Incident at a Coffee Shop

Although I've had the honor — and great joy — to chat with all sorts of folks who knew and worked with Guaraldi, I often think about the people I missed interviewing.

I first met Vince's son David, and his family, at an all-Guaraldi concert George Winston gave in November 1998, in Santa Rosa. David's group included his grandmother — yep, Vince's mother — and I walked her back to their car, when the evening concluded. She held my arm like a cultured lady at a society dance. So close, I reflect, so close ... but that was years before I decided to write my book.

Vince's ex-wife, Shirley, also died before I ever had a chance to meet her. As far as I know, she never was interviewed formally about their years together. That may have been by choice; she's not mentioned at all in Bob Deorchuck's excellent Guaraldi profile in the July 1981 issue of Keyboard Magazine — which definitely is worth seeking out, for those who've not read it — and there's no evidence she attended any of the annual Guaraldi reunion concerts at the Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society, for as long as they lasted.

Gretchen Glanzer and friend. She modeled for Lilli Ann
during her early years with Vince, and therefore knew
how to "sell" a photo. Many of Guaraldi's LP covers are
droll, but this definitely is the best.
(Photo by Charles Weckler)

Number One with a bullet on my list of those who got away, however, is Vince's longtime girlfriend, Gretchen Katamay (Gretchen Glanzer, when he knew her). I missed her by inches ... well ... by a few months. She maintained a close relationship with Vince's two children, and particularly with Dia. Gretchen apparently was a cheerful, gregarious woman who lived life to the fullest and loved talking about Vince. I was lucky to gain access to an on-camera interview she gave in August 2003, for a project that never got off the ground; I was, as a result, able to spend about an hour listening to her share memories ... many of which put an even broader smile on her already beaming face.

But I sure wish I'd met her in person.

I therefore was quite pleased to receive a note from a gentleman named Brian McCormack, who thought I'd enjoy hearing a little story he had to tell. He thought correctly; he also agreed to share his anecdote in this wider forum. Take it away, Brian:

I've been a huge fan of Vince Guaraldi since I was a child, and have enjoyed playing his music on the piano for many years now.

On Labor Day weekend in September 2007, I was visiting two friends — Rob and Ted — in Morro Bay, California. We're all landscape architects, and a larger bunch of us got together one evening to drink wine at Rob's house, and enjoy the charm of his family and his small California coastal town. Some of us had worked together at the same landscape architectural firm in Southern California in the 1980s, while others had graduated together from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

Rob, Ted and I drove to nearby Los Osos the following morning, to Celia's Garden Café, a locally owned coffee shop. We sat outside to enjoy our lattes and scones, and two very cool ladies about my Mom's age sat next to us. We all started talking; we explained about being landscape architects, and how most of us had started our own firms, and that the weekend was a reunion of sorts for us. The ladies were quite interested in our work, and I'm pretty sure we gave them our business cards.

We also talked about my heritage, as I'm a member of Idaho's Nez Perce Tribe. (Later that day, Rob took Ted and me on a hike to visit some local Indian archaeological sites along the California coastline.)

Eventually, we got around to asking the ladies about their professions.

One of them told us that she once was a concert promoter for Bill Graham in the Bay Area, and that she had toured with the Grateful Dead and other 1960s and '70s-era rock bands. She talked about some of the bands that she had managed. One in particular was Jefferson Airplane and Grace Slick. I was a huge fan of their music, and we talked about how I liked playing some of Jefferson Airplane's music on the piano. (I also was a piano major in college.)

She also mentioned having lived with Vince Guaraldi. She was surprised when I told her I loved his music.

I always think of this lady whenever I play any of Vince's pieces on the piano. (My favorite is "Manha de Carnaval.") I didn't get her name that day, and only learned that it was Gretchen after visiting this blog. I was hoping to run into her again during my next visit to Los Osos, but was sad to read in the Lost Live Dead blog that she had died in 2009. My condolences to her family and friends.

That was a memorable Labor Day weekend for me, to say the least.

By all accounts, Gretchen charmed everybody she met, and that certainly seems to have been the case here. I envy your chance encounter, Brian, and I'm grateful you got in touch.

It would be nice, one day, to hear you play "Manha de Carnaval."

Champlin at the bit

Wheels within wheels within wheels. Researchers love this phenomenon.


