Bob Weir rarely parted ways with his guitars. Over the years he spent as a founding member of the Grateful Dead — and afterward with groups like his jam band Ratdog and Dead & Company — Weir acquired about 100 electric and acoustic models he said in the 2015 documentary, The Other One.

But Weir, who died January 10 at age 78, told Guitar Player in 1998 that he had two favorite guitars in his collection: a Gibson ES-335 from the early '70s (“an old sweetheart”) and an Ibanez George Benson model with an interesting back story.

“I was working with Ibanez on some designs in the mid '70s,” Weir confessed, “and they showed me a new guitar that had just come in from Japan. I played it a bit, and they told me they had made it for George Benson. I told them, ‘No, you didn't. You can call the police or do whatever you're going to do to me, but I'm taking it.’

“It still has Benson's name on it, and I've written so many songs on that guitar. I don't know if George knows that ever happened, and I'd like to apologize to him.”

Weir’s death comes months after he was diagnosed with cancer in the summer of 2025. Although he beat the cancer, he succumbed to underlying lung issues, according to a post on his Instagram page.

Over his years with the Grateful Dead, Weir established himself as a vital member of the group. No one better articulated Weir’s contributions to the band than Jerry Garcia, who relied on Weir’s innovative chording and steady rhythms as a support for his own virtuoso lead work.

“He's like my left hand,” Garcia told Guitar Player’s Jon Sievert in the October 1978 issue. “We have a long, serious conversation going on musically, and the whole thing is of a complementary nature. We have fun, and we've designed our playing to work against and with each other.

“His playing, in a way, really puts my playing in the only kind of meaningful context it could enjoy. That's a hard idea to communicate, but any serious analysis of the Dead's music would make it apparent that things are designed really appropriately. There are some passages, some kinds of ideas, that would really throw me if I had to create a harmonic bridge between all the things going on rhythmically with two drums and Phil [Lesh]’s innovative bass style. To solve that kind of problem as he does is extraordinary.”

Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna guitarist Jorma Kaukonen spoke glowingly of Weir’s talents in an interview with Guitar Player late last year. He noted how Weir studied with blues guitarist Reverend Gary Davis and came back with an arsenal of remarkable chord shapes.

“Bobby’s a freaking genius on a lot of levels,” Kaukonen said. "He went and studied with Reverend Davis, and the chord shapes Bob used were Reverend Davis’s chord shapes, and these were not typical kinds of things most fingerstyle guitar players use. It was interesting, really interesting, ‘cause he was playing with a pick, not his fingers. It was really cool, actually.”

Years after Garcia’s death, in 1995, Weir quickly escalated his involvement with Ratdog, his blues-rock-experimental jam band with bassist Rob Wasserman, keyboardist Jeff Chimenti, saxophonist Dave Ellis, drummer Jay Lane, and Matthew Kelly on harmonica and guitar.

He also went on to form the group Further with Lesh as well as Dead & Company alongside former Grateful Dead members that included drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, guitarist John Mayer, bassist Oteil Burbridge and keyboardist Chimenti.

“Not everybody gets a chance in midlife to reinvent himself,” Weir told us in 1998, “and I'd be remiss to overlook that opportunity and challenge.”

Back in 1962, Jorma Kaukonen traveled from Ohio, where he was studying at Antioch College, to the University of Santa Clara in California. He was already an accomplished fingerstyle guitar player, having been tutored by a friend at Antioch — who in turn had studied with Reverend Gary Davis.

So he was in some ways the guy least likely to become one of psychedelic rock’s primary electric guitar heroes.

But that’s exactly what Kaukonen became three years later as a founding member of Jefferson Airplane. (He was also responsible for the band’s name.) Kaukonen did get to demonstrate his acoustic dexterity on “Embryonic Journey” from 1967’s iconic Surrealistic Pillow album, but he mostly spent eight studio albums — including the 1989 reunion album, Jefferson Airplane — helping to create a fresh guitar direction alongside bandmates Paul Kantner and bass guitar player Jack Casady, with whom Kaukonen started another band, Hot Tuna, in 1969. (Singer Grace Slick — who spoke with GP about Jimi Hendrix — joined after the group released its 1966 debut, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off.)

“I guess on some levels they dragged me kicking and screaming into it,” Kaukonen tells us, via Zoom, about his migration to electric guitar. Again, it was a confluence of circumstance. I’d just recorded the Wabash Avenue stuff,” he explains, referring to recordings of acoustic club performances that were released for Record Store Day Black Friday this year.

“I was thinking about moving to Europe, maybe going to Denmark and being an expat musician or some nonsense. Who knows what I was really thinking back then. The Airplane ball got rolling, and the rest is history.”

After the Airplane first dissolved in 1973, Kaukonen continued on with Casady in Hot Tuna and also began a solo career with 1974’s Quah. These days, he’s back in Ohio — near Athens, in the southeast corner of the state — holding guitar classes and gatherings at Fur Peace Ranch, which he runs with his wife, Vanessa. With his 85th birthday looming on December 23, Kaukonen is playing some special, guest-filled concerts to commemorate it in December and has announced there will be no more extensive touring. But he’s not planning to retire.

“The passion is still there,” Kaukonen maintains. “I think in many respect the acumen is improved. Jack and I were talking about this. I think both of us have been in this game for a long time, and on some levels the playing has improved in a lot of ways. I’m probably not as fast as I used to be, but who is? I think as a much younger player. The passion and the excitement that I was able to do it at all sort of carried me through in a lot of ways.

“Today I’m more consciously aware of the story involved in what I’m doing when I’m playing. The audience has allowed me to tell and retell my story in different ways for many years, and I appreciate that.”

And in appreciate of that, we asked Kaukonen for the stories of some of the other key guitarists he encountered during the heyday of the San Francisco psychedelic scene.

Jerry Garcia

“Jerry’s one of the first people I met there, ‘cause he’s a really gregarious kind of guy. He was sort of the overlord of the Palo Alto scene, but he came down to play the Offstage [the San Jose venue crucial to bridging the gap between folk and psychedelic music in the 1960s].

“I think we were sharing a bill, both there playing a show — not together but the same night. We took a break, and we thought smoking pot in an alley on First Street in San Francisco seemed like a bad idea.

“So even though it was in the middle of a gig we drove out to Allen State Park. We were up on this rock, and it’s summer and the sun’s song down. It was a real beatific moment. We just got to know each other. And then we went back to the gig, and whoever was on played next.

“Jerry was an affable guy. He had played in bands for years, which I had never done, not counting a little band Jack and I had in highs school. So when I got into the Airplane I went right to Jerry, asking, ‘What do I need to do in order to fit in?’ ‘Cause the band didn’t need what I could do as a solo fingerstyle guitar player.

“And what he told me was learn to play in the holes, and learn to leave holes, which is good advice for a lead player in a band.

“He was just one of the immensely talented guys that put the work in all the time. ‘Cause it’s not magic. You can’t just touch a stone and be able to do that. As a banjo player, he obviously gravitated later on in his career to play the pedal steel guitar, which is an incomprehensible instrument to guys like me. He was just one of these guys who could play a lot of instruments really well.

“Now the bar’s always getting raised, and these days we can go almost anywhere string music is loved and find some 20-year-old kid who can play Dobro and banjo and all those instruments really well. It wasn’t like that back then, but Garcia could play everything really well.”

