1973 was a transitional year for Jerry Garcia. Along with his duties in the Grateful Dead, who were begrudgingly careening into celebrity, he could also be found hanging out (and keeping his chops) in Bay Area music clubs for pick-up jam sessions. Two groups formed out of these communal hangs – the first being the bluegrass supergroup Old And In The Way, and the second was commonly referred to as simply ‘The Group’. There was no need to label what was intended to be spontaneous and without commitment…until Betty Cantor, dame of the golden reels, set up shop and recorded two nights at the famed Keystone Club in Berkeley, California.

The jam sessions originally began in 1970 at the Jefferson Airplane clubhouse, The Matrix. It was there that drummer Bill Vitt, organist Howard Wales and bassist John Kahn backed seminal blues players before Jerry started coming around. With Garcia in the mix, the sound in favor of futuristic jazz explorations resulting in the spacey Hooteroll? album. Howard was later replaced by jazz pianist and organist Merl Saunders who had just returned from the east coast. The repertoire also changed – the jazz foundation was still there but R&B (Smokey Robinson’s “I Second That Emotion” and Holland–Dozier’s “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)”) was reintroduced along with reggae (Jimmy Cliff’s “The Harder They Come”), Broadway show tunes, and of course a healthy dose of Bob Dylan. Seemingly random in assortment, the material was all tied together by Kahn and Vitt’s funky backbeat – one that allowed Garcia and Saunders to weave in and out effortlessly.

When Cantor and her partner, Rex Jackson, locked in the reels and pressed record on July 11–12, 1973 they were capturing four immensely creative musicians at their peak. While the Keystone gigs have been previously released via a series of records in the 1970s and 1980s – Keystone Companions: The Complete 1973 Fantasy Recordings collects every single note from those two nights.

Merl Saunders & Jerry Garcia :: Positively 4th Street

Below is our conversation with the sole living member from the group, Bill Vitt, who sheds some light on the group and recordings from those nights.

Aquarium Drunkard: What was your background prior to 1973? Who were you playing with?

Bill Vitt: I played with the Jerry Garcia Band, Bill Champlin, Howard Wales, Michael Bloomfield, and many others. I also led two bands: Rumors and Main Man and The Sides. Also did a lot of studio work, a few of the records I played on: Hooteroll? with Jerry and Howard, 3 records with Brewer and Shipley (One Toke Over The Line), 2 or 3 with Tom Fogerty, Danny Cox, Merl Saunders, Phil Wood, Last Days at the Fillmore (one song) and all the records that were released from Keystone gigs. I moved to Los Angeles in ‘65 and did many demo sessions and master recordings at Don Costa’s studio on Fairfax (Frank Sinatra used the same studio) with Eydie Gormé and Kathy Carlson. I also played with The Coasters.

Less séance, more opening of the gates — those were our closing thoughts on Weyes Blood’s 2014 longplayer, The Innocents. And with that in mind Natalie Mering’s latest, Front Row Seat to Earth, ushers us through those gates and into the hinterlands. It’s here that we find her old world brand of folk married by blood oath to a more elegant, almost baroque chamber pop. As a whole the album evokes an atmosphere reminiscent of private press psych-folk and progressive exploration, none more evident than on the stunning “Be Free”. Transcending the shackles of love, codependency and isolation, the track rides waves of bubbling synths and a floats with a cathartic weightlessness, free in spirit. words / c depasquale

Weyes Blood :: Be Free

“For me, it’s a bit like when they discover a frozen reptile or something and it starts running real quick once it’s reanimated,” says Mark Stewart, firebrand, techno-philosopher and alternative agitator, says of his decision to reboot his legendary post-punk band The Pop Group in 2010.

Since then, the Bristol-based band has issued two albums, Citizen Zombie in 2015 and the recently released Honeymoon on Mars, records expanding on the polymorphic range of the band’s classic late ’70s, early ’80s works Y and For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? Blending dub, grime, rock, and free jazz, Honeymoon on Mars finds Stewart and co. fresh and taut. It’s far from your average “let’s get the band back together” vibe, but that’s fitting for a group which transformed and mutated as a matter of principle, often within the same song.

Talking with Stewart is a lot like drinking water from a burst fire hydrant. He free associates and offers fascinating insights every other word. He hops between time frames and peppers his thoughts with self-deprecating cracks and wickedly funny jokes. His voice — one informed by radical weirdness and boundless creativity — feels like the kind of voice we need now, as much as ever. Following, our phone discussion with Stewart, which has been condensed and edited for clarity.

The Pop Group :: Zipperface

Aquarium Drunkard: This is your second release since reforming the Pop Group in 2015. What inspired this new burst of life for the band?

Mark Stewart: It’s really kind of weird. Everything’s changed. I wasn’t sleeping when the Pop Group finished. The last-ever Pop Group concert was this huge rally in Trafalgar Square in London. I was working for this thing called the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. That was the last ever Pop Group concert, but it was also my first-ever solo show.

