Grateful Dead/Jerry Garcia Tour Itinerary June 1969

The Menlo Hub, at 1029 El Camino Real in Menlo Park, probable site of The Underground, where Jerry Garcia first started to play with John "Marmaduke" Dawson  in 1969 (it's also not impossible that the Su Hong restaurant next door at 1039 was the site)

I have been constructing tour itineraries for the Grateful Dead for brief periods of their history. There is so much information circulating on websites and blogs (including my own) that go beyond published lists on Deadlists and Dead.net that these posts make useful forums for discussing what is known and missing during each period. Rather than go in strictly chronological order, I am focusing on periods where recent research has been done by myself or others.  My principal focus here is on identifying which dates have Grateful Dead shows, which dates might have Grateful Dead shows, and which dates are in dispute or may be of interest (other entries in my Grateful Dead tour itinerary series can be seen here).

What follows is a list of known Grateful Dead performance dates for June , 1969, including performances by individual band members. I am focused on which performances occurred when, rather than the performances themselves. For known performances, I have assumed that they are easy to assess on Deadlists, The Archive and elsewhere, and have made little comment.  I am not considering recording dates, interviews or Television and radio broadcast dates in this context. My working assumption is that the Grateful Dead, while already an infamous  rock band by the end of 1966, were still living hand to mouth in 1969 and scrambling to find paying gigs.

Grateful Dead/Jerry Garcia Tour Itinerary June 1969
June 4, 1969: The Underground, Menlo Park CA: John "Marmaduke" Dawson
As I had previously discussed in the May 1969 itinerary, Jerry Garcia had taken to backing John Dawson on Wednesday nights while he played his songs in a hippie hofbrau, so that Garcia would have a venue to learn pedal steel guitar. After the first time, which was either May 7 or May 14, Dawson invited David Nelson, and they had a little trio. Nelson probably played electric guitar, and Dawson played acoustic. Nelson hadn't been doing that much, and he and Dawson had been talking about how they could make a go of a band using Dawson's songs. With the unexpected presence of Garcia as a sideman, lots of possibilities opened up.

This foundational saga of the New Riders Of The Purple Sage has been repeated many times by all three of the participants. Nonetheless, it has been surprisingly difficult to lock down any details. I am pretty sure I have determined where the Underground was located, at 1029 El Camino Real, near both Kepler's Books and Magoo's Pizza. The establishment at that address today is called The Menlo Hub (above). I still have yet to find an ad, listing or flyer, so I have no idea how Dawson was billed, or if he was advertised at all, so I can mostly only try and pin down dates by triangulation.

However, I do have somewhat of a confirmation of the June 4 date. The South Bay's most popular rock club was The Poppycock, at 135 University (at High Street) in Palo Alto. The headliner for June 4th and 5th (Wednesday and Thursday) was a band called Southern Comfort (some members of the band ended up playing with Mike Bloomfield, and saxophonist Ron Stallings even ended up in Reconstruction). One member of the band told me that he recalled playing the Poppycock one night--they played there many times--and they were planning to go over to "some coffee shop" nearby because they had heard on the musician's grapevine that Garcia was playing. However, just as band members hopped into their van for the journey, having unloaded their equipment at the club, they got busted by the Palo Alto police. While nothing came of the bust (and the Palo Alto police did not return any weed, thus thoughtfully preventing crimes from being committed), they never got over to see Garcia. This strange little story points at Wednesday, June 4, which is as near as I have gotten to a confirmed date of Marmaduke date at The Underground.

The cover of the 1968 album Electric Band by The Glass Family, on Warner Brother Records

June 5-8, 1969: Fillmore West, San Francisco, CA: Grateful Dead/Junior Walker And The All-Stars/The Glass Family
The Grateful Dead were now a headline act at Fillmore West. For this Thursday thru Sunday booking, they were supported by Junior Walker And The All-Stars and The Glass Family. The Glass Family were a psychedelic power trio from Southern California, who had released one album on Warner Brothers in late 1968. It's likely that the Warners connection helped get them on the bill with the Dead. Junior Walker, of course, was an R&B singer/saxophonist on Motown, best known for hits like "Shotgun" and "Roadrunner." At the time of this show, Junior Walker And The All-Stars were riding high with the song "What Does It Take (To Win Your Love)' which would reach #4 on the pop charts.

This four-day stand at the Fillmore West by the Dead is infamous for a number of reasons. On Friday, June 6, the perpetually late Jerry Garcia arrived at the venue to find the Grateful Dead on stage with Wayne Ceballos of AUM playing lead guitar. Ceballos had been an old friend of the band, dating back to the Warlocks days, and Lesh had asked him to sit in, no doubt under threat from Bill Graham. Actually, the Dead sound pretty good with Ceballos playing Garcia's rig for the first six numbers.

The last night of the booking, Sunday, June 8 is even more infamous. Sunday afternoon, there had been a fairly substantial free rock show in Golden Gate Park, albeit not including the Grateful Dead. Probably as a result of that, a fair number of musicians seem to have been hanging out at the Fillmore West at the Dead show on that Sunday night. This Sunday night, however, was the time when Owsley distributed some chemical concoction that was far too powerful for human consumption. Phil Lesh and others have written about the difficulty of performing in such a state, with attendant results. From a surviving tape, it appears that Jerry Garcia and others sat out the second set. Elvin Bishop and Wayne Ceballos led the surviving members of the Dead and probably others (including All-Stars drummer Billy Nicks) through a 48-minute "Turn On Your Lovelight," and a few blues numbers to follow (I have written about that show at length also).

June 3, 4, 10, 11, 18 or 25?, 1969: Peninsula School, Menlo Park, CA: unknown billing
Peninsula School, at 920 Peninsula Way in Menlo Park, had been providing progressive education to the South Bay since 1925. In the fifties and early 60s, it was one of the few havens for the "ban the bomb" crowd who opposed the Cold War and the military-industrial complex. People who had attended the school included John Dawson, future Dead soundman Bob Matthews, future GDTS guru Steve Marcus and me, albeit not simultaneously. Afternoon rock concert events in the Spring and Fall seem to have been regular occurrences in the 1960s, dating back at least to 1967.

McNally describes "at least one embryonic concert" at the Peninsula School, where Bob and Jerry had played in 1961" (p.321). It's difficult to date this event, but there are relatively few plausible open dates in the month of June. However, the concert would have been in the afternoon. McNally implies that there was an actual rhythm section at this show, but I have never been able to confirm this. The New Riders Of The Purple Sage would go on to play Peninsula School three more times, and I have found eyewitnesses to all of those shows, but not yet to the very first one.

Given that the Peninsula School show would have been in the afternoon, one theory I have is that it was tied to another New Riders show. If they played the same night as at The Underground, it would make sense to play Peninsula and then The Underground. Alternately, it could have been the same afternoon as the California Hall show (June 11, below), too, since in those days Menlo Park and San Francisco were about 40 minutes apart (current Silicon Valley commuters would shake their head in disbelief, but it was true). Although this must have been an end-of-term event at Peninsula, earlier in June is still more likely than later in June, and late May is not totally impossible.

A poster for the California Hall show on June 11, 1969 with Bobby Ace And The Cards Off The Bottom Of The Deck

June 11, 1969: California Hall, San Francisco, CA: Bobby Ace And The Cards Off The Bottom Of The Deck
The California Hall show seems to be a unique occurrence in Grateful Dead history, but there were some tantalizing hints of things to come. Our knowledge of the show comes from a poster and a setlist. The setlist comes from a Deadhead named Judy Dawson (no relation to John that I know of), who had the foresight to write down what she saw. Yet we have no tape, so we can only guess what the show actually sounded like. The poster billed the band as Bobby Ace And The Cards Off The Bottom Of The Deck.

According to McNally (p.321)

it was a quasi-benefit for Scientology, because Weir had listened to [Tom Constanten] over the winter and studied L. Ron Hubbard's ideas as a way of strengthening his position in the band. After a few months he decided he neither felt nor played better, and was tired of paying money for nothing, so he quit. The benefit was actually his goodbye to Scientology, and featured Garcia, McDuke, David Nelson, Phil, Mickey, Peter Grant on banjo and T.C. on piano

Judy Dawson's setlist had 15 songs, all but one of them covers of country or country-style songs. From our current perspective, songs like "Mama Tried," "Me And My Uncle" and "The Race Is On" are familiar, but they would not have been to most of the audience. Most hippies knew exactly nothing about country music, so big hits like "Tiger By The Tail" and "Green Green Grass Of Home" might not have resonated. Of course, the three Everly Brothers songs  would have been recognized by everyone there, as would Joe South's "Games People Play," which was also a pop hit at the time. The entire crowd probably sang along with The Beatles "I've Just Seen A Face." The one original song was the newly-written "Dire Wolf," which would have sounded like a country cover.

Our knowledge of the "lineup" comes from the poster, although I presume McNally talked so some people who were present or performed. However, the actual configuration of the show remains tantalizingly obscure. Was this a proto-New Riders show, with Garcia on pedal steel the whole time? Presuming Weir sang the Everlys songs--NRPS never did--who shared the vocals, Garcia or Dawson? Did Garcia and Weir did some of the numbers as acoustic guitar duets? What instrument did TC play, a Fender Rhodes, an upright, a Continental organ? Since Garcia and Dawson were rehearsing first in Weir's living room and then in Mickey's barn, this show was probably an outgrowth of those rehearsals, but we don't actually know what happened. There even may have been a separate New Riders set, since all we have to go on is Judy Dawson's list.

The Bobby Ace experiment was never repeated in this format, so there must have been some kind of dissatisfaction with how it played out musically. Nonetheless, the outlines of the future Grateful Dead plans can be seen, even with the limited evidence. I'm aware that "Bobby Ace And The Cards Off The Bottom" played with the New Riders on April 17-19, 1970, but I believe the circumstances to have been quite different. I suspect that show was an "acoustic Dead" set, a warmup for what was to come on the forthcoming "An Evening With The Grateful Dead" tour.

California Hall was at 625 Polk, and was just another hall for rent. I assume this show was put on by people associated with Scientology. Since the band were booked at Fillmore West, the show could not have been advertised as "The Grateful Dead" until June 9. In any case, whatever Weir's motives or obligations may have been, the band seems to have used the show as an exercise in trying out some different approaches. It would be nice to find some actual eyewitnesses to this show.

