On May 11th, Round Records will release a brand-new Jerry Garcia box set titled Jerry Garcia Before The Dead. As its name suggests, the new box set compiles rare—including a number of unreleased—recordings of Garcia performing live before the 1965 inception of the Grateful Dead.
Earlier this month, we previewed two tracks from the forthcoming sets: a 1963 rendition of “Deep Elem Blues” with Garcia’s first wife Sara Ruppenthal and a 1964 take on Bill Monroe’s “Raw Hide” by the Black Mountain Boys (a group comprised of Garcia, Geoff Levin, Sandy Rothman, and New Riders of the Purple Sage’s David Nelson).
Now it looks like Huffington Post has premiered to new additional tracks ahead of the compilation’s official release. Both tracks—a take on the traditional “All My Trials” and a version of Richard M. Jones’ “Trouble In Mind”—find Garcia teaming up with longtime friend and writing partner Robert Hunter at the 16th birthday of their friend Brigid Meier. The performance took place in Menlo Park, CA, where Meier’s father worked at the Stanford Research Institute (which gave him access to the reel-to-reel tape recorder he used to immortalize the show).
“The most remarkable thing about this is it’s a very intimate group. There’s probably about 10 or 15 people in the room,” author and former Grateful Dead publicist Dennis McNally told Huffington Post. “You got an 18-year-old kid… He semi-talked his way out of the Army… He had played a little electric guitar at a pickup band in high school, and then had learned fingerpicking from a friend of his while in the Army.”
You can give both tunes a listen below, and Jerry Garcia Before The Dead can be preordered here. The compilation will be released as a four-CD set and as a five-LP vinyl set.
Bob and Jerry – “All My Trials”
Bob and Jerry – “Trouble In Mind”
[H/T – JamBase]