Bob Weir

“Bobby didn’t say much back in those days. I’ve read things where he said he would go and watch me play, and stuff like that, and to be honest with you I have no recollection of that.

“But Bobby’s a freaking genius on a lot of levels. He’s one of these guys that’s been able to give substance to his strings for a very long time, whether it’s the show at the Sphere in Vegas or any of that kind of stuff. He’s a get-it-done kind of guy.

“But I remember, back then he went to get lessons from Reverend Gary Davis. I’d met Reverend through Ian Buchanan, who was my mentor, but I never studied with him. And I’ve never talked about this to Bob but I’ve seen the effects. He went and studied with Rev. Davis, and the chord shapes Bob used were Reverend Davis’s chord shapes, and these were not typical kinds of things most fingerstyle guitar players use. It was interesting, really interesting, ‘cause he was playing with a pick, not his fingers. It was really cool, actually.”

Paul Kantner

“[University of] Santa Clara was a very conservative school back in ‘62 when I started there. It was the dark ages in a lot of ways. I met this guy named Bob Kenzie, and in the first month or so I was in Santa Clara he said, ‘There’s this guy you need to meet. He went to Santa Clara last year and dropped out.’

“So we drove over the hills of Santa Clara and we went to the beach, and in a shack on the beach was Paul Kantner. I don’t know if he was surfing, but there was certainly a surfboard leaning up against the house, and he was playing a 12-string guitar. Even though we weren’t playing the same kind of thing — he wasn’t a blues player — we decided out of self-defense against the world we needed to get to know each other. And we did, and one thing led to another over the years.

“Paul was more of what we would call in that era a commercial-style folk singer. He listened to more contemporary stuff rather than going back to the masters, as me and my self-important friends liked to do. His thing was to put a group together.

“I remember he moved to L.A. and he lived down there with [David] Crosby for a while, and he had a commercial folk group — him, a lead-ish guitar player and a girl singer. In a way it was precursor to what the Jefferson Airplane would be. When he came back from L.A., he spent a little bit of time in San Jose, then moved to San Francisco. And the next move would be Jefferson Airplane.”

John Cipollina

“What an interesting player he was. He played with his fingers, but he wasn’t a ‘fingerstyle’ guitar player. When we talk about psychedelic guitar he was, in my opinion, one of the precursors and one of the finest exponents of true, San Francisco psychedelic-style guitar.

“I remember thinking at the time that what he did just fit with what Quicksilver [Messenger Service] was doing. Their rhythm section was pretty solid, so there was a lot of room for him to be John, and there’s no question — for me, at least — that his sound is the sound of that band, aside from the vocal harmonies. But the instrumental sound of the band, that was him.”

Woodstock was the defining concert of 1960s rock and roll. The three-day event held in August 1969 boasted some of the day’s top acts, including Jimi Hendrix, the Who (whose set was famously interrupted by Abbie Hoffman), and CSN&Y.

But two of the biggest groups to play the festival refused to let their performances be included in the 1970 concert movie or its companion album: the Grateful Dead and Creedence Clearwater Revival.

As it happened, the two groups performed one after the other as Saturday, August 16, turned to Sunday, August 17. And the problems that went down during the Grateful Dead’s set affected CCR’s, causing the group’s set to suffer.

Dead guitarist Bob Weir explained that a downpour made the stage a danger zone.

“The stage was wet, and the electricity was coming through me. I was conducting!” he recalled. “Touching my guitar and the microphone was nearly fatal. There was a great big blue spark about the size of a baseball, and I got lifted off my feet and sent back eight or 10 feet to my amplifier.”

Matters weren’t helped by the fact that the band were incredibly high, resulting in a haphazard performance even before the rain began.

"We had this thing about the big shows — 'blowing the big ones' — and I'm not sure why that was," drummer Bill Kreutzmann told Conan O’Brien in 2015. "It was so bad that we didn't allow it to be in the movie. It was terrible."

CCR guitarist John Fogerty watched it all go down from the side of the stage. He says his group — then one of the biggest acts in rock thanks to 1969 hits like “Proud Mary,” “Born on the Bayou,” “Bad Moon Rising” and “Green River” — were originally scheduled to go on much earlier in the day.

“We were promised a prime time on a Saturday night, like nine o’clock,” Fogerty told O'Brien. “What they didn’t tell me is, ‘You’re gonna follow the Grateful Dead.’

"Things went sorely wrong after they hit the stage. Everybody was running late, of course.

“But what they didn’t tell us until the ’90s was they had all taken LSD just as they went onstage.”

The group’s drug intake, combined with the hazardous stage conditions, caused delays in their set. Fogerty — who at the time was rocking his iconic "ACME" Fireglo Rickenbacker 325 electric guitar — claims that at “about the middle of their set, it went dead silent. It was quiet for about an hour and then they started playing again."

He says Creedence finally went on at “literally 2:30 in the morning” — although many sources say it was actually 12:30 — only to find the audience dead asleep.

"I come running out — ‘cause this was a big chance; there was a half a million people there — and I look down there and I see a bunch of people who look a lot like me, except they're naked. And they're asleep. They were all kind of piled together.

“It looked like one of those pictures of the souls coming up out of Hell, like Dante’s Inferno, or something. But they were all asleep.

“So we started rocking out in the middle of the night and in the middle of nowhere, trying to get things going here.”

After about five songs, he addressed the crowd, hoping to rouse a response from the sleeping masses.

“I said, ‘Well, I hope you’re enjoying some of this. We’re having a great time up here; we just want you to like us,’ you know.”

“And waaay out there, about a quarter mile, some guy is flicking his lighter. He says, 'Don't worry about it, John! We're with ya!'

“So in front of a half a million people, for the rest of my big Woodstock concert, I played for that guy."

In the end, Fogerty decided the muted reception didn’t look or sound good for the group’s image. He refused to let the footage or audio from their set go into the Woodstock film and album.

But ultimately, one bad show wasn’t enough to ruin what ended up being a banner year for Creedence Clearwater Revival.

“We came home, and after a couple of days I realized, ‘What the heck, that’s just one disappointment; Creedence is still moving forward,’” Fogerty recounted to GP. “So, I didn’t worry about it too much.”

Fogerty, who won a 50-year battle for the ownership of CCR’s music in 2023, recently celebrated by releasing Legacy: The Creedence Clearwater Revival Years, which features his new takes on classic CCR tracks.

Bob Dylan’s transformation from acoustic folk singer to electric folk-rocker dismayed his hardcore folk fans in 1965. But one folkie who never cared for Dylan’s music suddenly took notice of what he was he was doing. And he liked it.

Jerry Garcia was a folkie in the early 1960s, but his preference was for traditional bluegrass, not the topical folk that was Dylan’s standard in his early years.

Ironically, it was when Dylan went electric that Garcia and his Grateful Dead bandmates — then performing as the Warlocks — took notice of him. The album that made them a convert was Dylan’s 1965 release Bringing It All Back Home.

“Before that, I was too much of a folkie to really like what he did,” Garcia reveals in a video interview recently uploaded to the Grateful Dead’s YouTube channel. “I was not that much into his topical songs. I didn’t really like the sound of his voice that much.

“But Bringing It All Back Home had some moments of real amazing poetic beauty and just the sound of the instruments on it and on some of the tracks was just gorgeous.

