Grateful Dead

Candyman supplementary notes

By Jesse Jarnow
 

Both of the guest keyboardists on “Candyman” have had deep creative careers outside their associations with the Grateful Dead, well worth exploration.
 

After spending several decades working predominantly with photography and visual art, Lagin released Cat Dreams in 2016, an album as playful as 1975’s Seastones is ethereal. Seastones is now available in a greatly expanded two-CD form, with another realization available as a single LP.
 

Following Hooteroll?, his studio collaboration with Jerry Garcia, Howard Wales has released another eight full-lengths, available via Bandcamp, most recently 2018’s Undisclosed Location. Mixing deep grooves with Wales’s idiosyncratic melodic logic, it’s a straight line to the Matrix in the spring of 1970. I’m especially fascinated by his almost entirely solo 2014 album, Overview.
 

For a guide to Jerry Garcia’s work at Wally Heider’s San Francisco studio between 1969 and 1974, consult the Heider’s page on the recently launched JerryBase.com, an incomplete list currently documenting 80 different sessions with the Dead, Howard Wales, Link Wray, Brewer and Shipley, and many more.