February 10, 1981
A forgotten Jerry Garcia Band classic
February 10, 1981
Date Listened
January 20, 2025. Jerry Garcia Band shows tend to be a bit shorter, and are easier to finish in one sitting.
Sources
We’re lucky to have any Jerry Garcia Band shows. Unlike the Grateful Dead, the Jerry Garcia Band generally frowned upon audience taping. The few non-official sources we have tend to come from people who smuggled tape recorders in. There are numerous shows with no record at all, and many of the tapes that do exist are pretty bad.
In this case, we’ve got not one good tape, but three.
The old standby tape appears to be SHNID 33740 by well known taper Jim Wise. It’s a perfectly fine recording and is quite listenable.
There’s another tape by Jim Vita that apparently circulated a bit over the years. The most recent digitization is SHNID 152438. To my ears, this one sounds a bit muffled when compared with the Wise tape.
Finally comes my personal favorite — George Sterry’s SHNID 142837. This sound like a “front of board” recording to my ears, and is almost as good as a soundboard recording.
Honestly, all three recordings are great — but the Sterry one is just a little bit better than the other two in my opinion.
Reputation
This is where the Jerry Garcia Band really deviates from the Grateful Dead.
Though I personally consider some of their performances to be superior to their contemporary Dead neighbors, we haven’t seen the same fan scene sprout up around the Jerry Garcia Band. There’s still a lot of confusion within the scene about things as basic as what songs were played at which show. We don’t have anything quite like Heady Version to gauge the general community response, and most people who post online about Jerry Garica Band shows post only about the official releases.
Searches on Reddit’s Jerry Garcia Band subreddit have been fruitless. Even posts about the “best jams” like this one don’t mention this show — which is a shame if you listen to it.
With no comments on the official website and nobody talking about this online, I think it’s safe to say that this is not a highly rated show.
Discussion
Honestly, I think this show should be ranked higher.
This is from an interesting iteration of the Jerry Garcia Band — the early days of Melvin Seals on keys, but without any of the female backup singers. With the obvious exception of The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, the songs are generally played up tempo and with quite a bit of energy. Though you don’t hear any of the spacey abstract jams that you get from some of the 1974 and 1975 recordings with Merl Saunders, the jams you do find here are energetic and are a lot of fun.
The biggest problem with these Jerry Garcia band shows is that the setlists seem to be similar every night. You know they’ll play Deal near the end; you know they’ll fit in Tangled Up In Blue at the end of one of the sets; you know they’ll pull out one of the reggae numbers at some point in time; you know you’ll get at least one slow song (Dixie here) and at least one blues song (It’s No Use).
But that’s actually part of the joy of the Jerry Garcia Band.
The Grateful Dead strikes me as an attempt to create cohesion and music from absolute chaos, an ensemble that redefined itself every single night. That must have been absolutely exhausting for the performers, and the tour simply never ended.
In contrast, the Jerry Garcia Band was much more traditional and sensible, with predictable setlists, songs that stayed within their frameworks (for the most part; there are some notable exceptions), and more of an emphasis on improvisation within a well established framework.
In a sense, actually, songs like this gave Jerry Garcia more freedom to innovate, since that constant demand to create magic from chaos simply didn’t exist. And that’s why I think the Jerry Garcia Band shows from the early 1980s tend to sound a lot better than their Grateful Dead contemporaries.
Now, does this show really rank up there with famous shows like February 28, 1980? Not quite. But this is still an excellent show, and is criminally underrated.