"the world’s most recorded musician in the world’s most famous arena"

Jerrybase: https://jerrybase.com/events/19911115-01

The Red Light folks tagged GarciaLive 16 (MSG 11/15/91) with the subject line, and I have to say that it's badass. That crew does a good job, IMO. I am not kissing up. It's a hard job and they have released some amazing stuff. And that's just a good line. Tip o' the cap.

I wanted to post my review of this release from Grateful Dead Studies.

It contains some pretty good distillations about which you will read again in Fate Music.

The performance by the ... JGB at Madison Square Garden on November 15, 1991, represents the acme of Garcia’s solo career, the culmination of a nearly quarter-century name-claiming journey by which he established his identity as an individual American musician, Jerry-Garcia-full-stop, beyond and distinct from his wider fame as Jerry-Garcia-of-the-Grateful-Dead.

...

Jerry Garcia never planned a solo career; it just sort of happened as he sought more and different avenues for expression than the Dead allowed. Inchoate jams at the Carousel Ballroom became tempo études (“Mickey and the Hartbeats”) at the Matrix, which became regular but musically formless Monday night jams with Howard Wales, which morphed into ongoing and more musically grounded gigs with Merl Saunders. Even after four years, the amorphous aggregation resisted naming itself, going by “The Group” in the Bay Area, or just listing members’ names, before coalescing into “Legion of Mary” for its last eight months. The meantime saw numerous aggregations under other (and others’) names, playing diverse musics, cutting some records, running some drive-by tours, and banking an increasingly sizeable pile of accomplishments, including the country New Riders of the Purple Sage, the space-jazz Hooteroll? proj- ect with Wales, and the incandescent bluegrass all-stars Old and In The Way. Otherwise off-nights found Garcia making a singular solo record, engaging protean Dawg Music (David Grisman’s Great American Music/ String Band), renewing bluegrass ties with the Good Old Boys, vibrating electrons with Ned Lagin, and making time for a vast array of sessions, sit-ins, dalliances, and one- and few-offs.

But the Jerry Garcia Band (1975–1995) bore his name, and it played the music its eponym liked, the way he wanted to play it. Over the years the JGB, always featuring Garcia’s friend bassist John Kahn but with an evolving array of other musicians, grooved to soul, R&B, Motown, contemporary gospel, reggae, and other Black idioms that fit the band’s changing personnel, especially after the arrival of church organist Melvin Seals in 1981 and his handpicked backing vocalists starting the next year. A second tranche of cover tunes drew from the contemporary White Anglosphere, both the British Isles and North American settler colonies, heavy on the Americana. Garcia-Hunter originals, some shared with the Dead and others exclusive to the JGB, rounded out the repertoire. The six players integrate seamlessly. This is the canonical Jerry Garcia Band, a lineup that lasted 1984–1993, the core three plus steady David Kemper on drums and harmony vocals by Jackie LaBranch and Gloria Jones, Oakland church singers with day jobs who took to calling themselves the Jerryettes.

Read the whole thing as they say. I dig this show, and I dig imagining how this son of an immigrant musician might have felt seeing that family name in lights at the Garden.

Fate Music in a Nutshell: JGB at MSG: November 15, 1991

I just changed the name at the top of the blog from Jerry Garcia's Middle Finger to reflect the progress I am making on Fate Music: Jerry Garcia's Name-Claiming Journey Beyond the Grateful Dead. That subtitle subject to change, that lead title not.

The best summary narrative is in my review of Jerry Garcia Band. Garcia Live volume 16: Madison Square Garden, November 15th, 1991 (Round Records JGFRR1037, 2021) in Grateful Dead Studies volume 5 (2021/2022): 228-234 [pdf].

If Carousel and Matrix jams present the uhr moment for Jerry Garcia Beyond the Dead, this musician's son's first time headlining Madison Square Garden under his own name supply the acme.

Anyway, read the whole thing if you are so inclined. And, of course, stay tuned!

Thank you all for reading Jerry Garcia's Middle Finger, commenting, correcting, all the rest. The function of this bit of cyberspace will remain mostly unchanged, maybe a bit more pimping. But this will still capture whatever random slop I can generate in the meager time I have.

