Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers.
I didn’t quite know what to expect. On a read, it felt like this was all material that I already knew. From a strictly informational perspective I didn’t feel like I got anything I didn’t know out of Jerry’s mouth. But when I went back to transcribe some key things, so engaged the book a second time, I felt like it really painted an intimate picture of Jerry by Jerry. McNally did a great job in using his own creative talent to let Jerry –a Jerry, a version of Jerry– paint a lovely little posthumous self-portrait.
This is sort of like my “in praise of editorial judgment” thing –no reader here could possibly disagree– Dennis McNally obviously knew Garcia well, was blessed to have spent a lot of time talking about everything under the sun with him, and he creatively arranges a lot of the material that I know (of), but hadn’t really understood. It’s nicely paced, a nice easy afternoon conversation, plenty of room to breathe, unlike so many of the Garcia interviews we get to hear. It’s a nice piece of work, and it’ll be on my shelf (or wherever I put it) for the long haul. (It’s so nice that I won’t even lament that absence of spatiotemporal identifiers for the quotes.)
A note on “reading notes”: this is just my selective culling of quotes of particular interest to me. There’s nothing representative about this stuff, I don’t imagine. I pick up different stuff from LIA (who can remember it all without the contrivance of “reading notes”). The method is to sort these quotes into their respective topic buckets (with little tags like #why and such), then put the book aside and move on to the next thing.
Raw notes below the fold. I lost steam with bolding the names at some point …
with other people”.[1]
to talk about himself and to pitch a current endeavor in as brief and efficient
a manner as possible, was completely lost on Jerry”.[2]
see especially “Bob
Coburn interviews Jerry Garcia” for an example of Garcia’s antipitch.
The January
’76 Bonnie Simmons interview is another.
life”.[3]
arrive at the Keystone in Berkeley and spend all afternoon running scales on
his guitar, with a joint and a cup of coffee at hand. Occasionally he would
tell his roadie and confidant Steve Parish, ‘Go get me someone weird’”.[4]
#adayinthelife
“was a musician from Oklahoma who attended the University of Chicago and
fell into the highly creative blues scene of the early 1960s there, joining the
Butterfield Blues Band before moving to the Bay Area”.[5]
“Bobby” Clifford: “A trained nurse, she was interested in
music; she had a good voice and exposed Jerry to opera”.[6]
#musics
“A free-thinker, labor union activist, and true San Franciscan. Jerry
adored her”.[7]
doo-wop group from New York City, had a hit in 1953 with their first song ‘Gee’, which was the first R&B tune
Jerry would recall hearing. He particularly liked the untrained street-corner
quality to their vocals”.[8]
Edmiston, brothers and friends of JG who played in the Thunder Mountain Tub Thumpers.[9]
“Tiff” Garcia – “the nickname came from the very young
Jerry’s struggles to say his name”.[10]
(née Rudolph) was girlfriend to Ken Goldfinger.[11]
was a noted member of the ‘Funk Art’ assemblage school of painting” ..
taught at California School of Fine Arts. played guitar and jazz banjo.
“it was his playing of a Big Bill Broonzy record in class that inspired
Jerry to want to learn to play guitar. Wally also influenced Jerry morally,
[15] encouraging his bohemian tendencies to seek a life of art and spirit
rather than money”.[12]
friends with Peggy Hitchcock,
“an heir to the Mellon fortune, a friend of Timothy Leary’s who made him
welcome at her family’s Millbrook Estate, and a friend of Ron Rakow’s”
(McNally 2015, 15)
Bill Monroe.[13]
One of the singers he listened to was Katie Lee, who happened to be Jerilyn
Brandelius’s step mother.
attempt to counsel him away from suicide that caused Jerry to miss several
reporting times and would lead to Jerry’s general discharge. Ron also taught
Jerry some rudiments of fingerpicking acoustic guitar”.[15]
of … I don’t know how kids normally take the place they grew up, but for me,
San Francisco was a magic place. I mean, I used to go out to Sutro’s [Baths]
and places like that and just breathe in the reality of it. … I just loved
those places. I was there from the time I could get on a fuckin’ Muni bus, you
know, or a streetcar. From the moment I could get on those damn things, and cop
a dime somewhere to do it, I was all over that city”.[16]
they went to the Peninsula.[17]
“Always weird for me. Yeah, because of the hang-up between what I would
describe as love and sex. … Those were both things that always hunge me up, but
I – I had a hard time being just loose, sexually, really. It was hard for me to
just fuck somebody. I never enjoyed that”.[18]
#sex
“For me, Catholicism was much more a matter of the invisible world. It bent
me much more in that Justin Green way [namechecks Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary]”.[19]
much more than any ideas.”[20]
They weren’t really churchgoers, maybe go down there to keep up appearances when
the offerings are made.
