Product Review

This release, a previously unheard studio recording of Jerry Garcia at age 20, fills in a nearly empty slot of his musical canon, and is the earliest known studio recording of Garcia. One day in late 1962, Garcia and four band mates walked into Stanford University's KZSU radio station to make this recording. They called themselves the Hart Valley Drifters, and the spoken introduction tells us that the band included Jerry, future Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter and guitarist David Nelson, who would later form the New Riders of the Purple Sage with Garcia. They were joined by Ken Frankel, another early musical partner of Jerry's, and Norm Van Maastricht. The Hart Valley Drifters was one in the long line of groups that Garcia put together during the folk revival of the early 1960s, but it was perhaps his first band to present a professional level of musicianship and vocal harmony. The session captures an early moment in Jerry's career when he'd become well educated in American roots music, and showcases influences from which Garcia and Hunter would later draw on for the Grateful Dead's Workingman's Dead and American Beauty.