GD/NRPS: March 21, 1971, Expo Milwaukee Convention Center, Milwaukee, WI

March 1971 is an interesting one to me re the GD. It’s overlooked between the (overrated, IMO) Port Chester shows of February and the college and Fillmore East shows of April. Given my taste for the obscure, I’d naturally be drawn to it.

Musically, and thus most importantly, it has one of the most unusual appearances of 1971: a raging 15+-minute Caution -> Feedback tucked inside an otherwise standard (i.e., no major jams) early ’71 show at the Fox Theatre, St. Louis on March 18th. .Huh? Anyway, homey says check it out. The tapes also sounds great since I think they were multitracking at least some of the shows for what would become Skullfuck.

The logistics of this time period are marginally interesting. I have posted about this separately.

I thought it noteworthy that NRPS played, while I had never seen this on lists before. But I see that the New Riders concert history for 1971 has been updated with lots of gigs. The Jerry Site will get a once-over in view of this.

Anyway, I started this post wanting to note a few things about March 21, 1971. Here are a few things not apparent (or different) from Deadlists, and/or otherwise noteworthy.

• also appearing: the Ox (apparently a Milwaukee band)
• the venue is consistently referred to as the Expo Milwaukee Convention Center. Carman (1971) gives the address as 4805 South 2nd Street, though I also found the address as 4747. It seems to have been attached to the Red Carpet Inn. (Cue Wimpy: “Ahh, the red carpet treatment … this is obviously the superior establishment.”)
• venue capacity is given at 2,500, while attendance was estimated at about 5,000. Sounds like it was dangerously packed.
• Jensen (1971) says that the GD performed “And We Bid You Goodnight”. This was presumably the encore/final song.
• Deadlists says “This is the complete show, there was no second set (the band had to catch a plane)”, but there is no mention of this in the many discussions of the show in the Milwaukee papers. Where does this information come from. 

A few further trivia:

• The Bugle-American v2 no.11 (#24) of March 18-24, 1971 has a nice spread in its second section. Three photos by Mark Goff appear (my photocopy is too dark to make scanning worthwhile, I think). One is of Jerry backstage, a second is of the serious crowding at the venue entrance, and the third looks to be a terrific shot taken right over Jerry’s shoulder, past Marmaduke as the NRPS play. I’d like to track down this photog, or at least this photo, because it looks like a real keeper.
• Another oddity that I stumbled across, with methodological consequences, is that the version of the Milwaukee Journal available at the Google News archive is different, with different content, from some other versions floating around. Take March 22, 1971. Google News has the “latest edition”. I don’t know what edition I have (my photocopy is truncated in the key spot), but the content is also different, and some of it doesn’t seem to exist in Google News. I obtained my photocopies from the Milwaukee Public Library using its (not inexpensive) research service. Carman (1971) appears as the front page of that day’s newspaper from that source. A search on various other content from my photocopy turns up empty on Google News. Nothing we can do about it, but just caveat lector: if you are looking for something that should be in Google News but isn’t, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. The Google is not all-knowing even with respect to the sources that it archives.

REFERENCES

1. Carman, John. 1971. Rock Show a harbinger in Battle for Youth Park? Milwaukee Journal, March 22, 1971, pp. 1, 3. 
2. Jensen, Dean. 1971. Lively Bash by Grateful Dead Has Jugs of Wine, Little Verse. Milwaukee Sentinel, March 22, 1971, p. 5.