Spanish, I think exclusively, and … I learned to speak Spanish speaking to
them”.[21]
He never knew he learned it until the Dead played Spain, and he realized he
could understand people.
she was pretty into it when she was in school, and she was into operettas and
that as a singer, and she played a little piano, and she was an opera buff,
too, an opera nut. I mean, she was big on it. I grew up with ears full of opera all the time”.[22]
“She was big on classical music and big on opera. … she took me to the
opera once in awhile. And she was a big fan of Leonard Warrant and Risë Stevens
and the opera singers who were famous in those days. … I was always hearing
her, and she would sing snatches of arias. She had a pretty good soprano voice
and she played a little #song-‘Moonlight Sonata’ on the piano”.[23]
“I remember that from when I was a little kid. I mean, a little, little
kid.”[24]
She is Jerilyn Brandelius‘s
stepmother.
was mediated: “What were your connections with … the outside world, as it
were? Radio, obviously. I mean, you were a little kid before television.”[25]
#TV #radio
about that that was so … It was very romantic to me even though I was just a
little kid. Something about her voice. You know? … I didn’t know anything about
music, then. I wasn’t aware of styles, or … I wasn’t aware there was such a
thing as country music. This was when I was a little kid. And for me, all music
was just undifferentiated stuff that came out of the radio.” [26]
#radio more on Katie Lee: “I remember that because it was the thing of the
beautiful, the unaccompanied female voice”[27]
#women
it was the purity of it that got to me, and the pure melodic thing of it that
just got right to me. I don’t know, something about it that said something to
my soul. You know? I couldn’t say what it was. It was a totally emotional
thing.”[28]
#depression
as a little kid in my room, me and my brother, listening to the radio, you
know, at night …” #radio “And the thing about radio is that you spun
the worlds of radio in your head. You know? And so radio drama had that
wonderful thing of the mental world …”[29]
first one was when I must have been three or four or something like that, and
there was [35] a record of some tune, like, I think it was #song ‘The Girl I Left Behind’. Another
little folk song, a little marching song or something like that. And a windup
phonograph that my grandparents had up in their country place. There was no
electricity, just a windup phonograph with the little needles and a few, [a]
handful of old records … old, dusty shit.”[30]
And there was this one record, and I put it on and I’d play it and I’d play it,
and I’d wind up the thing and play it over and over again. I played it for
hours on end. I don’t know what it was about it, but I remember doing that and
I remember there being something about the song, something about the music. It was like scratching an itch. … #song ‘Sweet Betsy From The Pike’, one of those American folk songs … I
literally wore those records flat. I don’t know why. It was like a
compulsion …”[31]
“Oh, sure. Because it was network. It was everywhere. On Saturday night, The Grand Ole Opry was on at least an
hour everywhere.”[32]
#musics #country
music”.[33]
#pedal steel #musics #country
first TV on the block”, in 1949.[34]
“Uncle Miltie. Time for Beany
was one of the important things for me. The old Beany, the puppet show” … Bob
Clampett and Stan Freberg did
that puppet show … “It’s one of the very earliest TV experiences that I
remember. And later on, Jackie Gleason
in that era, you know, and The Toast of
the Town [a.k.a. The Ed Sullivan Show],
Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca and all that stuff.”[35]
straight. There was one country and western program in the Bay Area [Hayride, on KGO in 1950]. One live
country [show hosted by] Dude Martin,
and he featured –the guy he featured was Rusty
Draper [a finger-picking guitarist], who was the guy that made a popular
single record of #song ‘Freight Train’.”[36]
#musics #country #Elizabeth_Cotten
Costello Meet Frankenstein, 1948. Garcia had deconstructed the plot,
turning the three monsters in the film (Frankenstein, Dracula and Wolf Man)
with the WWII Axis Powers.[37]
clearly not himself and plagued by diabetes (which he didn’t treat properly),
his mood swings made him somewhat silent and withdrawn … he clearly didn’t want
to be bugged.”[38]
#1990s
Dolce Vita; Last Year at Marienbad
[“It concerns ambiguous characters in a confusing environment”.[39]],
The Fly[40]
is one he hasn’t seen [but saw the original], but he knows the director (David
Cronenberg) from Scanners and Videodrome.
movie buff to boot.”[41]
By Me. “Stephen King has a real touch with characters. I read all
his books. I like horror stories. Stephen King writes well.”[42]
about Alice in Wonderland.[43]
pretty well made for” Jerry.[44]
“I was glad that somebody was brave enough to make a movie about that
weird—I always applaud
the weirdness in human life. You
know what I mean? I mean, such as it appears. That’s the stuff that’s fun to
look out for because, what the fuck? You know?