If you are a lurker - come on out and play! "We're trying to have a reasonably good time here", and all that. I know the partly depends on me generating posts. I wouldn't hold my breat, but, either way, gimme a shout here, email, or if you find yourself in Colorful Colorado.

ISO OAITW paper

I am looking, not quite desperately but maybe with some urgency, for some vintage Old And In The Way paper. Could be an Old And In The Way poster, could be an Old And In The Way handbill.

I am writing Fate Music, with a credible plan to finish the manuscript this calendar year. The above pictures my workspace two homes ago. I had aimed to have every major Garcia aggregation beyond the GD on a frame on the wall in my workspace to inspire me as I write. I have more now than what is shown, and a good many even of the lesser Garcia Band configurations, but the biggest hole is Old & In The Way.

Years back, Wolfgang's Vault had a beatup 5/25/73 poster, black and red, for like $700. I wish now I had pulled the trigger on it. There is not much OAITW paper of any kind - that handbill and poster, the 10/7/73 qua 11/4/74 bus handbill, not sure what else.

Your humble blogger hubly asks you to search your closets, shake the trees, ask your friends, etc. My OCD can't take it, and my Muse demands it.

TIA!

Linked Jazz --> Linked Jerry (a.k.a., the Side Trips Social Network)

Something like this social network graph will form the centerpiece image (I will pay for color) of Fate Music. I presented a brutally rudimentary glimpse of such a thing like ten years ago at the GD Studies caucus meeting in ABQ, calling it "The Side Trips Social Network". Social network analysis (SNA) is groovy stuff.

https://linkedjazz.org/network/

https://www.openculture.com/2020/03/linked-jazz.html

WOW

Nina Blackwood Interviews Jerry Garcia for MTV, ca. June 2, 1983

Some classic lines here, like the studio as building a ship in a bottle and playing live like piloting a rowboat in the ocean. I wasn't super careful about getting everything 100% perfect, especially not where there's GD talk. I am not 100% certain about the geolocation, but it's got to be about right.

Jerry Garcia Interview by Nina Blackwood
MTV Studios / Teletronic Studios
West 33rd Street and 10th Avenue
New York, NY 10019
June 2, 1983 (Thursday)
Youtube > Tuberipper m4a > otter.ai

! metadata: date a little uncertain. The Relix version (Blackwood 1983) says "conducted at MTV by Nina in May, 1983". But the Gary Gershoff pix at Getty (https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/portrait-of-mtv-vj-nina-blackwood-and-rock-blues-musician-news-photo/1364449796) date this as 6/2, and that does seem likely.

! venue: At this time, MTV was housed in the Teletronic Studios on West 33rd Street, right around the corner from 10th Avenue

! map: https://goo.gl/maps/RkQZy4xDDLUyUWqG7

! ref: Blackwood, Nina. 1983. Jerry Garcia: Interviewed for MTV. Relix 10, 4 (August): 16-20.

! R: source: part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-zEcX9_nXM TT 13:02

! R: source: part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jl85mQ49Rlw TT 14:16

rough transcription after the jump

MTV Interview, June 2, 1983

I don't know where this would have taken place, but the date of June 2, 1983 seems right, in between shows at the venerable Roseland Ballroom on 52nd Street and promoter John Scher's main room, the Capitol Theatre in Passaic outside of Philly.

I have gotten direct quotes on the Garcia-on-the-side (GOTS) material, and sketchily paraphrased the GD history and other stuff. The man was just so brimming with energy. Check him out around 7 minutes in to part one, talking about the amazing creativity and peculiar genius of so many Deadheads. Good stuff.

update: if you want verbatim, you can copy it from ... the published transcript. D'oh!

! ref: Blackwood, Nina. 1983. Jerry Garcia: Interviewed for MTV. Relix 10, 4 (August): 16-20.

