Revisit the David Crosby and Grateful Dead supergroup ‘David and the Dorks’
By 1970, Jerry Garcia had gotten into the habit of performing ad-hoc concerts at his local club in San Francisco, The Matrix. Originally the home for Jefferson Airplane, The Matrix simply wasn’t big enough to hold most of the Bay Area bands that began to explode by the end of the 1960s, like the Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service. But during nights when there weren’t any scheduled shows, the club became a haunt for some of the biggest names around the scene.
Garcia was a notable frequent guest, often sitting in with any and all musicians who wanted to take the stage on a given night. These informal jams started to become known as Jerry Garcia and Friends, a precursor to Garcia’s solo venture, The Jerry Garcia Band. The Matrix was also the site where new bands would formalise, such as The New Riders of the Purple Sage (which originally featured Garcia and Dead drummer Mickey Hart). They also included Mickey and the Hartbeats (a spinoff of the Grateful Dead that briefly existed when Bob Weir and Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan were briefly kicked out of the band in 1968).
Garcia’s welcoming aura made The Matrix a warm and friendly environment for musicians and friends to relax and jam. One person that really needed that kind of atmosphere was David Crosby, the recent Los Angeles ex-pat who had found major success thanks to his time in The Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young.
Just after he permanently moved to the Bay Area, Crosby’s girlfriend Christine died in an automobile accident. Her death sent Crosby spiralling, with his drug use becoming more intense and his actions becoming more erratic. The only thing that kept Crosby’s mind off the accident was playing music, so he jumped in with both feet by working on CSNY’s Déjà Vu and his own solo debut, If I Could Only Remember My Name, at the same time.
The Dead had their own hands full that year as well. Manager Lenny Hart had recently absconded with most of the band’s finances, causing them to increase their touring workload. The band were also under heavy scrutiny for their role in the Altamont Free Concert, which left three people dead. Somehow during all of that, the band found time to record their two most celebrated studio albums, Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty.
The members of the Dead were also assisting Crosby on If I Could Only Remember My Name (all of the albums mentioned were being recorded at Wally Heider Studio in San Francisco, which led to Garcia contributing his iconic pedal steel guitar intro to CSNY’s ‘Teach Your Children’). With a collection of songs between them, it was decided that Crosby, Garcia, Hart, and Phil Lesh would play some loose gigs together at The Matrix.
“We had a little band called David and the Dorks,” Garcia recalled. “He was the star, and it was his trip that we were doing. It was right around the time he was in the Bay Area a lot… we did maybe two or three shows… they weren’t announced or anything; we just went in there on a Monday night and had a lot of fun, and the sound was cool. In fact, that was the core of the band that played on David’s album.”
David and the Dorks were so spontaneous that many of the details surrounding the four shows that the band played are hazy. Some recall Bill Kreutzmann being the drummer, not Hart. Exact setlists are hard to come by, although it is known that a combination of songs from both Crosby’s repertoire and the Dead’s were played. The only show with a full tape is from December 15th, 1970. Even then, the tape is occasionally labelled as “Jerry Garcia and Friends” or even “Jerry and the Jerks”.
Check out some of the live recordings from David and the Dorks down below.
