Deadicated: Steve Kimock’s Tribute to Jerry Garcia
Photo by Stuart Levine
From March 10-15, guitarist Steve Kimock will tour the East Coast with a project that explores Jerry Garcia’s R&B roots. Kimock will harken back to some of the classic Jerry Garcia and Merl Saunders recordings from Berkeley, Calif.’s Keystone, with a band that includes Kimock’s longtime associate Bobby Vega (bass), fellow RatDog bandmate Jeff Chimenti (keyboards), son John Morgan Kimock (drums), newer collaborator Dan “Lebo” Lebowitz (guitar) and a member of the Keystone-era Garcia/ Saunders Band, Bill Vitt (drums). Kimock debuted the project at Sweetwater Music Hall in Mill Valley, Calif., during a stretch of dates from Dec. 12-14, 2013, and revisited it for three shows this past December, followed by an appearance on Jam Cruise.
You’ve said that when you first arrived in the Bay Area, you weren’t trying to sound like Jerry, you were “failing to sound like Roy Buchanan.” Roy Buchanan is someone who is often overlooked. Can you talk a bit more about that?
It didn’t really hit me—the Freddie King, Roy Buchanan connection to Garcia’s playing—until two years ago. I was riding in the car and fishing around in the pocket of the door for a CD and came up with the Keystone stuff, the Merl and Jerry stuff. I guess John had been listening to it, but I hadn’t in years. I put it on, and I just immediately went, “Oh my God, this is incredible.” That early, non-Grateful Dead stuff—Jerry’s really showing his roots, and he’s really playing directly out of that bag.
There are great swaths that are cut directly from the cloth of that first Roy Buchanan record—the approach to the bends and the harmonics, and the melodic contours. I’ve been listening to various instrumentals. On one tune in particular, the whole solo is cut from the Roy Buchanan model—“It’s Too Late (She’s Gone),” with the half-step bend up to the tonic at the top. And there’s a bunch of B.B. King and Freddie King in there, for sure. So when I heard Jerry playing that material with that approach, it was like, “Oh my God, that’s exactly where I was coming from growing up.” It was a neat realization.
At the time of that little revelation, I already held some gigs at the Sweetwater, but I didn’t have a band in mind, didn’t really have a specific direction for what I was going to do. And I thought, “I should just do that.” This is a good tip of the hat to that scene and the interconnectedness of all that music and those people that I’m using as a model for the approach to this thing.
You make a direct connection by having Bill Vitt in your band.
The thing about Vitt that’s cool for me is our relationship—personally and musically—predated any of my exposure to that music that he helped make. I didn’t know about the Garcia Band at the time. I met Vitt real early on as part of a community of North Bay jazz musicians, who were horrified when they found out that I was playing with Keith and Donna [Godchaux]. They were as horrified to find that out as Keith and Donna were to find out that I was playing with progressive-jazz guys. They both reacted like, “Oh, man, those guys are playing some weird shit, and they’re taking some weird drugs.”
But Bill was a musical mentor and somebody I was looking up to. Later on, I discovered he was working both sides of that street, too. I remember calling him up for a gig one time. I said, “Hey, man. Why don’t you come and do this gig? It’s just some blues and some funk and stuff like that. You know, no big deal, just playtime.” And he said, “I don’t ‘playtime,’ I play with time.” [Laughs.]
He’s no slouch and he’s known me since I was in my 20s. Later on, the rest of the connections were made. All those people in that band were friends of mine that I worked with and learned from, and he’s the only surviving guy out of a bunch of guys who adopted me musically, and were godfathers to my children. Merl and Martin [Fierro]—they were some significant people in my life. So it’s really, really, really nice to have him there, just to complete that circle and to make those connections.
You mention Martin. After those Keystone shows, he would go on to join to Jerry and Merl in Legion of Mary. The repertoire is pretty close but, clearly, you made a decision not to bring in a sax player.
I’m not working the “do the Jerry thing” angle. I can’t do that with a clear conscience. But to be coming from the same place—and to be using those influences to inform the music in that same kind of way—is satisfying and important. I feel like it connects me to my youth, and it connects me in some way in that lineage and in that family of players.
Martin was one of the first cats that I saw when I came to the Bay Area, in like ‘75-‘76. I saw him at the Old Waldorf playing with Merl. I was so wet behind the ears, and I had just driven a station wagon full of crap across the country and I wind up at the Old Waldorf. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. is there and I was completely flabbergasted. I was standing right in the front and Martin’s up there with Merl, with the full Indian headdress on, blowing his saxophone through the Echoplex. [Laughs.]
And my mind was so completely destroyed by standing there. That was it—I was completely wiped clean, basically.
I met him shortly after and started playing with him. So there’s nobody I played with in California longer, or who I had a deeper love or learned more from, probably, than Martin on every level. It’s really difficult for me, even though he passed quite some time ago, to hire a tenor player. [Fierro died in 2008.] So it’s a guitar-specific thing and a shared influence thing. But personally, as much as I love saxophone in general, it’s not an easy place for me to go, emotionally.
Your repertoire in this setting, like the Garcia/Saunders band itself, includes a smattering of Jerry Garcia/ Robert Hunter originals. What do you hear in those compositions?
