LN jg1974-08-24.jgms.all.sbd.10162.shn2flac

On Saturday, August 24, 1974, the Jerry Garcia and Merl
Saunders played the Great American Music Hall at 859
O’ Farrell Street, San Francisco, CA, 94109. I have written
about this show once before, just to lay out a few contradictions around
the date/venue combination, which I basically dismiss. I am of the view that
this show happened as we have it in The Garcia List despite lots of other
weirdness around the August 1974 record of shows (about both of which – The
Garcia List, and August 1974 confusion—I will post before too long).

Here I report on what I hear through shnid-10612, a very nice soundboard
recording from the First Betty Batch, taped by the incredible Betty
Cantor-Jackson.

Tape Provenance
and Quality

The etree copy is identified as 10″ MSR > C > DAT
> CD > EAC > SHN. It entered the lossless realm in around July 2002
via jjoops, who had received CD copies from Katy Miller. For reference, Eaton
lists this date as follows: “08/24/74 Great American Music Hall, San
Francisco Ca – complete; 4.6, 135min, Sbd, A1D0, Reel Master > Cass 1 > Dat
0, 48k; 7inch Master Reel @ 7.5 ips 1/2trk > Tascam 122mkIII 1st Gen Cass
> 3800 x0.”

The first question I have is whether these are different
reel sources, one of them 10” and another 7”. It is possible. As I note, these
recordings almost have the feel as if they were intended for a live release. I
have seen hints and allegations of various 1^st gen mixdowns
involving this date, 8/28/74, and other dates, perhaps around the release of the “9/1/74” Keystone show (which is not from a single show, but from several). That said, it’s probably safest to assume that
these came from the same 1^st gen cassettes that Eaton has on DAT,
and possibly from Rob’s DAT itself.

Either way, these look to be part of the First Betty Batch.
Recall that the First Betty Batch and the Second Betty Batch were tapes that
were bought in the storage locker auction ca. 1986 and digitized by a large
crew of people, many of whom had the idea that they should be freely and widely
circulated. As reported in Dwork et al.
(2000), Harvey (2009) and various other sources, the daisy chain involved in
transferring these tapes (7” and 10” reels) was as follows: 1x Technics 1506 reel
to reel playback deck (Bob Menke’s) > 1x Sony PCM-501ES (Dougal Donaldson’s)
> 1x Panasonic VHS hi-fi VCR deck > 3x Beta hi-fi VCR decks > 1 other
VHS hifi VCR deck > 2 cassette decks. I don’t know to whom the various other
decks belong, nor the extent to which their Garcia tapes have circulated. I
know that some of Dougal’s Garcia PCMs emerged (e.g., 7/21/74, maybe 7/22/74,
maybe 6/4/74), and that there other tapes that are identified as MSR >
cassette (such as the Sacks version of 7/21/74 [shnid 10127] and this 8/24/74
tape). That may imply that whoever got cassette copies also circulated them
independently, that Dougal himself had cassette copies, or some other
arrangement.

The tapes are beautiful. Even with the limits imposed by the
(various) A>D steps (e.g., wasn’t the Sony PCM 501ES doing A>D at
14bit/44.056kHz?) and an assigned cassette gen, underneath it (and, don’t get
me wrong, it’s not far underneath) lies a gorgeous, full, rich, balanced, crisp
Betty Cantor-Jackson recording. She has amazing ears.

Personnel

This is Garcia, Saunders, Fierro, Kahn and a drummer. I
believe the drummer is Paul Humphrey. Argument against is that Bill Kreutzmann
is known to have played the day before (8/23/74) at the Berkeley Community
Theater for the Ethiopian Famine Relief Benefit. Argument for is that this
sounds like Humphrey to me. I don’t trust my ears, but this is my thinking. update 20181211: drummer is probably BK. As
I note below, I think this is the period in which Martin really starts to step
forward. I like that, but others find it less appealing. Kahn is really good
here, and Garcia is right, if a little be restrained.

Song Notes

Some notes on some of the songs, straight from my listening
notes.