A poster for the June 13, 1969 at Fresno Convention Center (Selland Arena), with the Grateful Dead, AUM and Sanpaku

June 13, 1969: Fresno Convention Center, Fresno, CA: Grateful Dead/AUM/Sanpaku
During this period, the Grateful Dead were booked by the Millard Agency, Bill Graham's booking agency. One of Millard's strategies was to extend the reach of the Fillmore out to the suburbs and farther Northern California. By mid-1969, lots of rock fans had read about the San Francisco scene, but they couldn't get to San Francisco much or at all. This was even more true for high school fans, a big part of the rock audience in those days. Millard brought the rock audience to them, by bringing less well-known San Francisco bands to them. At the time, although the Grateful Dead were already legends, they did not in fact sell that many records, and were always available for far-flung gigs.

Fresno has always been a substantial agricultural town in California's Central Valley. In the late 1960s, Fresno had a population of about 150,000, although its economic importance was far larger than it's size (as of the 2010 Census, the population was 494,000). Fresno is about three hours from San Francisco, and almost equidistant to Los Angeles. The Fresno Convention Center, at 700 M Street, was built in 1965. I do not know for certain whether the 1969 show was played at the Selland Arena or the somewhat smaller Ernest E. Valdez Hall adjacent to it.

In any case, as was typical of the Millard strategy, the higher profile Grateful Dead were booked with two other bands from the agency, AUM and Sanpaku. AUM had just released an album on Sire Records, and Sanpaku were newly-signed by Graham's management agency, yet another affiliated organization. The booking concept was that the show would help build an audience for the two opening acts. In any case, for "Lovelight," Ceballos and Sanpaku flautist Gary Larkey joined the rave-up. Other musicians may have been on stage as well. Deadlists seems to list Ronnie Hawkins as a guest singer. I find this utterly unpersuasive in any way, and wonder what the source of that might be. My assumption is that Ceballos was singing as well as playing guitar.

June 14, 1969: Gym, Monterey Peninsula College, CA: Grateful Dead/AUM/Bitter Seeds
On Saturday night, Millard had booked the Dead and AUM at the Monterey Peninsula Junior College gymnasium. Monterey is a not actually very near to San Francisco. It may seem that way on a map, but I assure you it's a long drive. Monterey County also had relatively few residents, but there were hippie enclaves in places like Pacific Grove, as well as some soldiers from nearby Fort Ord.. As a result, there were few rock shows in the Monterey area, the legendary annual jazz festival notwithstanding.

My understanding is that the shows were booked by local hippie entrepreneurs. Just possibly some of those hippies had some other, mysterious, source of income beyond their little head shops near Cannery Row. In any case, local promoters financed some shows in Monterey in the Summer of '69, and Millard was more than happy to provide the bands. The Bitter Seeds were apparently a local group, but I haven't been able to find out anything about them.

June 18, 1969: The Underground, Menlo Park CA: John "Marmaduke" Dawson
Again, it has been very difficult to confirm any shows with Dawson, Garcia and Nelson, but this Wednesday night seems like an available date.

June 20-21, 1969: Fillmore East, New York, NY: Grateful Dead/Buddy Miles Express/Savoy Brown (early and late shows)
Although 60s album release dates are not to be taken literally, June 20, 1969 is often assigned as the release date for Aoxomoxoa. In any case, June 20 was probably the date that Warner Brothers began promoting the record.  Warner Brothers had a huge investment in the album (by the standards of time) and would have needed to make every effort to have it succeed, however unlikely that may have seemed. Since New York was one of the two poles of the record industry, headlining at the Fillmore East was as high a profile show as there was in the country. Journalists, agents and executives all turned out for the Friday night early show at Fillmore East, and it was usually reviewed in Billboard or other trade magazines.

The high profile of Fillmore East accounts for the weekend of Grateful Dead shows in New York unattached to any larger tour. The Dead would have flown out with their guitars but without their sound system, since they could have used the Fillmore East PA. We don't have a setlist for the Friday early show--I wonder if it was reviewed by the trades (Billboard, Cashbox, Variety, etc)?--but I wouldn't be surprised if the Grateful Dead responded to a high profile event by doing little off their new album and not particularly playing well. Industry people would not have been prevalent at the Friday late show nor the Saturday shows, so I'm sure the Dead played great.

Both the Buddy Miles Express and Savoy Brown were promising aggregations that were receiving a heavy promotional push by their respective record companies. This was true of every Fillmore East opening act at the time, and often enough true of the headliners as well (as it was this weekend). Buddy Miles had been the drummer in the Electric Flag, but when Mike Bloomfield and Nick Gravenites had finally left by Summer '68, he had taken over and the group had been re-named the Buddy Miles Express. By mid-'69, the group featured old friends of Miles from Omaha, Billy and Herbie Rich. Herbie Rich played organ and saxophone and had been in The Flag, and bassist Billy had been in the popular soul group The Whispers, out of Oakland. Miles' new album was called Electric Church, and it included four tracks produced by Jimi Hendrix. Miles's heavy beat and the Express's versatile four-piece horn section seemed to open a new chapter in rock and funk, and the Buddy Miles Express influenced the music of Hendrix and Miles Davis, if in fact they are hardly listened to much today.

Savoy Brown was a hard working London blues band on their second tour of America. They had just released their fourth album, the excellent A Step Further on London Records. Some years later, a different lineup of Savoy Brown would have a decent-sized hit with the song "Tell Mama" (not the Etta James song). However, the sound of the mid-'69 Savoy Brown would sound familiar to most American 70s rock fans, since the group was anchored by 3/4 of the future lineup of Foghat. Savoy Brown had a somewhat bluesier sound than Foghat would, but the essential boogie of guitarist Lonesome Dave Peverett, bassist Tone Stevens and drummer Roger Earl helped Savoy Brown break through in America (band leader Kim Simmonds played lead guitar, and lead singer Chris Youlden and pianist Bob Hall completed the band). Foghat was a huge touring act in the 1970s, and at their peak around 1977 were a bigger live draw than the Grateful Dead.

June 22, 1969: Great Lawn, Central Park, New York, NY: Grateful Dead
The Great Lawn is in the middle of Central Park, running from about 81st to 86th Streets (bracketed by 5th and 8th Avenues, of course--take the A, B or C to the 81st Street stop). I think concerts in Central Park were pretty common in the 60s, though rarely by groups headlining at the Fillmore East. Although this was a free concert, this was not a "guerrilla" show, even if whoever granted the permit didn't quite realize the stature of who would be playing. In any case, the show was well reviewed in both the Village Voice and Variety, and must have done the Dead a lot of good in Manhattan.

It's worth considering that all three bands playing the Fillmore East that weekend had new albums and were being pushed hard by their record companies. Yet only the Dead, the weekend's headliners, played free in the park, since it was against orthodoxy to "give it away." Yet the Dead must have made numerous new fans, and the positive buzz helped too, plus they got reviewed in Variety--all in all a good weekend.  Although the Buddy Miles Express was kind of flawed, if still interesting, Savoy Brown was a great band in 1969 and would have made busloads of new fans if they had played for free in Central Park. Yet it probably never occurred to the band, their management or their record company that it was a good business practice for a rising band to play for free on a summer afternoon in the media capital of America.

June 25, 1969: The Underground, Menlo Park CA: John "Marmaduke" Dawson
The Dawson/Garcia/Nelson performance at The Underground on Wednesday, June 25 has some confirmation, due to a setlist. I do not know the exact source of the setlist. I have assumed that this was another list from Judy Dawson. I was in contact with an old Palo Alto hand who said he recorded a  show at The Underground (since he was David Nelson's former housemate, this was not farfetched), but he said that no one made a copy of the tape and he had since lost it. While he has since passed away, its not impossible that someone made a list from the tape. In any case, the set list gives us a whiff of what the trio were playing. 

Tiger By The Tail / Fair Chance To Know / Mama Tried / The Next In Line / I'm In Love With You / Stagger Lee / Coat Of Many Colors / Whatcha Gonna Do / Truck Drivin' Man / If You Hear Me When I'm Leaving / The Race Is On / Six Days On The Road / Jailbait Gets You Busted / Close Up The Honky Tonks / Last Lonely Eagle / For What It's Worth / I Still Miss Someone / Together Again / Superman / Lay Lady Lay / If You Want To Run / Buckaroo / Long Black Veil / Me & My Uncle / Delilah

I recognize five familiar Dawson originals, as well as seven covers that turned up in Grateful Dead or New Riders sets over the years. As for the other songs, they offer a snapshot of the trio's taste:

• "Tiger By The Tail"-a Buck Owens classic
• "The Next In Line"-a big hit in 1956 for Johnny Cash
• "I'm In Love With You"--too hard to idenfity
• "Stagger Lee"-there are many versions of this, but it's interesting to see that it was part of the repertoire
• "Coat Of Many Colors"-I had thought that this was the Dolly Parton song, but that was not released until 1971
• "Jailboat Gets You Busted"-I assume this is the classic old country song "San Quentin Quail." Jim And Jesse had a hit with it about 1964, but there were lots of versions (no one sings this anymore)
• "Close Up The Honky Tonks"-recorded by Buck Owens on his 1964 album "Together Again," which besides the title track, included "Truck Drivn' Man", "Hello Trouble" and "A11," which turned up in New Riders and Kingfish sets on occasion.
• "For What It's Worth"-very interesting to see a contemporary hit in the set. Interesting, too, to think of Garcia's pedal steel channeling Neil Young's droning guitar part
• "I Still Miss Someone"-although not precisely a hit, this Johnny Cash song was the b-side to his big 1958 hit "Don't Take Your Guns To Town," and a regular part of Cash's live shows.
• "Lay Lady Lay"--this Bob Dylan song was a huge hit on the radio. At the time, it was just a song from the April 1969 Nashville Skyline album, and it also had been released as a single by The Byrds (the Dylan single was released that July).
• "If You Want To Run"--I can't figure this out
• "Buckaroo"-Buck Owens' instrumental theme song

I wonder if there weren't additional members of the 'band' by this time, beyond the original trio? In any case, anyone with additional suggestions or information about the songs on the setlist is encouraged to include them in the Comments.

