Some questions remain regarding the attributive date and venue for this recorded rehearsal with Tom Constanten. Here is a chrestomathy of comments, informed by some primary and secondary research, that may provide some answers. (My apologies in advance for the length of this message.)
I have learned that the 6 Nov. 1968 attributive date was at some point changed by some consensus to 6 Dec. 1968 (it appears in DeadBase X as "12/??/68," and on at least one tape as 12/6/68) based on Tom's having become a member of the band on 23 Nov. 1968. (As has been correctly pointed out, Tom did play with the band as a guest on 11 Mar. 1968, and he did contribute to Anthem of the Sun.) However, it is certainly conceivable that Tom would have rehearsed with the band before his debut as a member (assuming his having been at liberty to do so); after all, Keith Godchaux rehearsed with the band in late September and early October '71 before his live debut on 19 Oct. 1971. Given the recording of a rendition of "Clementine" at Pacific Recording in San Mateo on 5 Nov. 1968, I concur that the best attributive date for this rehearsal with Tom Constanten is 6 Nov. 1968. So far, I have come to know of two digitally transcribed sources for this recorded rehearsal. The online source entry for one source and the source detail for the other yield leads for possible further investigation. The first is ShnID-012618 (Tzuriel). On 30 Jan. 2011, "dr. unclear" over at db.etree.org revised the online source entry, changing the date of attribution from "??/??/68" to "11/06/68." One inquire of "dr. unclear" why he (or she) made this change. The second is ShnID-082393 (Evans/Waddell). On or about 5 Feb. 2007, Jamie Waddell wrote in his source detail that the source had been "confirmed, infact [sic], to be 11 6 1968 by respectable traders." One might inquire of Jamie Waddell just who it was who confirmed this date attributed to this recorded rehearsal. As for the venue: Pacific Recording in San Mateo is a good possibility, given the recording of a rendition of "Clementine" there the day before on 5 Nov. 1968. However, unless band management and Ron Wickersham were able to secure the space for free or on the cheap, it seems somewhat doubtful that the band would book time in a recording studio -- which tended to be expensive, even then -- simply to hold a fairly extensive rehearsal. Then again, the band members may have wanted a studio reference recording for further listening; they may have hoped the rehearsal would fructify propitiously into a session; they and Owsley (or Wickersham, or others) may have wanted to try a "live" recording with the best recording technology available to gauge the results. But all of this is supposition and surmise. We do know the band ran up a huge tab with Warner Bros. (in the hundreds of thousands of dollars) for studio time during the recording of Aoxomoxoa. Notwithstanding the foregoing, it is meet to note that the 13 Aug. 1968 live studio recordings of "Clementine jam" and "The Eleven jam," made not with the 16-track Ampex MM-1000 (which had not then entered the picture) but with an 8-track machine (which pieces were included as bonus tracks on the Rhino reissue of Aoxomoxoa on CD), sound very much like this recorded rehearsal with T.C. from a few months later. The timbre and spatial orientation are similar. The cleanliness of the sound and relative volumes of the instruments jibe. The approaches are all of a piece, which indicates continuity of recording environment and engineering. It is also meet to note the highlights of the history (which is consistent with Susan Wickersham's "long history" of Alembic) recounted in fulsome and illuminating detail by Blair Jackson in his Grateful Dead Gear (Backbeat Books, San Francisco: 2006) at 74-84. This history supports the attribution of the venue of this recorded rehearsal to Pacific Recording, but may contradict the attributive date of 6 Nov. 1968. The band headed back into the studio in the fall of '68, booking time at Pacific Recording, where Bob Matthews and Betty Cantor were working. Pacific had an old Altec mixing board that was compatible with an Ampex AG-440 8-track recorder. The band began recording Aoxomoxoa on this unit (on which the recording speed varied due to poor tape transport) at Pacific Recording on 5 Sept. 1968, and continued apace until the part-time chief engineer and maintenance man at Pacific Recording, Ron Wickersham, showed up with only the second Ampex 16-track MM-1000 ever made. Ron mentored Bob and Betty in the use of the new 16-track behemoth. The band scrapped what it had had and started fresh. Odds are good that the rehearsal with T.C. was recorded on the MM-1000, which afforded not only more tracks but better interfacing for mixing and effects. In late November '68, Tom Constanten was fresh out of the Air Force and was invited to join the band. He played a Vox Continental because the Hammond B-3 organ had been repossessed. As Dennis McNally recounts in his A Long Strange Trip (Broadway Books, New York: 2002) at 281, before Tom left the United States Air Force, he programmed at least one of their computers to generate a printout six weeks to the