Pure Jerry: Merriweather Post Pavilion, September 1 & 2, 1989 | ||||
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Live album by Jerry Garcia Band | ||||
Released | March 25, 2005 | |||
Recorded | September 1 – 2, 1989 | |||
Genre | Rock, rhythm and blues | |||
Length | 228:14 | |||
Label | Jerry Made | |||
Jerry Garcia Band chronology | ||||
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Jerry Garcia chronology | ||||
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Source | Rating |
Allmusic | |
The Music Box |
Pure Jerry: Merriweather Post Pavilion, September 1 & 2, 1989 is a four-CD live album by the Jerry Garcia Band. It contains two complete concerts, recorded on September 1 and 2, 1989, at the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland. The fifth in the Pure Jerry series of archival concert albums, it was released on March 25, 2005.
The lineup of the Jerry Garcia Band for these concerts — and for many of the band's concerts from 1985 to 1995 — was Jerry Garcia on guitar and vocals, Melvin Seals on keyboards, John Kahn on bass, David Kemper on drums, and Jaclyn LaBranch and Gloria Jones on backing vocals.
On Allmusic, Lindsay Planer said, "The lineup heard here was the longest running incarnation of the Jerry Garcia Band... By the late '80s Garcia and company had matured from the smaller intimacy of concert bars and theater-sized venues to easily filling sheds (read: amphitheaters). The boost in popularity could possibly be attributed to the level of musicianship that audiences were consistently treated to. In fact, the consensus among seasoned Deadheads and Garcia aficionados was that his work outside the increasingly cumbersome Grateful Dead scene was often better and more inspired. Pure Jerry: Merriweather Post Pavilion, September 1 & 2, 1989 offers nearly four hours of evidence to support their claims."
In The Music Box, John Metzger said, "... by 1989, the [Grateful Dead] once again was performing as a formidably cohesive unit. Naturally, this positive turn of events affected the Jerry Garcia Band, too.... One certainly could quibble that perhaps the Merriweather Post Pavilion concerts might have been better represented by a compilation-style effort... Yet, there also is something to be said for releasing shows intact, if only because concerts by the Jerry Garcia Band, much like those by the Grateful Dead, contained a unique ebb and flow, and plucking songs out of context, more often than not, seriously diminishes the group's carefully constructed continuity.... while Shining Star remains a more pristine representation of the latter day Jerry Garcia Band, Pure Jerry Volume 5 is also a very worthy endeavor..."