The subsequent Wednesday, July 2, was an unlikely night for a show, since I suspect the band was on the way to distant Colorado Springs for a daytime show on July 3. The following Wednesday the band was on the road, and on Wednesday July 16 the yet unnamed New Riders opened for the Grateful Dead at Longshoreman's Hall.

A poster for the June 27-28, 1969 concerts at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds in Santa Rosa, as well as the June 29 show at The Barn in Rio Nido. Note that Jack Casady and Jorma Kaukonen, "From Jefferson Airplane" are atop the poster, and the Grateful Dead are just "special guests."

June 27-28, 1969: Veterans Memorial Auditorium, Sonoma County Fairgrounds, Santa Rosa, CA: Grateful Dead/Jorma Kaukonen, Jack Casady and Joey Covington/Cleanliness And Godliness Skiffle Band
The Grateful Dead played a weekend of shows in Sonoma County. I have written about these shows at some length, so I won't recap every detail. "Jorma Kaukonen, Jack Casady and Joey Covington" would now be referred to as Hot Tuna, but they name did not come into use until Fall '69. At the time, the trio would just jam off familiar blues tunes, without the anchors of the actual songs we now associate with electric Hot Tuna.

The Cleanliness And Godliness Skiffle Band were a Berkeley group who had formed at the Jabberwock, out of the same stew that created Country Joe And The Fish (for the complete CGSB history, see our band history here). Initially a kind of acoustic skiffle group, a sort of New Orleans style jug band, by 1969 they had become semi-electric and were a sort of country-folk hybrid. On the first night in Santa Rosa, Mickey Hart was late. Uniquely, the Dead invited CGSB drummer Tom Ralston to sit in for Hart and share the drums with Kreutzmann.  "Dagmar," a sharp-eared reviewer, wonders

except that the drums sounded off for the first few tunes- up to "sittin", actually. something just didn't click, not sure what... maybe billy and mickey had to get their "country legs", so to speak. but, when "sitting" came on, it was back to good ole double drummin! boss man is smokin as usual. 

Garcia plays pedal steel guitar on a few numbers, Peter Grant plays banjo here and there, and Weir sings "Dire Wolf," so the Dead were in a pretty experimental phase.  I believe the "Dire Wolf" got released as a bonus track, although I think Hart had arrived and taken over the drum chair by then.

On the second night, as a kind of thank you for Ralston subbing for Hart, Jerry Garcia sat in with the Cleanliness And Godliness Skiffle Band, playing pedal steel guitar. The CGSB played a lot of the type of Johnny Cash and Joe South covers that the New Riders played, along with their own original material, but there was definitely room for some steel guitar, and in the memories of the band members it sounded great. CGSB harmonica man Brian Voorheis (in a personal email) doesn’t recall the precise set list, but he does remember some of the the country styled songs they were playing, some of which Jerry would have sat in on (quoted directly from his email):

"Who Will Buy The Wine" (from Skiffle album)
"A-11" (a Buck Owens tune about a jukebox selection that makes him cry )
"How High's The Water, Mama?" (a Johnny Cash classic sung by Gary [Salzman])
"County Fair" (a Gary Salzman original ),
and I may have done Johnny Cash's "There You Go" - can't remember if I was doing it yet. There could also have been Gary's other originals, 
"(It's Hard To Keep Your Head Above The) Waterline", and 
"I Couldn't Marry Juana (Cause I Couldn't Get Her Out Of Mexico)"

I feel confident that Jerry could have played "I Couldn't Marry Juana" with great sensitivity. Note that Garcia and Marmaduke were already doing "A11" themselves.

June 29, 1969: The Barn, Rio Nido, CA: The Grateful Dead
The Sunday night Rio Nido show was advertised on the same poster as the weekend Santa Rosa shows. However, the Rio Nido dance hall was tiny, with only room for a few hundred patrons. We are pretty certain that the Rio Nido show took place, since the announcer on Saturday night (June 28) reminds everyone of the show. However, the CGSB did not play and I don't think Jorma and Jack did either. The CGSB had had a pretty memorable weekend, and 40 years later they recalled the long drive back to Berkeley on Saturday night, still amazed that Garcia had sat in with them. If they had been playing Rio Nido on Sunday, they would likely not have driven back to Berkeley, and they would likely recall that show as well. It makes much more sense to think the Dead played the smaller Sunday night show by themselves.

update: the Owsley Foundation release of Jorma Kaukonen/Jack Casady/Joey Covington Before We Were Them was recorded on June 27, but there is one track from June 28. At the end, the announcer mentions a "jam" at Rio Nido and says that "Jerry Garcia and a friend" will be playing. This is all but certainly Garcia and Dawson, with David Nelson most likely as well.

October 21, 1972: Alumni Lawn, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN The Grateful Dead (Last Free Concert)

The crowd at the Grateful Dead concert at Alumni Lawn, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, October 21, 1972 (from the VU Hustler newspaper)

When Deadbase first  became available, it was the fruit of many years labor by a wide variety of people. Deadbase I was published in Spring 1987, and it was a multi-year, multi-person effort to create a list of every Grateful Dead performance and an accurate setlist to go with it. The arrival of the internet heralded Deadlists, and that was soon linked to the Archive, so Deadheads who used to check their mailboxes every day hoping a box of Maxells had arrived could now simply click on a few links and turn the volume up. From that point of view, all the things that Deadheads had desired were now manifest: no more strange meetings with some weird dude in the hopes of persuading him to make you a copy of a show where the Dead played with a horn section. Now, you just clicked, and it was off to the races.

A peculiar feature of 21st century Deadheads, however, has been a sophisticated knowledge of extant tape recordings that has drowned out the initial historical enterprise. "Shows" now tends to mean "tapes," and those are expressed as music rather than event. Now, the members of the Grateful Dead are probably good with that--wherever they are--since music is ultimately what the enterprise was about in the first place. Yet shows without tapes, or tapes taken in isolation, often lose all reference to the remarkable events that created them in the first place.

There is a six-song fragment of the end of a show at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN on October 21, 1972. There is some interesting, if poorly recorded, playing, but it's hardly a major tape. Yet a closer look at the event itself calls up something remarkable, a final glorious burst of the 60s at a private University in Tennessee, of all places. The October 21, 1972 concert in Nashville was a free concert, and it was the very last free concert by the Grateful Dead outside of San Francisco.

The Grateful Dead, to the extent they had a plan, had generally tried to invade a new town and play for free, with the confidence that enough people would be made fans for life that it would pay off in the future. They worked that mojo time and again, in Vancouver, San Francisco, Manhattan, Toronto, Montreal, Denver, Atlanta and other places, all places that they thoroughly own even to this day. The last stab was Nashville in '72, yet outside of Nashville, no one seems to remember. This post will attempt to frame the October 21, 1972 free concert by the Grateful Dead at Vanderbilt in its proper context.

Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN
Vanderbilt University is a private University founded in 1873 with a $1 million grant from Cornelius "Commodore" Vanderbilt, who had never actually set foot in the South.Vanderbilt was attempting to help heal the wounds caused by the Civil War. Today Vanderbilt has 12,000 students from around the United States and the world, and numerous distinguished alumni. To many Americans, Vanderbilt is known as an academically accomplished school in a major football conference. Vanderbilt is in the football-mad SEC, and as such it bears comparison to Stanford in the Pac-12, Northwestern in the Big 10 or Duke in the ACC. I think most Vandy alums would feel comfortable being compared to those three schools.

On one hand, Vanderbilt is clearly the superior academic school in its conference, but on the other hand it has a history of being outmatched in football. While Stanford has to compare itself to UC Berkeley academically--don't get me started--and Northwestern to Michigan, and Duke plays in an indifferent football conference, Vandy is the clear academic star of the SEC but has to play all those powerhouses every year. Thus a year like 2012 when Vandy was 9-4 (and 5-3 in the SEC) is memorable indeed. Back in Fall '72, Vanderbilt was 3-8, and 1-5 in the conference, so students had to take solace in the fact that they were at a far better school than the ones beating them on the field.

Another thing hanging over college students in 1972 was the Vietnam War. Male students had to worry about being drafted, and going to college was one way to get a deferment. That meant, however, that flunking out of college didn't mean skulking back to mom and dad with a hangdog look--it meant getting a very, very short haircut and giving up two years of your life for a very dangerous obligation. So idyllic as the 70s may seem from this distant remove, the world of those students was not so carefree as it may seem today.

The State Of The Grateful Dead, Fall 1972
In the Fall of 1972, the Grateful Dead were perceived as rock and roll veterans, rather than outlaws. They still did things their own way, but they were only one standard deviation removed from the rock mainstream. The Dead had helped create the national rock touring circuit, where good live bands could find an audience by making new fans in every city, and numerous English and American rock groups were crisscrossing the country, following the Dead's footsteps, often almost literally, from previous years.

By 1972, the Dead had had three hit albums in a row (Workingman's Dead, American Beauty and 'Skull & Roses'). They had never had a true AM radio hit, but they were regularly played on FM radio throughout the country. Their concerts were more and more successful, as well. In all the cities that they had been playing regularly, they would return to play either larger places or more nights, as Deadheads got on the bus at each stop, and almost never stepped off.

However, since the Grateful Dead's success was predicated on live concerts, the band tended to be a hit in the places where they had toured for years. The heart of the rock circuit, pioneered by the Dead in the 60s, was I-80 and I-95. There were some secondary routes, on I-70, I-5 and I-10, but the heart of the action was on I-80 and I-95. Relatively small cities like Des Moines (I-80), Portland, ME (I-95) and Portland, OR (I-5) were Dead strongholds because they were between major stops on the circuit, and near the main Interstates, so the Dead played them regularly. Other cities, particularly in the South and Southeast, had rarely seen a Dead concert anywhere near them, and so the band had few followers there. Since other rock bands did not play those cities so regularly, either, so there wouldn't have been as many venues or promoters seeking the Dead.

1972 was the last year when the Grateful Dead still set out to conquer new lands, like Alexander The Great. The most famous of those expeditions was the legendary European tour that begat the Europe 72 triple album. But even afterwards,  the group was still sending expeditions into unconquered territory. The Dead's 70s innovation was broadcasting entire concerts on FM radio. This reached a much wider audience than the old free concerts of the 60s, and those FM broadcasts had a huge effect in cementing the Dead's audience in cities where they had played for many years, like Chicago and New York.

