#ron tutt

TCB to JGB

Rest in Peace Ron Tutt

Flashback on 60: Jerry Garcia Band: Let It Rock: The Jerry Garcia Collection, Vol. 2 (2009)

Editor’s note: The year 2025 marks the 60th anniversary of the Grateful Dead’s birth. This is the third Flashback on 60, a periodic feature in which Sound Bites revisits the band’s career.

With the Dead on hiatus and its status unknown to fans, Jerry Garcia and was previewing what his music would sound like for the balance of the 1970s with his new Jerry Garcia Band.

Recorded Nov. 17-18, 1975, in California and released in 2009, Let It Rock: The Jerry Garcia Collection, Vol. 2, captures the inaugural JGB powerful from the gate with acoustic piano playing a prominent role in music that was more rooted in the ground than in the cosmos.

Keyboardist Nicky Hopkins serves as Garcia’s nominal co-frontman with the rhythm section of Ron Tutt, on break from his full-time gig as Elvis Presley’s drummer, and bassist John Kahn, the only musician other than Garcia to be a permanent member of JGB providing the floor.

Acting as onstage emcee, playing his own material and foreshadowing the sound Keith Godchaux would bring to both the Dead and Garcia Band for the rest of his tenure in Garcia’s orbit, Hopkins is an indispensable element who was ultimately dispensed. But here, he is Garcia’s foil, playing both in support and in counterpoint to the titular bandleader, as the two inspire each other in ways that reverberate though the decades on pristinely preserved sound waves.

And Garcia occasionally ceded the group, handing Hopkins the reins on “Pig’s Boogie,” which gallops for 10 rollicking instrumental minutes; giving over the stage entirely for the tender “Lady Sleeps;” and closing the collection with Hopkins’ Zappaesque “Edward, the Mad Shirt Grinder,“ also wordless.

But this was ultimately Garcia’s sandbox. And he kicked around in it gleefully choosing from relative rarities like Chuck Berry’s title track to the Rolling Stones’ “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” to songs both original (“Sugaree,” “They Love Each Other”) and borrowed (“Sitting in Limbo,” “That’s What Love Will Make You Do”) that Garcia would include in his extracurricular activities for the rest of his life.

Though JGB’s setlists were less varied than the Dead’s and despite the deluge of material sprung from the vault in century No. 21, Let it Rock is one Sound Bites return to often. And the reasons are myriad and mostly novel: the gregarious Hopkins and his incongruous contributions; the freshness of this new outlet Garcia had created for himself; the roots of JGB’s two-decade blossoming; and indisputably glorious performances (not novel for the Garcia Band) make it a must-have.

Read Sound Bites’ previous Flashback on 60 entries here.

Song Review: Jerry Garcia Band - “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” (Live, Feb. 13, 1976)

If the Grateful Dead played “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” as a lament - and they did - then the Jerry Garcia Band rendered its early takes on the Bob Dylan number as a death march.

The version in question dates to Feb. 13, 1976, before JGB added the reggae chorus, and drags on for 19 minutes of funereal balladry that recedes briefly around the 12-minute mark when Garcia’s guitar hits on a spiraling motif that Keith Godchaux mimics on piano.

This beauty-in-subtlety moment is, alas, fleeting as the music wanes and Donna Jean Godchaux opts for some off-key wails on the final refrain. It’s not JGB’s finest moment.

“Knockin’” follows “The Harder They Come” ahead of the June 14 release of GarciaLive Volume 21.

Grade card: Jerry Garcia Band - “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” (Live - 2/13/76) - C-

Y de Billy Joel, Jerry García y Carpenters (que tienen nuevo libro), entre muchos otros artistas con los que tocó durante muchos años o colaboró esporádicamente. 

Tutt fue parte de la TCB Band (Taking Care of Business) original de Elvis Presley junto al guitarra solista James Burton, el bajista Jerry Scheff, el guitarrista rítmico John Wilkinson, y el teclista Larry Muhoberac, desde su primera actuación en Las Vegas en 1969, hasta el fallecimiento de Elvis en 1977. Músicos de alto nivel al servicio del “Rey”. 

RIP Ron Tutt

TCB to JGB