We’ve already burned out the normal shit.“[45]
interest me, and that whole experience.”[46]
#chiaroscuro
I really did. And you know, there is an interesting series of teeny-weeny
coincidences that go along with that. I’ll tell you about it. Do you know who
Jacques Vallee is? [Vallee is a scientists who worked on the mappings of Mars
for NASA and was part of developing ARPANET …] [47] Vallee is one of the few
real scientists who’s involved in the flying saucer stuff. The Lacombe
character [in Close Encounters] …
He’s sort of patterned after Jacques Vallee, who is actually a computer guy, a
computer scientist, but he’s an astrophysicist. He’s a young guy, not very old,
and he and Allen Hynek are the two scientists who are most seriously involved,
scientifically, with the flying saucer phenomenon.”[48]
that happen within their respective probability distributions. “When Close Encounters came out, we were
booked at the hotel on the street corner opposite the theater where it opened
in New York, where it opened ten days before general release. It was at the
Ziegfeld Theatre, and I was there with my band and we were playing at the
Academy of Music [later the Palladium. {sic:
it was the Palladium by the time of Garcia’s November 1977 engagement.}]”[49]
these guys come up the stairs and say ‘Hey, would you okay this Conehead poster
because Connie Conehead wears a Grateful Dead t-shirt?’ … that’s where I
started to get to know Franken and Davis.”[50]
Garcia “and Candelario went to see that movie about six times during the
week. It was right down the street. You know? We could go out. There were no
lines or anything. It was the easiest thing in the world to just go over there.
And the movie was so great looking on the big screen, brand new print”.[51]
I wonder what he means by “we could go out – like, he could [still] go out
to the movies right in Manhattan xxx check xxx and not be hassled?
just, you know, one of those things, like a perfect moment”.[52]
the Crows. And it had a real, it had a real street kind of voice. The guy’s
voice was … it had a real street voice. And I remember the sound of it was – yeah,
yeah. … As a doo-wop group, the Crows sounded great. And it still sounds
badass, too. … That was the first tune that I remember.”[53]
#sound More on ‘Gee’ “That was an important song. That was the first kind
of, like where the voices had that kind of no-trained singer voices, but
tough-guy-on-the-street voice”, as McNally calls it, “street
corner”.[54]
much, but what I did like was the way ‘Rock Around The Clock’ sounded when it was at the beginning of Blackboard Jungle [1955].[55]
#movies #film #sound
liked the black stuff better, you know. And at that time, like “Shake,
Rattle and Roll” – there was a ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’ that Bill Haley
and the Comets did, and there was a ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’ that Joe Turner
did. There was an R&B version out about the same time that I liked much,
much better.”[56]
#race
in the area. And I preferred the one in Oakland, KWBR. And I just … my ear fell
into it, you know?”[58]
#sound He listened to Ray Charles, John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed, Lightnin’
Hopkins, B.B. King as guys he could hear on the radio.[59]
Later he mentions Muddy Waters and Jimmy McCracklin.[60]
More on KWBR: “It had Bouncin’ Bill Doubleday on it. It didn’t have George
Oxford, Jumpin’ George. He was on KDIA in San Francisco”.[61]
James (12/31/82), of “moving it to a little bar on Mission Street …”,
to which Jerry replies “I could have been there and been very happy.”[62]
#why
Street, to “where the SUP [Sailors’ Union of the Pacific, 450 Harrison
St., corner of First Street], is now, and that was when my father had it. My
mother sold it, sold the property, and the SUP was built there, and she got the
next corner where the 76 [Union Oil Co.] building is now” [now replaced by
1 Rincon Center).[63]
during the day. It closed when the union hall closed, pretty much, and a few of
the executives, the stronger-willed executives from the 76 would come down and
hang out with the sailors who drank there. And it was fun. It was a nice
bar.”[64]
there, my mom’s upright piano, that I used to play after hours and fuck around
with, and I used to listen to Jerry Lee Lewis on the jukebox, and Buddy