Still, the Dead's touring was somewhat limited to certain cities, so they seem to have decided to fall back and their old tactic of the 60s, and played a few free concerts. The free concerts at American University in Washington, DC on September 30, 1972 and at the Alumni Lawn at Vanderbilt University would be the last free concerts by the Grateful Dead outside of San Francisco.

An article from the VU Hustler in October 1972. Inset: they never suspect "good acid."

More from the VU Hustler

An article in the VU newspaper, The Hustler, from few days before the concert, explained the back story:

The Alumni Lawn location was selected by special arrangement with the Grateful Dead. The concerts committee had tried to bring the group to Vanderbilt "for at least three years now," and had finally persuaded them that "appearances in the South are worth while." They "refused to play in the [Memorial] gym for acoustic reasons, and preferred Alumni Lawn" to all other suggested sites.

These details tell us a few interesting things. First of all, if the Dead had refused to play the gym, then they were being paid to play at Vanderbilt--this was no hippie guerrilla strike.

The Dead were mostly playing smaller theaters on this tour, older places that probably sounded pretty good. The tour had opened in St. Louis at the Fox Theater from October 17-19 (Tuesday through Thursday), and would go on to The Performing Arts Center in Milwaukee (Monday and Tuesday October 23-24) and then Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus and Detroit. So the band had an open weekend on Friday and Saturday (October 20-21).  I think tour manager Sam Cutler probably used the following logic: if they played indoors, the students and local hippies would show up, but those people liked the Dead anyway. If they could play a free concert, it became a regional event, and it would have a much greater impact. Clearly, Cutler was able to persuade Vanderbilt to use their entertainment budget on a free concert, probably an unprecedented request that I suspect was never repeated.

Alumni Lawn, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN October 21, 1972
Apparently, the day started out foggy with a threat of rain, but the sky cleared by the one o'clock showtime. 15,000 fans came from hundreds of miles. Vanderbilt let people camp out on the lawn the night before--no word if veggie burritos were available for purchase--as long as people were willing to "brave the elements" (it probably got down to 50 degrees). As for the day of the show, the crowd was handled differently than at Golden Gate Park. According to The Hustler, the plan was that

Student marshals will "attempt to secure the area immediately in front of the stage with ropes until 11:30 am," in order "to assure Vanderbilt students a good seat." Entrance to the special area will be by VU ID only beginning around 9 am.

[Concert Committee member] Kahn commented that there will be sufficient area for non-Vanderbilt students to view the concert but admitted that "we will have to rely on the good faith of Vanderbilt students" to hold the student section.

I saw the Grateful Dead many times at the Greek Theatre, and let me tell you the school never did anything like this for us. OK, I admit I would have let "townies" into the student section, but it would still would have been cool to flash your student ID and get into the front. No wonder the memories of the Dead concert on the class of 1973 website are so fond.

The balance of the article is full of reminders about camping (sleeping bags only, no camp fires) and warnings about not engaging in illegal drug traffic, but on the whole, the message from the University is fairly positive. The article ends "Rain or shine, the Concerts Committee expects the Grateful Dead and their music 'to infect our campus with good time spirit.'" That they apparently did.

The show was scheduled to start at 1:00pm,  possibly to accommodate students who had just finished taking their LSATs on Saturday morning. The band started a little late--just like they were at home!--but the 15,000 or so lucky fans present got themselves a full dose of the Grateful Dead.

One	Bertha ; Me And My Uncle ; Deal ; Beat It On Down The Line ; Sugaree ; El Paso ; China Cat Sunflower > I Know You Rider ; Black Throated Wind ; Tennessee Jed ; Jack Straw ; Loser ; Playing In The Band
Two	The Promised Land ; Brown Eyed Women ; Big River ; He's Gone ; Greatest Story Ever Told ; Bird Song ; Truckin' > The Other One > Morning Dew ; Sugar Magnolia
Encore	Johnny B. Goode

There is a surviving soundboard of the back of the second set, 77 minutes or so, from "He's Gone" through "Morning Dew". The quality isn't great, but there's no doubt that the Dead showed Nashville what they were all about, and "Truckin'">"The Other One">"Morning Dew" must have been a mighty fine way to follow a morning when you took your LSAT exam. People indeed came from all over to see the Vanderbilt show, and they remember it decades later.

From Dead.net

I was too young to drive, so a friend and I took the Grayhound bus to Nashville ... walked down Broadway to VU. It was a beautiful Fall afternoon...the show was outdoors on a hillside. What a magical afternoon that was....Great show.

As a teen living at home, I used to get fried, come home and put on headphones in bed to listen to the Midnight album hour on the radio. When Europe '72 came out, the DJ played two sides of it. I had never even heard of the Dead, but I got on the bus that very night! Wow, for a kid growing up in Nashville listening to the ABB, The Beatles, Jethro Tull, and the like, the Dead blew my mind that fateful night. Soon thereafter, I learned that the Dead were doing a free show at Vandy. I remember marveling at all the knobs on Phil's bass and at how cool Donna's hair was. I also remember meeting heads who'd come down from NY and had pitched a tent on the quad at Vandy. I couldn't believe anyone would come down from NY for a concert! After the show, I understood why! 

From the Archive

I moved from southern California to Nashville to attend college at Vanderbilt and started hearing a lot of good bluegrass. My sophomore year and the Dead were scheduled to play, right on campus where I lived! Amazing. Total party carnival extravaganza. I've seen them at UCLA Pauley Pavilion and outdoors also at UC Santa Barbara, but this was like seeing them at home. Fantastic

and more from the Archive

Thanks for posting this. I was there at this show in Nashville. Brings back some awesome memories of the Dead.This was my first Dead show and will always be one of my favorites. 

I had just turned 18 and I was pretty darned impressed. Another time when it rained right up to showtime, then became a beautiful sunny fall day in TN. This was the day I got on the bus.

And some guy put some great photos online from Vanderbilt, and they give a pretty good feel for the relatively low-key event. Vanderbilt had students from everywhere, so while the Dead may or may not have cemented their standing in Nashville, numerous Commodores left Vanderbilt as fully signed up Deadheads.

"Tennessee Jed"
The rock concert industry was still young in 1972. Outside of California, New York and a few big cities, it was even younger. Although the music industry had been well entrenched in Nashville for decades, rock music meant something different to young people, particularly young people who faced the threat of themselves or their friends being drafted to fight a pointless foreign war. Rock concerts made people feel that there were lots of other people like them--maybe they still do--and some of the now-typical rituals were still new and exciting. It's unfortunate that there is no audience tape of the Vanderbilt show, because I would still like to hear the audience's roar of approval when the Dead sang the first chorus of "Tennessee Jed."

At Dead concerts, and indeed at most concerts, people like to cheer when their city or state are mentioned in a song. It was a famous ritual at Grateful Dead New Year's, with numerous people from out-of-town, for people to cheer for the different cities named in "Truckin'." Cities like San Francisco, New York and New Orleans were often mentioned in rock songs, but other cities had to take their pleasures where they could find them. While Europe '72 was apparently being played on the radio in October '72, the overwhelming majority of the audience would have had no idea about "Tennessee Jed." In a place like Nashville, hearing a San Francisco band sing "Tennessee, Tennessee/Ain't no place I'd rather be," tongue in cheek or not, had to have lit up the entire campus.

Aftermath
The Dead only played Nashville two more times, both in 1978. I think the reason for this was prosaic. Nashville is on I-40, and it wasn't really between any two cities that the Dead played regularly. The Dead regularly played North Carolina, because it was between Washington, DC and Atlanta, but Nashville just wasn't on the way to anywhere else that the Dead typically played. So the Dead conquered Nashville, for a day, but then they retreated. By the time they could have played Nashville successfully, they could make even more money in Chicago or New York, so there wasn't really any need.

More significantly, after the Vanderbilt show, the Grateful Dead never played a free show in unconquered territory again, and indeed they only played two more such shows in Golden Gate Park. Some of that was economic: University entertainment budgets shrunk in the 70s, and schools no longer had the cash to pay a major rock band to play without some compensation from ticket sales. The other was practical: after '72, if there was a free Dead concert anywhere, with any kind of fair warning, people were going to come from everywhere, by any means necessary, and complete madness would ensue. Now, that sounds like fun to me, but University or city administrators did not want to have a mini-Woodstock, much less an Altamont, on an open field. No amount of student marshals could have controlled that.

So the lucky Commodores, Nashville residents and out-of-towners who saw the Grateful Dead at Alumni Lawn on October 21, 1972 not only saw a great '72 Dead show on a nice Fall afternoon, they saw the end of an era. The Dead never again played a free concert in a new town, just to get everyone to hear their music. But for one last time, they showed they could do it, rolling in like psychedelic cavalry to rule the campus all of Saturday, and rolling out the next day leaving unforgettable memories, if only anyone could recall them.

Summer 1972: Pierce Street Annex, San Francisco: Vince Guaraldi/Jerry Garcia/Mike Clark

The cover to the 1969 Warners lp The Eclectic Vince Guaraldi

After Jerry Garcia's death, scholarship on his musical career only increased from its already high level. This was magnified by increased access to the internet, which allowed the entire Grateful Dead community to contribute their pieces of knowledge to Jerry Garcia's history. One of the conventional yet still remarkable things about Jerry Garcia's music was its astonishing breadth. While carrying on a full-time career in the Grateful Dead, Garcia played in a wide variety of groups: country rock with the New Riders Of The Purple Sage, R&B with Merl Saunders, bluegrass with Old And In The Way, honky tonk rock and roll with the Jerry Garcia Band and a slew of famous guest appearances with CSNY and others. There are various blogs focused on continual research in Garcia's career (see here and here), and TheJerrySite acts as an anchor, with an encyclopedic overview of Garcia's performing career.

Thus it seems remarkable that an entire band featuring Jerry Garcia has been missed entirely by historians. Now, I grant, this 'band' only played two or three shows in the Summer of 1972 at a San Francisco fern bar. Yet Garcia was already a bona fide legend by that time, and yet no trace of the performances surfaced until 2012. It is a remarkable testament to Garcia's relentless commitment to expanding his horizons that we are still finding an undiscovered Garcia country 40 years on.

