Furthur at the Fox

Artifact of the Week: Signed Furthur Fox Theater Poster

Tape of the Week: 9/18/09

This week, the Palace would like to go Furthur!  

With Phil Lesh and Bob Weir's new band in the middle of their first winter tour (did anyone see those freaky-great photos of the Wall of Sound behind them at Radio City Music Hall?!?), I thought it would be fun to revisit the start of this amazing new group, check out a cool signed artifact from their first show together, and link up to a tasty matrix recording of that night that began to circulate back in December.

 
2009 was a great year for Deadheads.  With the remaining members of the Grateful Dead out on the road for the first time in five years (under the banner of "The Dead" with Warren Haynes on lead guitar), the spring tour proved to be a success for both the band and deadheads. It was one of first times since Jerry's passing in 1995 that I had seen everyone around me at a show so damn excited! It was great to see.  Dark Star Palace will have to do a feature on these shows in the future...  

 

The momentum started with the "Obama show" at the Warfield in February 2008 and it looked like the boys were still in good spirits and were ready to have some fun on the road.  An early indicator that they were moving back to a more traditional Grateful Dead approach to the shows was that Warren Haynes was essentially playing the "Jerry-role" in the band and was given free license to sing most of Jerry's songs, help lead the band through jams and transitions, and basically be treated as a full member of the band.  This was a marked contrast to earlier incarnations of the band (the Other Ones, etc.) where they would have a variety of different guitarists trying everything but NOT to play like or take on Jerry's role...

Anyway, I don't want to rat-hole here, but there were indicators on the Dead's spring tour that the band was ready to head back to being more like the Grateful Dead. They were coming to grips with it...finally!  After the last "Dead" show wrapped up in July at the Gorge, I remember I spoke to a friend who had run into Bob Weir's wife in the parking lot of Whole Foods in Marin. He knew her and she mentioned to him that Bob was "really excited about this new band that he is helping form."  My friend was a bit confused, as this sure didn't sound like Ratdog or the Dead...and no rumors had come out yet about any "new" band.  It turns out that Bob couldn't "help talking about how great this new group sounded and that the rehearsals were going great."  There was even talk of a tour in the months to come.  What a surprise it was when word hit the street that a new band called "Furthur" had booked the recently refurbished Fox Theater in Oakland for a 3-night run to test the band out!

After scooping up tickets for all three nights (they sold out VERY fast), I began to research what the deal was with this new group. I found out quickly that there were a few jaw droppers.  First off, both Phil Lesh and Bob Weir were in the group...the 2 guys in the band who had rumored to be at odds (probably mostly with business, not music) in the past. It seems that the Dead tour had really helped these guys re-bond.  Second, there was no Mickey or Billy in the band.  Folks are STILL bringing that one up. Finally, the big bomb was that Bob and Phil had recruited the "Jerry-guy" from Dark Star Orchestra...a Grateful Dead cover-band (this is not a accurate picture of course, since DSO is THE GD cover band on the scene that has been blowing folks minds for years...so no disrespect meant here).  When I heard that John Kadlecik was going to take the lead guitar slot, I couldn't help but think that this was either the worst, most Vegas'y move ever made...OR it was pure genius.  It turned out to be the later. By getting a guy who had Jerry's chops, knew the entire Grateful Dead songbook and most importantly, had a great Jerry-vibe when he played, it allowed Bob and Phil to approach their playing in the band like they did for 30+ years with the Grateful Dead.

All three of the Fox shows turned out to be fantastic.  The venue was a true mind-bender.  With a Moroccan-themed bar/restaurant attached to the theater with full-on in/out access, the old theater's funky lighting rig next to the bathrooms, and the wildest 40+ foot "Hollywood Hindu Gods" with eyes fully lit up that flanked both sides of the stage...well, it has to be the ultimate spot to hear and see an incarnation of the Dead!

This week's Artifact of the Week is a signed poster from the first night.  I first saw these when I walked in, and after a moments hesitation, was something I knew I had to pick up.  The Mike Dubois-designed poster is number 11 (the Eleven!) of 500.  They had the first 40 of these signed by Phil and Bob...and since the poster is so well done with their custom guitar and bass looking like smoke coming out of the steam train, it ended up being a must-have for a collector freak like myself.

