(an ad from the June 20, 1974 Village Voice for a concert at the Atlantic City Convention Center on July 5, 1974, featuring Seals & Crofts and Maria Muldaur. h/t Streets You Crossed for the clips)
(Note: My lengthy series on John Kahn's live performance history is simply on Part IV, but for research reasons I am jumping ahead to do this man now. Eventually Parts V-VIII will appear and complete the chronicle up to this point)
By mid-1974, Jerry Garcia and Merl Saunders were a regular attraction in Bay Area nightclubs and concert halls, yet they were little more than a rumor elsewhere. In fact, the Garcia/Saunders aggregation had made their East Coast debut the class before, playing a secret party on September 5, 1973 and the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, NJ the following night, but they even had not played New York City proper. Rather oddly, they played a three night stand at Manhattan's Bottom Line club on July 2, 3 and 4, 1974. These three dates have always glared out at me as a strange anomaly, but a nearer look at newly discovered evidence makes the Bottom Line shows seem fairly logical.
I had always vaguely assumed that Garcia, Saunders and their group had been flown to New York for some form of showcase, but I could never figure out for what. Thanks to the exhaustive chronicling of Tri-State Area rock ads in the wonderful All The Streets You Crossed blog, however, it is open that but one person-Merl Saunders-needed to be flown in for the Bottom Line shows. I had known that the Grateful Dead were closing their turn in Springfield, MA on Sunday, June 30. However, I did not see that not alone was John Kahn on tour with Maria Muldaur during this period, it appears that the Muldaur tour had a gap between Sunday, June 30 and Friday, July 5.
Given that Monday night (July 1) was "musician's night off," when clubs are closed, Tuesday through Thursday (July 2-4) was a prime opportunity for Garcia and Kahn to record a picture and make a little money. By using Bill Kreutzmann on drums, and with Garcia crew members Ramrod and Steve Parish already on the tour, the 4 of them could meet Kahn in New York. All that would have been required was Merl, and he must have been flown in for the shows. An organ would have been rented, and since the Garcia-Saunders band did not use their own PA, save for Jerry's guitar and amp and Billy's drums, the Dead's equipment could get the long journey home to California.
Maria Muldaur had released her self-titled debut album on Reprise Records in late 1973. However, the album did not actually get off until some months later, when the David Nichtern song "Midnight At The Oasis" became a hit single. The song peaked at #6 in April, 1974, spending 14 weeks on the Billboard charts. As I discussed in Part VII of this series (not really-I haven't written it yet), Maria Muldaur had been touring in back of the show since at least October 1973, and John Kahn had been a member of her band since December of that year. Muldaur had had an engagement at the Boarding House in San Francisco from December 27-31, 1973, and not only had headliner Country Joe McDonald canceled due to an accident, but her bass player got food poisoning, so Kahn had been drafted at the final second. Kahn learned "20 songs in an hour," according to Muldaur, and protected the day with his exceptional bass playing.
In the 1970s, the show business was highly profitable, and both companies and artists focused on touring as a way of increasing record sales. The Grateful Dead were a striking exception to this, and never more so than in the 1970s. As the 70s dawned, FM radio featured somewhat quieter music, and the most successful albums were by "singer-songwriters," a euphemism for melodic, mellow music that was shorter and more approachable than the harsher, longer and louder music of the 60s. While Crosby, Stills and Nash kicked the cut off, the Dead themselves benefited, in that the "country-rock" sounds of Workingman's Dead and American Beauty received more FM radio airplay than either their old or future efforts.
In the early 1970s, solo artists tended to be more large than new bands, all of them singers if not actually songwriters. While these solo artists toured with full electric backing bands, few of them had a permanent working band. The few that did make a regular working lineup, like Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seger, tended to be on the harder rocking side. Most artists toured intermittently and hired sidemen for each tour, or each leg of the tour. The band members received a weekly wage while on tour, but had no equity stakes in the winner of the album. This suited artists and record companies, since profitable bands wouldn't give up because the drummer was mad at the organ player, or other such "creative differences." Backing musicians had greater freedom to clean and take their opportunities, but they had fewer financial and creative chances to hit it big. As a result, most 70s solo artist worked with a rotating frame of players, adding and subtracting different musicians as circumstances warranted.
When John Kahn had joined Maria Muldaur's band, it had featured guitarist David Nichtern, who had written "Midnight At The Oasis," pianist Jeff Gutcheon and drummer Bobby Mason. I do not know who Kahn replaced as bassist. As I discussed in Section VI (pretending, for a moment, that I have already written it, ha ha), Kahn had met Maria when he had played on the 1972 Pottery Pie album recorded with her then-husband Geoff Muldaur. However, Geoff Muldaur had been the driver on that project, and Maria and John seemed to give had little contact. Once Kahn joined the ring on an emergency basis at the end of 1973, however, he seemed to get over as the regular bassist for her group.