For me, doing stuff is doing stuff, whoever I’m doing it with. When we reformed, it was out of the blue. All of us are against “heritage” things. As soon as me and Gareth [Sager] started talking about it, we thought no, no. We were properly punk in that we were independent. We controlled our catalog and fought to defend our intellectual property, right? So we started talking about reissues, because there was a huge demand for stuff which hadn’t been out for years and all these young bands were talking about [our records]. Then suddenly, I get this phone call from All Tomorrow’s Parties, and they have these underground celebrities curating the lineups. Matt Groening, the Simpsons guy, wanted me to reform the Pop Group and Iggy to reform the Stooges.

I just thought, “What a weird concept.” I had Homer Simpson going ‘round and ‘round in my head. And we’re looking more like Homer Simpson day by day now. [Laughs] It was a real shock to the system. I had been doing these weird collaborations with Kenneth Anger the filmmaker and political things and performance art, and I thought, “Can I approach working with these people as a new thing?” We were still all friends, but we wanted to ignore what came in the past. Every Pop Group song was different; even within the same song we can change styles, so we thought let’s just give it ago.

Address Los Angeles, a new recurring feature on Aquarium Drunkard, explores the lesser-to-unknown corners of LA: be it an address, an artist, or a fleeting thought.

The mailroom at 6311 Yucca Street in Hollywood must’ve been pretty busy in the mid-60s. You could join The Partridge Family Fan Club by sending in a postcard; for $15 you could become a minister, by mail, with the Church of Universal Brotherhood (whose selling point was simply that being a minister, with a flock, exempted you from the draft); or write a complaint letter to Seven Seventy Publications because one of their magazines, maybe Raunchy, Vegas Playgirl, Nifty Nylons or Nu-Color Nudist wasn’t smutty enough for your specialty interests. You could also send in your own lyrics to Preview Records and have the great Rodd Keith, pioneer of the song-poem genre, set it to music and sing your words.

Or you could, for a short time, stop into the offices of Hiback Records. There you’d find a roughly 30-year old Gerry Hibbs, former Chapter President of Phi Kappa Tao at UCLA, and his fellow Bruin alum, Mike Hogan: the President and VP, respectively, of Hiback.

Tradition runs rampant around Thanksgiving: generations of old recipes, football, Alice’s Restaurant, The Last Waltz, and, of course, a parade of balloons shutting down NYC. What else do you need? If you thought you were covered in the Thanksgiving tradition department, we did too…until a few years ago, when someone blew the dust off a long lost tape — Doug Sahm’s Thanksgiving Jam.

Thanksgiving weekend, 1972: the Grateful Dead found themselves in Austin, allowing Garcia and Lesh to rendezvous with an old Bay Area running buddy, Mr. Tex-Mex himself, Doug Sahm, and piano-journeyman Leon Russell, at the famed Armadillo World Headquarters for a musical cornucopia of roots music. No genre was left untouched – blues, bluegrass, R&B, rock & roll, honky tonk and, naturally, Bob Dylan. All played with an ad hoc band, including members of Texas psychedelic pranksters The 13th Floor Elevators and Shiva’s Headband, with a setlist that effortlessly bounces from hellcat versions of Kristofferson’s “Me & Bobby McGee” and the Stones’ “Wild Horses”, to a don’t-spill-your-beer “T For Texas”, saddled with stompin-the-nails-out-of-the-floorboard cuts like “Hey Bo Diddley” and “Money Honey”. This is a shitkicker of show, best served turned up, with fistfuls of turkey and pint glass of your favorite sumthin’. words/ d norsen

download/tracklisting after the jump…

Since the early 2010s, we’ve been enamored with the output of Paradise of Bachelors.

Founded by Brendan Greaves and Christopher Smith, the label’s aim of “documenting, curating, and releasing under-recognized musics of the American vernacular, historical and contemporary alike” has led to releases by modern acts like AD favorites Michael Chapman, Hiss Golden Messenger, Weather Station, Steve Gunn, Itasca, Nathan Bowles, and more, as well as illuminating reissue projects by Terry Allen, Mike Cooper, Lavender Country, and more.

Greaves and Smith are not only connoisseurs of sound; they similarly invested in art, cooking, and chiefly, reading. After a few fascinating conversations with them, we asked them to assemble something of a “Paradise of Bachelors Reader,” focused on the fields of science and fantasy fiction. The boys did not disappoint, assembling a list as deeply considered as their discography. – j woodbury

“Learn the true topography: the monstrous and wonderful archetypes are not inside you, not inside your consciousness; you are inside them, trapped and howling to get out.”

– R.A. Lafferty, The Devil Is Dead (1971)

As a record label comprised of old friends with largely aligned, often weirdly telepathic, curatorial interests—decidedly not the same thing as taste, which is a bourgeois ruse, but don’t get me started on that—Paradise of Bachelors has long nurtured a vexed relationship with genre. It fulfills certain pragmatic needs, of course, to discuss expressive culture, and music in particular, by classifying and categorizing it. But it’s such a sloppy, politicized business, often more related to the identity of the listener, and the perceived identity of the artist—race, class, geography, faith, etc.—than to actual emic cultural values, auditory information, or slippery musicological signifiers like “style,” that we tend to avoid it when possible, at least amongst ourselves. We live in a fractious, fearful world that requires no further divisions, aesthetic or otherwise. (“World music” and “folk music” are perhaps the most egregious and noxious examples of the diluted meaninglessness of musical genres, but they all collapse upon close inspection.)