 

This week's Tape of the Week is the matrix recording of the first Fox show that came out in December of last year.  We all knew it would only be a matter of time before a matrix was made from the soundboard and audience recordings that had circulated just days after the show.  NOTE: it is worth your time to check out all 3 of these Fox shows.  They are all great, but the first night with Bob and Phil slowly getting the train chugging down the track with The Other One (a perfect Furthur band opener!) is priceless.  A new band had been born, pouring it's light into ashes.... Check this band out while you can! Such a long, long time to be gone, and a short time to be there!

Here is a link to the stream of the 9/18 matrix:  

• 9/18/09 

Furthur

Fox Theater, Oakland, CA
Friday, September 18, 2009

Jam ->
The Other One ->
The Wheel ->
Jack Straw
The Music Never Stopped ->
Bird Song ->
Born Cross Eyed ->
Let It Grow

Lost Sailor ->
Saint Of Circumstance
Althea
Scarlet Begonias ->
Fire On The Mountain ->
St. Stephen ->
The Eleven ->
Terrapin Station ->
Not Fade Away

Donor Rap
Touch Of Grey

Until next week at Dark Star Palace...

Owsley "Bear" Stanley: The Dark Star Palace Coffee...

Artifacts of the Week: Owsley aka Bear!

 Belt Buckles / Business Card / Signed Wall of Sound Photo

Tape of the Week:  6/20/86 (Bear Recorded!)

Some years back, on my 35th birthday, I was getting ready to head over to Alfred's Steakhouse in San Francisco to celebrate my big day with my girlfriend (now wife). As we were getting ready to leave our loft, my cell phone rings.  Since the number didn't look familiar, I let it hit voice mail. When I checked it, there was a rough voice on the line saying "Hey Unterfunken, it's Bear. What's the point of having a cell phone if you don't answer the damn thing? Call me at this number." Owsley was back in town after being out of the United States for seven years and wanted to meet up while he was here so I could get a buckle.  As last week's Tapes of the Week were Owsley-recorded, I thought it would be a nice transition this week to link to a "new" recording of his that has just hit circulation a few weeks ago.  I thought I would pair this with a few stories and artifacts from when I had coffee with Owsley "Bear" Stanley.

After touching base with him, Bear decided he wanted me to meet up with him on Sunday for some coffee over by the Grateful Dead's old business office in San Rafael.  Despite my girlfriend not having any interest in this hook-up, I told her that she should really meet Bear... it would be like meeting Thomas Edison and da Vinci. Or at least Ben Franklin. She decided to go. So off we went.  It wasn't until we got to the coffee shop that I realized I wasn't totally sure what Owsley looked like these days.  For one, he had never allowed himself to be photographed!  But I shrugged this aside as Ms. Funken and I sat and tried to figure out which of the characters that were passing by the coffee shop window might be Bear. 

 
Finally, in he came... dressed in a black leather vest, a grey ponytail and a funky leather sack. He looked very much like a older funky Deadhead.  Bear spotted me right away and greeted me with a "You must be Funken!" Owsley and I had been emailing for about a decade at this point... I remember I was first put into contact with him due to a dispute over even vs. odd-ordered harmonic distortion in solid state / vacuum tubes for recording preamp devices. We totally disagreed on this topic (I being against solid state and insisting it could not do even-ordered harmonics)... but in the end, Bear ended up being right. I found out then that Bear has no problem letting you know that he knows he is usually right!  And it's true... his path of "empirical evidence=reality" does seem to make him quite right most of the time.

For the next few hours, my girlfriend and I were treated with wonderful tales that only Owsley could tell.  Topics included: his 40+ year diet of eating only meat/animal products (and no carbohydrates), the role of line arrays in the Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound, descriptions of his process for making sculpture, how to make a "meat-shake" if you can't chew steak (due to some personal issues going on with him), X-rated stories from Janis Joplin's dressing room circa '68 that are so frickin' nasty that my girlfriend still brings them up with a shudder, how he came to be known as "Bear" (see Chewbacca attached photo for a clue), his theories on stereo/surround/mono recordings, how fame is perceived and how it made Jerry Garcia and John Lennon fall (and why he wouldn't let me have a pix of the 2 of us), why omnidirectional microphones are his favorite mics for stereo recording, how his father was a United States Senator and State Govenor, and of course, a few tidbits on the psychedelic landscape and how he became one of the key figures of making the 1960's, well, the 1960's. Obviously, there was about 300 nooks and crannies that we mined as well!  This was all after we spent some time checking out Starbucks blenders that he wanted to buy for grinding up his meat.  Funky!