“La-La” [Allan | Scofield | JB] is understood as a
Martin Fierro composition and features him on flute. I know little about the
song, beyond that it was released on Keepers (1997). As I
have conjectured, August 1974 is where Martin Fierro really starts to step in
front of this band. He leads the first five minutes here with his flute. In the
4-min mark he uses some really nicely controlled echo and reverb. I suspect if
we go back and compare we’ll find that he only really started using this sort
of thing from July 1974. Folks who object to Martin’s playing (I am not
generally among them) will probably like his playing less and less from July
1974 to the end of the year. (I haven’t revisited true 1975 LOM shows with this
hypothesis in mind, so let me not comment on his playing there yet.) During
this time, Garcia is very subtly strumming a vaguely Brazilian rhythm behind.
Really tasteful, “back” stuff. Betty’s recording really does La-La
justice, too. Everything is mic’d just perfectly. the 9-minute mark, after some
really nice gentle Merl solos, John Kahn steps forward a little, even more prominently
in the 10-minute mark. Everyone is really tight here. @ 11:15 La-La I think
Merl is the one who signals a decay of the song structure, which really
interests me. Garcia is always ready to go to space, so it’s probably part of
their playing together that Jerry restrained himself and put Merl in front of
it (at least in this case). I need to revisit, but he does something right
around this time that decays the notes, I can’t describe it. By mid-to-late
11-minute mark, Garcia has heard him and he signals that he’s ready to get
spacy. John is there, too. Late 12-minute mark, there is some spacy knobbing
going on. I have typically associated this sound with Martin’s saxophone, but
here it is. I wonder if it’s a synthesizer that Merl has that can either be
keyed to the saxophone or switched over to a knob or pedal or key that Merl
has? Late 12-minute mark, just some nice decayed jazzy spacing it. Martin has
picked the flute back up (he had laid out for a few minutes, or maybe was just
doing that funky space sound I just described) Garcia speeds up 14:12, tries a
little fretting, Martin is doing the reverb and echo on his flute again. Early
15-minute mark the drummer digs in and tries to set a faster pace, getting
underneath John who’s going that speed as well and scaling around, a little
fast wiggle @ 15:47ish. Jungle echo’ing, gotta be wired up through Martin’s
flute? Yep, listen @ 16:50, where it’s coming out as hybrid flute and jungle
echo. Garcia leads a more urgent decay @ early 17-min mark. I find this
material engaging. I think some would critique it, but I find it to be pretty
productive jamming for this whole time. The song clocks in around 18 and a half
minutes, but it doesn’t sound to me like it meanders. The transition to PMTWGR
is flawed but interesting. Martin quite explicitly blows the “La-La” theme on
the flute, while Kahn quite explicitly (and rather more definitively) asserts
the “People Make The World Go Round” intro. Bass v. flute, so to PMTWGR we go!

“People Make The
World Go Round” [Allan | JB] is absolutely
fantastic. It starts with the bass-led intro, beautifully accompanied by the
flute, Merl running some nice gentle organ keys, Garcia just strumming, nice
tight-string rhythm happening. A little palate cleanser after the space out.
It’s interesting to me that this is indeed how this band used PMTWGR, a
warmdown and not a jam vehicle. In the one Aunt Monk version in circulation (2/14/75),
it was a 20+ minute echofest (and really good). I have always assumed that
these guys got the song from Milt Jackson’s 1973 album Sunflower (my CD version of which is part of a “CTI Catalogue
Re-Launch Series”, produced by Didier C. Deutsch, ZK 65131, 1997), since on
that album the song precedes Freddie Hubbard’s “Little Sunflower” [Allan | Scofield | JB] (called just “Sunflower”
on the Milt Jackson album), which this group also played (9 times between 5/9/75
and 7/4/75 in various personnel/band configurations). (Blair Jackson has said this latter tune
was brought in by Martin, FYI.) But beyond their propinquity on the Milt
Jackson album, there’s no particular reason to imagine that PMTWGR came from
there. Composed by the Stylistics’ writing team of Thom Bell (music) and Linda
Creed (lyrics), and released on that band’s eponymous 1971 album, it was
covered by inter alia Michael Jackson
and Ramon Morris (on Sweet Sister Funk).
These guys could have gotten it from anywhere, and listening around a little
bit I don’t hear a distinct arrangement that jumps out as the source for
Merl/Martin/Jerry and the rest of these guys.