day after his departure featuring characters configured in the shape of a upraised middle finger and the letters "USAF." I'll bet if someone asked Tom about this, he would know the exact date this message emerged, the exact date of his discharge from the Air Force, or both. (Obviously, knowing one date leads to the deduction of the other.) His discharge date, possibly retrojectively determined, may definitively contradict the attributive date of 6 Nov. 1968 for this recorded rehearsal at which he played organ. (In other words, I don't think T.C. went AWOL just to make this rehearsal, but given his disgruntlement, you never know.) To record the Avalon Ballroom shows in January 1969, the engineers and crew loaded up the MM-1000 and, in Matthews's colorful description, "we got ten people with ropes and we carried it like a sedan chair up the stairs to the Avalon." Bear and Wickersham devised a novel and direct approach to the recording, which they implemented with Bob and Betty (and the crew): they split the signal from the microphones, so an identical signal to the PA feed was fed directly into the track channels on the MM-1000. The result was an unadulterated recording with clean sound and a beautifully airy and spatially satisfying mix. Though the two digital sources we have for the recorded rehearsal with T.C. are lossy and are plagued by dropouts, volume fluctuations, and distortion, when the sound is good, it matches the sound of the MM-1000 from Live Dead remarkably well. Before the recording of Aoxomoxoa was finished, the band had a falling out with Paul Curcio, then the owner of Pacific Recording, and so Blair recounts that they decamped to Pacific High Recording in San Francisco, which had moved from its early location in Sausalito to 60 Brady Street in the city. (Susan Wickersham has recounted that Alembic moved there in 1971, taking over the former Pacific High Recording studio.) As the 5 Nov. 1968 recording of "Clementine" (obviously not included on Aoxomoxoa, but coeval with its content) is the final recording session I see listed in DeadBase X for the album, it is possible that it and the recorded rehearsal the next day occurred at Pacific High Recording. However, as the redoubtable Ihor Slabicky has noted in The Compleat Grateful Dead Discography, since the album was not released until May '69 at the earliest, and likely was released on 10 June 1969, it is more likely that all recording was done at Pacific Recording with subsequent mixing done at Pacific High Recording. It is tempting to attribute the venue of this recorded rehearsal to the Avalon Ballroom (a rehearsal was held and recorded there on 23 Jan. 1969; "The Eleven" and "Dupree's Diamond Blues" are included as bonus tracks to Download Series Vol. 12, Wash. U., St. Louis 4/17/69, though I have not listened to them because I do not yet have that release), or to the band's/Alembic's rehearsal space in Novato in January '69. It sure sounds like Bob, Betty, Owsley, Ron Wickersham, and others are field-testing in a ballroom or concert hall the MM-1000 setup that Bob, Betty, and Owsley used so successfully in recording Live Dead. The relative prominence of the organ and bass in contrast to the distance and indistinctness of Jerry's vocals (until he switches mics and his vocals move from ambient deep right channel to direct up-front left channel) and of the rhythm guitar suggest a recording made both with ambient miking and with early direct injection into an studio 'board-and-reel rig made "mobile." So too, the reverberation and decay of Mickey's guiro during "Dark Star" and of his cowbell in "St. Stephen," and the reverberation throughout in the guitars, vocals, tom-toms, bass drum, and cymbals, smack of an empty, reflective hall, not a dry, carpeted recording studio with baffles and the like. The harmony vocals in the final chorus of "St. Stephen" definitely reverberate and decay as they would have done in a reflective open space. Again, notwithstanding the foregoing, the explanation of these recording phenomena provided by Bob Matthews in his description of the recording of Live Dead with the MM-1000 does support the attribution of this rehearsal to Pacific Recording as recorded there on the MM-1000: "[B]y utilitizing time -- such as delay and reverberation decay -- in a very musically defined and tuned manner, you can add the dimensionality that makes it feel like it's in a real space." (Grateful Dead Gear at 84.) I believe that is exactly what the engineers and the Kwipment Krew did at Pacific Recording with the Ampex MM-1000 in the fall of '68: create a clear, well-balanced, dimensional sound with a combination of ambient miking and direct injection to make the studio sound as "live" as possible. It is worth noting the plywood panelling in the control room at Pacific Recording that is pictured in Blair's history (Grateful Dead Gear at 77). If this panelling were in the recording space, it would account for some of the reflectivity heard in the rehearsal recording. I reiterate my concurrence that the best attributive date and venue for this rehearsal (pending definitive confirmation pro or con) are 6 Nov. 1968 at Pacific Recording in San Mateo.