So here it is: in the Summer of 1972, Jerry Garcia played unbilled at a San Francisco fern bar called The Pierce Street Annex, in the Marina District. The other members of the band were pianist Vince Guaraldi, of "Peanuts" fame, drummer Mike Clark, later of the Headhunters, bassist Seward McCain, and tenor saxophonist Vince Denham. The sources for this remarkable bit of missing history are two members of the band, McCain and Clark. Both were regular members of Guaraldi's quartet, and they recalled this part-time excursion. Clark specifically recalls that they only played two or three times, and that they played music in the style of Miles Davis' Bitches Brew album, just unstructured electric jazz jamming.

Sources
2012 saw the publication of the definitive biography of pianist Vince Guaraldi, Vince Guaraldi At The Piano, by Derrick Bang (McFarland and Company) , a fine book that is a must-read for anyone interested in West Coast jazz from the 50s through the 70s. Guaraldi had first become popular with the recording of own "Cast Your Fate To The Wind" in 1962, but he became nationally known when he did the soundtrack for the Peanuts television specials. The Peanuts income put Guaraldi in a position that was fairly unique for a jazz musician--he was financially secure. Guaraldi loved to play live, but he didn't like heavy touring, so from the mid-60s onward he mostly just played in and around the Bay Area. In that respect, Guaraldi had some parallels to Garcia, with Peanuts and the Grateful Dead providing the financial anchors (each with their own Pigpen, of course).

Guaraldi was a fine, versatile musician who had already had a successful career prior to Peanuts, but the TV specials took the pressure off. Guaraldi became friendly with Garcia and the Grateful Dead through his girlfriend Gretchen Katamay, who worked on the management side of Bill Graham Presents. Guaraldi had jammed with the Dead, although nobody remembers when (I think it was during the December 31, 1968 show, at about 3am). Guaraldi had also sat in for Howard Wales one night at the Matrix, on June 22, 1970, so there had been plenty of contact. By the early 70s, however, Guaraldi's records didn't sell that much, and while he was a popular club attraction, his ubiquity created a tendency for music fans to take him for granted. Nonetheless, Bang has done remarkable research in pursuing the different musical paths that Guaraldi too in the 70s, from soundtrack work to traditional jazz to electric fusion excursions.

However, when Bang gets to the Summer of '72, we find out about the hitherto unknown band from bassist Seward McCain, who recalled it in a 2010 interview with Bang (p.268)

The warm summer months also bought a hot--and rather unusual--collaboration.

"Jerry Garcia had apparently taken a hiatus from the Grateful Dead, and was available for the summer, so we played together at The Matrix," McCain recalled.  "It was the Vince Guaraldi/Jerry Garcia Band, so it was a quartet, once a week. There are no recordings, but wow, it was an interesting experience. Jerry played guitar, Mike Clark was on drums, and Vince was into jamming on one and two chord things, which was perfect for Jerry, so he just jammed with us, in his own way.

"We had good crowds; Vince and Jerry together really were a draw. And it was the loudest band I've ever played in. Vince straddled his Fender Rhodes across the tops of two 5-foot 300 watt amplifiers, which faced out diagonally to the audience, on their sides. So he had 600 watts of power blasting out toward the front. Jerry came with an arsenal of amps, and Mike played as strong as any drummer ever did; he was as loud and powerful as Billy Cobham.

"I was there with an electric bass and one bass amp, it was bare survival for me, to keep up with that volume level. It was unbelievably loud."

The weekly sessions continued throughout the summer, and then both Guaraldi and Garcia returned to their separate lives.

When I first read this, I was quite startled, and indeed thrilled, but a few details troubled me. Obviously McCain didn't know that playing outside of the Dead was common practice for Jerry Garcia, and the summer of '72 was exactly when Garcia was most likely to be looking for new ventures. The biggest hangup, however, was McCain's recollection of playing The Matrix, since The Matrix had closed in May 1971. Author Derrick Bang also pointed out that McCain hadn't been in Guaraldi's band when he had played the Matrix, so he couldn't have been recalling a show a few years earlier.

However, this conundrum was solved by drummer Mike Clark. Clark was interviewed by radio journalist and scholar Jake Feinberg in 2011. In the wide-ranging interview Clark recalled (the quote was transcribed by Bang in his concurrent blog post)

At one point, Vince said, I'm gonna to try some electric stuff, so bring a bigger drum set. I said okay. We went to a place on Fillmore Street called the Pierce Street Annex. It was a place where people tried new, experimental stuff. It was Seward McCain on bass, Guaraldi on piano, a tenor player named Vince Denham, myself on drums, and Jerry Garcia played with us a couple of times.
We played music that sort of sounded like Bitches Brew; I don't think he meant it to go in that direction, that's just how it came out. We didn't have any tunes; we just jammed on different grooves.

Obviously there are some differences in the memories of McCain and Clark, as it had been 38 and 39 years, respectively: Clark remembers just a few shows, McCain a whole summer, and Clark recalls a saxophone player that McCain forgot. That vagueness is easily explained away, as the truth is probably in the middle somewhere. For one thing, Denham was a regular member of Guaraldi's band, whether or not he played with them every time. The key point, however, is Clark's recollection of playing The Pierce Street Annex. The Pierce Street Annex was the new name for the old Matrix, so Seward McCain's memory was correct. As far as I am concerned, whatever the precise details, I am confident that the Guaraldi/McCain/Clark/McCain ensemble played Pierce Street Annex more than once, probably both with and without saxophonist Vince Denham.

The Pierce Street Annex
The Pierce Street Annex was a bar near the Matrix. When the Matrix closed, in May '71, the Pierce Street Annex leased the space and renamed it The Pierce Street Annex. I do not know what the street address of the original Pierce Street Annex was, but it seems to have shared a wall with 3138 Fillmore, where the Matrix was located.

The Pierce Street Annex was part of an early wave of San Francisco bars that were known as "Fern Bars," a polite term for upscale watering holes where young professional single men and women could meet and, well, y'know. Of course, men and women had been making new friends at bars since at least World War II, but San Francisco fern bars like the Annex or The Balboa Cafe (just across the street at 3199 Fillmore) were light enough to grow plants, rather than dark and forbidding, and it lent a different air to the proceedings, even if the results might have ultimately been the same. At the same time, gay bars were serving a similar purpose for other people, so San Francisco was a pretty fun place to be in the early 70s.

The Pierce Street Annex was not a music bar, per se. They weren't regularly in the music listings, and music fans did not regular check out the Annex to see who was playing. Thus historians have assumed that no music was played there, because none was advertised in the SF Chronicle. However, they did have music, probably mostly jazz. Since the Matrix was equipped for music, and more importantly, would have had a license for performers, it would have been surprising if the Pierce Street Annex had not taken advantage of it. Even though jazz was not particularly popular in the early 70s, the idea of it implied sophistication, so jazz at an upscale pickup joint made a lot of sense.

Of course, I have to assume that the managers of Pierce Street Annex hired Vince Guaraldi thinking he would play the "Peanuts" theme and that sort of thing. According to McCain--with reference to Vince Guaraldi's concert history--Vince and his band apparently did just that at least a few times.   On these other occasions in question here, however, Annex management were probably thrilled when Jerry Garcia showed up. Of course, when the ensemble launched into some unstructured Bitches Brew jamming, that must have gone on for hours, they probably had second thoughts. Now, according to McCain, they packed the place, although supposedly it was usually packed anyway. Still, I have to wonder--it would be a strange night indeed if you went to Pierce Street Annex hoping to find the San Francisco version of Mary Tyler Moore, and found yourself listening to an earsplitting fusion jazz jam. Oh, well: if Garcia and Mike Clark were jamming, you were already getting really lucky.

(For more about the Pierce Street Annex, see Derrick Bang's post here)

Dates?
The little recognized fact that makes the Garcia/Guaraldi collaboration so likely is that it took place in the Summer of '72. Of course, Deadheads knew that Garcia had not taken a hiatus from the Grateful Dead, as he always had at least one side band throughout the 70s. What was significant about 1972 was that Garcia had no side band at all. John Kahn had gone to Woodstock, NY and joined the Butterfield Blues Band, and he had invited Merl Saunders to join him. As I have detailed at length, there were almost no Garcia/Saunders shows in 1972, save for a two-week window in late June/early July, when Kahn and Saunders seem to have been back in town.

My assumption is that the Vince Guaraldi ensemble would have played on a weeknight. On a weekend, a bar like Pierce Street Annex would be packed, so music would be superflous. On a Wednesday night, say, a little high-end jazz might be an inducement for young urban professionals (the term "yuppie" didn't yet exist) to stop in. So I have been looking at possible Wednesday nights that both Garcia and Guaraldi would be available. However, you can substitute any weeknight and get the same result.

Garcia and Guaraldi Summer 1972  Timeline:
Friday, May 26, 1972: Last Europe '72 Grateful Dead show (Strand Lyceum, London)
Wednesday, May 31, 1972: open
Wednesday, June 7, 1972: Mark Teel's Club Francisco (Vince Guaraldi dropped in to jam)
Wednesday, June 14, 1972: open
Saturday, June 17, 1972 Hollywood Bowl,  Los Angeles (Grateful Dead)
Wednesday, June 21, 1972: open
Wednesday, June 28, 1972: open
Friday, June 30, 1972: Keystone Korner, SF (Garcia/Saunders)
Saturday, July 1, 1972: San Jose Civic Auditorium (Garcia/Saunders)
Wednesday, July 5-Friday, July 14-New Twin Flames, Tucson, AZ (Vince Guaraldi)
Friday-Saturday, July 7-8, 1972, Keystone Korner, SF (Garcia/Saunders)
Sunday, July 16, 1972: Dillon Stadium, Hartford, CT (Grateful Dead)
Monday, July 17, 1972: Gaelic Park, Bronx, NYC (Allman Brothers w/JG as guest)
Tuesday, July 18, 1972: Roosevelt Stadium, Jersey City, NJ (Grateful Dead)
Friday-Saturday, July 21-22: Paramount Northwest Theater, Seattle, WA (Grateful Dead)
Tuesday-Wednesday, July 25-26: Paramount Theater, Portland, OR (Grateful Dead)

It doesn't require a Statistics degree to see that Garcia and Guaraldi barely had any shows to play between the end of Europe '72 and the mid-July tour. I have arbitrarily used Wednesday as a marker, but every other weeknight was empty as well, except for those mentioned in bold above. Garcia's only recording during this period was probably with Merl Saunders at Fantasy, for Tom Fogerty's Excalibur album.

