Description
Tale of the Tape:
“Russian Lullaby” / “Who Was John?” from Heads & Tails: Vol. 2
Recorded January 26, 1976 at the Keystone Berkeley, Berkeley, CA
As 1976 dawned, the Jerry Garcia Band burned through keyboardists at an alarming rate, playing with nearly a half-dozen in just under four weeks. After years resisting putting his own name on the marquee, Garcia had established the Jerry Garcia Band with bassist John Kahn and drummer Ron Tutt in September 1975. They’d toured with great British pianist Nicky Hopkins, who sadly proved unfit for road duty. They played a weekend with James Booker, “the best black, gay, one-eyed junkie piano genius New Orleans has ever produced” (as Dr. John memorably put it), but that wasn’t tenable either.
With three nights at Keystone Berkeley booked at the end of January, Garcia’s Reflections out in February, and tours to follow, they auditioned more keyboardists at their Front Street rehearsal clubhouse. The third (and fourth) candidates were just right, and just slightly more known quantities. Just like that, the following evening, Keith and Donna Jean Godchaux were onstage at Keystone Berkeley. Available for pre-order now, one side of Heads & Tails, Vol. 2 documents the first stable Jerry Garcia Band lineup. It would last for almost two years and approximately 100 gigs, taking on vocalist Maria Muldaur and recording Cats Under the Stars before Ronnie Tutt's departure in late 1977.
Donna Jean Godchaux-MacKay would insist that it was Garcia who introduced the Godchauxs to gospel material during listening sessions in their Stinson Beach music room. Probably at Garcia’s urging, they’d recorded the traditional “Who Was John?” for Keith and Donna, released by Round Records in 1975, with Garcia producing and joining the harmony stack. Nonetheless, as if needing an excuse, the Godchauxs’ arrival signaled the Garcia Band’s turn towards the more overtly spiritual.
Though “Who Was John?” is assigned a “traditional” songwriting credit, it’s also a singular “John the Revelator” rearrangement likely created around 1936 by Mitchell’s Christian Singers of Kinston, North Carolina, the only group known to have recorded it in this particular form. This Keystone performance is likely the song’s live debut for any of the players, not known to be performed by the Godchauxs at any of their 1975 gigs with their own band.
“Who Was John?” became not only a set-piece for the newest model Garcia Band but a musical touchstone, a route to something spare, direct, and powerful that they chased for the next three years. A concise 9-and-a-half minutes, Tutt and Kahn’s marching pulse is a sturdy gait that might strut unbowed through the same Biblical winds that would soon shape originals like “Gomorrah.” The bass vocalist is Keith Godchaux, continuing the singing he’d been doing at the Keith and Donna gigs. Donna Jean vocalizes ecstatically off-mic during Garcia’s first solo, an improvising band member. It’s the kind of song one can imagine Ron Tutt’s other boss, Elvis Presley, joining them for, if the King ever found Himself in Berkeley and wanted to get down with the longhairs.
This new spareness is something like the opposite of the Grateful Dead’s newest direction, the harmonically and lyrically dense Blues For Allah, released five months earlier. It’s evoked, too, in Irving Berlin’s “Russian Lullaby,” recorded for Garcia’s second solo album in 1974, the arrangement borrowed from Argentinian guitarist Oscar Alemàn, a close musical cohort of Gypsy jazz guitar innovator Django Reinhardt.
Garcia had debuted his live version during the Hopkins era, but “Russian Lullaby” is virtually made for Godchaux’s instinctive ivy-like piano, vining across the changes and weaving through Garcia’s comping. It’s not on the rehearsal tape from the day before, and entirely possible Keith Godchaux had never played the song before. It’s the sound of a new band growing before your ears. – Jesse Jarnow
Learn more & pre-order: https://www.garciafamilyprovisions.com/collections/heads-tails