“(I’m A) Road Runner”
[Allan | Scofield | JB] was written by the Holland/Dozier/Holland
team at Motown and first released by Junior Walker & The All Stars on the
1965 record Shotgun. JGMS had
started playing it around the start of 1974, and IMO it got better by August
1974 than it had been earlier. The song lives right at the top of Garcia’s
vocal range in this period, in fact probably just a bit beyond it. When he
first started singing it, to get to these notes he sort of parodied them, which
is just not a good emotional register for Garcia. It doesn’t make me as
uncomfortable as Marmaduke’s {RIP} treatment of Honky Tonk Women, which had a
worse to-be-taken-seriously-ratio for a more parodiable song, but I don’t like
those early Roadrunners (see 2/5/74, 2/9/74 for reference). Look it ain’t a
Dylan song, but it’s a good piece of Americana and it deserves some respect,
dammit!

Jimmy Cliff’s “Sitting
In Limbo” [Allan
| Scofield |JB] is an early version
for this band (third time), performed with extreme care to good effect. It
almost sounds like Garcia thinks he’s on the radio, that’s how careful he’s
being. Almost like he thinks he’s being recorded for release. The vocals are as
perspicacious as Garcia vocals could get. Despite that this song lives in a
really tight spot for his vocal range, he doesn’t crack or clam up, not once.
He doesn’t sound too thin (though a critique might say it is, indeed thin). He
doesn’t stumble once on the lyrics. His guitar playing is reasonably safe, but
pretty well flawless. I think he really likes and respects this song. And,
again, Betty’s tape does this quiet song great justice. Now, this sort of thing
doesn’t light me up (I like the rough as much as the diamond), but if you want
to hear Jerry paying attention, this is as good an example as any.

Overall

Great recording, pretty good show. La-La -> PMTWGR are
the highlights, for me.

Listening Notes
after the jump.

Jerry Garcia and Merl Saunders

Great American Music Hall

859
O’Farrell St

San
Francisco, CA 94109

August 24, 1974 (Saturday)

132 minute Betty Cantor-Jackson soundboard

–Set I (6 tracks, 69:34)–

s1t01. … Neighbor Neighbor [#7:53] [0:08] %

s1t02. Favela [16:01] [0:04] %

s1t03. I Second That Emotion [12:58] [0:07] % [0:13]

s1t04. Problems Got Problems [11:35] [0:09] % [0:06]

s1t05. He Ain’t Give You None [12:02] [0:11] %

s1t06. Money Honey [7:53] (1) [0:11]

–Set II (5 tracks, 62:30)–

s2t01. The Harder They Come [15:17] [0:10] % [0:04]

s2t02. La-La [18:32] ->

s2t03. People Make The World Go ‘Round [3:43] [2:08]

s2t04. (I’m A) Road Runner [9:55] [0:08] %

s2t05. Sitting In Limbo [12:26] (2) [0:07]

Lineup:

Jerry Garcia – el-g, vocals;

Merl Saunders – keyboards;

Martin Fierro – saxophone, flute;

John Kahn – el-bass;

?? – drums.

JGMF:

!
Recording: symbols: % = recording discontinuity; / = clipped song; // = cut
song; … = fade in/out; # = truncated timing; [ ] = recorded event time. The
recorded event time immediately after the song or item name is an attempt at
getting the “real” time of the event. So, a timing of [x:xx] right
after a song title is an attempt to say how long the song really was, as
represented on this recording.

! Jerrybase: https://jerrybase.com/events/19740824-01

! db:
shnid-10612 (this recording).

