EmailAnnouncement
To: thedeadwoodsociety@yahoogroups.com
From: Christian Crumlish <xian@well.com>
Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2004 12:24:40 -0800
Subject: [Thedeadwoodsociety] When the Fat Man met the Black Chopin
For one brief shining moment in the first half of January, 1976, just weeks after Nicky Hopkins' drinking problems separated him from the Jerry Garcia Band, an obscure piano and organ sideman from New Orleans hopped a bus for San Francisco for a keyboard gig and rehearsal that was really a tryout. It didn't go well. It was a revelation. Booker was simultaneously too crazy and whacked out for the hippies and too straight and stiff in his show-business professionalism, rehearsing the patter he would weave over the outro to a song they were rehearsing ("This is how we gonna go out, Jerry!).
Nevertheless, for fanatical fans of these two brilliant musicians, the extant rehearsal and performance tapes (they played two gigs at Sophie's in Palo Alto before the the experiment formally came to an end) represent a sort of holy grail once we hear about them. Finding them proves them to be a seminal document from two demimonde traditions in American popular music: San Francisco psychedelic folk rock and New Orleans rhythm 'n' blues and piano professor tradition.
And we know what might have happened if Booker had been just a bit less crazy and Jerry just a lit less comfortable already in his band: The Grateful Dead may just have found the perfect keyboard player and foil to Jerry they never really had. The rehearsal recordings represent a glimpse into a parallel universe I'd visit in heartbeat. To be a fly on the wall as Booker teaches the JGB some of his songs (he thought he'd been asked to come in and lead the band) and as Jerry teaches Booker an additional bridge in Tico Tico, or solos feelingly over Booker's plaintive outro refrains on Goodnight, Irene, in which he sings "please don't let me drown / I kind of want to, want to drown"), in fact for the entire 90 or so minutes preserved (on cassette by John Kahn) is a privilege indeed.
Your mission, at the coming Dead caucus of the regional American Popular Culture convention in San Antone, should you choose to accept it, is to follow me on an obsessive journey to the time when two great flowing rivers of music briefly crossed in a sheltered hollow, leaving marks on each other all downstream.
Officially, I am on a panel with some typically dry dusty academic name, with something like 15 minutes to work with. I intend to make about 12 minutes of remarks, play about 3 one-minute music clips, and if possible show some slides (let me know if I need to make transparencies or can project directly from my laptop - last time I came, two years ago, I had made expensive transparencies for my Cryptical Envelope Filter presentation and did not end up with the overhead A/V necessary to show them. Holding them up to the light was an aesthetically impoverished situation.
Now, 15 minutes does not do justice to 1/7/76.
Thus, I propose a Listening Party in chez Meriwether / Crumlish at the Cheaper Nearby hotel. I propose that those of us on this list who are coming hash out the ideal evening. I want to be inclusive. I'd like the room to include some of our scholarly colleagues who didn't plan to be in the Dead sequence. I will of course invite the documentarian. I have some friends from Austin and the SXSW scene thinking of coming too (it's only 73 miles north of San Antonio). The listening party will be big fun.
It will not be a free for all, though. It is a chamber music / lecture event. We need to have a CD player. I will probably bring my Altec Lansing speakers from my computer but upgrades are more than welcome, within the limits of being decent to those in the hotel's neighboring rooms.
I will make introductory remarks and then comments before and after each cut, to give you some idea of what to listen for. I am also preparing a program with liner material, timings, transcripts of banter, and again song-by-song contextual notes. Your program will be a souvenir from the listening party, and I will strive to have some copies of the rehearsal recording pressed on CD if anyone wants to go home with a copy and listen again without me interrupting the flow and yammering on. If not I'm sure we can do a vine quite easily.
How does that sound? Is there sufficient interest in such a presentation to warrant it? Does anyone want to do the light show? :P
--xian
p.s.: I am bringing my tenor ukulele. I bought it on tuesday. I learned Yellow Submarine this morning. I am so happy.
p.p.s.: If anyone (david Gans) has a bootleg copy of Festival Express, I propose we provision a DVD if necessary from a vid rental store and watch it another night. I have seen it and believe me, you will love it like you can't believe.
--
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