Corry, one of my many colleagues (co-conspirators?) in the realm of meticulous fact-finding, recently forwarded what he hoped might be a helpful tidbit of information. Corry focuses on the greater San Francisco rock 'n' roll scene, with a particular emphasis on the activities of Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead. You'll lose happy hours (days? weeks?) at Corry's blog, Lost Live Dead, and I recommend it highly. He shares my passion for attempting the impossible: Just as I hope to eventually nail down every club, concert and studio date Guaraldi ever had, Corry hopes to do the same with Garcia and the Dead.

So, while pursuing a lead involving Garcia's possible participation with the Sons of Champlin in August 1969, Corry came across a brief quote from Bill Champlin, who once had been asked about this very possibility. As it turned out, Champlin didn't remember Garcia sitting in during the performance in question, but then he (Champlin) added an additional comment, which is what Corry passed along to me:


I jammed with Jerry's band with Bill Vitt and John Khan at the Matrix once, with Vince Guaraldi.


Now, that was tantalizing. Readers of this blog know that I'm always after fresh evidence of "Vince and Jerry" collaborations, particularly at the Matrix. (See the May 11, 2012, blog entry.) My Guaraldi timeline already included quite a few of his verified appearances at the Matrix, and it's known that he and Garcia occasionally played together at that club, particularly during the regular "Monday jams" that took place for a few years. But I didn't have any listings that found Guaraldi alongside Garcia, Bill Vitt, John Khan and Bill Champlin. Clearly, this bore further investigation.


Happily, Champlin was easy to reach, and he responded quickly:


I couldn't remember a date of that jam, but I'll try to recall the stuff for you. Bill Vitt called and asked me to come play rhythm guitar, because Jerry was so busy fooling around with some kind of effects unit, very cool but not kickin'. So, being a friend of Bills', I brought a guitar and amp and set up. I didn't know that Vince was gonna play 'til I got there. Cool stuff for me; I'd been a fan since the red plastic Fantasy album with "Cast Your Fate to the Wind" on it. Anyway, we played, and it was very cool. Vince was way cool. Damn, what a great musician. At one point I was looking down, and suddenly I heard this beautiful soprano sax wafting across the band; I looked up, and there was Vince Denham playing, beautifully as always, after having just played with Don Ellis at Fillmore West. I found out that he and Vince had hit it off. Curley Cooke came up and jammed on my Gibson for awhile also, and then the night was over and I went home. Looking back, it was a rare night, but back then it was never a surprise to find great players coming together, even in spite of themselves and their careers. 


That's all I remember, but between then and now there's been a lotta water under the bridge, and I could very easily have lost a few details of the night. I'm writing to you from backstage in Osaka, Japan, which means that I'm still out there makin' noise, so I look back on those rare jams with a lot of respect for the players. Vince Guaraldi was one of the big ones for me. Anyway, there it is. Be good, Bill.


Wow! Suddenly we're talking about Guaraldi, Garcia, Bill Vitt, Bill Champlin, John Khan, Curley Cooke and Vince Denham. And Champlin's narrative contained one big, fat clue: Don Ellis and Fillmore West.


Ellis and his band were at Fillmore West June 18-21, 1970; the magnificent double-LP set Don Ellis at Fillmore was recorded during those four memorable evenings. Now, Vince Denham wasn't yet an official member of Ellis' band — he joined a bit later, with the 1972 release of Connection — but Denham certainly could have been "hanging around" during one or more of those Fillmore sets.


After sharing this newest data with Corry, he cross-matched with some additional details:


The Grateful Dead played the Pauley Ballroom in Berkeley on Sunday, June 21, 1970 (two nights after Memphis, and three days before New York). Jerry Garcia and Howard Wales were booked for the Matrix on Monday, June 22, so that fits Champlin's timeline. It sounds like Howard Wales was booked, but Guaraldi actually played the gig.


I [also] know a lot about the Don Ellis Orchestra. Among many other things, it was sort of a session man's side project, so Vince Denham and every other working jazz musician would have had numerous friends in the Ellis band — there were 23 guys in it; Denham had to have known somebody — so whether he jammed or not, Denham must have been at Fillmore West to hang out.


And, just for good measure, Corry forwarded a clipping that ran in the entertainment section of the San Francisco Chronicle on Monday, June 22, 1970 (on Page 44, if you insist on full disclosure). You can see that at right.


So, there we have it: Thanks to Bill Champlin, I'm satisfied that we can identify June 22, 1970 — a date which, until this moment, had remained empty on my Guaraldi timeline — as the memorable evening that featured Guaraldi, Garcia, Vitt, Champlin, Khan, Cooke and Denham.


As Corry said, "Yeah, I'd go!"


