2000 Jerry Garcia/Scott Muni 9-13-91 MUNI: Let's talk about the band, the Jerry Garcia Band. There are some very familiar friends from the past, even back to the '60s, and some newies. So why don't we start with Kahn? GARCIA: Everybody knows John by now, probably, at least everybody that knows me knows him. He and I have been playing together since - we started working together for Howard Wales at a little club in San Francisco called the Matrix on Monday nights, right around '68, '69, somewhere around there. When the Grateful Dead isn't working, I like to keep playing. So they used to have this Monday night jam session, but Howard gradually sort of took it over. Howard's this amazing organ player - difficult person, but wonderful musician. And for some reason he liked our playing, John and mine. We didn't know each other, John and I. In fact we played with Howard for almost a year before we even actually started talking to each other. Really. We would just show up, plug in, and play. About half the set I'd be whispering to John, I'd be saying, "Hey, man, what key are we in?" Howard didn't have tunings or anything, he just played. Sometimes he would do these things that were so outside that you just couldn't - unless you knew where it was going, you had no idea where to start. Sometimes they'd turn out to be just these things like four-bar blues turnarounds, relatively simple musical things, but they were so extended the way he'd play them - "God, what is this?" Anyway, I learned a lot - both of us learned a lot about staying awake and listening to what's going on, playing with Howard. It was a real experience. We played with him for a couple of years, and then Howard went off and kinda - periodically he gets this thing of where he just can't deal with the music world any more, and he just disappears. So we were there, stuck there, and we were supposed to play Monday night, and we didn't have a player. John said, "Well, I just did some sessions with this guy Merl Saunders." So ol' Merl steps onto the scene, and he was wonderful. He was just great great fun to play with. I learned lots about the stuff that I'd missed in music, lots of legit stuff like bebop, the way that works, and the way standards are put together, and that sort of thing. I learned a lot of musical stuff playing with Merl, and we had a good time playing together. That went on for a good long time. We played off and on throughout the '70s, mostly. During all this time the band had lots of different players - Bill Kreutzmann played drums with us for a while. Armando Peraza used to play with us for a while, and different players sort of in and out, kind of a floating deal, and it was still basically one of those things I did when the Grateful Dead wasn't working. I think the first time we ever went anywhere was we came here to New York and played for a Hell's Angels wedding on the Staten Island ferry out there. I think that was the first time we played here. Then we also did a show, I think, for John Scher, at the Capitol Theatre, the old Capitol Theatre. That was the first time that that band ever left the West Coast. It was always one of those things that was kind of a part-time deal for me. Anyway, it slowly started to evolve. We put out some records with Merl and did some stuff, but it was still mainly kind of low key. After a while, Merl had other stuff to do. John and I kept playing. We tried a whole long series of different keyboard players, everybody from Nicky Hopkins to James Booker. We had some great players at various times. We had Ronnie Tutt, played drums with us for a long time. We had Keith Godchaux from the Grateful Dead, and Donna were both in the band for a while. Maria Muldaur was also, so Donna and Maria were our first back-up singers, first singers sort of like the present configuration of the band - four pieces with two girls. That went on for a while, and then somewhere there in the '70s the Grateful Dead did a show with Elvin Bishop. I was standing behind this guy on the stage. He was the second keyboard player in Elvin's band. This big guy, he was just playing a Fender Rhodes. But he was playing so tasty, I'm just standing behind him. It's a pretty thick band, so figuring out just how to get in there was, I thought, the work of a good musician. He was just playing the tastiest little stuff. I thought, "This guy is just too much!" I asked him what his name was. He said, "Melvin Seals." Melvin Seals. So years later I got Melvin. I don't remember exactly when he started playing with us, but right around the late '70s, early '80s, Melvin started playing with us, and he was just a monster. He's turned out to be the guy that we were looking for all along. There's something about - when you've got a four-piece band, for me the big thing is being able to support the guitar solos, and maintain the same amount of intensity as when the guitar is playing rhythm. You can get a lot of power going, playing power chords like on the guitar, and when you drop out and go to single-string stuff sometimes the bottom falls out. But Melvin's got this thing of he knows how to