! R:
Source: “10” MSR > C > DAT > CD > EAC > SHN. Source discs
provided by Katy Miller. Extraction and normalization using EAC, tracking using
CDWave, .shn encoding using mkwACT, and sector boundary verification using
shntool by Joe Jupille ([email protected]).” Shn to flac conversion using
TLH by jgmf, 12/21/2011.

! R:
Seeder Notes: “Disc one peaked at 90.3%, but only reached 47% after
Neighbor Neighbor.  I normalized the rest
of the disc to 90.3%, and also normalized disc two from around 30% to 98% using
EAC.”

! R:
this is a beautiful recording, though it may run a touch fast?

! R:
provenance. Since I have spent time with so many beautiful Betty tapes, future
tape historians might find useful the little bread crumbs I can leave about how
these tapes came into the present (mine or yours – ‘s’all good). This one
traveled a little different path and is a little different. Eaton lists it as
follows: “08/24/74 Great American Music Hall, San Francisco Ca – complete;
4.6, 135min, Sbd, A1D0, Reel Master > Cass 1 > Dat 0, 48k; 7inch Master
Reel @ 7.5 ips 1/2trk > Tascam 122mkIII 1st Gen Cass > 3800 x0.” Not
sure why the fileset says a 10” master reel. This tape must be derived from
that same cassette (and possibly Eaton’s DAT). Note that this is a different
provenance than the Third Betty Batch tapes (which are MSR to Rob’s DAT) or the
First Betty Batch tape we encountered with JGMS “7/21/74” and
“7/22/74” (which had a PCM gen attributed to Dougal Donaldson)).
There was an earlier seed of 7/22 made by Darrin Sacks (shnid 10127) that
listed MSR > cassette > DAT. I suspect that this tape and that tape came
from the same original tape made during the transferring of the First Betty
Batch. (The standard understanding of the daisy chain involved in transferringt
the First Betty Batch is as follows: 1x Technics 1506 playback deck (Bob
Menke’s) > 1x Sony PCM-501ES (Dougal Donaldson’s) > 1x Panasonic VHS
hi-fi VCR deck > 3x Beta hi-fi VCR decks > 1 other VHS hifi VCR deck >
2 cassette decks.) The limitations of the cassette medium may also partly
explain why, in general, this tape is edited between every song.

! R:
s1t01 Neighbor Neighbor fades in, not much missing. Mix and level fluctuations,
with low vocals and guitar, loud horn, etc. Clears up gradually over the first
couple of minutes.

! R:
s1t02 Favela considerable mix fluctuations first few minutes.

!
s1t02 Favela drummer is very busy. I wonder if this is Paul Humphrey?

!
s1t04 PGP is just a little sluggish and out of sync, though Merl is growling
enthusiastically.

! P:
s1t06 Money Honey is done faster than usual.

!
s1t06 (1) JG: “Thank you. We’re gonna take a break for a little while.
We’ll be back later on.”