March 23, 1975 - Jerry Garcia Interview

I don't know who the interviewer is, nor the radio station from which this particular recorded. It is the first track of shnid-126296. This is the interview Jerry gave before the SNACK Benefit at Kezar Stadium. Sounds like reading the newspapers around the time of the show will prove interesting, mismanagement of budgets by bureaucrats probably a recurring theme. I can't talk about that now.

Instead, just a few quick thoughts, with link to audio and my reasonably full transcription below the fold.

1. Why Side Trips?

One of the theses I'll address in the book is that Garcia's side projects were about more and different live gigging, relative to what he could get with the GD. It ain't earth-shattering to posit the primitives of quantity and quality of course. But the evolution over time is very interesting, how he interpreted and put into practice, these desiderata, is really rich. Indeed, it's what Fate Music will be about, how Garcia navigated his life beyond the Grateful Dead. It's a nontrivial problem, and his solutions tell us a lot about him and, certainly for me, sheds light on the human condition, on how each and all of us must navigate our own lives "beyond the Grateful Dead".

On the quantity side, history's arc bends pretty straightforwardly: until mid-1975, "more" meant "all the time". As time went on, it would this would diminish and become highly routinized, mostly through the Jerry Garcia Band. He'd play a weekend or two at a regular local haunt (the Keystone Family of venues until 1987, the Warfield after that, a weekend or two every few months, with the occasional off-weekend show thrown in. West coast trips to SoCal and up to the Pacific Northwest. Maybe an East Coast tour, eventually only in the fall.

A simple chart of the number of GOTS gigs over the years will nicely illustrate the point, but I don't want to go generate one right now. Soon enough.

The quality calculus, i.e., the evolving meaning and practice of "different" on The Side, moves, over the years, from challenge to comfort. The cut-point is 12/31/75-1/1/76. Prior to that point, the side projects involved more challenge than comfort. After that point, the curves cross and comfort starts trumping challenge.

I say all of this because there's a nice Q&A here on where Garcia's head was it, with respect to all of this, on March 23, 1975.

0018 interviewer You're an incredible guy, because with all the history of the GD and the all the musical avenues that the Dead has explored, you also work with Merl Saunders and the bluegrass thing OAITW… do you find that that is what you need to keep stretching musically?

0044 Well it’s just that I have a lot of different interests, and any one thing might not take up … If I have space … for example, when the Grateful Dead were touring, there would be times when we would be on the road for two weeks, three weeks, and then off the road for two or three weeks. During that two or three week interim period, I’d usually want to play some, y’know, play music somehow. And, obviously the Grateful Dead can’t go out and play in clubs, without causing some sort of amazing commotion … and so I started taking up my time about four or five years ago jamming, just jamming, on Monday nights at the Matrix, and started playing with Howard Wales and them, and later Merl, and John Kahn played bass and stuff like that. But it started to be a more or less regular thing, and I just got into feeling that, ‘yeah, when I’m not workin’, if I’m not on the road or touring or something like that, there’s still a lot of room for me to play and cha … and reach, y’know, out to a, … in a learning sort of situation and all that.

2. Fate Music

There's a great little Fate Music line here, too, where he talks about OAITW (@01:46)

Bluegrass music is something that’s a little different. It’s something I’ve always loved. And mainly with bluegrass music, you sort of have to wait for an opportunity to present itself, where there are musicians around that understand the music and play it really well .. and Old And In The Way was a result of that sort of coincidence, where suddenly there was [sic] three or four of us around who knew the music and who enjoyed playin’ it. So we started loosely, just getting together and playing for fun, and then got to be more serious about it as time went on. But really those things sort of happen accidentally in a way.

I like this for the Fate Music theme of these things coming together by happenstance. But this little synopsis also speaks to the process of institutionalization. It starts off a lark and ends up a job. That's one feature of the arc of Garcia on The Side that's essential to keep in mind.

3. GD and Side Trips

One of the key issues that I spend a lot of time thinking about (since my subtitle is Jerry Garcia's Musical Life Outside the Grateful Dead) is how the side stuff and the GD interact. Here, Garcia is asked whether being so busy with side stuff undermines the Dead. His answer (@02:22): "No, I don’t think so. I think it adds to it, just in terms of that each thing stays fresh if you’re not doin’ it all the time. You come back to it with new ideas and new influences and stuff like that.

