Garcia and Saunders played the Pamoja Jazz Concert on October 3, 1971 at Frost Ampitheater, sharing a bill with Big Black and the Bobby Hutcherson – Harold Land Quintet. Love that jazz billing.
Anyway, for a long time I have been aware of a show review by Paul Grushkin from the Stanford Daily a few days later (1). I think I learned of it in the wonderful (though in need of an update!) Dodd and Weiner bibliography (2). I have been after it, but Stanford doesn’t seem to play nicely on interlibrary loan and the Daily doesn’t seem to have been sent to many other university libraries. Anyway, with the help of Corry and another generous soul I have gotten a hold of it. [update: now available online – ain’t progress grand?] I had been hoping for some setlist information, but alas there was none to be found.
Instead, there are a few other tidbits, both of which appear in the clipping below, which is discussing Garcia and Saunders.
From the back, I wonder who this Charlie Conn is? At first I thought it might be a rare case of Jerry playing with a bassist other than John Kahn, but the homonymy –five dollar word alert– of “Conn” and “Kahn” makes me wonder if Charlie is John misunderstood or if some Pranksters were afoot or something.
Of greater interest is this: Garcia and Saunders “played a memorable week-long stand last April at the Matrix.” Now, the meaning of “last” in this context in American English is a little fuzzy, so this could be April 1971 or April 1970. April of 1971 is booked with astonishing solidity by the Grateful Dead. April 1970 hardly seems more likely, based on the existing state of our knowledge. Not only is the month fully booked, but this seems still to have been the Wales period, with known Wales/Garcia billings happening and no Garcia/Saunders ones for another six months.
So whatever Grushkin is referring to here, it doesn’t seem to be April 1970 or 1971. What could he be referring to instead?
I’d like to propose May 1971, so that when Grushkin said “last April” he meant “last May” in the sense of “the last May that passed [1971]” and not “May of the last calendar year [1970]”. Why? Well, looking at my Garcia spreadsheet, May 1971 is among the most sparsely populated non-coma months, and yet we know that the man was a pickin’ fool at this time.
After the GD Fillmore East run that ends 4/29, I have a JGMS listing on 5/11 at the Matrix, a three-night JGMS stand at Keystone Korner from 5/20-22, another JGMS at the Korner on 5/26, and then the seemingly pretty wacky Winterland shows at the end of the month. To reiterate, that’s a suspiciously empty month for live gigs.
Not sure what else he was doing (e.g., working on Skullfuck?), but it’s entirely possible that there were more Garcia/Saunders gigs during May 1971. There is certainly room in Jerry’s calendar (as far as is known) for a weeklong stand at the Matrix. The alternative may perhaps be that Grushkin is referring to the multinight run at the Keystone Korner, which might transmogrify into a weeklong stand at the Matrix (the previous month) under the right … conditions. So I’ll keep my eyes open for more in May.
Update: I have researched the last few months of Matrix gigs in the SFC, and I don’t find anything that fits the bill. I have to check the Examiner. But this still remains a little bit of a head-scratcher.
Caveats, criticisms, questions, codicils, cavils and other commentary most certainly welcomed.
REFERENCES:
– (1) Grushkin, Paul D. 1971. Garcia, Saunders Impressive at Frost. Stanford Daily,
– (2) Dodd, David G., and Robert G. Weiner. 1997. The Grateful Dead and the Deadheads: An Annotated Bibliography. Music Reference Collection no. 60.
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