Category: listening notes

  • Jim Nelson on the Drums and Several Great Rarities: JGMS at Keystone, October 4, 1974

    LN jg1974-10-04.jgms.all.aud-falanga.8649.shn2flac This is great to hear. Three points of historical interest. 1) Louis Falanga’s onstage audience tapes are great documents. 2) Lots of interesting material including, here, some great jazz (“Valdez In The Country”, “People Make The World Go Round”, “Freedom Jazz Dance”), and a great rare (in the Garciaverse) Motown, “Ain’t No Mountain…

  • Junco Partners – LN jg1976-01-10.jgb.all.aud-cook.8077.shn2flac

    Down the road, came a junco partner (right now, wow-oh-wow) He was loaded, he was loaded, he was loaded, as loaded as can be Lord, he was knocked-out, knocked-out, knocked-out and loaded And he was singing, he was singing, he was singing this song for me Some great American music in this set, including several…

  • Flight Of The Bumblebee

    LN jg1976-01-09.jgb.all.sbd-tjs.8386.shn2flac More Booker raw materials. Jerry Garcia Band Sophie’s 260 S. California AvenuePalo Alto, CA 94306 January 9, 1976 (Friday) 112 minute sbd Kahn Shriver shnid-8386 shn2flac –set I (7 tracks, 54:05)– s1t01. //All By Myself [#7:47] (1) [0:54] s1t02. Goodnight Irene [10:35] -> s1t03. Für Elise [0:51] -> s1t04. Slowly But Surely [11:41]…

  • “Gimme some chords, Jerry Garcia, gimme some chords”

    LN jg1976-01-07.jgb-rehearsal.93mins.sbd-tjs.8385.shn2flac I will just post raw listening notes, because I will be sweeping bit and pieces of it up into a larger narrative that I have been working on. (update – see “James Booker, Classified”) Jerry Garcia Band Club Front 20 Front Street San Rafael, CA 94901 January 7, 1976 (Wednesday) – rehearsal 93min…

  • 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).…

  • 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…

  • UMass ‘Master of the Fretboard’: JGB, February 20, 1980 (late show)

    LN jg1980-02-20.jgb.late.aud-Sony_23F-Nak_550.131018.flac2448 The Jerry Garcia Band (JGB #11a) played 22 shows in the 29 days of February 1980, warming up locally and then touring college and off-campus theaters, reportedly to help pay for the film rights to Kurt Vonnegut’s “Sirens of Titan”. I have all kinds of information about John and Jerry’s quest for those…

  • Jerry’s New Year’s Eve – LN jg1975-12-31.jgb.all.aud-Falanga-Menke-8664-retrack.noshnid.shn2flac

    GarciaLive 5 GarciaLive, volume 5, December 31st 1975 Keystone Berkeley (2014) is out, available via jerrygarcia.com. Let me start by expressing gratitude for these GarciaLive releases. Having been a massive outlier in my interest in Garcia on the side, having often expressed frustration at the paucity of Jerry shows released under the old regime, I…

  • Jerry Garcia and Merl Saunders at the Keystone Korner, May 20, 1971 (LN jg1971-05-20.jgms.80mins.sbd-boswell-smith.126365.flac2496)

    Corry heard a lot of this keyboard work as Howard Wales. So did I. I also heard Jerry’s guitar tone as 1968, and the recording as the Matrix. I parsed the tape, which seems correctly identified, we talked it over, and I think we agree that this is some very interesting tape. Speaking for myself,…