bluebirdsing

i don’t want michael hurley to ever die.  ever. 

Jerry adds a few more traditional-sounding country steel licks to Brewer & Shipley’s “Oh Mommy,” - b-side to their only hit single “One Toke Over the Line.”  Long-time Garcia Band bassist John Kahn also plays on this one.  In yet another sign of how Nixon would use anything to stir up the culture war, the absolutely innocuous “One Toke” landed the group on his “enemies list.”  That’s like branding The Eagles as Maoists for “Take it Easy.”

Brewer explains how Jerry made his way onto the song:

“Wally Heider’s studio in San Francisco had a bunch of the Bay Area musicians in there every day,” explained Michael Brewer.  “Part of Jefferson Airplane’s original record deal was unlimited studio time there, so Studio A was basically their room and the Dead had kind of the same deal and they were upstairs in Studio B or D. It was like going into the office. The Dead was in there every day, or some offshoot of the Dead; the Airplane or offshoots were in there every day, Hot Tuna or whoever.  We knew a lot of them from back in the folk days. I met Paul Kantner when he played banjo

and had a flat-top haircut, so we went back a ways with some of these people.  Jerry had just started playing pedal steel guitar. He came in one day, and we were working on some stuff. We said, ‘Hey Jerry, we got a song here, would you like to play pedal steel?’  And he said, ‘Sure.’  So he set up his pedal steel and played on a song called ‘Oh Mommy’ (I Ain’t No Commie), the B-side to ‘One Toke Over the Line.’”  

This would happen again, later that spring of 1970, when he played pedal steel on Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s “Teach Your Children.” After the second take, just as he was warming up, Crosby told Jerry, “That was great. Have a snort.” And that was the end of the session.

— p. 406, A Long Strange Trip, by David McNally

David Crosby and Jerry Garcia doing drugs?  At a 1970 recording session?  Go ahead and pour yourself a double and let that breaking news sink in.  But Crosby called this one right.  There are times when the first or second take nails it.  And this is certainly one of those occasions.  After 50 years, the dappled-sunshine pedal steel he adds to “Teach” continues to glow.  Whatever else you may think of the song - hazy-headed hippie nonsense or legit folkie theme song for anti-war boomers or ? - you can’t deny the pedal steel work on display is top shelf material.  But what got us here today wasn’t the revelatory quote above, but the while-I’m-eating-breakfast-at-a-diner revelation that the most well known Jerry Garcia solos are pedal steel bookends for a band he wasn’t in.  Let that sink in for a moment.  Out of all the solos Jerry let loose in his 35 years of making music, the one solo I’m sure he is best known for is one the vast majority of listeners don’t know is his.  This points us back to the amazing longevity of The Grateful Dead, who produced exactly one top-ten single, 1987’s “Touch of Grey,” in their 30 year history.  But it is also a reminder of how sympatico Jerry was with a broad range of American roots music and musicians.  His devotion to playing (see Bill Graham’s comments in the video above), multi-instrumental prowess, and band-before-ego ethos made him an ideal session musician.    On pedal steel, an instrument he never practiced enough to achieve the same mastery as he attained on banjo and guitar, he played for New Riders of the Purple Sage, Jefferson Airplane, Paul Kantner, Brewer and Shipley, Tom Fogerty, Paul Pena, Doug Sahm, Link Wray, Robert Hunter, Peter Rowan, and solo efforts by David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash.  Check back in over the next few days for a taste of Jerry’s pedal steel on a few of these albums.