For whatever reason, live tapes have always been much harder to locate for Jerry Garcia Band shows than Grateful Dead gigs. The resulting dearth of high-quality concert recordings makes LPs like Jerry Garcia Band’s GarciaLive Volume 23: August 14th, 1993 Shoreline Amphitheatre particularly exciting.
It doesn’t hurt that the titular concert was among JGB’s most-spectacular latter-day performances in terms of both setlist and execution.
By ’93, guitarist Garcia, keyboardist Melvin Seals, bassist John Kahn, drummer David Kemper and singers Gloria Jones and Jacklyn LaBranch were well-oiled and slick. Kahn and Kemper were particularly expressive with the former’s mix of lead and rhythm playing and the latter’s aerodynamic, driving-force execution providing everything Garcia and Seals, who played a lot of piano at this show, needed to shine as featured soloists.
And, boy howdy, do they shine on GLV23.
At two hours, 20 minutes, this was a long show by Garcia Band standards and Garcia played many of the standards, including “How Sweet it is (To be Loved by You),” “Run for the Roses,” “Midnight Moonlight” and a version of “Shining Star” that runs a full 20 minutes, with a long vocal coda from Garcia, Jones and LaBranch. Throughout the performance, Garcia experiments with atypical tones and makes his guitar ring extra-true by - paradoxically - placing it lower in the mix, so it’s more part of the pattern rather than the lone decoration; “Lay Down Sally” has a particularly fine example of this tack.
Rarely played tunes such as “The Maker,” “You Never Can Tell (C’est La Vie)” and “Wonderful World” - Sam Cooke’s, not Louis Armstrong’s - also appear and, despite a couple of minor vocal gaffes, prove JGB was not averse to rehearsing.
“Don’t Let Go,” with long solos from Garcia and Seals, is the jazziest, most-cohesive example I’ve ever heard, full of melody and devoid of aimless searching. And when the band skips the final verse and refrain, and instead drops into “That Lucky Old Sun,” GarciaLive Volume 23 attains must-have status as Garcia sings with subdued sublimity and Seals turns Shoreline into a house of worship.