4. Record Companies

The interviewer asks Garcia to evaluate whether the record companies were a good idea, in retrospect. This is really informative: in his mind, they were dead by 3/23/75. Here's Jerry's reply (@0427):

Well, yeah. I think so. Certainly in our heads I think it was a good idea. It hasn't been the world's most outrageously successful endeavor, but that's not the focus, either. Again, that hasn't been the focus. Now that we're in the midst of a bone-crushing economic slump, and all the rest of that stuff, our, we're scuffling just like everybody else is, basically.

5. Film Company

Round Reels, the film company, remains almost totally opaque to me. Garcia mentions it here as if it's a relatively recent innovation. He mentions The Movie and also the company's involvement with what would become, in 1983 (!) Hells Angels Forever [imdb].

6. The First Pirates' Ball, JGMS, 9/5/73, S.S. Bay Belle, NYC Harbor

In that connection, he paints a great picture of the first Pirates' Ball show (for the second, see my post on 9/15/76), September 5, 1973 (@0540). There was one

time that Merl and I and Bill Kreutzmann and John Kahn played for the Hells Angels, for one of their parties, where they rented sort of a ferry boat … the kind that go around Manhattan, y'know? They rented a ferry boat and they had this blowout for all these Hells Angels. They came from all over the United States, plus all kinds of New York weirdos and stuff like that. We played on this boat, on the top deck of the boat, underneath the Brooklyn Bridge, and went around the island a few times. The Jolly Roger was flying, y'know? And we played out by the Statue of Liberty with all these crazy Hells Angels and all this stuff. And they were filming it from all over, from perspective points like the tops of buildings, in New York, looking down those long canyons, and you could see this ferry boat go by with the Jolly Roger and that kind of stuff. There's a lot of really … there's a lot of arresting … striking visual stuff in the movie.

7. Hiatus

"That's part of the reason we stopped performing, was an effort to pursue completely new ideas and shake loose the past, in terms of musical … stuff" (@0742, discussing the "Blues For Allah" stuff they're going to play in just a few minutes)

Anyway, loved this interview. Not sure if it has been transcribed before, but, anyway, here it is.

Hartbeats as Tempo Études

LN jg1968-10-30.hartbeats.163mins.sbd-gadsden.xxxxxx.flac1644

Well, we probably won't ever be able to identify everything about the various Matrix Tapes (dates, personnel, etc.), with 100% certainty. But there's no particular reason to doubt that this is something like Mickey and the Hartbeats (here, as Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, Mickey Hart, with guest Elvin Bishop on a few tunes) from around Wednesday, October 30, 1968.

Many people find this too noodly, but I appreciate them in all kinds of ways, among them that the middle section (t08-t16) is a like a long tempo Étude. I can appreciate this material as such.

I have listened closely to the bass playing and other context clues in the last fragment. I hear Phil repeatedly speaking and have to conclude that it's Phil-souding-like-Jack, rather than Jack-sounding-like-Phil.

Mickey and the Hartbeats
The Matrix
3138 Fillmore Street
San Francisco, CA 94123
October 30, 1968 (Wednesday)
163 minute sbd via Bill Gadsden 2008 reel transfer flac1644 JGMF

(23 tracks, 163:04)

t01. noodling [0:53] ->
t02. Dark Star [17:09] ->
t03. Death Letter Blues [8:57]
t04. talk (1) and tuning [2:19]
t05. The Other One // [15:57#] %

t06. talk and tuning [0:30] %

t07. // Turn On Your Lovelight [#9:30] [0:09] %

t08. talk (2) and tuning [0:40]
t09. noodling (New Potato Caboose theme) [1:10] ->
t10. talk (3, 4) and noodling [3:48]
t11. Clementine [3:57] ->
t12. The Seven [9:30] ->
t13. Elevens, Sevens and Sixes [2:04] ->
t14. The Eleven [7:35] ->
t15. Death Don't Have //% No Mercy [8:#32] (5)
t16. talk (6) and tuning [1:18]
-enter Elvin Bishop-
t17. untitled 19681030a [14:53] ->
t18. untitled 19681030b [6:20] (7) [0:10]
t19. talk (8) and tuning [0:33]
t20. Prisoner Blues [10:49] (9) [0:05] % [0:09]
-exit Elvin Bishop-

t21. ... The Seven [9:29] (10) [0:35]
t22. tuning and talk (11) [6:39]
t23. Dark Star ... [19:10#]

