Late For Supper

Lyrics: [none]
Music: Jerry Garcia

An instrumental on Jerry Garcia's first album. The songbook for the Garcia album has a schematic of the tracks (it says "Score by Philip Davenport"). See page 1 and page 2 (apologies for poor quality scans). The text is:

NOTES - LATE FOR SUPPER

A major compositional element of this piece is the four times repeated Attack of Track 1, consists of multi-octave tone cluster produced by laying the forearms on the piano keyboard. This effect is sustained and then decayed by use of echo. The other piano tracks consist of indiscriminate clusters, enhancing the pianoness of the composition.

1. The bent-note glisando effect at Attack 2 is produced by starting the tape recorder just after the piano impact and adding echo. Tracks 2 to 8 begin at half-scond intervals at sec. 25. This greatly enhances the echo effect.
2. The piano cadenzas at this point are self-revealing. The Round Robin which is a 'sound-washing-in-soun' effect is produced by feeding source sound from the mixdown board to a tape recorder. (Tape Recorder 2) patched into the echo control. Sound is then taken from the playback head of Tape Recorder 2 (which is 0.5 second delay from the record head) and sent back to a free track on the main board and looped again into Tape Recorder 2, while the new material from the main board is also feeding into Tape Recorder 2. The result is that echo is literally reproduced and continues to do so cumulatively.
3. Attack 4, which utilizes only tracks 1, 9, and 10, is characterised by the wandering of the guitar track over the piano attack. This is the single instance in the composition that a single voice stands out in the soloistic sense.

Although the melodic line is random, the quality is one which lends resolution to the composition.