Holly”.[65]
Deuces]. That was one of my anthem songs when I was in junior high school
and high school.”[66]
“I remember ‘Lonely Avenue’ was
one of the first ones. I remember really liking ‘I Got A Woman’.”[67]
that different records had, the different styles, the bands, the way they … you
know? The way the records themselves sounded, the
textures of them.”[68]
Garcia would say to his friends “Sit down and listen to this record and
listen to how that thing sounds there”.[69]
‘n’ roll records … I remember listening to them and wondering, and those things
were an important part of why I liked certain records and why I liked the sound
of things.”[70]
narrates “Whatever its name or lack thereof, the bar at the corner of
First and Harrison deeply influenced Jerry by becoming the first of the
communities he would belong to. It was a workingman’s bar in what was then a
blue-collar workingman’s town, directly across the street from the headquarters
of the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific. A central part of the SUP’s heritage
profoundly honored the memory of the two strikers killed twenty years before
just a few blocks down the hill on ‘Bloody Thursday’, during the city’s great
strike of 1934. Plenty of the men at the bar had been part of that strike, and
they treated Jerry as family.”[71]
#unions
doesn’t mean you’re smarter than anybody else. It doesn’t mean your better or
smarter or anything than anyone else. … Being a musician is just a matter of
choice. It certainly doesn’t entitle you to anything.”[72]
want the responsibility, you know? I wouldn’t care to have that many people
waiting around to see what I wanted them to do. … I would feel awful if I made
wrong decisions. And I wouldn’t care to do that. I’ve already been through that
in my head”.[73]
It’s like if we have a vehicle to dreams, let’s knock ’em down, you know. Let’s
set ’em up and knock ’em down. … This life is what we can do with it. … So long
as it’s going that way, let’s do it that way. Let’s be good to ourselves. Let’s
be good to each other. I wouldn’t know what else to do in life. It would be a
terrible bummer to not be able to go through life with your friends, anyway.
That’s what the very start was about, you know.”[74]
is a great trip. There is an art of performance.”[75]
connect to Judy Garland cabaret economics.
Jerry’s early influences. Lots of social network possibilities.
mom took him out to Cazadero in 1959, to get him straight.[76]
Wally Hedrick,[77]
teacher, Wally Hedrick, played acoustical guitar, and he brought a record of
Big Bill Broonzy and his acoustical guitar to one of our classes. He also
played banjo, four-string banjo, in one of the jazz bands around San Francisco.
Traditional jazz. And I heard him play the guitar, and I heard Big Bill Broonzy
on this record, and that’s when I decided, you know, I definitely do want a
guitar.”[79]
to do it, man. I had to make that sound. You know? Man, I’m telling you. It was
like a disease with me. It took me over, it really did.“[80]
WOW #why #sound
amp, right here. Here’s my books down here. I’m working now on fourths. You
know, I’ve got a bunch of exercises here. In the middle of the night is when
I’m happening, you know. Like, about two or three in the morning, I break this
sucker out and then I play it, and I look up and it’s six, you know? Five or
six. I don’t know how long I do it, and sometimes I do one little thing over
and over and over and over again, and it’s one of those things, it
gets me, you know.”[81]
called The Chords.[82]
that I otherwise would never have picked up in a million years. I mean, those
songs were not, you know, they weren’t bebop or anything like that, but they
were the kind of changes that I didn’t start to understand until I was playing
with Merl for a couple of years”.[83]
Jerry recognized it as “the sound I heard on some records, solos like on
some Elvis Presley records even. [DM: Scotty
Moore.] Scotty Moore, right, played some things that he did a little bit of
fingerpicking, Merle Travis style.
I’d never heard Merle Travis. I’d never heard Chet Atkins. I’d never heard any of those guys. And I just thought
I heard something that sounded cool as hell on those
records. ‘What the fuck is that?’ I tried to duplicate it, but it didn’t seem
possible.”[84]
#sound #musics #country
led JG to get serious, p. 102.
