Ronnie’s Return, Pete’s Payoff: JGB in Provy, November 15, 1981

Ticket stub for JGB 11/15/81, contributed by Doc Gillespie to TJS.

LN jg1981-11-15.jgb.all.aud-stankiwiecz.127050.flac2496

Ron Tutt is a great drummer, but am I biased?

Ron Tutt is a beast. Check out the little one-minute fragment discussed in note #1. No biggie, just fun. Then pick some of the other songs I note and hear him play.

Question: Is my perception of Tutt’s greatness here perhaps driven by a subconscious desire that it should be so? From a Garcia-on-the-side perspective, his presence is the most interesting thing about these shows, and this could bias my listening.

Tutt’s Return and Garcia’s Affairs

After two and a half years and a lot of gigs (I could try to count it, probably will when the time comes), Ron Tutt walked –I have no evidence that he was pushed– away from the gigging/touring Garcia Band in summer 1977. He seems not to have left on bad terms, or otherwise is such a pro that he kept working with these guys, because I am pretty sure I have him in Club Front in September. I need to check the Cats Under The Stars credits, though my sense is that they won’t clarify much. Either way, from, say, Fall 1977 they appear to part ways (except for the occasional joint appearance on a tax lien slapped on the Jerry Garcia Band and the three partners in it – Garcia, Kahn and Tutt).

So The Return of Ron Tutt, as Steve Marcus billed this tour on the Grateful Dead Hotline, wants to feel like a Good Thing to me. Why? I think it represents Jerry starting to get on top of his long-blighted financial affairs. I believe that this tour represents an early step in a multistep process of Garcia getting his business affairs together in the first half of the 80s. This feels like closure for Garcia and Tutt, and that’s something that Jerry achieved all-too rarely in his relations with others, personal or professional. His biggest character flaw, if I had to pin it down, was that he lacked the courage/capacity to give people bad news, like “I am leaving you”, to their faces. He either just ran away and tried to avoid it or he had Parish do it. Really chickenshit stuff, with folks like Merl Saunders, who deserved better.

But maybe here, in late ’81, with Tutt and with presumed (but not confirmed) opener Peter Rowan, Garcia is getting in front of something and trying to make it right. I am not saying he wasn’t a kind, generous and righteous dude in all kinds of other respects. He could do crazily random, generous things. But if you had had a relationship with him that he had fled, he usually didn’t come clean about it. He was just not emotionally equipped to confront hard interpersonal things.

Is this guilt money? Probably. The late work with Merl (e.g., Blues From The Rainforest) feels for all the world like Garcia leveraging his name to sell some records for his friend. The albums with Grisman clearly reflected their rediscovered joy in playing together and shared love of American music, but they also set Grisman, and his record company Acoustic Disc, in good financial stead. But guilt money is better than the silent treatment, the cold shoulder, not Jerry’s, but the decidedly uncuddly Parish’s; never mind a steel-toed boot in the ass. It’s good to help old friends (à la Rowan opening on this tour, I conjecture). It’s good to clean up old loose ends (à la Tutt playing on this tour, I hypothesize).

(Aside: if I am correct, that the “function” of this tour was to generate some paydays not just for Jerry and John, but also for Ron Tutt and Peter Rowan; and, if in turn, that suggests that Garcia is tying up some old unfinished professional business, maybe with some personal feelings involved; then I find the timing amazing. As he descended into opiate addiction he also settled some very unsettled (and unsettling) money and personal matters. Persian is like an institution, a variance-suppressing device, in principle a calming and settling (and, if you like, deadening) force. Marx on religion as the opiate of the masses and all that. Making sure you are on a sound financial footing does take some of the thrill out of life, though the alternative is the kind of ride that’ll kill you. Who needs the stress? If the Persian “helped” get his mind around stabilizing his affairs, then that would be a positive, and even a possibly intended, in a very diffuse sense, consequence of his drug use. Of course, that ride’ll kill you, too, but then again, they all do, eventually.)

Back to my question, reframed and disposed of

Because this tour might represent a small moral and personal victory for Garcia, with whom I obviously sympathize, I might be hoping, needing to hear musical excellence, giving my listening a kind of valence bias. But I don’t think that’s what’s going on. Two other things seem more likely. First, my interest in the topic generates an attention bias. I am listening to and for Mr. Tutt, and I hear him. And what I hear is freaking outstanding. Second, and I think this explains most of the variance, it could just be that the man could and can play the drums.

Yes, I think that’s it. Ronnie Tutt is a monster.

Show and Tapers

Oh yeah, there’s a guitar player, and he’s pretty good on this night, too. Love his energy, tone, power, articulation on this tour. Excellent playing. There are some newly-emerging vocals limitations, but it’s in a place where he can still manage it, and often does so through inventive inflections and so forth. I am not saying his voice is better than it had been earlier in the year, rather that his singing is sometimes more interesting.

Richie Stankiewicz made some really nice tapes. Thank (Tetragrammaton) for the tapers! Tim Friend, Steve Rolfe, and probably others walked into the Providence early morning with great pulls from this show.

A nice tape of a nice show. Check it out.

Jerry Garcia Band
Ocean State Performing Arts Center
220 Weybosset Street
Providence, RI 02903
November 15, 1981 (Sunday) – 7:30 PM
Stankiewicz flac2496 shnid-127050

–set I (7 tracks, 67:16-1:15)–
s1t01. crowd [0:32]
s1t02. Sugaree [10:34] [1:46]
s1t03. Catfish John [9:48] [1:52]
s1t04. [0:06] I Second That Emotion [9:41] [0:03] % (1) [1:04]
s1t05. [0:05] Valerie [6:54] [1:10]
s1t06. [0:07] That’s What Love Will Make You Do [9:30] [0:24] % [1:02]
s1t07. [0:13] Tangled Up In Blue [11:03] (2) [0:12] % pre-set II [1:15]

–set II (6 tracks, 70:39+1:15)–
s2t01. Mission In The Rain [11:40] % [0:04]
s2t02. The Harder They Come/ [12:11#]
s2t03. [0:49] Russion Lullaby [15:54] [0:27] % [0:27]
s2t04. The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down [8:30] ->
s2t05. Dear Prudence [13:50] ->
s2t06. Midnight Moonlight … [6:35#] %

! ACT1: Jerry Garcia Band #14b
! lineup: Jerry Garcia – el-g, vocals;
! lineup: John Kahn – el-b;
! lineup: Jimmy Warren – electric keyboards;
! lineup: Melvin Seals – organ;
! lineup: Ron Tutt – drums;
! lineup: Julie Stafford – vocals;
! lineup: Liz Stires – vocals.

JGMF:

! Recording: symbols: % = recording discontinuity; / = clipped song; // = cut song; … = fade in/out; # = truncated timing; [m:ss] = 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 [m:ss] right after a song title is an attempt to say how long the song really was, as represented on this recording.