! Band: Hartbeats
! lineup: Jerry Garcia - el-g, vocals;
! lineup: Phil Lesh - el-bass;
! lineup: Mickey Hart - percussion;
! guest: Elvin Bishop - el-g (t17-t20), vocals (t20).

JGMF:

! R: 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/19681030-01

! db: http://etreedb.org/shn/1205 (Gadsden/Wise/Sacks, presumed same source tapes, but older transfer than the present fileset); http://etreedb.org/shn/112737 (PNW flac2496 presumed lineage MSR (Abrams) > R (Kafer) > R @ 7.5ips (Will Boswell) > digital, leading me to believe that 112737 has an extra reel gen, since IIRC Gadsden in 2008 transfered the Kafer "1st copy" reel, which is represented in this fileset; 112737 is also mono); http://etreedb.org/shn/116833 (Berger flac2496 from Moore unlineaged stereo reel, TT 89 minutes (so "incomplete).

! Deadlists Comments [abridged]: The 'On The Town" column in the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper, by Ralph J. Gleason, which which gave listings of what bands were playing locally, says that "Jerry Garcia & Friends" are playing at The Matrix" on these dates (see the San Francisco Chronicle for Monday October 28, 1968 p. 45). Bobby and Pigpen were absent. On page 26 of issue #34 (Summer 1996) of Dupree's Diamond News, Dick Latvala stated in an interview 'What I know exists in our Vault are the shows, and they are on four-track 15 i.p.s." and 'There are two dates, 10/28 and 10/29, both of which have four reels. On 10/30 there's a Dark Star Jam into a Jerry vocal, could be Death Letter Blues'. He also stated 'That's what's written on the box. I haven't listened to it.'"

! Historical/dating: Note that Dick's statement contradicts itself in saying that there are two days (28 and 29) but then describing what's on the tape of the 30th. I do not know whether the GD Vault copies are masters, copies from Abrams's house tapes, or something else. I suspect they're copies from Abrams's house tapes, but I do not know for sure. Regarding how this relates ... [edit: not sure where I was going to go with that]

! R: Tape Provenance: Peter Abram's 7" 1/4 track SBD reels @ 7.5ips > Peter Kafer/Bill Gadsden's 7" 1/4 track Maxell reels @ 7.5ips > Revox B77 playback > Alesis Masterlink (sampling @ 24 bit, 96kHz) > CD > EAC > CDWave > TLH (FLAC level 8) > foobar2000 (tagging).

! R: the sound quality is what you'd expect for a Matrix Tape. This is a stereo recording.

! historical: on shnid 116833 Berger speculates that only the first 90 minutes is from this date, while the rest is from 10/8/68. I don't think so. I have listened to and noted both, and I can confirm that the talk around the various pieces of music is different. I haven't A-B'd them directly, which would seal the deal, I think.

! P: t02 Dark Star: Phil Lesh is a monster right from the get-go. He is fiercely melodic right from the start. This really is an attempt to have two lead instruments simultaneously, because Lesh and Garcia are on the same plane. Jerry seems to quote Tighten Up @ 1:49, and he's still dancing with some of that feeling around 2:15. Very sweet stuff. . Back to Star at 2:30. @ 6:24 Garcia quotes Born-Cross-Eyed for a a little bit. At 11 min mark things take a darker, slower turn. While JG is signalling the return of Dark Star @ ca. 13:00, Mickey makes a little statement on the toms. Jerry considers but re-asserts Dark Star. Mickey and Phil assent, Mickey picking the scrapy-turny things again and Philip doing his Dark Star melodic statement. That rough breadcrumb framework established, Garcia wanders around again, but with Dark Star now providing a tighter backbone.