“I thought ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ was one of the prettiest things I’d ever heard, and as soon as I heard it I immediately wanted to perform the song. That was when his songs started speaking to what the freak on the street was experiencing.”

Garcia would go on to praise Dylan’s early electric albums, include 1966’s Blonde on Blonde, as his “heavily melodic renaissance,” thanks in part to the contributions of guitarist Robbie Robertson.

“All those passing chords … the relative minor substitutions that sort of characterize those songs, the moving second lines that happen in them. All those things are signatures of that era of Dylan’s writing,” Garcia told David Gans, “the kind of melody which you hear but he doesn’t sing.”

As for “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” Garcia went on to play the tune many times with the Grateful Dead. Dylan and the Dead would tour together in 1987, during which time they performed the song live.

As the former Grateful Dead leader noted, Bringing It All Back Home saw Dylan abandon the protest music of his earlier period and begin to write more personal and even confessional songs, often using surreal and opaque lines and references, which became a staple of the emerging psychedelic rock genre. Among its most famous electric songs are three that open the album: “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “She Belongs to Me” and “Maggie’s Farm.” Like the other cuts on side one, they feature

But it’s on side two that Dylan returns to his acoustic roots with “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Gates of Eden,” “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” Although recorded on the same day as the other three songs, January 15, 1965, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” was a fairly new song written earlier that month, and Dylan wanted to get it recorded while it was still fresh.

As he explained, it was inspired by Gene Vincent’s “Baby Blue.”

"I had carried that song around in my head for a long time and I remember that when I was writing it, I'd remembered a Gene Vincent song,” Dylan said in the sleeve notes to Biograph. “It had always been one of my favorites, ‘Baby Blue’… It was one of the songs I used to sing back in high school. Of course, I was singing about a different Baby Blue.”

He most certainly was. “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” is considered one of the greatest kiss-off songs ever written, a parting of the ways with no chance of reconciliation. The identity of Baby Blue has never been revealed, but Dylan performed it as his final song at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival after his electric set was booed, making it an apt, if bitter, farewell to the folk scene.

The following interview originally appeared in the October 1978 issue of Guitar Player.

Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead have become cultural institutions, though they never planned it that way. Other bands have achieved a similar status, but for different reasons – unlike the major rock attractions who are idolized from afar, the Dead are seen up close, enjoyed, and respected. They were patriarchs of San Francisco’s psychedelic colony of the 1960s, city fathers in a community of crazies. 

As perceived in the general press, Garcia and company were the hippie band, playing music for getting stoned, seeing God, dancing, singing, blowing bubbles, mellowing out, or whatever – good-time music without rock-star pretensions. But the Grateful Dead were more than that, and they have produced an extensive catalog of music that transcends the experiences of late-'60s San Francisco.

Today, without hit singles, they remain heroes to their confederacy of loyal fans, or Deadheads.

Looking back, the Dead’s popularity marked a change in popular music. By mainstream commercial criteria, they should have failed. They lacked a charismatic central figure, did not pursue any of the tried and true Top 40 formulas, and did not wear spiffy outfits. They weren’t cute. They didn’t aspire to be chart busters or darlings of the mass media, and they weren’t – they couldn’t have been. 

To most promoters, producers, and disc jockeys, the aggregation of San Francisco musicians were nothing more than the noisiest cage in a menagerie of freaks.

The Dead were and are a part of their brotherhood of fans. More than a decade ago, instead of seeking the isolation and celebrity of big-bucks show biz, they gave free concerts. Their go-with-the-flow approach to live performing involved half-hour tuneups, long breaks between songs, marathon concerts, an eventual 23 tons of privately owned equipment, and a lesser amount of drugs. 

These sometimes-impromptu events were promoted by word of mouth or by flower children with rainbow clothes and pinwheel eyes, passing out handbills, perhaps balloons, and sometimes LSD – which was legal until August 1966. Concert posters with kaleidoscopic, highly stylized artwork were tacked up in head shops and on telephone poles.

The do-your-own-thing philosophy of the Grateful Dead should not be mistaken for a lack of seriousness – the Dead were simply serious about doing their own thing. The commitment to their own codes, sometimes interpreted as anarchy by straight record industry execs, provided the band with enormous staying power. 

By succeeding on their own terms, Jerry Garcia’s band helped change the 1960s fan/artist relationship and perception from a hopelessly distant, sometimes hysterical worship identification to something born of shared experience.

Previously you’ve said that you seem to go through cyclic learning stages. What causes that to happen?

“I think it’s something that happens to every guitar player as he keeps on playing through the years. You’re struggling to learn a whole body of material, and you finally learn it and can play it expertly, and then you get bored. It becomes a 'now what?' situation. You’re struggling to obtain ground and you reach a plateau, and then your boredom finally drives you to develop to new levels. 

“I think that’s a healthy and normal thing. I seem to go through it about once every year and a half or two years pretty regularly. That’s pretty much how my metabolism seems to work. I think of myself really as a guitar student as much as a player or performer, because there’s so much being developed and so much that’s already been done that I’ll never learn it all.”

What kind of things do you do during these stages?

“First, I go out and buy all the new guitar method books that have come out since the last time and read through them and try out ideas and exercises. I find it really helpful to see somebody else’s handle on it, because it’s possible they can show me new ways of looking at the instrument or music that I hadn’t considered before. The state of guitar education today is incredible compared to just 15 years ago. You can learn an astounding amount from just reading books that are available today. 

“I’m working very hard now. I’m working hard on things that I haven’t worked hard on before. I have certain exercises that I do, but it’s more like working out little bits and pieces of unfinished ideas. 

“A lot of it is just free playing, exploring for places where all of a sudden something is vague or awkward like suddenly finding yourself in a position that’s odd in relation to the key you’re playing in. Or, for example, you’re doing a run that’s going down scale intervals, and you’re on, like, the top E string, and you’re ending on one part of the passage on your first finger and then jumping a position and starting the next part with your little finger and moving down. That’s a difficult thing to do on the guitar.”

How do you learn to master that kind of passage?

“I’ll just keep going over it until it’s smooth, and then it starts to turn up in other places. Anything you work at technically always turns out to have unexpected rewards. You realize later, not only is this convenient for me to make a very full, long run, but it also gets me conveniently from position A to B to C. You start to really see interconnections.”

How is your picture of the fingerboard developing?

“Finally the complete pattern of the fingerboard is becoming more apparent. I’m forcing it into shape in my own psyche, in my own way of seeing and feeling. I’m spending seven or eight hours a day with it. I’m trying to rebuild myself, I feel like it’s time for me to do that in my playing. I don’t know whether it will amount to anything, but in six months I’ll know. I’m sort of in a two-year plan right now – the first pause of the next level.”

When you’re not going through these intense learning periods, how much time do you usually spend with a guitar?

“It depends on the schedule. When I’m on the road it’s a lot more, but when I’m home I’d say I spend no less than an average of two hours a day at the absolute worst. That’s, like, really screwing around. 

“I think four hours is more normal for me. on the road it goes up to about six, including the show. I lose my edge in a day if I don’t stay on top of it constantly. Anything more than two days and it’s like being a cripple. And the more you play, the more you notice it if you miss a day. But then there’s also the thing that, if you’re away from the guitar for two or three days, sometimes you can come back with something else. 