!
s2t02 “La-La” [Allan | Scofield] goes into some
interesting places in the first five minutes. This is understood as a Martin
Fierro composition. As I have conjectured, August 1974 is where Martin Fierro
really starts to step in front of this band. La-La is obviously a Martin Fierro
feature. I know little about the song. It was released on Keepers
(1997). But, getting back to Martin, he leads the first five minutes here with
his flute. In the 4-min mark he uses some really nicely controlled echo and
reverb with the flute. I suspect if we go back and compare we’ll find that he
only really started using this sort of thing from July 1974. Folks who object
to Martin’s playing (I am not generally among them) will probably like his
playing less and less from July 1974 to the end of the year. (I haven’t
revisited true 1975 LOM shows with this hypothesis in mind, so let me not
comment on his playing there yet.) During this time, Garcia is very subtly
strumming a vaguely Brazilian rhythm behind. Really tasteful, “back”
stuff. Betty’s recording really does La-La justice, too. Everything is mic’d
just perfectly. the 9-minute mark, after some really nice gentle Merl solos,
John Kahn steps forward a little, even more prominently in the 10-minute mark.
Everyone is really tight here. @ 11:15 La-La I think Merl is the one who
signals a decay of the song structure, which really interests me. Garcia is
always ready to go to space, so it’s probably part of their playing together
that Jerry restrained himself and put Merl in front of it (at least in this
case). I need to revisit, but he does something right around this time that
decays the notes, I can’t describe it. By mid-to-late 11-minute mark, Garcia
has heard him and he signals that he’s ready to get spacy. John is there, too.
Late 12-minute mark, there is some spacy knobbing going on. I have typically
associated this sound with Martin’s saxophone, but here it is. I wonder if it’s
a synthesizer that Merl has that can either be keyed to the saxophone or
switched over to a knob or pedal or key that Merl has? Late 12-minute mark,
just some nice decayed jazzy spacing it. Martin has picked the flute back up
(he had laid out for a few minutes, or maybe was just doing that funky space
sound I just described) Garcia speeds up 14:12, tries a little fretting, Martin
is doing the reverb and echo on his flute again. Early 15-minute mark the
drummer digs in and tries to set a faster pace, getting underneath John who’s
going that speed as well and scaling around, a little fast wiggle @ 15:47ish.
Jungle echo’ing, gotta be wired up through Martin’s flute? Yep, listen @ 16:50,
where it’s coming out as hybrid flute and jungle echo. Garcia leads a more
urgent decay @ early 17-min mark. I find this material engaging. I think some
would critique it, but I find it to be pretty productive jamming for this whole
time. The song clocks in around 18 and a half minutes, but it doesn’t sound to
me like it meanders. The transition to PMTWGR is flawed but interesting. Martin
quite explicitly blows the “La-La” theme on the flute, while Kahn quite
explicitly (and rather more definitively) asserts the “People Make The World Go
Round” intro. Bass v. flute, so to PMTWGR we go!

! setlist
s2t03 “People Make The World Go Round”
[Allan | JB] is absolutely
fantastic. Bass-led intro with beautiful flute accompaniment, Merl running some
nice gentle organ keys, Garcia just strumming, nice tight-string rhythm
happening. A little palate cleanser after the space out. It’s interesting to me
that this is indeed how this band used PMTWGR, a warmdown and not a jam
vehicle. In the one Aunt Monk version in circulation (2/14/75),
it was a 20+ minute echofest (and really good). I have always assumed that
these guys got the song from Milt Jackson’s 1973 album Sunflower (my CD version of which is part of a “CTI Catalogue
Re-Launch Series”, produced by Didier C. Deutsch, ZK 65131, 1997), since on
that album the song precedes Freddie Hubbard’s “Little Sunflower” [Allan | Scofield] (called just “Sunflower”
on the Milt Jackson album), which this group also played (9 times). (Blair Jackson has said this latter tune
was brought in by Martin, FYI.) But beyond their propinquity on the Milt
Jackson album, there’s no particular reason to imagine that PMTWGR came from
there. Composed by the Stylistics’ writing team of Thom Bell (music) and Linda
Creed (lyrics), and released on that band’s eponymous 1971 album, it was
covered by inter alia Michael Jackson
and Ramon Morris (on Sweet Sister Funk).
These guys could have gotten it from anywhere, and listening around a little
bit I don’t hear a distinct arrangement that jumps out as the source for
Merl/Martin/Jerry and the rest of these guys.

! R:
s2t03 bad PA buzz after the song, @ 3:45-3:50. NB the room definitely sounds
roomy, like the GAMH rather than the Keystone.

!
context: s2t03 PMTWGR the audience is giving the band a really nice round of
applause, all the way to 4:30. @ 4:30 Garcia is teaching someone some chords.
“You gettin’ it?” @ 5:17 JG is saying over and over and over again
“the chords, the chords, the chords, the chords”.

!
personnel: Martin Fierro plays flute on La-La and PMTWGR only, I believe. I am
trying to pin down which songs were his flute songs. Wondering Why, for sure.
What else?