! setlist t03 Death Letter Blues is the Leadbelly song (see Jackson 1987); @ 6:24 Jerry early engagement with a little bit of what would become the And We Bid You Goodnight/Goin' Down The Road Feelin' Bad theme. This is just about a one-off version.

! t04 (1) JG: "Thank you. Uhh, I might explain, uh, that we're ...we're really here just playin' ... just goofin'. I mean, we really don't have anything in mind or anything. Yeah. (laughs) We're just thrown together by fate ... and so we're uh playin' Fate Music. Also called Luck Music." Someone else: [inaudible]. JG: "Good one, good one. ... fateful."

! P: t05 TOO @ 7:20 Jerry starts a crazy hot, pretty fast 12-beat up-down pattern -- very unique. Phil hears the promise and jumps on it right away. @ 8:17, a little Latin feel. Jerry picks up that earlier progression @ 8:31. It's real nice, very power-tro-ish. Not quite Latin (though there were some Spanish inflections between the two groups of 12-note runs), but hot as hell. @ 8:52-9:02 Phil lands on some pretty deep two-beat march space, then a little Spanish 4-beat, then they are back on the Other One by 9:15.

! R: t05 TOO cuts out.

! R: t07 Lovelight cuts in.

! t07 Lovelight is insrumental.

! R: t08 there are various tape splices and some static during this long tuning

! t08 (2) can hear Elvin Bishop say something like "Let's play, man." @ 0:35 JG: "I don't think we have any straps. ... I'll sit down [?if we need?]." Maybe they are looking for a guitar strap for Elvin.

! t10 @ 1:49 (3) Mickey Hart: "Hey Ram?" Ramrod: "Yeah." MH: "Did you get the hammer? Did you get the [inaudible]?" More inaudible talk.

! t10 at end (4) Phil Lesh: "Wanna try the six?" JG: "Yep. Sure."

! setlist: t11 Clementine: This is an instrumental version. See LIA's post for an analysis of the song and how this version fits into its short, uneven history.

! t12 The Seven: I track "The Seven" where I track it, but the whole 3-minute range of "Clementine" is really the gradual transmogrification of The Six into The Seven. I put it here because I take Mickey's hard assertion of the tempo at this point to signify the change. Since this is a series of tempo Études, well, the tempo *constitutes the "song".

! P: t12 This version of "The Seven" , notes from a musical person, MJ: "3/4 time jazz waltz, but technically not because and it swung of course because it was a jazz waltz. If it is a 6/8 it's slow. The fact that it's swung means that if it was a normal 6/8 it would ... usually if it's in 6/8 at a normal speed ... so the combo of 6/8 with swing beat makes it unusual. A slow 6/8. Sounds more like a 3/4" to MJ.

! P: t12 Note the sequence: "The Six" -> "The Seven" -> "The Eleven" ... this is a tempo Étude. Insofar as we like attributions from The Horse's Mouth, we might even consecrate (by officializing, naturally) this track as "The Six", per Phil's identification (see note 4, above).

! t13 @ ca. 0:13ff Jerry is playing The Eleven while Phil is back to Clementine/The Six! @1339 hear someone say something. Now Phil is playing The Seven while Garcia is playing The Eleven. That's really what Hartbeats is all about. Mixing tempos. Garcia is mostly staying on 11/8, while Phil plays around with sixes (Clementine) and sevens. So I am just coining a term for this: Elevens, Sevens and Sixes.

! t14 The Eleven is instrumental.

! R: t15 DDHNM a little static @ 0:53, 1:14; hiss seems to come up during this track.

! R: t15 DDHNM splice @ 5:08, unknown amount missing.

! t15 (5): JG: "Thank you."

! t16 (6) JG: "Well, where's Elvin? Where'd he go? Where'd that skunk go? Where'd he go?"

! personnel: t17 Elvin Bishop is present from this point forward (from 94 minutes in). As far as I can hear, he is only present until the end of t20 (about 33 minutes).

