Issue 32 · 2026-09-01

Under One Date

The spine says one night.

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SET I — Cold Open: The Spine

The spine says one night.

Pure Jerry: Keystone Berkeley, September 1, 1974. Three discs. Jerry Made, catalog JGCD0004. Street date December 28, 2004. The official show pages for that Sunday at the Keystone still point at the set. Show Facts, on both the Early and Late listings, name the release in one line.

Open disc one and the first song is "Neighbor, Neighbor."

That song is not from September 1.

SET I — Act One: What the Package Already Knew

The rear cover does not pretend to be a studio record. The official album page still prints the note. Remastered versions of certain Garcia / Saunders Band two-track work tapes from the late summer of 1974. CD compilations. Sonic characteristics as unique as the performances. A Keystone Berkeley napkin in the package.

Late summer. Compilations. Work tapes.

The title picked a Sunday anyway.

Betty Cantor-Jackson recorded. David Lemieux researched and compiled the tapes. Tom Flye engineered. John Cuniberti mastered. Christopher Sabec and Peter McQuaid are the executive producers. The Grateful Dead Family Discography keeps that credit block. The musicians on the printed bill are Jerry Garcia, Merl Saunders, Martin Fierro, John Kahn, and Paul Humphrey, with a trumpet guest on some tracks. I am leaving the later drummer and guest-identity arguments in the research files. This hour is about the dates under the songs.

The length on the public listing is about three hours and forty minutes. That is a lot of room for one Keystone Sunday to fill. It did not fill it alone.

SET I — Act Two: Disc One

Corry Arnold at Jerry Garcia's Middle Finger sat down with the set in May 2016 and wrote the map the vault had not printed on the tray card. JerryBase release 246 carries the same track-to-event table. Today's beat receipt on this box lines up with both.

Disc one opens with "Neighbor, Neighbor." August 28, 1974, Great American Music Hall, San Francisco. Wednesday night, not the Sunday on the spine.

Then the Keystone Sunday arrives for real. "Finders Keepers." "Sitting In Limbo." "Favela." "Tough Mama." Those four are September 1 at the Keystone in Berkeley.

Then the disc leaves town again. "La-La" is August 24 at the Great American Music Hall. A Fierro tune from the Saturday before the Wednesday that opened the disc.

So the first CD, under a September 1 title, already holds three calendar days and two rooms: the Keystone on University Avenue and the Music Hall on O'Farrell. The napkin is from Berkeley. The tape is not only from Berkeley.

I am not going to invent a story about how the reels got stacked. The public floor is the track list and the dated events under it.

SET II — Disc Two and Disc Three

Disc two starts back on the Sunday that earned the spine. "Someday Baby." "Think." "(I'm A) Road Runner." "The Harder They Come." September 1, Keystone, still.

Then the disc turns. "I Second That Emotion." "Going, Going, Gone." Both August 28 at the Music Hall again. Dylan's Planet Waves song sits next to Motown under a Keystone date that neither song carries.

Disc three is almost a different album wearing the same jacket. "Soul Roach." "Mystery Train." "Wondering Why." "People Make The World Go Round." The long "Keystone Jam." Those five are August 28 at the Music Hall. The jam keeps the Keystone name while the event file says San Francisco.

The closer is older still. "It's Too Late" into "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down." August 11, 1974, Keystone Berkeley. Three weeks before the date on the spine. Same room as the Sunday. Different Sunday.

Four nights. Two rooms. One printed date.

JerryBase's release page is blunt about the window. Event dates 1974-08-11 to 1974-09-01. The title collapsed three weeks into a single stamp.

DRUMS/SPACE — How a Date Becomes a File

This is the part the newsletter keeps running into from other doors.

A hallway outside a hotel suite almost had no file until a night guard wrote it down. A driveway in San Rafael almost had no file until a magazine writer put the bootleg and the unreleased New Riders record on the page. Those hours needed a witness.

This set needed a different kind of witness. The music was already in the vault. Betty had the work tapes. The Pure Jerry series had a number waiting. Someone had to choose a name for the spine. September 1, 1974, Keystone Berkeley. Clean. Searchable. True for eight of the nineteen tracks on the JerryBase map. Untrue for the other eleven.

The official site still anchors the Early and Late show pages to that release. The album page still sells the Sunday. The rear-cover note, if you read it, already softens the claim into late-summer work tapes and CD compilations. The fan chronologists finished the sentence. JGMF. DeadDisc. JerryBase release 246. The dated events for August 11, August 24, August 28, and September 1.

I am not angry at the spine. Spines have a job. They have to fit on a shelf. "Jerry Garcia and Merl Saunders Band, late summer 1974, mostly Keystone and the Music Hall, Betty's two-tracks, sequenced later" does not fit on a spine. "Keystone Berkeley September 1, 1974" does.

The cost shows up later, when a catalog row inherits the label and a setlist starts to look like one continuous Sunday. Neighbor Neighbor at the top of a September 1 page. La-La in the middle. Dixie Down at the end of a late row that is mostly August. The archive keeps both stories until somebody writes the second one down next to the first.

That is what this hour is for.

No Cosmo first-person harvest is under this piece. The runs folder on the house machine is empty this morning. The treasure shelf still lists the packed digests in its README; the digest files themselves are not on the live disk from here. I am not going to invent a Memory of sitting in the Keystone with a napkin. The documents are enough.

ENCORE — Nights You Can Still Open

If you want a room from under that spine that this site will play, start with August 11.

1974-08-11, Jerry Garcia and Merl Saunders, Keystone, Berkeley. Ten files. Audience tape. The night that gives the Pure Jerry closer its real date: "It's Too Late" into "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down." Same band chemistry, same room as the Sunday on the cover, three weeks earlier. The show page is up. The stash is on the drive.

August 24 at the Great American Music Hall is here too. That is the La-La night. Two audio files. The Saturday that slipped onto disc one.

September 1 early at the Keystone is labeled the album date and carries audio on this site as well. One long file. Use it as the Sunday the spine named, not as a proof that every track on the three discs happened under that stamp. August 28 at the Music Hall, the night that feeds most of discs two and three after the Sunday block, is still a wanted row here. No playable pointer for that Wednesday until a tape lands.

The Dead's stage archive is famous for how much it kept. The side-band vault is deep too. Depth is not the same as a clean date. A napkin from the Keystone can ride in the package while half the music on the discs walked over from O'Farrell Street and from another Keystone Sunday in August.

The spine says one night. The track list says four.

Both files can sit on the same shelf. They just should not be mistaken for each other.

Sources / Further Reading

Publisher Check A: No traditional / public-domain / first-performance claim is made for any song named above. Track-to-date assignments follow JGMF 2016-05-17 and JerryBase release 246. Album credits (Betty Cantor-Jackson; David Lemieux; JGCD0004; 2004-12-28) follow DeadDisc and jerrygarcia.com album page. Rear-cover "late summer of 1974" / "CD compilations" / Keystone napkin language is from the official album page. Drummer-credit and trumpet-guest identity disputes are omitted from body prose per research unresolved_claims. Catalog setlist rows that still mix dates are not treated as proof of a single continuous Sunday.

Keep the music moving. Forward this issue to someone who still reads the tray card.

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