keep the intensity right up there. Plus it's also very beautiful in terms of the color and stuff. What Melvin does when he's not playing with me is he produces about 70% of the gospel music in the Bay Area, the Oakland choirs and stuff. He's also choirmaster for about five churches there. So when we started looking for singers, he went out and hand-picked Gloria and Jackie. That's where they come from, they're choir gals. Melvin picked them for their voices, their range and the sound, their tone. We've got a pretty good blend now, we've been singing together for a while now. And David Kemper is - I guess he's the most recent guy in the band, although he's been playing with us for about eight years now. He's an LA studio rock, he's one of those guys that works - that's how he earns his living, really, is by studio work. Anyway, this band also has great chemistry, which is one of the things you really need in a band, where everybody gets along, everybody likes the music, and traveling is easy. Everybody's like low-maintenance. Nobody gets weird on the road, everybody's comfortable about traveling, and it stays at a real high level. MUNI: Before we leave Mr. Kahn - GACRCIA: e's also an artist! MUNI: Did he do your album cover? GARCIA: Yes, he sure did. That's his work, yeah. You ought to see his others. He's an incredible artist. John has got incredible ideas. That's the thing about him. His other work, I think it's gallery quality. Maybe eventually people will start to pick up on it. He's got a houseful of it and all of it is amazing. The thing about his stuff is that most of it is things like colored pencil, but it's applied so thickly it looks like it's lacquered on. It's just unbelievable. The surfaces are unbelievable. MUNI: What I'd really like to do is talk about some of the songs individually. GARCIA: Sure. MUNI: Obviously you're a Dylan fan, as we all are. It doesn't make any difference where Bob goes by himself individually - sometimes he'll drift off and return a couple of months later with some great stuff. But his stuff that he's done - he always likes to say, "Well, I don't know really what I meant or anything," but we seem to know more about it than he does. It's good to do his stuff, isn't it? GARCIA: Well, I don't know whether he knows what he meant, but I know what I think he meant a lot of times. It doesn't even matter what he thinks he meant, probably. But his songs, they stand up. You can sing them a lot of times and they have a lot of facets to them. And there's the thing about them that when you sing them, you don't feel like an idiot. A lot of them have big bites. They're extraordinary pieces of poetry, and they have that thing of sometimes they're like a ray gun that hits you right in a part of your life. Sometimes you can't even say exactly what it is, but for me, they're emotional. They're real. They wo 2000 rk for some reason. Something about them works for me. So I love to do them. MUNI: As the Dead goes, you've always done some Dylan stuff. Now here on your album, "I Shall Be Released." GARCIA: Great song. Great song. I've always wanted to do it, but it's one of those things that's a little bit - The Band's version of it was so nifty, it's like "How am I going to top that?" Well, I didn't even bother. I just took it off in a slightly different direction. But to me it's just such a perfectly performable song. It's a song that's not difficult, but it's very effective. It's just lovely. MUNI: "Tangled Up in Blue." We've all been there! GARCIA: Yeah, absolutely. And that's like one of his neatest, like a love odyssey kind of deal. It's somebody's romantic voyage. At least that's the way I read it; I don't know whether that's what it means or not. It also has stuff in there about disillusionment and part of the adventure of your own life. You might not have the specific events, but everybody has events like 'em. Just the idea of going away, the idea of separating from people, doing odd things, taking odd jobs, kicking around, that kind of stuff. All that stuff is stuff that's real to everybody. Plus it's a great song. In terms of it has a terrific melody, it has terrific chord changes, and it just tears along. Our version of it, I must say - I didn't really cop this from Bob Dylan's version. I heard another version, I don't even know whose it is. There was a kind of a rock 'n' roll version of it, like the one we do, that was on the radio about ten years ago or something. I heard it in my car once. I don't know who it was, I have no idea. I never tracked it down. They had a way of doing it that's a little bit like - this is what I remember, maybe incorrectly - I sort of remember it going like this. MUNI: Many people do Dylan songs, and the Jerry Garcia Band in this new album's certainly not going to leave them out either. It requires, if we go back to the beginning, Jerry, of his early stuff, Dylan didn't have a hit. Peter, Paul and Mary had a hit over here, the Byrds had a hit over there - GARCIA: Right, yeah. Bob didn't have that many hits. MUNI: They all did Dylan songs, and it still goes on, thank God, anyway. Little