Vince Guaraldi's performance history hasn't been as thoroughly researched as Garcia's, but biographer Derrick Bang has done a fine job, and Vince would have been more or less as free as Jerry.  His big booking in the Summer was a two week run in Tucaon, but it still leaves room for gigging with Jerry.

So I think the Garcia/Guaraldi quartet or quintet played a few Wednesdays in June of 1972, or perhaps some other weekday, and perhaps even into early July. Anyone with insights, rumors or foggy memories should Comment or email me. Mike Clark says there is no tape, and although it would have easy to smuggle a tape deck into the Pierce Street Annex, what if you met Her, and she had wrinkled her nose and said "why do you have that little tape recorder?" So we'll just have to dream about it. But what a good dream it will be.

Notes On The Players
Vince Guaraldi would have been a critically important figure in San Francisco jazz without Peanuts, as Bang's book so aptly demonstrates. As a result of the TV specials, however, Guaraldi's name has spread far beyond the usual confines of popular 60's jazz artists, which is a worthy fate for a fine musician. Yet the other players in his band at the time are worthy of a few eighth notes, as well.

The cover of Herbie Hancock's 1974 Columbia album Thrust, featuring Mike Clark on drums

Mike Clark-drums
One characteristic of Jerry Garcia's electric side bands was that the drum chair was usually anchored by players of the highest quality. The best known was probably Ronnie Tutt, who drummed for Elvis Presley as well as the Garcia Band, but players like Bill Vitt, Paul Humphrey, Gregg Errico, Gaylord Birch and David Kemper were well known in professional circles. Indeed, when I tried to make a list of the Top 10 singles that Garcia's drummers had played on, I had to leave off Van Morrison's "Domino" (with 1981 drummer Dauod Shaw).

Mike Clark is no household name, but he is a true drumming titan, like Tutt, Humphrey or the rest of them. Mike Clark initially made his name as a jazz drummer in the Bay Area in the 1960s, based in Oakland. Although he saw himself as a jazz drummer, he would take funk gigs when they came his way, like any true Oakland player. The local Oakland scene had some very low-down funk, that would filter into popular consciousness in the 70s through Tower Of Power and The Pointer Sisters (who had Gaylord Birch as their bandleader).

Clark lived over on East 14th Street, and his roommate was the great bassist Paul Jackson. By 1973, Jackson had been hired by Herbie Hancock, whose music was heading in a more electric direction. Hancock recorded the album Headhunters in '73, with Jackon on bass and drummer Harvey Mason. Headhunters offered a new direction in jazz. Miles Davis had played funked-out, electric jazz on Bitches Brew back in '69, but it was challenging music to listen to. Headhunters was more accessible, yet still serious music, and it would herald an era of funky jazz that was both serious and fun at the same time.

Hancock used to call Jackson at home--it's not like he could call his cell phone--and when he wasn't home, Herbie ended up talking a lot to Mike Clark. Although Hancock was a bona fide jazz legend by 1972, he couldn't pay his band nearly as much as they could make in the studio. As a result, Harvey Mason was not willing to go on tour for the Headhunters album. Fatefully, Hancock asked Jackson if he knew any drummers who could play funk and still jazz it up. When Jackson suggested his roommate, it was the first time Hancock connected the dots and realized Clark's professional pedigree. Clark was on board.

Clark was a killer on stage, of course. He was a great jazz drummer with an Oakland funk beat, and he took the feel of 3rd and Broadway to the jazz world, just as Dave Garibaldi (Tower Of Power) and Gaylord Birch (Pointer Sisters) had done for soul music. Hancock's next album, Thrust, released in 1974, and featuring a Clark tour-de-force on the song "Actual Proof" made Clark's name in jazz circles, far beyond the confines of Bay Area jazz professionals. Hancock's band toured and recorded successfully without him as The Headhunters, and Mike Clark is rightly seen as having helped export funk into jazz. Clark has continued to have a successful career that is still in full swing. The list of players he has worked with is stunning, but now we can add Jerry Garcia to the list.

Vince Denham-saxophones
Vince Denham was a multi-talented reed player who mostly played soprano and tenor saxophone, as far as I know. He was generally based in the Bay Area up until the early 70s, but then seems to have shifted to Southern California. Denham had actually played with Garcia and Vince Guaraldi when Vince had substituted for Howard Wales at the Matrix on June 22, 1970. Denham had also served time with the legendary Don Ellis Orchestra, which was a remarkable ensemble in its own right.

Like many Los Angeles area jazz musicians, Denham seems to have mostly made his living playing rock and pop gigs. Denham was in one of the later lineups of the Loggins and Messina touring band in the mid-70s. Since then, Denham has played key roles in the touring bands of both Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald. Most LA jazz musicians make their living in the studios doing fairly conventional music, thus freeing them to play whatever jazz they like in nightclubs, so I'm sure Denham has played a lot of fine live music, but most of that was probably for comparatively small audiences. Whether Denham played just one or a few nights with Garcia and Guaraldi, he's definitely a peer, even though his name is not widely known.

Seward McCain-bass
Seward McCain had grown up in San Francisco, and had seen and heard Vince Guaraldi many times before he was asked to join Guaraldi's regular group in 1972. McCain had joined Guaraldi during his fusion period and played electric bass, but when Vince went back to a more acoustic style, McCain switched to upright bass. McCain was a regular member of Guaraldi's band up until his death in 1976. McCain played on most or all the Peanuts soundtrack work from 1972 onwards as well.

Vince Guaraldi-piano
Vince Guaraldi had had a great jazz career prior to Peanuts, but Peanuts put him in a unique category. Jazz went through a fallow period in the 1970s, and although Vince was financially insulated, like many 50s and 60s jazzers he was no longer a major attraction, and record companies were not interested in releasing his recordings. His time would have surely come around again, as it did for so many seminal jazz figures, but sadly Vince Guaraldi died of an unexpected heart attack during a break from a gig in Menlo Park, CA, on February 6, 1976. He was 47 years old. As one friend put it, "he loved playing for people. So he was playing at a club, and he took a break...and he died. It may not be the worst way to go" (Bang, p.298). Jerry would have said the same.

Coda: San Francisco, 1972
The 60s in San Francisco were rightly legendary, but the 70s were memorable there as well. As a result of the previous decade, San Francisco's preference for being open and progressive had gone nationwide. Young adults flocked to San Francisco, not to join a band, but to have a nice life. The gay bars and fern bars that seem quaint now were progressive institutions in their time, and they are remembered fondly by people of a certain age. If any of those greying folks have warm memories of the Pierce Street Annex in the early 70s, we have to remember to ask them who was playing music in the bar while they were scoping out the evening's prospects, because there was more than one way to get lucky.

Album Economics: Round Records 1974-76

Robert Hunter's Tales Of The Great Rum Runners, the first album released on Round Records (RX-101) in June 1974

Round Records was the record company formed by Jerry Garcia and Ron Rakow to release solo albums and other material by Garcia, other members of the Dead and other musicians. The venture was an adjunct to Grateful Dead Records, which had been born once the Dead became free of their Warner Brothers contract in March, 1973. Per the legend, certain members of the Grateful Dead were uncomfortable with the risk associated with expanding the record company, so Garcia took on that risk himself. The label released ten fascinating albums in its two year existence, finally folding in early 1976.

Since Ron Rakow was a partner in Round Records, and Rakow ultimately absconded with a few hundred thousand dollars of the Grateful Dead's money in 1976, no one wanted to talk about Round afterwards. What has made the historical record confusing, however, was that no one had really wanted to talk about Round Records even while it existed. Back in '75, many rock artists had their own record labels, and although Round was a very different animal, it didn't seem that way at the time.

The public face of Round was of course Jerry Garcia, but in those days, journalists were still busily asking Garcia about LSD and Woodstock. There might have been a few generic questions about Round, but the ever-engaging Garcia simply answered the questions he was asked, and the conversation would spin far away from his own record company (Rakow did give an interview about Round to Record World, accessible on the indispensable Grateful Dead Sources blog, but it was more about the mechanics of distribution).

What happened with and to Round Records? More importantly, what was supposed to happen? To the extent we know what happened to the label, it was sunk with the financial morass that finally squeezed out Grateful Dead Records. In the end, Round released ten albums, but many of them were released quite some time after they were recorded. This post will attempt to unravel some of the financial underpinnings of Round Records. Once the cobwebs have been removed and the framework becomes visible, we will get some picture of what Garcia may have had in mind for Round. As in many other ventures, Garcia and the Grateful Dead had very imaginative ideas, but once again seem to have fired up the locomotive before the railroad tracks were finished.

Looking backwards, however, the timeline for Round Records releases makes no sense at all, and bears little relationship to Garcia's musical efforts at the time. One reason for that may be that Round was poorly run, by a partner who was neither organized nor reliable. Of more interest to me than Ron Rakow's business practices, however, is an analysis of what music Jerry Garcia was interested in making outside the Grateful Dead from 1973 to 1975, and how Garcia may have seen Round as fulfilling those ends. Without suggesting a narrative for Garcia' side projects, the history of Round Records would make no sense whatsoever.

A Round Approach
The evidence of Round Records' birth and passing is maddeningly non-specific. Given the lack of direct evidence, I have tried to analyze Round Records as an institution, rather than focusing too much on the particular actions of individuals, which may remain forever unknown. My institutional analysis points towards some interesting conclusions:

• Round Records was conceived as an independent record company that would release a wide variety of material, much of it not likely to be popular
• Round would be a platform for experimental  or unheard music
• Most of Round's projects were to be recorded in-house, at either Mickey Hart's ranch studio (The Barn), or Bob Weir's garage studio (Ace's).
• Inept business practices insured that the Round venture floundered, and almost everything released on the label was well out of date by the time it came out
• Almost everybody involved with Round was unhappy with the music and the finances, and thus only talks about Round in an indirect way

To explain my conclusions, I will present the following:

• A brief overview of the beginning of Round Records
• An institutional analysis of the likely explanation for Jerry Garcia Round album Garcia inexplicably having the same name as the previous Garcia solo album on Warners
• A timeline of the Grateful Dead finances in conjunction with Round releases

The Birth Of Round Records
The Grateful Dead informed Warner Brothers that they would not be renewing their contract, nor signing with anyone else, in the Fall of 1972. This was unprecedented for a rock band. Because of contractual obligations, they would not be free of Warners until March 1973 and the release of Bear's Choice. Perhaps Warners or another company thought they could talk the Dead out of independence--the record companies certainly tried--but the Dead stuck to their quixotic plan. The resulting entity was called Grateful Dead Records, financed by a large loan from the First National Bank Of Boston, organized by the always ambiguous Ron Rakow, who had been in and out of the Grateful Dead's finances since about 1966.