Before he left, he pulled a slew of his hand-made jewelry out of his sack.  From mind-boggling / uber-detailed owl rings to peaceful moon-face buckles...  it was an amazing collection of his artwork. There must have been 20+ amazing pieces. Unfortunately, I couldn't afford any of these! But the real deal was a 1983-vintage Grateful Dead Steal Your Face bronze buckle that he had just found when clearing out his old storage space during this current trip. This is our first Owsley Artifact of the Week! 

It was "new old stock," and was something he knew I wanted to buy from him (Owsley, of course, designed the Dead's Steal Your Face logo with Bob Thomas in 1969). He talked Ms. Funken and I through his process for making the buckles, discussed bronze vs. silver, and went into detail on how he came up with the design for the buckle while in Egypt with the Dead in 1978 (see attached poster for the shows). One will notice that there is a sun disc and two serpents above the Steal Your Face on the buckle.  These images come directly from the Egyptian Book of the Dead (and related hieroglyphs) that represent the sun god "Ra" and the union of upper and lower Egypt (via the 2 snakes).

After looking at various coffee grinders that he wanted to bring back home with him, Bear agreed to sign a small Wall of Sound photo I had... this was after he refused to sign anything saying that he "never signed anything unless it was an artwork of his."  I countered that the Wall of Sound WAS an artwork of his, so therefore he shouldn't have an issue with it.  He agree with that logic and proceeded to sign it: "I made this! - Bear." 

About a year after meeting up with Owsley, and well after he had returned to Australia, he hooked me up with a second SYF buckle as I had described to him how I wanted have the buckle be the centerpiece to an Egyptian falcon-winged inlay that would go into the amp-rack stand for the Dark Star Palace's Grateful Dead McIntosh MC75, MC275, and MC2300 amplifiers.  Bear thought I was nuts to use the buckle for this purpose, so initially offered to hand-mold the same design in plastic so I could back-light the mold.  But, this turned out to be a hassle for him, so he just sent on another buckle, as well as a business card (attached, though I removed the email/phone info) via his North American art agent.  Of course, he also thought my surround sound layout for the Palace was a "recipe for crap sound" and that I would be better off using a line-array as was used in the Wall of Sound.  Of course, I disagreed.  It appears that some things will never change.

On to this week's Tape of the Week, which is an amazing new discovery for Deadheads. It is one of Owsley's late-career personal "sonic journal" recordings.  It began circulating just a few weeks ago, on January 19, 2010, on Owsley's 75th birthday. The show is from June 20, 1986 at the Greek Theater in Berkeley. Jamie Waddell digitally edited and mastered Bear's master audio cassette.  When seeded, the info on the tape was that it was recorded from "a combination of microphones and select console feeds" at the soundboard via help from Dead sound man, Dan Healy. When doing the mastering, Jamie mentioned that "no patch-work was performed (via audience recordings). This is what he (Owsley) chose to tape. Tape flip in LIG (Let It Grow). There is a good deal of reverb in places, but overall it is a very nice tape; certainly unique. This single cassette came anonymously last week in the mail, with a private tale of ownership. It is a confirmed master cassette. No more tapes are available from this person."  

As the fan photo (on the left) shows from this show, Jerry's health was on the decline. Just a few weeks after this performance in Berkeley, Jerry lapsed into a diabetic coma on July 10. He didn't come out of the coma for five days, and was not released from the hospital until his birthday on August 1st. Jerry had been severely impacted by the coma, and with the help of old friend and collaborator Merl Sanders, spent the next several months having to re-learn how to play the guitar from scratch.The Grateful Dead returned to the stage in December of 1986. By June of the following year, their new LP (In the Dark) was released, and the Dead would be bigger than they had ever been in their 20+ year journey... Check out the links below for the Owsley Matrix, as well as the audience recording that you can stream.

Set One
01. In The Midnight Hour
02. Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo
03. El Paso
04. West L.A. Fadeaway
05. Me And My Uncle ->
06. Mexicali Blues
07. Candyman
08. Let It Grow

Set Two
09. Uncle John's Band ->
10. Playing In The Band ->
11. Comes A Time -> 

[ Drums -> Space ->
I Need A Miracle -> ] <---missing

12. Black Peter ->
13. Around And Around ->
14. Good Lovin'
MISSING: Encore- Mighty Quinn

• 6/20/86 (Bear's Matrix Recording)
• 6/20/86 (Audience Recording)

Until next week at Dark Star Palace.....