Over the years, having had the opportunity and the great honor and pleasure of working with various members of the Grateful Dead on their own projects, I’ve become familiar with that material. In terms of songwriting, the neat thing about Jerry’s stuff, to me, was that outside of the folk and bluegrass elements of his influences, he was deep into the Tin Pan Alley-era music, and popular songwriting from the ‘40s—show tunes and stuff like that. Some of it, like the intro to “Mission in the Rain,” is set up as if it was on Broadway. A lot of his writing, to me, had more of a resemblance to the Cole Porter songbook—or Gershwin, or Rodgers and Hart, or something like that—than The Beatles, for example.
The stuff that impressed me about Garcia’s musical writing was the depth and sophistication of it, harmonically, which was because he was familiar with all of the music. He was not a big jazz fan, necessarily. I remember showing him some stuff and he was like, “That’s elevator music, man.” [Laughs.] With those chords, that was not the harmonic territory that he was working from. It wasn’t ‘60s jazz stuff.
You performed with him at Golden Gate Park one afternoon in 1988. How did that all come about?
That gig, as I recall, was the end of this Soviet/ American walk for peace thing, where a bunch of musicians and peace activists and artists walked or somehow got themselves from New York all the way to San Francisco. A bunch of musicians played at the end of it and, somehow, Zero [Kimock’s principal group from the era] was the house band. There were all these other folks doing their thing and it was fun because I got to play “Wooden Ships” with Grace Slick and Paul Kantner. It was that kind of thing.
We were up there playing with this cast of characters and people were hanging out of the trees. At one point while we were playing, the place starts going nuts, and I’m thinking, “Geez, what happened?” So I look around, and here comes Jerry and Steve Parish walking down these steps at the back of the bandshell with a guitar.
Every step they take, there’s a giant roar of approval from the crowd. They’re getting closer and closer but they’re coming in on stage right and I’m all the way over on stage left. So they walk all the way across the stage, Jerry plugs the guitar into the amp, and whoever is managing the stage comes running out and goes, “No, no, [not yet]—one more tune.” And I was like, “You’re kidding, after that entrance? You’re gonna get the guy off the stage?” So Jerry takes four steps from his amp and stands there next to me like, “OK, I’m off the stage.” And I thought, “Oh, god. I’m so fucked.”
We didn’t know what we were going to play—we thought it was time to do Jerry’s segment, which we had actually rehearsed for—and Greg Anton goes, “‘Little Wing’—play ‘Little Wing.’”
So we do this instrumental version of “Little Wing,” where I do the giant blowing-up sound with the echo and the fuzz and the Stratocaster, and Jerry’s standing right there. After we’d finished the song and it’s time for him to play, he looks at me and says, “Hey, man. Don’t make me look bad, OK?” [Laughs.] It was so typically, right on, ice-breaking stuff. You know, “Get out of your head. Stop worrying about it. Let’s play some music.” And we played and it was a lot of fun.
The following spring in Guitar Player magazine, he identified you as one of his favorite guitar players. Did you know that was coming and did you notice any immediate impact on the size of your audience?
It was a big surprise that he mentioned me, along with Frank Gambale, as being guys that he was listening to that maybe people weren’t aware of. It was neat to get a nod like that from Jerry. He threw me a bone, and I think that gig probably had something to do with that.
I knew that other people thought it was significant, but I definitely did not quite understand it at the time. I wasn’t a Deadhead; I wasn’t following it. But as a musician growing up in the Bay Area, kind of in the shadow of the Grateful Dead, or of Garcia, I was aware of it. The way I was aware of it was I would go to my gig at the Chi Chi Club and there’d be two people because everybody was next door at The Stone where Garcia was playing. So basically, all it meant to me was there was gonna be nobody at my gig. [Laughs.]
Did you play with him any other times?
Not in public. We had a kind of guitar-geek relationship where we’d hang when we could. And I think just establishing that, “Hey, we’re talking about music,” bubble helped keep people away. I think he enjoyed having somebody to hang with that was as much of a geek at the instrument as he was.
Would you play at all or just talk?
Play and talk, but mostly talk. I had some specific questions about the Grateful Dead, for instance. The stuff on the records was just so clear, and the listening and production were so incredible. I wanted to know how it translated into a hockey rink or a stadium—“How do you get away with playing this music in an acoustical environ- ment where you can’t dot an eighth note?” [Laughs.] So he invited me to one of these Madison Square Garden shows, just to sit behind the amp and see what was really going on—what’s the difference between what’s coming off the stage and what’s going on the tape, and where the energy was and stuff. That was a revelation, too.
He was so intelligent and so funny. I remember I was up on the stage before the show, in the little pipe and drape in Jerry’s area with the little chairs. We were sitting there smoking cigarettes and he says, “I got a new guitar.” And I was like, “Oh, yeah? How does it sound?” He’s got the guitar on the stand, and he kind of reaches over and flicks the edges of the finger- board like he’s flicking a booger, and the guitar goes pink and he looks at me. [Laughs.] It was sort of the variation of the Chet Atkins story—someone says, “That guitar sounds great.” So he puts in on the stand and says, “How does it sound now?” It was that kind of relationship.
As weird as it must’ve been to have lived a life in that band, all those guys were just way nicer than they needed to be, more often than not. They’re good people.