“Now, that’s not one of those things you can depend on, but sometimes it does happen just in the flow. You come back and you have a little more of something. I don’t know what – confidence, new ideas, or something.” 

What do you see as your major limitation?

“A lack of an early musical education. I’ve been able to compensate for it some, but having an early education means that a lot of things become reflexive, automatic. Now, sometimes that can perpetuate bad habits on a technical level, but in terms of sight-reading and the like, I wish I had started earlier. 

“I’m not unhappy with my progress, but that’s the one thing. As it is, I’m glad to have been able to develop an intuitive approach to music, and I can see that there could be disadvantages to having a completely schooled approach. Sometimes that blocks out the intuition; there are people with great technique who have nothing to say.”

How did your early process of music education work?

“My first orientation was learning from my ear. So I learned mostly from records – Freddie King and B.B. King extensively – and, you know, everybody else. That was my first exposure, mostly because the Bay Area didn’t have that many guitar players back when I started playing, and there really wasn’t a lot of local information, or at least I wasn’t able to uncover it. 

“For me, I would describe my own learning process as wasting a lot of time. I did it the hardest way possible, or it seems that way now. I had to spend a lot of time unlearning things – bad habits and so forth. I think I went through as many of these unlearning cycles as I could. It was around 1972 or ‘73 when I finally unlearned all the things that had hung me up to that point.”

Like what, specifically?

“Oh, like playing out of preference to certain positions – like tending to think along certain positions because they were more available to my hand, rather than for musical reasons. 

“It became a serious problem for me to correct onstage. I think that’s an easy trap to fall into – doing things that are merely easiest for you and are within your immediate grasp with the excitement of playing on stage. And other things I would describe as rhythmic and idea habits in addition to technical habits – having a more or less limited kind of vocabulary and tending to depend on my ability to exploit it rather than developing a greater vocabulary. 

“I’ve been through a lot of things like, for example, deciding never to play anything shorter than a half-note during a solo for a year in order to cut down the busy-ness. I get tired of busy stuff, and I decide that I want to exploit the single-note capability and the tone of the guitar, so for a period I play really slow leads regardless of the rhythmic path. After awhile I get tired of doing that and start working on developing speed.”

Could you discuss your approach to fingering?

“I think it has something to do with my early five-string banjo playing. Most guitar players I’ve noticed seem to use a flat fingering. I’ve somehow trained myself to come straight down on top of the string. I play mostly on the tips of my fingers, so the high action doesn’t get in my way at all. I’m not pulling other strings along with it and so forth.”

Do you use the little finger on your left hand much?

“Yes. Early on, I was lucky enough to have someone point out the usefulness of that finger. As a result it is one of my stronger fingers, and I prefer to use it even more than my ring finger. 

“That’s always made me different from most rock guitarists that I know – even the really good ones. I think in rock and roll a lot of guitar players favor something that lets them use the ring finger for greater articulation and vibrato effects. For me, I’ve got to be able to do it with every finger. I find it ridiculous to have to close all my ideas on my ring finger just so I can get a vibrato. That eliminates a lot of possibilities automatically.”

How do you achieve your vibrato?

“Well, I have about four or five different families of vibrato. Some of them are unsupported; that is to say, nothing is touching the guitar but my finger on the string. Other methods are supported, and I just move the finger for the sound. Sometimes I also use wrist motion, and other times I’ll move my whole arm. I also use horizontal and lateral motion for different sounds and speed. 

“Each has its own separate sound, and it depends on what I’m going after and which finger I’m leading with. For example, if you’re playing the blues, it’s generally appropriate to use a slow vibrato. Generally speaking, I tend to be style-conscious in terms of wanting a song to sound like the world it comes from.”

Do you play many notes by hammering-on and pulling-off?

“Generally, I like to pick every note, but I do tend to pull-off, say, a real fast triplet on things that are closing up-intervals that are heading up the scale. I do it almost without thinking about it. I almost never pull off just one note. I seldom hammer on, because it seems to have a certain inexactitude for me. I think that was a decision I made while playing the banjo. 

“My preference is for the well-spoken tone, and I think coming straight down on the strings with high knuckles makes it. So my little groups of pull-offs are really well-articulated; it’s something I worked on a lot.”

How do you approach right-hand technique?

“Generally I use a Fender extra heavy flatpick, which I sometimes palm when using my fingers. The way I hold the pick is a bit strange, I guess. I don’t hold it in the standard way but more like you hold a pencil. I think Howard Roberts describes it as the scalpel technique. The motion is basically generated from the thumb and first finger rather than say, the wrist or elbow. But I use all different kinds of motion, depending on whether I am doing single-string stuff or chords.”

Could you discuss your distinctive approach to accenting?

“Again, a certain amount of it is related to banjo playing, where you have problem-solving continually going on. There are three fingers moving more or less constantly, and you have to change the melodic weight from any one finger to any other finger. What that really involves is rhythmic changes. So, for me, it’s always been interesting to have little surprises like, for instance, accenting all the off-beats for a bar. 

“There’s also the constant playing in odd times with the Grateful Dead that contributes to that. For instance, if the band is playing in 7/4 time, I might play in 4/4. When you do that sort of thing, you begin to notice certain ways in which the two rhythms synchronize over a long period of time. 

“Thinking in these long lengths, you automatically start to develop rhythmic ideas that have a way of interconnecting. If you’re in the right kind of rhythmic context, then you have the option of being able to continually reevaluate your position in time. For me, it then becomes a thing of syncopations based on other syncopations. 

“For example, I like to start an idea when the music is in flow on a sixteenth-note triplet off of four. So that’s, like, intensely syncopated on its own, and if I start my phrase there, it’s like constructing one sentence off of another one before the first sentence is completed. That sort of linguistic analogy is something I’m very attracted to.”

Could you talk about your process of composition?

“I usually compose on the piano. The melody usually comes first, and then the accompaniment. Most often I’ll record it on a cassette, though there are certain things that I feel must be written out, or I’ll definitely lose them. 

“I can play things on a piano and have no idea what they really are unless I analyze them. I don’t play piano that well, but it’s possible to come up with a six-note chord that could be anything when I hear it on a tape. So sometimes I find it helpful to keep track of how I arrive at an idea, though I do find that if the idea has enough weight it sticks with me, and I rediscover it again later. I’m a lazy writer, not at all diligent.”

How do you and Robert Hunter work together on songs?

“It works just about every way. Sometimes I have a melody that must have a certain kind of phrasing, and it becomes a matter of discipline for him. I get down to very specific terms in telling him what musical qualities a lyric must have – at this point I want a vowel, at this point a percussive sound. Then other times he gives me a sheaf of lyrics, and I’ll go through them and find ones that appeal to me and start to work on them. Then sometimes when we’re working together to polish things up, a whole new idea will emerge, and we’ll go with that. 

“We trust each other. He trusts my ability as an editor; and I edit extensively – sometimes it drives him nuts – but we work together pretty well. It’s been a long working relationship.”

What process do you go through for building solos?

“The way I start is to learn the literal melody of the tune. Then I construct solos as though I’m either playing with it or against it. That’s a pretty loose description, obviously, because there are a lot of other factors involved. Later on, I start to see other kinds of connections, but one of my first processes is to learn the literal melody in any position. 