! t17 untitled 19681030a is a nice mournful theme. It has a name, I think (hence me calling it untitled 19681030a-I think this can be substituted with an actual name ... if it were just a theme, I might have called it "mournful theme" or something like that). Before the track mark, you can hear Jerry asking something like "what's that tune?" I want to say that it's probably an Elvin Bishop melody, but I have no idea. It's really pretty. Damnit, what is the name of this? It surely has a name. @ 6:38ff Elvin is doing a theme that sounds almost related to New Potato Caboose thing. It sounds a little bit like Donovan's First There Is A Mountain, as well. @ 7:40 quotes The Seven a little bit. He, especially, is focused on these tempo Études. In the 11-12 minute marks it has more NPC feel. Around 12 minutes in, someone yells a change to someone else, but I can't hear what it is. Things slow down. By 14-min mark Phil is referencing The Seven again. @ 14:18 Garcia takes up a four note repeating thing, and then by 14:30 he is doing a slowed-down version of his ending riff from Born Cross-Eyed! His work here is very much more reminiscent of early 1968 than of, say, the Fillmore West shows four months later.

! t18 untitled 19681030b is a blues instrumental. It sounds very similar to Prisoner Blues. It cooks pretty well. In the late 3-min mark it has a little Death Letter Blues vibe. In the 4-minute mark Jerry and Elvin have some very nice call-and-response going ... Jerry is being the gunslinger here, for sure.

! t18 (7) JG seems to say "That's right" at the end. Then he says, obviously in answer to a query about what to play (presumably from Elvin): "Anything you like. Just start it."

! t19 (8) JG: "JG: "Hey, you got a vocal mic for over at that end? Elvin's gonna sing one." He's smiling behind his (?non-? beard) as he mentions Elvin singing.

! setlist: t20 Prisoner Blues: This is presumably just a way of being conventional about this. It's not a song so much as a theme around a slow blues.

! t20 (9) Elvin Bishop: "Thanks."

! setlist: We can't know for sure if the stuff from this last piece (t21-23, 35+ minutes) is from the same night as the other material. For that matter, it's really impossible to know whether anything on opposite sides of any tape discontinuity is from the same night. This could be snippets. I have separated out what I view as the different pieces with an extra line in the tracklist. I don't know that it is from one night or several, and I am not trying to sow obscurity or confusion. We might as well assume that this is from the same night and that that night is approximately correctly dated as October 30, 1968. I mention this only to get in front of the question that might arise from the presence of "repeat" engagements with The Seven and Dark Star. Given the exploratory nature of these Hartbeats dates, it's entirely possible that they took repeated, separate passes at these tunes. But it's also possible, given the nature of Matrix Tapes, that this material is a separate snippet from a separate night or set.

! personnel: There is no second guitar on the last piece.

! R: t21 The Seven cuts in.

! t21 @ 1:36 JG is yelling something. Sounds like he says "It all falls in, man", mentions Phil and the bass.

! t21 (10) JG: "That's not necessary. You don't really have to do that. We're ... uhhh ... We're here primarily to screw around. And, uh .. so don't expect anything that isn't screwing around. Because everything we're doing is screwing around unless otherwise stated in advance." JGMF NB this makes me think this piece is from early in a set/show/date.

! R: t22 tick @ 1:16.

! t22 (11) Phil Looney Tunes goof @ 2:45. They are talking about drinks, I think. Phil asks "Ohhh, 7-Up this time?" @ 4:11 Mickey says "Hey Ramrod?" Around 6-minutes in Mickey's gear is ready and he says "OK, now let's play." So this long interlude sounds like it was to do with gear. Indeed, the drums seem to be audible in the right at the start of the track, then move middle/left. Phil: "A little bossa nova, huh?" JG: "Bossa nova?"

! t23 compare this Dark Star with the "November 1968" version. This one starts off with the bass and guitar together, jumping right into the guiro -- a classic start to primal Dark Star. I think that one is different.

! R: t23 hard for me to tell if it's a tape fade (I think it is) or if they just soften to a close with Dark Star.

REFERENCE:
Jackson, Blair. 1987b. Roots, part 14. Golden Road no. 14 (Summer): 44.