of Jerry Garcia, is an absolute frenzy of the written word, part of a broader orgy of production and consumption, Mr. Supply and Ms. Demand doing the cha-cha. This post is mostly about the deluge of…