!
setlist: s2t04 “(I’m A) Road Runner”
[Allan | Scofield] was written by the Holland/Dozier/Holland
team at Motown and first released by Junior Walker & The All Stars on the
1965 record Shotgun. JGMS had
started playing it around the start of 1974, and IMO it got
better by August 1974 than it had been earlier. The song lives right at the top
of Garcia’s vocal range in this period, in fact probably just a bit beyond it.
When he first started singing it, to get to these notes he sort of parodied
them, which is just not a good emotional register for Garcia. It doesn’t make
me as uncomfortable as Marmaduke’s {RIP} treatment of Honky Tonk Women, which
had a worse to-be-taken-seriously-ratio for a more parodiable song, but I don’t
like those early Roadrunners (see 2/5/74, 2/9/74 for reference). Look it ain’t
a Dylan song, but it’s a good piece of Americana and it deserves some respect,
dammit!

! P:
s2t05 Jimmy Cliff’s “Sitting In Limbo”
[Allan | Scofield] is an early version
for this band (third time), performed with extreme care to good effect. It
almost sounds like Garcia thinks he’s on the radio, that’s how careful he’s
being. Almost like he thinks he’s being recorded for release. The vocals are as
perspicacious as Garcia vocals could get. Despite that this song lives in a
really tight spot for his vocal range, he doesn’t crack or clam up, not once.
He doesn’t sound too thin (though a critique might say it is, indeed thin). He
doesn’t stumble once on the lyrics. His guitar playing is reasonably safe, but
pretty well flawless. I think he really likes and respects this song. And,
again, Betty’s tape does this quiet song great justice. Now, this sort of thing
doesn’t light me up (I like the rough as much as the diamond), but if you want
to hear Jerry paying attention, this is as good an example as any.

!
s2t05 (2) JG: “See y’all later. Good night.”

!
overall: My overall evaluation, in terms of performance, recording, historical
interest, everything, is as follows. Recording is an A. It’s very, very nice. A
high-resolution digital transfer of the master reel (presuming it’s been safely
stored) would be release-quality. Betty brough her A-game this night, probably
with two-week old Cole on her hip. This particular fileset has some sonic
limitations, just given its history (possibly an A>D transfer at
14bit/44.056kHz?, plus the cassette gen after passing through a long line of
shitty ca. 1987 gear [see note on tape provenance for thoughts on the gear
involved]). This fileset is not release-quality, notwithstanding the
amazingness of Betty’s master tape. The performance is average for the period
(which is to say, for my money, excellent overall), with the exception of the
@@ La-La -> People Make The World Go Round in set II, which I think is
top-notch. There are some interesting selections in set I. Jerry seems mostly
into an AM radio kind of mood with Neighbor Neighbor, I Second That Emotion,
HAGYN and Money Honey). I tend not to find most of these songs that
interesting, with HAGYN my most preferred and ISTE my least. I always think of
Neighbor Neighbor in terms of the gradual erosion of a healthy private space for
Garcia, but that’s certainly me over-reading things. The more bitter he sounds
during Money Honey, the better to my ears, and this one doesn’t stand out. The
only Merl vocal of the night, PGP, is a little bit disjointed. Favela, which is
a song I can like a lot and to which I pay a lot of attention, also failed to
light me up on this listen, though I have come to understand that could change
with the next listen. Set II, also, is more careful than hot. The best balance
to my ears comes with La-La > People Make The World Go Round, a 20+ minute
excursion through some really tasteful jamming. The rest of it is nice, clean
(good music to introduce a non-fan to, perhaps), but not risky or flawed enough
for my taste.

REFERENCES:

·        
Dwork, John, and Alexis Muellner, with Dougal
Donaldson, Doug Oade and Mark Kraitchman. 2000. Outside the System. In The Deadhead’s Taping Compendium, vol.
III, An In-depth Guide to the Music of
the Grateful Dead on Tape, 1986-1995 (New York: Henry Holt/Owl Books.), pp.
33-62.

·        
Harvey, Katie A. 2009. Embalming the Dead: Taping, Trading and Collecting the Aura of the
Grateful Dead. Master of Arts Thesis, Tufts University, August. URL http://www.scribd.com/doc/26367749/Embaling-the-Grateful-Dead,
consulted 12/18/2011.