tough. maybe, to do Simple Twist of Fate. You like that one, huh? GARCIA: Oh, that's a great song. It's just one of those things that's - it's a just beautiful little picture, in its own way, and it's also a perfect song. I made it more like a ballad than Bob does it. I'm not exactly sure why; maybe it's because for me there's a bittersweet quality about it. MUNI: So does the title. GARCIA: Yeah. "Simple Twist of Fate." This song is right up my alley. I'm totally comfortable with it. MUNI: The Jerry Garcia Band's new album has an old song on here. I'm going to admit truthfully that I remember hearing this. It was on a 78, and I guess it's about people getting up and going out to work and trying to make a go of everything, called "That Lucky Old Sun," because he's got nothing to do but roll around heaven all day. GARCIA: Yeah, I don't know where that song came from. I remember when I was a kid, too, way the heck back there in the early '50s or something, back in the days when they were doing that - there was a kind of a smattering of those weird songs like that, or like those Frankie Laine songs. MUNI: Yeah, Frankie Laine did it. Millions of copies sold. GARCIA: Yeah. I don't remember anything, really, about that original version of it. Our version is derived from the Ray Charles version of it. It's perfectly beautiful, like everything that Ray does - when he covers a song, he makes it his own. I'm no Ray Charles. I'm not Ray, but for me this song is fun because I get to sing in my baritone voice. Which is just about nonexistent. I get to sing real low down here. MUNI: You've got a Lennon/McCartney song on this album too. GARCIA: I was working at the Record Plant [in Sausalito]. This is back sometime in the mid-'70s, when I was producing the New Riders and working loosely with Crosby and those guys. I came in one afternoon and one of the engineers says, "Hey, man, listen to this." And he cues up this tape, and it's Larry Graham doing a fantastic version of Dear Prudence. Absolutely ass-kicking version. And I listened to it, and I thought, "God, it's just the most wonderful..." And the record never came out. But it was so good. The groove is what killed me on it, it had this just monstrous groove. And you know Larry's bass playing? With that great line in Dear Prudence, that great bass line, McCartney line, but Larry's power. And God, it was just sensational. It was a total knockout, and it was so hip. I stole it, frankly. Although, again, it's my faulty memory. So I have no idea. I don't really remember anything, I only heard this once, now. Larry Graham's version of it. But the groove in it knocked me out so much that sort of what I remembered of it, me and John actually pieced it together, kind of. Because he also heard it. But it's our version of somebody else's version of Lennon and McCartney, but the song is a great song. They wrote so many great songs. That's one of the ones - we've been doing it for a long time. We've done it in lots of different styles. We've actually recorded it a few times, and it never came out. But this version of it is more or less definitive. It's the way it sounds when we do it onstage. MUNI: Whether it's Dead or you alone or anything, you just feel kind of the excitement when you start mentioning friends and their music and all. Things that we share every day. We've mentioned Dylan and Lennon/McCartney. But here's Robbie Robertson's song that is still one of those just - it just sticks out. And you say, "I miss The Band." GARCIA: Another great songwriter. Great songwriter. MUNI: And man, here you come on here, and on this album you've got The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. GARCIA: Well, I've recorded this one before too. And it's still a great song. It's just a great song. That's all, what can you say about it? The lyrics are so intelligent and the melody is so lovely, the combination of things. It's just surefire. That's why I've been doing it all these years, and it's gone through a lot of metamorphosis. Their version of is kind of a medium tempo, a walking groove. It's more a flat and declamatory kind ofI And I chose to try to take it into a kind of a more emotional thing in there, because it's got some really expressive - it's got some very powerful words. I chose to take it in that direction, to go with the power of the lyrics. MUNI: One thing about the new Jerry Garcia Band album is that, as you well know at this point, there are a lot of familiar songs, but done only as Jerry, and now this band, doing their own things and having fun with the songs. But you did do a long cut. What everybody might say, "Uh-oh, here's the space job," or "Here's the hooky-dooky," or whatever Jerry's going to do with this particular thing. Tell us about Don't Let Go. GARCIA: Well, Don't Let Go is an old Roy Hamilton tune. MUNI: Ah, just one of my favorite records of all time. And I just think, you know, if you're going to go back and say an early rock 'n' roll hit, that thing cooked. It's too bad we lost Roy, but as a matter of fact, a year and a half ago, I found the record over in AM in the record library, and