The first public corporate mark of Grateful Dead Records was in fact a notation on the liner notes for the Garcia/Saunders album Live At Keystone. That album was released in January 1974, some months after Wake Of The Flood, the initial GDR release. However, the Keystone album was recorded before Wake, in July, 1973, so when Garcia was listed as "Courtesy Of Grateful Dead Records," it was a corporate indicator of Garcia's primary affiliation. The album was released on Saunders' label, Fantasy Records. There is reason to assume that Fantasy may have hoped that even if the Dead were going it alone, Garcia might have been available to record as a solo artist. Fantasy was used to working with jazz artists on a project by project basis, so there might have been some synergy there, but this is only speculation. In any case, Garcia seems to have had bigger plans.

Wake Of The Flood was recorded in August, 1973 and released in October. Despite some difficulties getting paid by distributors and some counterfeit pressings that cut into sales, the album was pretty successful. McNally said that it sold about 400,000 copies, a healthy number for those days. Since the Dead weren't sharing profits with a parent record company, the money for Wake was still pretty good. The band's concert receipts had improved as well. By Grateful Dead standards, the group was fairly flush with money at the beginning of 1974.

McNally describes the formation of Round Records as fraught with conflicts of interest (p.452). The Dead's lawyer, Hal Kant, objected that Grateful Dead finances shouldn't have been co-mingled with a solo project, and Garcia blew up, so Kant was replaced as Round's lawyer by Rakow's personal attorney. McNally does not put a precise timeline on the formation of Round, but it seems to be sometime after the formation of Grateful Dead Records. By the beginning of 1974, despite or perhaps because of their success, the Grateful Dead's self-contained empire was full of strife. Booking agent Sam Cutler was let go, and McNally describes a period of conflict and confusion (p.468-469).

Yet the first Round Records project, Jerry Garcia's second solo album, got under way in February 1974, with John Kahn producing. Presumably, Kahn and Garcia had already been working on the concept for some time. The solo album, mysteriously titled Garcia, just like the first one, was released in June, 1974. Even so, it was not the first Round release. That honor went to the first solo album by the hitherto ghost-like Robert Hunter, Tales Of The Great Rum Runners. Both albums were released somewhat simultaneously in June, 1974. Yet, then as now, no one can give a plausible explanation for why Garcia's solo album used the same name as his 1972 release for Warners. Garcia II would have made some marketing sense--but just calling it Garcia, like the first one? The silence accompanying this choice shouts dysfunction, and that dysfunction appears to be at the center of the Round universe.

Seastones, by Ned Lagin, credited to Ned Lagin and Phil Lesh (Round RX-106), released March 1975

What Might Have Been The Plan?
Round Records was formed in late 1973, as a vehicle encouraged by Garcia for releasing projects outside of the Grateful Dead proper. Garcia and the other members of the Grateful Dead had a wide variety of projects underway: live R&B with Merl Saunders, electronic music, bluegrass, new songs from Robert Hunter and perhaps more. They also had access to their own studio, namely Mickey Hart's own facility in his barn at his Novato ranch. Thus the more esoteric projects could be recorded at a more realistic price than the high rates of professional studios like The Record Plant in Sausalito.

I think Garcia wanted to run an independent record label that released his own music and the music of his friends, whatever it happened to be. Some of it might be somewhat commercial, like the Jerry Garcia Band or Kingfish, but some of it might be outmoded country subgenres or unfathomable experiments. At the time, major record companies were good at making money on music, but they were hit machines that depended on artists who toured heavily behind popular music. Warners or Columbia had too much overhead for bluegrass or something equally obscure. A low-overhead independent label would have been a different matter.

In theory, while the Grateful Dead rode the big horse, Round Records could have made creative music cheaply at Mickey's Barn in Novato and sold a modest amount of records to Deadheads and people of discriminating taste. Without much overhead, the players would get a little money, and there would be enough left over to make the next album. All sorts of friends and allies could get a chance to make the music they wanted to, not the mandated 10-songs-per-lp-of-rockin'-hits that the industry demanded.

The idea of Round Records as a self-sustaining, independent label, run by artists for artists, would have been a great idea--if it were 1990. David Grisman's Acoustic Disc was built on that model, and it has generally been very successful. While some of Grisman's albums, particularly those with Garcia, have sold quite well, some of the releases are specialist projects recorded for a modest, discriminating audience. No matter: they were usually recorded in Grisman's (high-tech) garage, and they are sold in limited runs to those who want them, via mail-order and the internet. None of this was plausible in 1974.

Many rock artists in the early 70s had "private labels," called "imprints" by record companies: the Jefferson Airplane had Grunt (for RCA), Frank Zappa had Bizarre/Straight (Warners), ELP had Manticore (Island), and so on. Certainly, those artists got to release albums by their friends: Zappa released albums by his best friend in high school and his daughter's nanny, for example. However, the big record companies still exerted a lot of control on the imprints. Their real interest was in using the artists to find new hitmakers. All of Warners' investment in Zappa paid off when he signed and civilized some crazies from Phoenix, AZ called Alice Cooper. When Zappa left Warners, they dropped all the acts on Bizarre/Straight except Alice, and they made millions on the band. That was what they had really wanted. Warners could not have channeled Alice Cooper as they were in 1969, but Zappa could, and the payoff for Warners a few years later was huge.

I don't doubt Warners or Columbia would have (and probably did) offer Garcia his own imprint if the Dead would sign. However, Garcia was dismissive of Grunt, the Airplane's label, so I don't think he had any interest in having a corporate entity under his control. In typical fashion, Garcia seems to have chosen to go it alone, but he chose it at a time when an independent label had no way of getting distributed or paid, and any unique music they made would never be heard on the radio, rendering it permanently obscure.

A careful look backwards shows a plethora of album projects by members of the Grateful Dead, most of them recorded at Mickey Hart's Barn studio: albums by Hart himself, Old And In The Way, Roadhog, Barry Melton and Jim McPherson were all recorded there, none of which saw the light of day (some of the McPherson material was released in 2009). There were ongoing experiments with electronic music (that would become Seastones) and radio plays (the mysterious radio play "Insect Invasion"), and numerous live ensembles like Garcia/Saunders, the Great American String Band and The Good Old Boys. Yet none of this came to light during the brief tenure of Round Records, and only bits and pieces surfaced in succeeding years. It stands to reason that all the recording going on was intended, ultimately, for release, and I think that Round Records was intended to be that vehicle. 

Jerry Garcia's second solo album (RX-102), inexplicably entitled Garcia, just like his first album two years earlier

Why Call The Album "Garcia"?
Although Garcia's 1974 solo album bore the number RX-102, ceding RX-101 to Hunter's album, the Round Records enterprise would not have gotten underway without the promise of an album that would actually sell. Jerry Garcia's first solo album had been released by Warners in January, 1972. The album was titled Garcia. More so than many people, Jerry Garcia was someone often addressed by his last name, even by old friends, so it was almost like a nickname.

It was common in the 1960s and 70s for record companies to title the first solo album after the artist: Neil Young, Stephen Stills and Jackson Browne's first albums were named after themselves, for example. The naming of Garcia's first album was particularly appropriate, since he played most of the instruments (all save the drums), and sang and wrote all the songs, save of course for Hunter's lyrics. In that sense, Garcia was very much a solo album. The Grateful Dead were rising in popularity in 1972, and Garcia was quite successful (I think it went gold). Radio friendly songs like "Deal" and "Sugaree" certainly helped.

There was no fathomable motivation to name Garcia's second album the same name as his first. The naming was so unfathomable that Grateful Dead Records themselves dropped it. Promotional copies of Garcia were imprinted with a stamp that said "Compliments Of", and people started to informally call the album Compliments Of Garcia, partially just to distinguish it from the first album. Informally, the album has been called Compliments Of Garcia ever since. The Dead.net Store now lists it as Compliments. It's not a bad title--but why couldn't they have thought of it before? Some artists with long, complex recording histories sometimes end up with the same or similarly titled albums, but usually they are a result of two different Live In Concert albums a decade apart. In 1974, Garcia had had only released two solo albums, but they both had the same name.

What had to happen for Garcia's first album on Round to have the same name as his only other solo album? There have to have been three culprits--poor planning, a failure to communicate and arrogance. On a business basis, Round Records was run by Jerry Garcia and Ron Rakow. Garcia was busy making music, however, so that meant that Rakow effectively ran the label. McNally quotes Dead attorney Hal Kant on Rakow's supposed professional credentials: "Rakow is supposed to be a serious businessman? He doesn't have a clue." Events seemed to have borne out Kant's assessment.

I have to assume that as Kahn and Garcia worked on the album, the name on the tape box or studio sheets was 'Garcia Project' or just 'Garcia.' In effect, I assume this was the working title for the album. A very fine Byrds album, Untitled, was called that because it was the name on the tape box, and when it came time for the release, the Byrds liked Untitled better than their planned name Phoenix. However, Untitled was a clever, ironic title, attracting attention to an excellent album.  So it's not hard to see how the solo album had a working title of Garcia, but still hard to see how it really got released with that name.

Garcia himself was never someone who liked to name things. Indeed, for all his eloquence, Garcia didn't even write lyrics. One of Robert Hunter's lesser duties, apart from lyrics, was as the designated Namer Of Things. If Garcia had had a little foresight, he would have asked Hunter to come up with a name. Hunter would have listened to the tape, and thought of something appropriate--perhaps even Compliments Of Garcia. Once Garcia had accepted Hunter's title, that would have carried the day. But what with recording Mars Hotel, touring, playing with Merl Saunders and numerous other things, Garcia seems never to have asked Hunter, nor made any other plans to name the album.

