Album Review: Jerry Garcia Band - GarciaLive Volume 8: November 23rd, 1991, Bradley Center
If you were one of the lucky ones inside Milwaukee’s Bradley Center with the Jerry Garcia Band on Nov. 23, 1991, it can now be confirmed that the concert was as outstanding as you remember it to have been.
GarciaLive Volume 8 presents that show - 15 songs in 130 minutes - in sparking, soundboard glory and it is nothing short of magnificent. If you weren’t there, this recording’ll make you wish you had been.
These Garcia Band archival releases are in many ways more important than similar releases by Garcia’s other group, a little outfit known as the Grateful Dead. Because unlike the Dead, JGB was not taper-friendly, which means circulating recordings were made surreptitiously and often came out sounding muddy and unfulfilling.
This is not that.
What’s striking about this edition of the Garcia Band is how much noise it made with just the namesake guitar, Melvin Seal’s churchy organ and the rubbery rhythm section of John Kahn - every bit as non-traditional a bassist as Phil Lesh - and drummer David Kemper, whose just-off-the-beat drumming resembles Ringo Starr’s best work and gooses this music along to great effect. Backing vocalists Jackie LaBranch and Gloria Jones add to the fullness and Garcia, even though he had to work harder in this slimmed-down outfit, seems more satisfied that he did with the contemporaneous Dead. He plays and sings with gusto, eschewing the MIDI effects he favored in his full-time gig and employing his vibrato when the songs moved him, which they often did in this setting.
Featuring just four Garcia-Robert Hunter originals, Volume 8 reads like a musical biography of what made Garcia, Garcia. Songs by Van Morrison (“Bright Side of the Road”), Bob Dylan (“Tangled up in Blue”), Bruce Cockburn (“Waiting for a Miracle”) and many others make appearances and are played so enthusiastically that you can hear LaBranch and/or Jones clapping along on some of them.
Whether bouncing his way through Eric Clapton’s “Lay Down Sally,” meandering his way across the Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” or grinning his way through Norton Buffalo’s “Ain’t No Bread in the Breadbox,” Garcia sounds like Garcia, even when playing what casual fans might thing of as un-Garcia-like music.
But if Garcia was anything, he was a sponge who soaked up and wrung out music of all kinds. That’s why gospel-flavored tracks like “My Brothers and Sisters” and “That Lucky Old Sun” - in which Seals’ organ solo seems to come straight out of a Baptist service - sound right at home against secular originals like “Cats Under the Stars,” the grungy blues of “Think” and the urban soul of the Manhattans’ “Shining Star.”
There are many reasons some Dead Heads - including Sound Bites - find the Garcia Band more satisfying than the Dead.
GarciaLive Volume 8 has 15 of them.
Grade card: Jerry Garcia Band - GarciaLive Volume 8: November 23rd, 1991, Bradley Center - A
Track list: Cats Under the Stars; They Love Each Other; Lay Down Sally; The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down; Reuben and Cherise; Money Honey; My Brothers and Sisters; Deal; Bright Side of the Road; Waiting for a Miracle; Think; Shining Star; Ain’t No Bread in the Breadbox; That Lucky Old Sun; Tangled up in Blue
3/13/17