“I am very attracted to melody. A song with a beautiful melody can just knock me off my feet, but the greatest changes on Earth don’t mean anything to me if they don’t have a great melody tying them together in some sense.”

Have you noticed any particular logic to the way the Dead have progressed through the years?

“No, and that’s one of the things that I constantly find interesting about the band. Each one develops in a different way and with a different sense of his own development. All of a sudden there’s somebody with a whole bunch of ideas that you haven’t stumbled on and might never have. That’s the fun part of playing with other people and exposing yourself to different musicians. You find all these possible ways to grow. 

“The Grateful Dead have never developed as a group. I mean, we’ve developed as a group in a certain kind of large sense, but everybody’s individual development has that thing of being surprising, interesting, and entertaining. That’s one of the things that keeps the Dead interesting to be involved in.”

Could you say a few words about any merits or disadvantages of playing stoned?

“There’s a thing about playing stoned without having pressure on you to play competently. If you have the space in your life where you can be high and play and not be in a critical situation, you can learn a lot of interesting things about yourself and your relation to the instrument and music. We were lucky enough to have an uncritical situation, so it wasn’t like a test of how stoned we could be and still be competent – we weren’t concerned with being competent. We were more concerned with being high at the time. 

“The biggest single problem from a practical point of view is that, obviously, your perception of time gets all weird. Now, that can be interesting, but I try to avoid extremes of any sort, because you have the fundamental problems of playing in tune and playing with everybody else. People have to pay a lot of money to see us, so it becomes a matter of professionalism. You don’t want to deliver somebody a clunker just because you’re too high.”

What do you have to say about the state of guitar playing in general?

“There are more good guitar players alive today than have ever existed. I welcome it. It’s been a long time getting here, the legitimizing of the electric guitar. Everybody has something to say. I really feel that you can’t avoid finding your own voice if you keep playing. You have a voice, whether you recognize it or not.”

Solid-state guitar amps were touted as “the way forward” when they debuted in the 1960s, but the fad soon fizzled. Still, a few brands earned praise and lasting respect on the basis of either their sounds, appealing looks or both. 

Kustom Electronics is one of the few companies that sat firmly in the “both” category, and its products rocked the backlines of many noteworthy stars in the late ’60s and early ’70s. 

Today, most guitarists know Kustom’s early creations as the Tuck ’n’ Roll amps, due to the striking upholstery technique borrowed from the automotive industry that was used to apply their padded Naugahyde coverings.

Kustom offered those vinyl wraps in a range of colorful metallic-sparkle options, including the Charcoal Sparkle shown on this 1970 Kustom K200B amp. However, several serious players of the day knew Kustom had something to offer on the inside, too.

The amps didn’t deliver the massive crunch and screaming lead tones that led so many other guitarists of the time to Marshall and Hiwatt amps, but they sounded bold and punchy, and packed a haunting tremolo effect.

Back in the day, Conway Twitty, Johnny Cash, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s John Fogerty, Leon Russell, the Grateful Dead, most of the Jackson 5 and many others embraced the Kustom look and sound, while Sheryl Crow and Mike Campbell took to these distinctive amps in later years.

This K200B was billed as a 200-watt model, although a 100-watt RMS rating might have been more realistic; many solid-state amps of the day were advertised using their peak power rather than RMS power.

The two-channel head has one Normal channel with controls for volume, bass and treble and a bright switch, and a Bright channel with additional speed and intensity controls for its tremolo, as well as reverb.

It stands on a matching ported 2x15 cab, although some were sold with mammoth 3x15 cabs. Inside the chassis is old-school solid-state construction. It looks less like the innards of your defunct VCR – the way many modern-day solid-state amps do – and more like the circuit layout of a tube amp from the era, minus the tubes.

Construction was relatively robust, and these things tended to do pretty well on the road, although they were certainly manufactured with an eye on the bottom line. With no master-volume controls at all, Kustom amps were intended for loud, clean playing. Crank them up, though, and they’ll exude some beefy, blocky crunch, too.

Kustom was a brand name of Ross Inc, a company founded by Charles A. “Bud” Ross in Chanute, Kansas, in 1964. Ross himself was the consummate “ideas man,” an entrepreneurial spirit who didn’t let a lack of know-how slow him down. 

“He had no background in electronics,” his grandson Cameron tells us. “He played bass, and he didn’t like a lot of the amps that were available at the time, and that’s how he started it. 

”He worked for a company selling garage doors, and the guy who owned that company said he would help him make an amp, because he had this idea and wanted to move to solid-state.” 

At the time, the state’s Small Business Association was offering loans to encourage people to start businesses in Chanute. Quitting his day job, Bud and his wife moved from Kansas City to Chanute, roughly 120 miles south, to take advantage of the opportunity.

“It could have been any town in southeast Kansas,” Cameron says, “but they picked Chanute because of a Mexican restaurant they liked. They rented a small grocery store and started making the amps there, and they lived in the apartment above it.”

The distinctive look of Kustom amplifiers came about via another Bud Ross brainstorm.

“He met a guy who had experience with upholstery work on automobiles, and liked that look,” Cameron explains. “He thought, This is very eye-catching, I think there’s something here. So again, that just goes to his eye as an entrepreneur and an innovator in the industry. He saw things differently from others.”

In 1972, Ross sold the Kustom brand to Baldwin Pianos in Cincinnati, Ohio, and formed Ross Musical Products to develop and manufacture a line of effects pedals.

One of these would be the legendary grey Ross Compressor, the rich- and juicy-sounding comp made famous in the late ’90s by Phish’s Trey Anastasio and later cloned and copied by virtually every boutique pedal maker.

Following that venture, Ross invented a handheld police radar gun that would go into wide distribution. Since then, Kustom amps have been manufactured by many other holders of the brand, including its current owner, Hanser Music Group, in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Bud Ross died in March 2018. Shortly after his passing, Cameron Ross and his business partner Ben Brazil formed Ross Audibles and reissued the Ross Compressor and Ross Distortion pedals. Of his grandfather’s work and impact on the music industry, Cameron concludes simply, “He loved what he did.”

ESSENTIAL INGREDIENTS

• Two-channels, all solid-state circuitry
• Volume, bass, treble, tremolo speed and intensity, reverb and bright switch
• Charcoal Sparkle Naugahyde “Tuck ’n’ Roll” covering
• 100 watts RMS, 200 watts “peak music power”
• Matching ported 2x15 speaker cabinet

Deadheads will be excited to hear a newly remastered and expanded version of the Grateful Dead’s classic 1973 album Wake of the Flood is set to be released on CD, LP and digital formats.

Out on September 29th via Rhino (the catalog development and marketing division of Warner Music Group), Wake of the Flood (50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) appears as two-CD and digital sets.

Disc one features the album’s seven original songs plus previously unreleased demo recordings of “Eyes of the World” and “Here Comes Sunshine.”

Disc two comprises six live tracks recorded on November 1st, 1973 at McGaw Memorial Hall, Northwestern University in Evanston, IL.

For Deadicated vinyl junkies, further special 50th Anniversary Wake of the Flood releases that will also appear on September 29th include a single 180-gram black vinyl LP; a limited-edition 12-inch vinyl picture disc; a limited-edition “coke bottle clear vinyl” exclusive to Barnes & Noble; and a Dead.net-exclusive, limited-edition “Watermark” Custom Vinyl.