Our weekly two hour show on SIRIUS/XMU, channel 35, can be heard twice every Friday – Noon EST with an encore broadcast at Midnight EST.

SIRIUS 457: Jean Michel Bernard – Générique Stephane ++ The Mekons – Where Were You? ++ Ought – Pleasant Heart ++ Wire – Pink Flag ++ Fugazi – Reclamation ++ Liliput – Die Matrosen ++ Josef K – Drone ++ The Fall – Frenz ++ Mission of Burma – New Disco ++ Flipper – Ever ++ The Soft Boys – Like A Real Smoothie ++ Patti Smith – Redondo Beach ++ Lou Reed – Caroline Says I ++ John Cale – Barracuda ++ Leonard Cohen – Everybody Knows ++ Leonard Cohen – Darkness ++ Leonard Cohen – Anyhow ++ Tom Waits – Goin’ Out West ++ Bonnie “Prince” Billy – Madeleine Mary ++ Nick Cave – Stagger Lee ++ Les Olivensteins – Fier De Ne Rien Faire ++ White Fence – Trouble Is Trouble Never Seen ++ Ghetto Cross – Dog Years ++ Lizzy Mercier Descloux – Wawa ++ Love & Rockets – Rain Bird ++ The Vaselines – Slushy ++ The Art Museums – Oh, Modern Girls ++ Ultimate Painting – Kodiak ++ R.E.M. – Stumble ++ The dBs – Moving In Your Sleep ++ Amen Dunes – Spirits Are Parted ++ Cass McCombs – Bum Bum Bum ++ Steve Gunn – Ancient Jules

*You can listen, for free, online with the SIRIUS three day trial — just submit an email address and they will send you a password.
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Neil Young took Crazy Horse out of the barn 40 years ago this month for a coast-to-coast US tour. Here’s the semi-official account, via Jimmy McDonough’s Shakey:

Joel Bernstein was shocked to discover that the audience was just as wasted as the band. “It was just a bunch of kids drunk and on reds for the first time. Not just beer and pot – it was reds and vodka, tons of beer. You’d look over at people who were vomiting on the red velvet seats. I think Neil was too fucked up to notice.” Bernstein was equally appalled by the crudity of the new Horse ensemble, believing it lacked the rhythmic finesse of the original lineup. “I’d marvel at the degree to which the band succeeded in bringing down Neil’s every attempt to soar,” he said.

Sounds like a trainwreck, right? I wasn’t there, of course, but the tapes tell a different tale. The November ‘76 tour is filled with incredible, raw performances. Crude? Sure, but who doesn’t love crude Crazy Horse. This is a trainwreck you want to be a part of.

Neil’s opening acoustic sets are fantastic, with a big helping of then-new or unreleased tunes like “Pocahontas,” “Campaigner,” “Give Me Strength,” and “No One Seems To Know.” For the best representation of Neil solo in late ‘76, go straight to Joel Bernstein’s own compilation, The Bernstein Tapes, which have been bootlegged for decades now, and feature some wild monologues in addition to the music. The ghost of Judy Garland shows up in Fort Worth.

There are also plenty of full shows – varying in terms of sound quality, but all pretty thrilling – especially when Crazy Horse joins Neil. Check out the Berkeley show, with a definitive electric “Peace of Mind.” Or the Madison gig, which includes an insane 17-minute “Like A Hurricane,” during which Neil puts down his guitar and starts pounding on the piano. Neil’s 31st birthday at Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre gets very loose. “I’m like Baskin Robbins now,” Neil says, already sounding fairly toasted in the opening acoustic set. There’s plenty of howling at the moon going on here. A few days later, the gang hit NYC, sending “Cortez” dancing across the water and dragging out a truly wasted “Helpless.”

While some of his neo-Takoma School peers have plugged in and/or headed in more straightforward singer-songwriter directions, Daniel Bachman’s focus remains firmly on the acoustic guitar. And that’s a very good thing. Bachman’s new self-titled effort on Three Lobed Records is a master class in fingerpicking and slide guitar that’s deeply felt and skillfully rendered.

Check out the unassuming perfection of “Watermelon Slices on a Blue Bordered Plate,” wherein Bachman unfolds an easygoing tune into a kind of cosmic purity. It’s a piece that can stand proudly next to the similar jams by Jack Rose and John Fahey — meaning there’s serious magic at work here. Elsewhere, the guitarist digs into two explorations of “Brightleaf Blues,” each moody note hanging like an unanswered question, accompanied by a drone that somehow shifts from piercing to warm and enveloping, filtering the light, stained glass-style. And the gorgeous version of the old hymn “Farther Along” is a serene prayer and a well-earned closer. Bachman is in it for the long haul, and we’re all lucky for it. words / t wilcox

Daniel Bachman :: Watermelon Slices On A Blue Bordered Plate

Related: The Lagniappe Sessions :: Daniel Bachman covers Jack Rose / William Moore