Unfortunately, the real story is that she got invited to a reunion of people from Fitch? College where she had attended for a couple of years but that Tricia? graduated from. (Sorry about this. I’m too lazy to go through all my shelves to see whether I own a JA bio or just got it out of the library.) But Grace thought it would be a gas to show up with Abbie Hoffman. They never even got in the door. She claimed later she was going to spike the tea with acid, but who knows whether that’s just a story or not.
I was a huge fan in the day. The day being so long ago that when I got a year’s subscription to Rolling Stone I got the Volunteers album free. (Total cost: five dollars.) I even got to see them live one night, following which I returned to campus and saw the last couple of hours of the Grateful Dead concert, at which some of the Airplane showed up. A truly fine concert night. But I never purchased any of their live albums, for good reason. They were a studio band, at least outside the Winterland.
Well they were a sucky live band because they were also a sucky studio band. Sly Stewart (of Sly and the Family Stone) once tried to record them and gave up after two hundred bad takes…and if you listen closely to studio recordings a large portion of the time Grace only had a vague relation to pitch anyways…and I am betting the drugs and personal conflicts didn’t aid things too, hard to be interested in playing a song if you can’t stand the person singing it.
The recorded Dead are pretty boring, but people say you got to have seen them live to appreciate them. Oh well. On the other hand, James Brown and his band were often horribly offkey on tape but sublime nevertheless. I just got the JJoplin Cheap Thrills CD and it really is great. Brings back good memories. The one I really wish I’d seen live was Otis Redding. He makes me cry.
Well, I bought the entire Monterey Pop set just for their performance of High Flyin Bird. Also, Bless Its Pointed Little Head was a live album, and is pretty good. Not completely stellar, but good.
Jimi Hendrix was some one who was always out of tune and off key but somehow it just didn’t matter. He could have dropped his guitar on his foot and it would have sounded cool.