Recorded by Jerry Garcia in early 1973, these rare demos are thought to have been given to the rest of the Grateful Dead. The raw rendition of the setlist mainstay "Eyes Of The World" is available to listen to below.

All of the above pressings of Wake of the Flood feature Plangent Processes tape restoration and speed correction and are newly mastered by Grammy Award-winning engineer David Glasser.

Grateful Dead Legacy Manager and Audio Archivist, David Lemieux, had this to say: “I was enthralled with the beautiful arrangements of some of the Dead’s greatest songs, everything so clear and present. The songs and vocal treatments all sounded so mature, like these were guys who knew things and they wanted to share what they’d learned in the eight years since forming the Grateful Dead.

“And what really caught my ear were the many additional sounds that were striking at first, but I can’t imagine these songs, on this record, without these many additional contributors.”

Meanwhile, former UC Santa Cruz Grateful Dead archivist Nicholas G. Meriwether writes that with Wake of the Flood, the Grateful Dead were, “not only building a musical microcosm, a unified narrative that described the state of the Dead’s project, but also providing an example of what that project could accomplish, what it was designed to do: to create a viable alternative, an artistic vision of the beauty that could be created within and despite the sad, messy strife of the world.

“And they let that message speak for itself,” he adds. “In an album rife with religious imagery and overtones, they never preached; they just revealed.”

For more info visit the Grateful Dead website.

Molly Tuttle appears to be everywhere. She’s the toast of her adopted hometown in Nashville, and she’s developing a deepening obsession with the most iconic classic rock band from her home ground near San Francisco, the Grateful Dead.

While she’s fluent in an array of Americana settings, Tuttle’s potent bluegrass chops make her a singular force of nature on six strings. 

Her latest album, 2022’s Crooked Tree, feels like taking a wild hayride with her blazing band, Golden Highway.

From the high-octane kick-off cut “She’ll Change” through the rollicking roll of “Goodbye Girl,” her fretboard fireworks create sonic spectacles. Tuttle’s crosspicking solos flow as fluently as banjo rolls, and she deftly applies clawhammer banjo technique to her guitar foundation on “The River Knows.”

The album even features an array of A-list guests, including contemporaries Billy Strings and mandolin maiden Sierra Hull as well as luminaries Dan Tyminski, Gillian Welch and Dobro icon Jerry Douglas, who produced the whole affair.

New Tuttle goodness continued to roll out at the close of her banner year. A deluxe version of Crooked Tree features four choice bonus cuts, including a cover of the Grateful Dead’s “Dire Wolf” and “Cold Rain and Snow,” a traditional folk song that they popularized.

The others are live versions of album tracks “Dooley’s Farm” and the upbeat minor swing of “Castilleja” recorded at Nashville’s historic Station Inn. 

Fiddle player Ketch Secor is one of Tuttle’s primary songwriting collaborators, and Golden Highway has been tearing up the road with his group Old Crow Medicine Show.

Just before we spoke, Tuttle joined Bob Weir and Eric Krasno on stage at the Guild Theater on her home stomping ground in Menlo Park, California, for a Thanksgiving Eve celebration of the Dead’s music with the Terrapin Family Band.

In addition to all that, Tuttle has just won a Grammy Award for Best Bluegrass Album while receiving a nomination for Best New Artist, the latter being significantly mainstream for a guitar player, and also kind of funny for insiders.

“It’s been a long time in the making,” she says with a chuckle. 

While the world at large slowly turns on to Tuttle, we at GP have been singing her praises since we spotlighted her as a fresh talent in the Youthquake issue of September 2017.

And in our most recent interview, the bluegrass star reveals how returning to deep roots led to a career blossom...

How did you wind up hopping back on the bluegrass wagon after a few years onboard a singer-songwriter train?

During COVID lockdown I wrote a ton of songs trying to figure out what direction I was heading in next, and all of a sudden I couldn’t stop writing these bluegrass tunes. I eventually felt like I had a collection that pointed to what I wanted to express and also went back to my roots growing up playing bluegrass.

You and Billy Strings seem to be everywhere collaborating with everyone. How did you settle on doing “Dooley’s Farm”?

I instantly thought of Billy because I heard his voice on it. He’s everywhere, as you say, so we had to find a day that he could pop by the studio briefly between tour dates. It was a lot of fun because he was one of my first friends when I moved to Nashville. He was my friend’s roommate, and we lived in a house together for a while on a street with tons of musicians in East Nashville.

It’s always great to reunite. Billy has a very different picking attack than mine, and I appreciate the clarity and definition in his notes. That always reminds me of Doc Watson, and then there’s the fact that he infuses a lot of metal guitar licks and scales. That’s cool to me because it’s super different from how I play.

I played the guitar solo on “Dooley’s Farm” because he couldn’t come in to track live with us, and I had already done overdubs by the time he arrived. He was mainly there to sing, and we did have him do a few passes on guitar. He mostly filled in textural elements here and there, and did some cross picking on the last verse.

What’s the tuning, and how did you play the main verse part?

I’m in drop D tuning. I start the main riff with an open-position D minor and then use my third and fourth fingers to play double-stops on the bottom two strings at the third and then fifth frets, with the other strings all open to get those deep, suspended F and G chords.

Jerry Douglas provides a signature Dobro solo on “Dooley’s Farm” right after your guitar solo. What do you appreciate most about his playing?

He’s super tasteful. His playing is so iconic, and his tone is so distinct. I’ll hear a song come on the radio and recognize his Dobro right away. He always picks the right spots to play. I try to emulate his musicality and his ability to perfectly accompany a vocal.

What was it like to have Douglas produce the record as well?

It’s my first album where most of the tracking was done live, and in a matter of only four or five days altogether, in the studio. I learned about how fun it can be to make a record where it felt sort of like a jam session, just running through the songs and keeping things spontaneous.

Everyone but the fiddle player and me stood in a circle in the main room. I was in a booth with a mic on my guitar and another one for my voice so that we could capture keeper vocal tracks as well.

Is your primary guitar the same Pre-War dreadnought that you started favoring during …But I’d Rather Be With You?

Yes. It has a spruce top with a sunburst finish and Brazilian rosewood back and sides. It’s become my favorite to play live as well because the sound is super clear and resonant.

I’ve been playing it all year and have definitely beaten it up a bit. I cracked the top in two different places, but the people at Pre-War are so sweet. They fixed the guitar right up and put a positive spin on it like, “The cracks open up the tone a little bit.”

I do feel like the guitar is sounding better and better from playing it so much. I actually visited the Pre-War shop back when they were building it. Before they put the back and sides together, they asked, “Do you want to write a secret note inside?” I took a line from one of my favorite Grateful Dead songs that I had just learned how to play, “Standing on the Moon.” I wrote, “A lovely view of heaven, but I’d rather be with you.” I think I drew a little moon too.

Little did I know I’d be recording that song after the pandemic hit and everything got locked down. All of a sudden it felt a lot more relevant, and I had a special little connection to that guitar. It kind of predicted my next album in a way, and I ended up naming the album …But I’d Rather Be with You.

How did it feel to play “Standing on the Moon” with Jerry Garcia’s 1943 Martin Herringbone D-28 at the Guild Theater?