No kidding. Me, too!


If all this seems like a lot of effort just to nail a single gig out of so many, well ... yes, of course it is! But that's the name of the game. I want to have the world's most accurate and informative timeline of Guaraldi's activities, and such a goal requires this level of dedication and perseverance.


Besides: If Corry and I — and other tireless investigators like us — don't do this stuff, who else will?

Guaraldi and the Grateful Dead: Yes, no, maybe?

One of the most enduring and tantalizing mysteries regarding Guaraldi's career is whether he performed with the Grateful Dead: an actual concert, at a public venue.

Plenty of folks insist that yes, it happened; a few photographs suggest as much ... but the person in question cannot positively be identified as Guaraldi. It's known that Guaraldi occasionally played with Jerry Garcia at the Matrix's Monday night jam sessions during the late 1960s; Guaraldi and Garcia also fronted a quartet -- with bassist Seward McCain and drummer Mike Clark -- during the summer of 1972 (venue unknown, alas!). But those were gigs with Garcia, not the Dead ... and despite all the tapes available, and all the archive material carefully saved by Deadheads, smoking-gun proof of Guaraldi's participation with the Dead has yet to be found.


All of which makes the ongoing debate even more enticing. I'll turn the rest of this post over to my colleage and Dead historian Corey, who runs his own blog, which you'll want to investigate.

************

Congratulations on the new book. What's a better place than a blog to speculate on the unknown? Let me pose a question, and anyone who has any information, insights or recovered memories (real or imagined) is encouraged to respond.

Any idea what Vince Guaraldi was doing on New Year's Eve 1968-69? Because jamming with the Grateful Dead fits a number of timelines. Various parties--Jerry Garcia, Dead road manager Bill Belmont and Dead keyboardist Tom Constanten, among others--all agree that Vince sat in on stage with the Dead, but no one can recall exactly when. So let me take a stab at proposing that at least one of those times was New Year's Eve 68'/69 at Winterland.

Some points:

1) During this period, the Dead were booked by Bill Graham's Millard Agency. The band had borrowed $12000 from Graham, and they paid it back by making Graham (Millard) their booking agent. Bill Belmont went on tour with them to collect Graham's money (to be fair, he was a friend and ally, but he was on tour at Graham's behest). The Millard period for the Dead was roughly Fall '68 to Summer '69, so that brackets Belmont's time as an eyewitness to a Guaraldi/Dead jam.

2) NYE '68 at Winterland featured 3 Millard bands (GD, Santana, Its A Beautiful Day, along with Quicksilver), and it must have been a staff party as well as an event. Gretchen (Vince's girlfriend, and BGP employee) would have been there, right, regardless of which Graham entity she worked for at the time? So that makes Vince's presence plausible. Also, the show went on until dawn, so Vince could have done something with his family, put them to bed, drove over to Winterland and still had 5 hours left to hang out.

3) No one remembers a thing about this show except that it was "legendary." I have a blog post about this subject:

http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2011/12/december-31-1968-winterland-grateful.html

Interestingly, a few commenters dredge up a flashback or two--Quicksilver seems to have played at midnight, not the Dead, for example. So the Dead's second set would have been at 3 am or something. If Vince played with the Dead on their second set on New Year's Eve, sometime between 3 and 6am, this would explain a few things. Jerry Garcia, Tom Constanten and Bill Belmont are sure that Vince played with the Dead, but can't remember when, there were no eyewitness accounts because all witnesses auto-deleted (the person who comments on my blog concedes that he remembers nothing after midnight). 

Belmont is confident that Vince jammed, but can't remember when. Since Belmon't job was to collect money for Graham, he wasn't going to get wrecked in Chicago or Texas, but at what was in effect a BGP house party in San Francisco? Batter up.

If Constanten suffered "electrical damage" in the wee hours, whose to say that Vince didn't sit down and let it fly? As I said, I had been under the impression that Vince would have played melodic jazz on a Fender Rhodes. Now I realize he wanted to hammer down the organ stops so he could hear it through a Leslie magnified by a dozen souped up MacIntosh amps. New Year's Eve as dawn approached would be a fine opportunity for Vince to have some fun with the Dead, apparently fondly but fuzzily remembered by anyone there. Much of the audience would have had no idea who Vince was--for that matter, they wouldnt have known who Constanten was either.

Just a thought. Don't know who's around who would still know, and of course if they were there they forgot. Still, maybe someone remembers something, and it would be nice to nail down the mysterious Dead/Guaraldi jams for certain.