Thanks to all of those involved in getting this wonderful resource, bringing loads of heretofore unknown information into the light for the first time.
Jerry’s collaboration with Ned Lagin forms a fascinating, little known piece of his musical mosaic. In my dialogue with Corry about Jerry and Merl (among other things), I gave expression to the view, probably at least part-cribbed from Corry’s brain along the way, that Garcia needed “outside” music in his life, as part of the overall palette. I reckon that playing with Ned scratched that itch for Jerry. Remarkably, Ned has mostly stayed out-of-focus, out-of-earshot, offstage in the prevailing Dead and Garcia histories, despite the fact that he was a regular collaborator for over five years.
Indeed, Ned blurs many of my beloved, life-preserver-for-a-drowning-man institutional lines … I think and write often about membership of a band, as distinct from being a guest, as distinct from a jam session or a one-off of some kind. Was Ned a member of the Grateful Dead? I think yes – he was an irregular member of the Grateful Dead, a member when he was there. I don’t know when to say that started, though … was he a guest at first? When he shift from one to the other, or was he just in the band as a member from the first time they came to his dorm room at MIT (!!!)?
Unanswerable questions, ultimately, though my empirical project requires me to make some judgment calls, to code some dummy variables as either ‘0’ or ‘1’. I need to soak in Nedbase a little more, think a little on it. Feel free to tell me how you think it is in comments.
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