It was amazing, and I got to meet Andy Logan, who told me that he’s kind of like the steward of the guitar. [Logan owns a vast collection of Dead-centric instruments including “Jerry’s Herringbone.”]

Andy said, “It’ll always belong to Jerry, but I want people to play it, so I keep it very well set up.” The setup was awesome and it sounded so good. A lot of guitars with Brazilian rosewood back and sides have a piano-like tone, and Jerry’s Martin definitely had some of that going on.

It seems like you’re digging deeper and deeper into the Grateful Dead.

I have gradually gotten more and more into their music. I learned “Cold Rain and Snow,” which they kind of made popular, when I was about 13 years old. I grew up in the area on the San Francisco peninsula where the Grateful Dead got started.

Bob Weir grew up right nearby where I did, in Menlo Park. So many of the songs I learned when I was a kid were in a roundabout way through the Dead. Diving deeper into their music feels like home to me. It is so ingrained; I just love it. And it’s so cool they have that bluegrass connection, which has played a huge part in my life.

My dad grew up on a farm in Illinois and would hear the Grand Ole Opry. My grandfather played the banjo. But then my dad started listening to Old and In the Way tapes with Jerry Garcia on banjo, David Grisman on mandolin and Peter Rowan on guitar. He felt compelled to move to the Bay Area, which he eventually did in the ’80s.

I feel a special connection to the Grateful Dead’s music, especially the more rootsy stuff, like the Workingman’s Dead album with “Dire Wolf” on it. My mom loves that album and she gave it to me when I was a kid. I kept my version pretty close to the original arrangement, although mine is all-acoustic and theirs features Jerry Garcia playing pedal steel.

To get a chance to play with Bob Weir was such a full-circle moment, and it was especially cool because I didn’t know he was going to be there until like an hour before I went to the show.

I remember a GP interview with him where he talked about using hand signals to lead the band. What was it like from your perspective?

The first thing that struck me when I was watching the show was that the band sounded so tight, and I knew that they had only started rehearsing the songs at soundcheck. Then I get up there and, yeah, he was doing things to signal them.

It was very cool to be standing right next to him and see how he does that, because I didn’t notice it when I was watching from the audience.

What’s your current stage signal chain?

I have switched to a dual-channel Grace Design Felix2 preamp direct box because I’m using two pickups in my guitar now: a K&K Pure Mini piezo pickup under the saddle and a K&K Double Helix magnetic pickup in the sound hole.

A stereo cord feeds both signals into the Felix, which has extensive EQ options to dial in the tone for each. Dual outputs go to our sound guy, who blends them according to the venue. By blending the two pickups, I feel that I get a fuller, more natural sound.

Do you use any other pedals or an amp?

No, but two players in my band Golden Highway have pedalboards onstage now, and I’m kind of curious to try out some pedals on my guitar. There are a couple of tunes in the set where I feel it would be cool to have a different tone.

Your friend Billy Strings is the king of the acoustic guitar pedalboard.

[laughs] I want to start small with just a couple. I actually have a lot, but I’m afraid to use them. I’m horrible with gear, so I have all of these pedals sitting around. I don’t think…well, maybe someday I could use as many as him.

You’ve risen through the ranks of Music City onto the international landscape. Who have you seen lately that deserves wider recognition?

There are a lot of great roots musicians coming up that I think of as peers. Christina Vane is a great blues picker that I just saw at Dee’s Country Cocktail Lounge in East Nashville.

I was watching videos of Amythyst Kiah the other night. She’s awesome and is already making a pretty big splash.

Jake Blount [who primarily plays banjo and fiddle] is a friend whose music I like, and his new album, The New Faith, is very cool. I believe he’s going to have a big year next year.

After its raucous birth in the 1950s and early demise following Buddy Holly’s death, Chuck Berry’s imprisonment, Elvis Presley’s Army enlistment and Little Richard’s spiritual rebirth, rock ‘n’ roll shriveled up.

The epicene years from 1960 to 1964 had been a formative but difficult period in which garage rock bands claimed back a piece of the teen pop charts before the British Invasion groups led the way to a rock ‘n’ roll victory.

Those spirited rebels were anything but monolithic. Many brought together influences of early rock, folk, blues, soul, trad jazz and more.

It’s hardly surprising that the old formulas for songwriting and music production were inadequate to the aims of these young and ambitious performers.

Something had to change, and in 1965, it did, largely due to the work of guitarists.

Fuzz effects, once novelty devices on songs like the Venture’s “The 2000 Pound Bee,” were used in earnest by players like Jeff Beck and Keith Richards for their otherworldly tones, along with already established effects like tremolo and reverb.

It was Beck, too, who introduced the sonorities of Indian music to rock ‘n’ roll with his guitar, soon to be followed by George Harrison and Brian Jones, who did likewise by learning the rudiments of the sitar.

What followed was a radical reconfiguring of teen “beat” music.

In the hallowed halls of recording studios like London’s Abbey Road and Trident, this took place with serious application of orchestras, Mellotrons, electric pianos, harpsichords, organs and early Moog synthesizers.

In the dingy basements and dirty garages of teen bands in the U.S., it was evidenced instead by a deconstruction of norms: screamed vocals and fuzzed-out guitars plied against primitive, pummeling beats.

In either form, this was psychedelic rock.

The shocking new sounds fired off synapses in ways familiar to those who had taken LSD.

The drug had become popular in California’s youth culture, primarily in San Francisco, where the Grateful Dead were at the epicenter of Ken Kesey’s acid-fueled happenings, as well as in Los Angeles, where Byrds guitarists Roger McGuinn and David Crosby dropped LSD with the Beatles in the summer of 1965.

Within months, both of those bands would dramatically change their musical direction as acid opened their minds to new approaches to sound.

By late 1966, in London, a newly arrived guitarist christened Jimi Hendrix was conjuring up his own singular brand of psychedelic guitar rock.

He needed nothing more than a Stratocaster and Marshall stack to do so, but with assistance from early effects guru Roger Mayer, Hendrix blew down the walls and signaled the birth of a potent brew of blues-based psychedelia that redefined the electric guitar.

Rock ‘n’ roll was never the same.

Born in the full glory of the psychedelic era, the Grateful Dead began their journey as Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions before morphing into an electric band called the Warlocks, in 1965.

As guitarist Bob Weir told GP senior editor Jas Obrecht in 1997, “We were still the Warlocks when we played the first Kool-Aid Acid Tests [a series of multimedia/LSD events hosted by author Ken Kesey], and by that time we were taking LSD and playing psychedelicized.

“We began turning up loud pretty quickly. From the start it was faster, looser, louder and hairier. We were going to see what this baby’ll do. It helped that we were playing in an uncritical situation.

“What didn’t help was that we were completely disoriented, so we had to fend for ourselves and improvise. We got better at it as time went on, so we could take a pretty massive dose and hang in there for a while.”

Classic psychedelic-era Dead tunes include the strangely beautiful “Rosemary” (from 1969’s Aoxomoxoa); “The Eleven” (1969’s Live/Dead), a mostly instrumental jam in 11/4 that features wall-to-wall wailing by Garcia; “China Cat Sunflower” (Europe ’72), with its interlocking guitar riff creating the counterpoint to one of Robert Hunter’s most mesmerizing compositions; and “Viola Lee Blues” (1967’s The Grateful Dead), of which bassist Phil Lesh said, “To my ear, it’s the only track that sounds at all like we did at the time.”