I played it on the air here, and I got calls saying "That was - who was that? What was it? Somebody knows who -" Well, what a terrific record. GARCIA: Yeah, it's neat. It's just plain neat. So once again, without benefit of having - I think we finally got either the sheet music or maybe a copy of the original record, but we don't use the shuffle groove that he had in it. That (sings), that kind of thing. But see, this is where I do all the songs that turn me on. If I love a song, my band is an opportunity to do it. For me it's not the thing of "Well, this is all 1266 my music." It's the music that I love. So this is another one of those songs I love. That's mostly what we do in the Garcia Band, is music that I like. I want to do some tunes that I love to do. I always thought Don't Let Go could go any number of ways. It could take any number of different styles or treatments. It's another one that's got a great set of lyrics, and great phrasing. That's what I copped from the original, is the phrasing, pretty much. But the groove is Garcia Band. That's what that is. MUNI: Your acoustic collaboration with David Grisman, just released - let's talk about that a little bit. GARCIA: Well, David's an old buddy of mine. We used to have a band together called Old and in the Way that was a good bluegrass band, and we've been friends for really a long time. He lives right in Mill Valley, which is a stone's throw from where I live. We've been running into each other about once or twice a year for the last 17 years, since Old and in the Way disbanded, saying, "Hey, let's do something together sometime!" And so finally this last year I started going to his house - he's got a little studio. He's also got his own record company. He puts out mostly his own records, plus other minority records, that is to say, records that are not part of the mainstream of anything. They're not jazz, they're not country, they're not bluegrass. They're acoustic music, that's his thrust, and they're mostly mandolin players, which is also his instrument. So he's a guy who's championing several - he's a minority's minority, in effect. He's also a great guy and a wonderful musician, and playing with him is like - he's one of those guys that's constantly throwing logs on the fire, you know what I mean? He and I are just opposite enough each other - I've got the loose approach and he's got the tight approach, and he loves to rehearse lots and get everything just so, and I like to say, "C'mon, let's just play." So we bounce off each other really well, and he's got a wonderful family, and his whole scene is great. He's just a terrific guy. So now we have a new collaboration going. I'm hoping we're going to get out - I'd like to play with David in Carnegie Hall, you know? Really nice venues that are intimate and are right for acoustic music. Because the music has a lot of detail. Also, David is turning me into an acoustic guitar player, which is something I've never been terribly good at - my chops are so much for the electric guitar, which is much lighter - the touch is much different. So now he's got me building up these muscles here where you play 'em snap. I'm finally getting so I'm getting a pretty good tone on the acoustic guitar, and it's exciting for me. It's something very different from everything else I do. MUNI: So this is a collaboration that might be around for a while. It's a challenge. A new challenge. Some fun. GARCIA: Well, I'm hoping so. We're not in any rush. New challenge, exactly. And since it's David's own record company, there's no participation on the part of the music business at large. It works out really well for him; it helps provide him funding for lots of the other projects that he does, which are things that no record company would ever do. It's got a Hoagy Carmichael song on it, David's record does. MUNI: Not Stardust? GARCIA: No, I'd love to do Stardust. The interesting thing about Stardust - my equipment guy, Steve Parish, Big Steve, maybe you've met him at times? His uncle is Mitchell Parish, the guy who wrote the lyrics to Stardust. MUNI: Oh my lord! His uncle's in good shape. He's one of the big song winners of all time in royalties. GARCIA: Yeah! I'm telling you! Satin Doll and all these songs. He's like in his 90s. We did Rockin' Chair. (sings) "Old rockin' chair's got me..." It was great. Also this is like a little of the feel of kind of a Django Reinhardt quality. Always been one of my heroes. This record has a little of that flavor, and other stuff too. It's an interesting record, and it was really fun. Also, no overdubs, it's all straight. Everything, vocals and everything all together. So it's like performance stuff. MUNI: You don't stop working. The Dead may stop touring, and then Jerry goes to work. GARCIA: Well, see, here's the thing, Scott. See, if I stop playing for longer than a month at a time, my chops are so bad I can't stand to listen to myself. So for the three months it takes me to recover from that, it's not worth it. So for me, I just keep filling in. I keep working. If I keep working, I keep playing at a reasonable level. . 0