connects to Garcia via David Grisman,
who was in the Even Dozen Jug Band
with him.[85]
[Pine Valley Boys] when Richard Greene was in the band.[86]
1966. “The ‘all’ experience, yeah, that whole day. That included the
experience of dying many deaths. … I run up the stairs and there’s this demon
with a spear who gets me right between the eyes, you know? Or I run up the
stairs and there is this woman with a knife who stabs me in the back. I run up
the stairs and there’s a business partner that shoots me, boom, you know? It’s
like playing [126] the last frame of a movie over and over, with subtle
variations, and that branched out into millions of deaths and all sorts of just
visions …”[88]
incarnations and insect deaths and then, you know, like kinds of life where I
remember spending some long amount of, like eons as kind of sentient fields of
wheat, you know, that kind of stuff. Incredible things, in these sort of long
pastoral kind of extraterrestrial kind of cultures, you know. Kind of
bringing-in-the-sheaves sort of thing.”[89]
That is hilarious. #LSD #drugs
himself situated at Olompali:
“I was lying on the grass. I closed my eyes and I had this sensation of
seeing, perceiving with my eyes closed. It was as though they were open, you
know? I still had this field of vision. And this field of vision had kind of a
pattern in it. It was partly visible, and then I had this thing that the outside
of the field of vision was starting to unravel, like an old-time coffee can,
you know that little thing that you spin around, it takes the little strip of
metal off. It was like that, and it began stripping around the outside of the
field of vision until I had a 360-degree view. And it revealed this pattern.
And the pattern said ‘All’, in incredible neon, you know? [laughs] It was one of those kinds of experiences.”[90]
#drugs #LSD
to build something they can’t tear down, you know, after you’re gone. But hey,
what the fuck? What I want to do is I want it here. I want it now, in this
lifetime. I want what I enjoy to last as long as I do and not last any longer.
You [135] know, I don’t want something that ends up being as much a nuisance as
a work of art, you know?”[91]
#death #art
an artist suffering in a garret somewhere, you know what I mean? I want to work
with other people, you know? … I’ve always preferred that collaborative kind of
work. I’d rather be part of something than working on my [own].”[92]
Line about not being so into himself that he thinks he’s got things together on
his own. #why
“a real important model for me is Golden Gate Park”[93]
and #film #movies Fantasia.[94]
you go from one end to another, you find yourself in these different worlds.
You know, there’s places where all of a sudden it’s real prehistoric, looking
at those giant ferns, and everything is weird, ancient things. And then you walk
a little further and all of a sudden you’re in this pasture, and there’s sheep
grazing and there’s a little pond … It changes. And you’re not aware of how
it’s changing or where it’s changing, but it does change, and it has a
beautiful seamless way of doing that, and it’s a work, really. Like a
poem.”[95]
mind-expanding experience, because it has ways of doing the things that I like
to do that aren’t the way I like to do them.”[96]
#GD_vs_solo dissonance
is that, for me, music is like a thing of hunks, you know, of, like, sentences.
For me, an idea is not one note. … An idea is like a sentence or a paragraph
sometimes”.[97]
it interactive, which also makes it fun. It’s part of what makes it fun.”[98]
#why
Point sat with him “one on one. It was a pleasure to work with him,
too, because, you know, Antonioni”.[99]
Gar had seen Eclipse and had studied
him, in a sense. They discuss Blow-Up
a bit, too.[100]
“he spoke in terms of the music totally in emotional terms. … He’d say
‘Okay, I want it to be sad here. I want it to be sort of bright and cheerful
here. Now, there is something ominous happening.’ … It was all in terms of mood
and in terms of emotion.”[101]
Kansas City, “some little soldiers-and-sailors kind of hall … We came out
after the show and a half a dozen cops were beating the shit out of some skinny
little hippie. One of them could have killed him. I remember getting so furious
… it made you want to kill.”[102]
and stuff, but I couldn’t make any sense of them. And then we went to a music
store in Denver, and there was a completely strung-up, tuned-up, nicely put
together, set-up and everything, pedal steel. You know, state-of-the-art
ten-stringer, with two necks and everything.” [105]
Sat and played with it, gained some understanding. “So I said, ‘I want to
buy this fuckin’ thing, but can you send it to me with it in tune, you know,
’cause I’ll never remember this tuning.’ So they packed it up and sent it to me
in tune.”[106]
of it, and I wanted for years to get one and play one right. I had one,
actually, in Ashbury for the longest time. An old cable one.”[107]
playing banjo. I was attracted to the sound of it on records.
‘Now there is a snappy sounding instrument. That
fucker really sings.’”[108]
#pedal_steel
people had no business going on strike.”[109]
background, I think, really, you know? Just because all my life I’ve been
respecting unions, the SUP across the street, my grandmother and the Laundry
Workers Union – I was a union person. I was raised in a union family.”[110]
#union
one of the all-time bad jokes … Musicians union is really silly. But it’s like
a reflex, you know?”[111]
#union #institutionalization
The Rain”: Garcia describes this as a very personal song, one that
makes him “feel very exposed”.[112]
“It’s white bebop.”[113]
Discussion of Scotty Stoneman.
Koestler described this kind of reverie in Act
of Creation (yyyy), and it has recently been elaborated by xxx as
“flow state”.
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