“JGMS 5/20/71” is probably really JGMS 5/20/71

As of late 2013, this presented as a Debbie tape of JGMS 5/20/71 at Keystone Korner. Note the four dimensions: the provenance of the tape, the band, the date and the venue.

1)
Tape: Pat Lee (from JGMF shnid-93137 notes): “It originated from a
stash of tapes that Kidd Candelario made for JG back in the early ’70’s
for his listening pleasure. It was labeled Garcia/Saunders jams with no
venue or date associated with the tape. I don’t remember if it was a
cassette or reel source.” I have gathered that Jerry’s
tapes found themselves in the possession of his ex-/”it’s complicated”
Debbie, whose Cincinnati-area acquaintance, or acquaintance’s acquaintance Will Boswell obtained
copies in ca. spring 1979. Note: contrary to the assertion in shnid-93137, the tape did not come from Peter Kafer. Later shnids have more accurate information, though none of them have complete and correct information.

2) Band: see Pat’s testimony: “Garcia/Saunders”.

3)
Date: We are given the date of 5/20/71 based on an analysis by David
Lemieux, apparently comparing this with Garcia Vault tape dated 5/21/71. See shnid-100855.

4) Venue: Pat Lee and
friends concluded that the tape was from the Matrix, based on its sound
profile. Matt Smith reached the same conclusion, as reported in shnid-93137. The venue is currently given as Keystone Korner, which seems to derive from Lemieux’s analysis. I think KK is right, see below.

Metadata Analysis

First,
along with Rob Eaton, Lemieux would be the guy likeliest to be able to
make this judgment, just for his ears and understanding of the music.
The fact that he has access to a piece of tape that no-one else can
compare, and that his A/B comparison leads to the JGMS 5/20/71 KK, is probably sufficient to call QED.

But, of course, I don’t give up that easily when there are dead horses to beat. 😉

Second, related, DL2 understands something
that I think is hard to see from outside the Vault: tapes were probably
recorded in batches at this early stage. In Bayesian terms, knowing
that there’s a tape of 5/21/71 in the Vault leads us to raise the
subjective posterior probability that the prior night was also taped.
Jerry wanted to have some tapes of this newish outfit to
listen back to. He did that sort of thing. He had Kidd or Bob Matthews
or someone come down to the club and spin a couple of nights’ oxide.
Maybe he leaves with the tape, or maybe he asks Kidd for it a day or
month later. Kidd grabs one of the nights, while another night travels a
different path, to an acclimatized Vault shelf in southern California
somewhere. (It is noteworthy that “5/20/71” does not appear to be in the
Vault, while 5/21/71 does – I agree with MS that this suggests that
Jerry’s tape –i.e., Debbie’s tape– was a master reel, so we are
listening to a first copy. However, the tape feels edited down, too, so unless Will introduced these, it’s possible that master reels are with Kidd or elsewhere.) Regarding specifically whether this might be
Thursday 5/20 or Saturday 5/22, that’s of course hard to say, but the tiny crowd makes Thursday sound more likely than Saturday. These shows were listed in the paper (“Rock, Pop Entertainment Here,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 19, 1971, p. 59), but a Thursday might have been reasonably quiet.

Third,
we are blessed with a 20 minute tape fragment traveling as “5/11/71
Matrix” (shnid-28784 | listening notes), also featuring “Save Mother Earth”. Lemieux A/B’d two pieces of
tape, but we can triangulate to publicly-traded tape. The “5/11/71 Matrix” performance of
SME sounds very much like this one, on every level. It especially
strikes me that Garcia’s guitar sounds the same, and it sounds a little
1968ish to me. A few times I said “sounds like Hartbeats 1968” when
auditioning. Yet these two pieces of tape must be very nearly
contemporaneous to each other, and they seem to have arrived by
reasonably independent routes within 9 days of each other in May 1971.
(To ensure independence of observations, I’d like to ask Lemieux if he
has listened to 5/11/71 or not.) Again, the fact that these seem to say
“May 1971” makes it more likely that they really are from May of 1971.
And, Bayes again, the fact that we have collector tape called “5/11/71
Matrix” joins the fact of Vault tape from 5/21/71 in increasing the
likelihood of escaped-Vault tape from 5/20/71.

Contra

What about the old
notion that this was a Matrix tape? I agree with Pat et al. that it
sounds like the Matrix, both in terms of some monitor fuzz around the
recording characteristic of tapes made there and in terms of the room
feel. I did an “applause analysis” after t03 and t04, and it sounds like
a few dozen people in small room. Moreoever, it sounds for all the world like a few
dozen people in small room at 3138 Fillmore Street, San Francisco, based on all of the circulating tape from that room from about the same time period. It sounds like a Matrix Tape.

Yet,
as Pat has said, “It was purely our guess that it came from the Matrix,
due to the sound, nothing else” and here’s the kicker – we have no idea
what Keystone Korner sounded like. My notes have it as capacity 200. So,
while I guess it was bigger than the Matrix, it was not a big room. If
Lemieux is correct that this is a Thursday
night, a reasonably small crowd might be indicated.

What worries me
more is the consonance of this tape with every Matrix tape I have ever
heard, which is, well, a lot, in terms of monitor fuzz, the sound of the
hardware. The fact that “5/11/71 Matrix” is labeled as such and is very
similar worries me a little bit, too, but not as much. He could have
asked for tape to be spun both times and places that month, and although
“5/11/71 Matrix” sounds like an ambient (i.e., aud) rather than a line
(i.e., sbd) recording, that’s not dispositive, either. Dead sound guys
were known to record from the hall, no reason it couldn’t have happened
on a Tuesday
at the Matrix. The tape is a little degraded (SME is pitched very differently on the two tapes), and it’s hard to see. But, again, my point here is that we don’t have a
baseline of what KK should have sounded like. Lemieux does, and he
thinks it sounds the same. So I reckon that what we are picking up is
that as contemporaneous performances in small rooms, possibly recorded
on the same gear, tend to sound a lot alike.

Bottom line

I conclude that these pieces of tape are correctly labeled JGMS 5/20/71 Keystone
Korner.

Corry concurs: “I have done a little listening and decided that your analysis is
fully supported by the evidence, even if the evidence itself is pretty
sketchy. A Thursday night tape (May 20),
recorded and casually edited by an insider (like Kidd Candelario) for
Jerry’s pleasure and analysis makes sense of what is missing and
present.”