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Almost Acoustic

Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band

Initial release : December 1988

Concensus Reality / GD Merchandising 4005

Recorded live, at the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco and the Wiltern in Los Angeles, during their fall 1987 tour. A remastered version of this CD was released in 2010.

Tracks

  • Swing Low Sweet Chariot (Traditional)
  • Deep Elem Blues (Traditional)
  • Blue Yodel #9 (Standing On The Corner) (Rodgers)
  • Spike Driver Blues (Hurt)
  • I've Been All Around This World (Traditional)
  • I'm Here To Get My Baby Out Of Jail (Davis / Taylor)
  • I'm Troubled (Traditional)
  • Oh, The Wind And Rain (Traditional)
  • The Girl At The Crossroads Bar (Bryson)
  • Oh, Babe It Ain't No Lie (Cotton)
  • Casey Jones (Hurt)
  • Diamond Joe (Logan)
  • Gone Home (Carlisle)
  • Ripple (Garcia / Hunter)
Credits above are as given on the recording and, in the case of Casey Jones and Oh, Babe It Ain't No Lie, reflect the arrangements of the songs used rather than original composition.

Musicians

  • Jerry Garcia - guitar, vocals
  • David Nelson - guitar, vocals
  • Sandy Rothman - mandolin, dobro, vocals
  • John Kahn - acoustic bass
  • Kenny Kosek - fiddle
  • David Kemper - snare drum
Credits

  • Producer - Sandy Rothman
  • Live stereo recording - John Cutler
  • Digital Editing - Sonic Solutions
  • CD Digital Mastering - Joe Gastwirt
  • Cover Art - John Kahn
  • Photograph - Ken Friedman

  • Recorded live in the fall of 1987
Notes

Sleeve note by Sandy Rothman:

In 1964, twenty three years before these shows were recorded, Jerry, David and I were playing music together in the early Bay Area folk music scene. After all the intervening years, we spontaneously got together again to sing and play. This time, Jerry played rhythm and lead guitar (instead of banjo), David played rhythm and lead guitar (instead of mandolin), and I played mandolin and dobro (instead of guitar) and some banjo (but not on these selections). We don't know why it happened this way. Then, we got together with John Kahn and he played bass. Kenny Kosek joined in on fiddle. David Kemper added some snare drums. It was fun. The music had a rough-hewn, energetic quality to it. Some of the shows were taped, just on two-track stereo DAT - no multiple tracks, no way to change anything. Here's a sampling of how it sounded. We think of this as mostly acoustic, not quite bluegrass, progress report for our friends, our fans, and people who love this music.
David Nelson spoke about the inception of the Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band in an interview. It followed Garcia, Nelson and Sandy Rothman spending some time together socialising and playing old songs;
We really had fun playing that old material, so we played a benefit for Bill Graham's poster artist. Bill got real excited about it and came into the back room. He said, 'I gotta take this somewhere,' and Jerry said, 'Take us to Broadway, Bill!' The next thing we know, we had 18 shows at the Lunt-Fontanne.
Related releases

Deep Elem Blues and Ripple were included on;

A remastered version of Almost Acoustic was released in 2010 in conjunction with a released that was billed as JGAB volume 2; Almost Acoustic was reissued by Grateful Dead Records on CD and LP in February 1989 (GDCD 40092). It was also reissued by Arista in 1995 (14005)

More live JGAB material was included on two releases in the Pure Jerry series;

Another version of Blue Yodel #9 performed by Garcia, John Kahn and David Grisman can be found on; 		Buy from amazon.com

album cover

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