Unlike "road dog" aggregations like Bruce Springsteen And The E Street Band or the Grateful Dead, who toured constantly, Maria Muldaur seems to take focussed on playing periodic engagements in key markets. She headlined a week in Denver from January 29-February 2, 1974 at the Ebbetts Field club, and seemed to get played a few other engagements too, but she does not look to have been on the road continuously. Thus while Kahn would have been busy dividing his time between Maria and Jerry, the conflicts would not have been insurmountable. In any case, if Kahn had not been available for a see or a leg of a tour, another bassist would have simply substituted for Kahn, possibly the same one that he replaced in the foremost place.
By mid-Summer of 1974, "Midnight At The Oasis" was a sizeable hit, and Maria Muldaur's management would have been looking to cash in somewhat on her success. Thus Maria performed as part of multi-act shows at some more sizable venues. On June 30, 1974, while the Grateful Dead were in Springfield, Maria Muldaur was on the note in Jersey City at Roosevelt Stadium, where the Dead would play five weeks later. Seals & Crofts ("Summer Breeze") headlined, with America, Maria Muldaur and the newly-minted Souther Hillman Furay Band filling out the day. After the Bottom Line shows on July 2, 3 and 4, Muldaur was back on the charge to Seals And Crofts at the Atlantic City Convention Centre on Friday, July 5, along with openers England Dan & John Ford Coley. All of the artists on both shows were on record labels associated with Warner Brothers, yet another mark of the prevalent promotional strategies of the time.
I have yet to reveal any performances by Maria Muldaur between July 5 and July 21, and I question that there were any. Per the practices of the day, Muldaur's touring would have been financed by advances from her own future royalties, so essentially she would have been lending money to herself in place to do live, so exposure was more significant than simply playing much of shows. On July 21, 1974, however, she opened for the Grateful Dead at the Hollywood Bowl, and a fine audience tape exists. Her lot for July 21, besides Kahn (whom she introduces as "The Captain, John Kahn") and pianist Gutcheon, features guitarists Amos Garrett and Stephen Bruton, and a drummer whose name I didn't catch. The circle plays excellently, but rather sloppily, not at all like a road-hardened band who has been knocking it down night after night. Was this the same lineup that played the East Coast earlier, or were Garrett and Bruton last second replacements for David Nichtern? Either possibility would be par for the course.
Thus the Garcia-Saunders show at the Bottom Line in Manhattan was perfectly logical from the charge of sight of the musicians. John Kahn was passing to be in the New York area the full week, and Garcia was already on the East Coast. Since Kreutzmann, Ramrod and Parish were already there too, and everybody's instruments, all that was needed was Merl Saunders and a rented organ, and the gig was on. Under the circumstances, its not surprising at all that Maria Muldaur made her first guest appearance with Jerry Garcia on July 2. Singer Ellen Kearney, a supporter of Muldaur's, also dropped by. Another guy dropped by one night, a guy named John Lennon, to thank Merl for being the beginning to record "Imagine." He was invited back to the succeeding night's soundcheck to practice a few songs, but he did not show. Garcia had speculated that the Hell's Angels hovering about the wing area may not have seemed welcoming, but a forthcoming book promises to identify Lennon's activities in great detail, so perhaps we will recognise what took priority over sitting in for "Money Honey" or something similar.
Appendix: The Bottom Line
The Bottom Line was on 15 West 4th Street in Greenwich Village. It hadopened in February, 1974, right in tune with early rock clubs around thecountry that were nicer and more attractive than the sawdust covereddumps where bands had usually played. This reflected both a more seriousattitude towards the music by rock fans and a gradual change to an aging, morewell-to-do audience willing to pay a little more money and buy drinks inreturn for a nicer concert experience. During this time, recordcompanies were focussed on showcasing their new acts, so playing clubslike The Bottom Line or The Roxy in Los Angeles were essential forcreating a "buzz" that would increase FM radio airplay and thus recordsales. Like most big city nightclubs, The Bottom Line tried to stay openmost nights of the week, and granted that it was New York, almost all theperformers were "name" acts with albums to their credit.
Despite the Grateful Dead's growing popularity on the East Coast, Garcia and Saunders only played single late shows on apiece of the 3 nights. The other shows featured Steeleye Span and Pousette Dart Band. Steeleye Span were an English folk-rock band, then on Chrysalis Records, broadly in the vein of Fairport Convention, while the Pousette-Dart Band was, at the time, a string band from Cambridge, MA (they would subsequently release soft-rock albums in the mid-70s). None of either the groups' members would probably have been in the society when Garcia and Saunders performed, since touring musicians would not consume a night in Greenwich Village sitting round the space they were playing. Manhattan stays open late, however, so Garcia, Kahn and the relaxation of the gang probably did not gain the point any time before midnight, still free to hold their sentence to establish the Village their first sample of Keystone Berkeley.
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