Year of the Tiger

 

 

Artifact of the week: Replica of Jerry Garcia's Tiger Guitar
(w/ one of Jerry's original pickups installed)

Tape of the week: 2/13-14/70 
 

Well, it's 40 years to the day of the start of the Grateful Dead's historic 2/70 run at the Fillmore East.  Since these shows go down as many-a-heads favorite tapes and/or early introduction to the band (due to the LP "Bears Choice" and the soundboard tapes of both nights that leaked into most folks collections), it seems like a perfect choice for this blog's first "Tape of the Week." Of course, the Dark Stars that were played on both nights are epic (during the electric set #2 on the 13th, and in electric set #1 on the 14th)... and as this song is Dark Star Palace's namesake, well... everything is just exactly perfect, isn't it?  It sure is!  Tomorrow night is a new moon (aka "little Dark Star")... which also happens to be Valentines Day.  And, that also happens to be Tibetan New Year! Whoa! So it's a heavy weekend and a perfect time for Dark Star Palace to kick things off. 

Speaking of heavy, did you know that Black Sabbath's debut LP came out on 2/13/70 (kicking off heavy metal) and that The Who recorded Live at Leeds (kicking off the hard rock live LP) on 2/14/70? What a weekend for great music! Anyway, I can't link up to a stream of these shows since the Dead won't allow released material to be posted, but I have found an official stream of Dark Star from the 13th that they put out on the wonderful Dicks Picks #4 CD.  For those in the know though, it would be worth your while to hunt down the juicy master soundboards (7" 1/2 track reels recorded at 15 inches per second) that were mastered straight from the master analog tape direct to digital and expertly transferred by the great Charlie "Miller-Time" Miller in February 2009 (I'll help you below!). Get them! Absorb! Enjoy!

• 2/13/70
• 2/14/70

Ok! On to the Palace's Artifact of the Week... Jerry Garcia's mighty and elusive Tiger guitar (as this weekend does kick off the "Year of the Tiger"). 

Of all the Dead's gear, what captures the essence of the band more than Jerry's favorite guitar?  From the time he first used it on stage with the band (11/4/79 in Oakland), until using it for the final Grateful Dead show (7/9/95 in Chicago...though new research states that 80,000 Deadheads may have been hallucinating that Tiger was actually used at this show...still TBD!), this guitar led millions of people on some amazing musical journeys.  I don't need to jump into all the technical details of Doug Irwin's masterpiece (see links below for that), but this axe does stand as an act of inspired genius.  

Dark Star Palace owns a replica of Tiger that was hand built by a luthier who has built guitars for Bob Weir, Phil Lesh and Jerry Garcia's family. The Six-Stringed Saint of San Francisco, Gary Brawer, did the electronics, custom made some additional parts and blessed it with some original Jerry magic (Gary, if you did not already know, was Jerry Garcia's guitar tech and worked on his famous Wolf, Tiger, Rosebud, and Bolt guitars... Photos of him with the Palace's Tiger below). It weighs in at nearly 13 pounds (no wonder Jerry never moved!), and has some fancy tricks up it's sleeve.  As with Jerry's, our Tiger has the Garcia-invented unity gain-buffered effects loop, as well as the "hippie sandwich" of various exotic woods (such as cocobolo, curly maple, etc.). There is brass from top to bottom, front to back and side to side.  The Brawer-cut brass nut was designed after the one he did for Jerry. 

One freakish addition are the custom cast brass knobs.  These were cast from the type of heavy knobs Jerry had (which were similar to the custom Starz Guitars knobs from San Francisco from around the mid-70's).  The ones on our Tiger were hand cast by Jim Springer based on Jerry's set. Jim also happens to be the guy who fabricated Luke Skywalker's and Darth Vader's Lightsabers for George Lucas in 1976 for the film Star Wars.  Pretty frickin' cosmic eh Obi-wan?!? Two of the pickups on this beast are classic Jerry (Dimarzio Super II and SDS-1), but the third one is quite special as it is one of Jerry's actual pickups that he helped design with Gary Brawer and had hand wound by Lindy Fralin. It was put into Jerry's guitar but only used for a few Dead shows. But that is a story for another edition of Dark Star Palace.  For now, welcome to the Palace and Happy New Year of the Tiger!

For more info on Garcia's Tiger and related replica guitars, check out these sites:

• http://www.wald-electronics.com/tiger.html 
• http://www.dozin.com/jers/guitars/tiger/info.html 
• http://www.lieberguitars.com/guitars/garcia/ 
• http://www.alembic.com/prod/tribute.html