What commentary there is about Ron Rakow mostly concerns his alleged dubious business practices. Those alleged practices aside, Rakow seems to have kept his own counsel (literally, with respect to the Round attorney) and not let anyone outside of Garcia know what was planned. It would be conventional even in a small record company to ask what the title of a forthcoming album might be, but I don't think Rakow had those conversations with people. I suspect he wasn't very direct with anyone about it, actually, but at the very least if the subject had come up, almost anyone in Grateful Dead circles would have mentioned that the first album was called Garcia.However,  I don't think anyone had those kinds of conversations with Rakow, even casually.

Finally, however, the most likely explanation for the Garcia title was Ron Rakow's arrogance. Rakow, for all his big talk, probably didn't know or didn't remember that the first album was also called Garcia. Rakow had probably taken steps that committed Round to an album title of Garcia, such as printing the cover. Rakow took great pride in saying how he had found a way to print extra copies of the Wake Of The Flood album cover cheaply (and then sold the records as cut-outs, another tangential subject), so it's not far-fetched to think that Rakow had a "deal' on the covers. Rakow does not seem to be a person who would admit a mistake or listen to reason, nor would he have had any interest in spending extra money to change the album title. If you've ever worked in a place where the boss doesn't listen, all sorts of stupid decisions are confirmed merely to insure that the boss never has to admit that he has wrong.

The strange history of the Garcia album title suggests that Rakow ran Round Records as a sloppy, private kingdom where he listened to no one save Garcia. Since Garcia wasn't interested in details, that left Rakow to manage Round Records unchecked. It looks like Garcia was working on numerous projects, with the idea that Round would be the vehicle for releasing them. Yet Round only intermittently released anything, often long after the musicians had moved on.

Old And In The Way, Round Records greatest legacy, recorded in October 1973 and released in February 1975 (RX-103)

Round Records Timeline 1973-1974
A detailed look at the chronology of Round Records shows how the label was dependent on money borrowed against the Grateful Dead. When Rakow found a source of cash, a few albums popped out out of the pipeline. However, each cash infusion obligated the Dead to more pressure from either their creditors or the record company, and the cycle repeated itself. What I believe to be Garcia's inspired vision for an independent record label turned into a tool for Ron Rakow to use Garcia as a fulcrum to leverage the Grateful Dead for cash. The Wall Of Sound and the Grateful Dead movie were also a huge cash drain on the band, leaving Round begging for scraps. The history of Round releases is intimately tied to cash infusions to the Dead, each time indebting the band further. No one seems to have gotten paid for a Round release, because the label was a financial house of cards in the first place.

• March 1973: Warner Brothers releases Bear's Choice: Grateful Dead become independent.
• April 1973: Grateful Dead Records launched, funded by a loan from the First National Bank Of Boston and an overseas distribution deal with Atlantic Records (for $300,000).
• April 1973: Old And In The Way (founded in March) records at Mickey Hart's Barn studio in Novato. The tapes have never surfaced
• May 1973: Ned Lagin moves to California, and begins working on what will become Seastones at The Barn with Garcia, Hart, Phil Lesh and others
• July 1973: Jerry Garcia records at Keystone Berkeley with Merl Saunders, for Fantasy Records
• August 1973: Grateful Dead record Wake Of The Flood at the Record Plant
• October 1973: Wake Of The Flood released on Grateful Dead Records
• Summer or Fall 1973: Round Records established
• January 1974: Live At Keystone, by Garcia/Saunder/Kahn, Vitt, released on Fantasy
• January 1974: The Dead start making plans for The Wall Of Sound, which will ultimately eat up all their increased concert revenue
• February 1974: John Kahn begins producing the Garcia album in Southern California
• April 1974: The Grateful Dead begin recording Mars Hotel at CBS Studios in San Francicso
• Spring 1974: Robert Hunter records Tales Of The Great Rum Runners at The Barn. It's possible that a Roadhog album of Hunter songs was recorded just before this
• June 1974: Round Records releases Rum Runners and Garcia
• June 1974: Grateful Dead Records releases Mars Hotel
• Late 1974: Garcia pays David Grisman $1000 to make an album out of Owsley's Old And In The Way live recordings. Neither Grisman nor any other band member receive another cent from the record, and Grisman and Garcia do not speak for the next 14 years.
• October 1974: Rakow and Garcia impulsively decide to make a movie out of the band's stand at Winterland (McNally p.478)
• Late 1974: Grateful Dead Records is effectively bankrupt, and Rakow arranges a distribution deal with United Artists Records

Whatever the grand plans of the Dead at the beginning of the year, they collapsed under the weight of the Wall Of Sound and poor financial management. Round Records had only released two albums in June 1974, and had been silent since that time. The Dead were rescued by the UA deal, but UA in turn demanded product from the Dead. However, early 1975 saw a flurry of releases from Round. UA probably didn't care, one way or the another, but accepted the releases as a condition of signing the Dead. The implication, however, seems to have been that any Round releases after the first two were throttled by a lack of cash.

The Old And In The Way album was released 16 months after it was recorded because there was no money to release it earlier. The fact that Grisman, nor any other band member, was not paid for the record is another implicit sign of poor fiscal management by Rakow.  Lagin has complained as well that the released Seastones was just a small piece of what they were trying to accomplish musically, and he has alluded to pressure from the record company. Whether that was directly from Round or indirectly from UA, it's another clue that despite attempting to provide musical freedom, Round's artists ended up unhappy.

Keith & Donna (RX-014), released February 1975 (RX-104)

Round Records Timeline 1975-1976

• January 1975: Jerry Garcia and Dan Healy record The Good Old Boys, with David Nelson, Frank Wakefield, Chubby Wise and Don Reno, at Mickey Hart's Barn. The Pistol Packin' Mama album will not be released for another 13 months.
• January 1975: Work is completed on a studio above Bob Weir's garage in Mill Valley. The studio is called Ace's. Per McNally, the band Heroes are the first to record there (McNally p.482). Garcia actually played on some sessions, which were released decades later on the Bill Cutler album Crossing The Line, but I have to think that a Round release was at least contemplated.
• February 1975: Round releases the Old And In The Way album (RX-103). With financing from the UA distribution contract, Round could release a flurry of albums
• February 1975: The  Grateful Dead, with Mickey Hart back on board, began playing at Ace's
• March 1975: Round releases the Keith And Donna album (RX-104)
• March 1975: Round releases Tiger Rose, the second Hunter album (RX-105)
• April 1975: Round releases Seastones, the Ned Lagin project (RX-106). A sticker on the album credited to Lagin and Phil Lesh, because UA wanted a member of the Grateful Dead's name on the record.
• June 1975: Under pressure from UA to deliver product, the Dead record Blues For Allah in two weeks at Ace's
• August-September 1975: Jerry Garcia begins recording Reflections at Ace's. There is a distinct whiff that Garcia needs to produce a salable album for UA, both to finance the Dead's operations and also the Grateful Dead movie.
• September 1975: Blues For Allah is released on Grateful Dead Records, but with a United Artists record number. 
• October-November 1975: Jerry Garcia records the other half of Reflections at His Masters Wheels in San Francisco, formerly Pacific High Recorders (and then Alembic Studios). He records with John Kahn, Ron Tutt and Nicky Hopkins, although Larry Knechtel is brought in to help on keyboards.

There were no Round releases between April 1975 and February 1976, when Reflections was released. The spurt of releases in early 1975 came via a cash infusion from UA. When that dried up, Round was dormant. What cash there was seems to have been absorbed by the movie, but once again Rakow's cash management can hardly be respected. Rakow made another deal with United Artists in early 1976, which provided another spurt of releases on Round. However, once Rakow wrote himself a check for  $225,000 in Spring 1976, the Dead found themselves broke and owing United Artists a Grateful Dead album. The regrettable Steal Your Face was the result.

Diga, by the Diga Rhythm Band, produced and led by Mickey Hart, the final release on Round (RX-110)

Round Records Timeline 1976
February 1976: Round/UA releases Reflections (RX-107)
March 1976: Round/UA releases Kingfish (RX-108). Weir was a member of Kingfish at the time, and the album was recorded at Ace's. Reflections and Kingfish were the sort of albums that UA would have hoped for when they financed the Grateful Dead.
March 1976: Round/UA releases Pistol Packin' Mama by The Good Old Boys (RX-109). UA cannot have been interested in this record, and it sank quickly. UA probably saw it as a rock star indulgence, like letting Frank Zappa release an album by a group that included his daughter's nanny.
May 1976: McNally details how Rakow had allowed the Dead's finances to become disastrous (pp.488-492). Rakow writes himself a huge check that bankrupts Grateful Dead Records, but Garcia refuses to insist on prosecution.
June 1976: Round/UA releases Diga, by the Diga Rhythm Band. This too was probably seen by UA as a rock star indulgence.
June 1976: Grateful Dead/UA release Steal Your Face. The whole record company experiment comes to an end. With few other options, and a movie to finance, the Grateful Dead have already returned to the road.

Looking Backwards
I will admit that I have drawn some very specific conclusions from scattered, fragmentary evidence. Nonetheless, any serious consideration of Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead's musical goals have to account for Round Records. There are so many things that are hard to explain: the title of Garcia's solo album, the strange, intermittent pattern of releases and the numerous unheard projects demand an explanation that hangs together as a plausible narrative. If someone can come up with a better explanation for the strange history of Round Records, I would be more than willing to try it on for size. For now, I'll have to stick with my own explanation of events.

In the early 1970s, Jerry Garcia, other members of the Grateful Dead and their fellow Marin musicians found themselves working on a wide variety of music, only some of which had any commercial potential. With Mickey Hart's studio, and then Bob Weir's, it seemed like all this music could be recorded and produced. Jerry Garcia and Ron Rakow hatched a plan to start a self-funded, independent record company to put out those albums. Garcia himself was the star attraction, but the door was open to bluegrass, electronic music, songwriters, drummers and many other kinds of weirdness. A record company not run for some corporate suits, but one run by and for the musicians themselves. It was a great idea, and some very good music got recorded.

Overrreach and a cash squeeze got the better of Round Records. Some ill-advised management decisions, possibly connected to some very dubious business practices, required that Round was beholden to the vagaries of the Grateful Dead's own very-difficult finances. The Round recording artists found themselves unhappy with both the released material and the lack of money forthcoming, making Round very similar to a regular record company. When Grateful Dead Records evaporated under the weight of its obligations to United Artists and Ron Rakow's self-dealing, Round Records disappeared with it. Such grand plans were not undertaken again, and rarely spoken of.