Here Comes Sunshine: Garcia ‘73

Rich Mahan (0:05)

The Good Ol Grateful Deadcast, the official podcast of the Grateful Dead. I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse Jarnow, exploring the music and legacy of the Grateful Dead for the Committed And The Curious.

Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Deadheads, welcome to season seven of The Good Ol Grateful Deadcast. I'm your co-host Rich Mahan. Thank you very much for tuning in. We're taking a bit of a side trip in today's episode, exploring the side bands Jerry Garcia was involved in in 1973, including the Garcia Saunders Band and Old & In The Way. And we look at how they influenced the Grateful Dead during this period. Lots of great guests in this one, so buckle up.

Grateful Dead have also just announced a brand new box set that we know everybody's going to love. Here Comes, Here Comes Sunshine 1973 This new release is a 17 CD limited edition set available exclusively from dead.net. It features five previously unreleased concerts recorded during the band's transformative spring of 1973 tour.

The shows included in this set are Iowa State Fairgrounds, Des Moines, Iowa, 51373, the Campus Stadium at UCSB in Santa Barbara, 52073, Keysar Stadium in San Francisco, 52673, and RFK Stadium in Washington, DC on 6-9 and 6-10-73. The 6-10-73 show will also be available as a standalone release in two configurations, a 4 CD set and an 8 LP set. The 17 CD set and the 4 CD set will be released on June 30th and will also be available digitally. The 8 LP set comes on July 28th and you can preorder all of the Here Comes Sunshine 1973 releases now over at dead.net.

Head on over to dead.net/deadcast and check out all of our past episodes of The Good Ol Grateful Deadcast including our complete seasons 1 through 6 You can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform so you can listen where you like to listen. Please help out The Good Ol Grateful Deadcast by subscribing, hitting the like button, leaving a review on your podcast platform of choice and sharing an episode on your social media. Thanks very much. It helps a lot more than you think. We now have transcripts for many of your favorite Deadcast episodes available for your reading pleasure. We recently uploaded season 1, so pop on over to dead.net/deadcastdashindex and check them out. Thanks to everyone who has left their stories over at stories.dead.net. We're now asking you to share your stories about going to shows in 1973 Catch any heaters in this glorious year? The Dead were on fire and we want to hear your firsthand account of the good times. Share those stories over at stories.dead.net and you may just hear yourself on the Deadcast. Thank you.

Well, this episode of the Deadcast takes a special side trip into Jerry Garcia's extracurricular projects in 1973, exploring his partnerships with organist Merl Saunders and the legendary bluegrass group Old & In the Way with guests David Grisman and Peter Rowan as we discover how these projects impacted the Dead's music. Ladies and gentlemen, Jesse Jarnow.

Jesse Jarnow (4:09)

Special episodes of television shows would sometimes begin with their characters breaking the fourth wall, speaking directly into the camera, just like I am now.

Or like in masterpiece theater, with a host sitting in an easy chair smoking a pipe.

So let's start today's episode like that. Imagine me sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. There are lots of dead tapes and old issues of the Golden Road strewn about. I'm in my desk chair. It's not tobacco.

And since the Deadcast is for families and proudly podcasting everywhere in the world, this week, I'm also in drag. Much love to all of our trans, non-binary, and otherwise awesome deadhead friends out there. Especially those stranded in places with people who, lately, somehow have found time to hate. And since you're wondering, it's a casual beachy sundress sort of situation with spangled pom-pom things on the sleeve. Pretty comfy, really. But the real reason we're starting off like this today is to note that we often get requests for episodes about the Jerry Garcia band or his work with David Grisman or some other aspect of Garcia's career outside the dead. And we have to remind the requester that, structurally, we are in fact The Good Ol Grateful Deadcast and that Garcia's side career is out of our jurisdiction. We've made a few exceptions over the years, specifically a bonus episode about Garcia's years in the folk and bluegrass scenes and one about his self-titled solo debut.

Our mission this season is to get into the new Here Comes Sunshine box set, which captures five fantastic dead shows from 1973 But to get into the Grateful Dead in 1973, a side trip is necessary. And as we learned, from a business perspective, things were kind of blurry back then.