Weir also cited a November 1965 version of “Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks)” as representing the band’s truest acid vision.

“That was sort of an ironic name for the tune, because caution was anything but what the tune was about.

"By the first album [1967’s The Grateful Dead] we had moved past our psychedelic era. We had gotten to a point of diminishing returns after taking acid for a couple of years.

“We’d started going back to the same places, and so it seemed, Okay, we got what we could out of that. Let’s move on. We didn’t turn our backs on it so much as we started looking in other directions.

“It sure as hell contributed to a willingness to listen to, and try to beg, borrow or steal from, other musical forms.”

Browse the Grateful Dead catalog here.

No player bridged psychedelic San Francisco’s acoustic and electric guitar waters like Jerry Garcia.

To see what I mean, delve into the historic details of Jerry’s Herringbone Martin D-28 and his “Alligator” Fender Stratocaster in my recent features on the Grateful Guitars Foundation.

Honored with the opportunity to record a track using them at Lucky Recording Company, I reworked one of Garcia’s signature acoustic guitar tunes.

Check out Alligator’s flexibility on this Grateful Guitars cover of “Friend of the Devil.” 

Here are insights I discovered on that epic trip…

Original Insights

“Friend of the Devil” was written by Garcia and John Dawson (New Riders of the Purple Sage) with lyricist Robert Hunter.

The Dead’s studio version from 1970’s American Beauty begins with a simple descending motif played by David Nelson (New Riders of the Purple Sage) that is quickly joined by Garcia’s meandering acoustic licks.

David Grisman’s groovy mandolin playing adds to the acoustic jamboree.

Tuning is standard, in the key of G. The main motif is a diatonically descending G major scale played in quarter notes that outlines a I to IV verse chord progression: Play a bar of G, plus a bar of C, and then repeat.

The chorus chords are D and Amin7.

You can play everything in open position if you start the motif on the open G string, but peeping live videos of Garcia, I notice he begins in third position on the fourth string before switching to open position.

He starts by using the third finger for the G at the fifth fret, followed by the second finger at the fourth fret for F#.

He then switches to open position to play the E at the second fret with his second finger, followed by the open D string.

Jerry plays the second half of the motif out of a C chord formation, walking the bass notes on the fifth string from C down to B, hitting the open A string and landing on the G at the third fret of the sixth string.

Interestingly, he sometimes played that using his pinkie. He probably found it easier to stretch that way while holding the top half of the C chord above, which equates to an Amin7 with a G in the bass at that point.

Cop a Swing Feel

The studio version has a swing feel: “1 a-2, 3 a-4.” You can achieve it by plucking a ghostly G note with an upstroke on the open third string for the “a” while using downstrokes to play the main quarter notes.

As the tune progresses, it takes on a jubilant, rollicking feeling. For a galloping giddy-up, try using a “down, down-up-down” plucking pattern to achieve a feel of “1 and a 2 and a 3 and a 4.”

That can either be precisely focused on individual notes, or opened up for a lively feel like boom chicka boom chicka.

For the latter, downstroke on the first note, then do a down-up stroke on the second and third strings for maximum chordal resonance.

Next Level: Open It Up

Put the guitar in open G to add more jangle (low to high: D G B D G B). Play both halves of the lick Jerry’s way, as the fingering now remains the same.

For chords, try a partial barre instead of a full one. For example, find the V chord at the seventh fret, but only barre strings five through three. Leave the top two and the bottom string ringing open for a huge D.

Use that same partial barre to add cool suspensions in the chorus and bridge, which includes II, IV and V chords played at the second, fifth and seventh frets, respectively.

Advanced Level: Try It My Way

Honoring Garcia’s creative spirit, I spiced up the rhythm and applied the A modal tuning associated with my group, Spirit Hustler (low to high: E A E E A E).

I brought the key up to B for vocal considerations, using a capo at the second fret.

The root is still on the fifth fret, and the partial-barre trick applies similarly.

Refer to this Frets Learn article to cop the “fingerstyle slap” technique I incorporated to take “Friend of the Devil” to another level.

Jimmy Leslie has been Frets editor since 2016. See many Guitar Player– and Frets-related videos on his YouTube channel, and learn about his acoustic/electric rock group at spirithustler.com.

Andy Logan is bringing Dead dreams to life and giving gig-worthy players cause to feel grateful.

The avid collector is putting top-shelf copies of the makes and models Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir played – and sometimes the original articles – in the hands of special talents via the Grateful Guitars Foundation, his 501(c)(3) nonprofit that provides musical instruments for players who help carry the jam band tradition forward.

Logan’s arsenal includes many custom builds, as well as two of Garcia’s all-time most historic instruments: his 1955 “Alligator” Fender Stratocaster and 1943 “Jerry’s Herringbone” Martin D-28.

Recently, Logan acquired a pair of Modulus Blackknife electric guitars and a pair of Alvarez acoustic guitars played onstage by Weir in the ’80s and ’90s.

Logan is on a mission to have a representative version of all their axes, from their mid-’60s psychedelic years to the group’s demise in ’95.

After dabbling in psychedelic rock in the 1960s, Garcia, Weir and company spawned the jam band community that thrives to this day, and Logan wants to ensure it stays that way, eternally.

He lends and occasionally gives gifted players incredible instruments that would otherwise be beyond their means, all for the greater good for the scene.

“The Grateful Dead went to great lengths to get the tones they were after,” Logan offers. “They wanted the audience to hear exactly what they wanted to express with their instruments. Hearing those tones meant the world to us fans, and as a gear guy, you want to recapture that tone you remember touching you so deeply.

“When you hear it, you feel enriched and fulfilled. The greater good behind arming musicians with this kind of gear is that it’s inspiring. Give them top-quality tools, and it elevates their game. They play better and harder. The more fun they have, the more we have in the audience.”

Logan made international news in December 2019 when he purchased Alligator and Jerry’s Herringbone at a Bonham’s auction with winning bids of $420,000 and $175,000, respectively.

Alligator was Garcia’s primary electric from spring 1971 to August ’73, and the performance debut vehicle for such hallowed tunes as “Tennessee Jed,” “One More Saturday Night,” “Ramble on Rose” and “Eyes of the World.”

As for the Martin D-28, Garcia used it to write and record 1970’s folk-rock classic American Beauty, which featured “Friend of the Devil,” “Ripple” and “Truckin’.”

Inspired by his new acquisitions, Logan launched the Grateful Guitars Foundation in 2021 as a non-profit vehicle to let others share in his passion for authentic Dead tones while giving the instruments in his extensive collection new life.

Logan afforded GP an opportunity to play Garcia’s guitars, and they turned out to be way more than mere relics. They are astonishing instruments, and have been well attended to by legendary luthier Rick Turner in the years since Logan acquired them.

The Martin’s tone is a dreadnought dream, rich and resonant with abundant bass and an articulate top end.

Alligator is a holy grail-caliber Stratocaster. Its slim neck feels fabulous in hand, and the pickups produced an array of quintessential Strat tones through Logan’s silverface 1969 Fender Twin head that was once part of the Grateful Dead’s arsenal and came to Logan via longtime roadie Kidd Candelario.

Check out Alligator’s flexibility on this Grateful Guitars cover of “Friend of the Devil.” 

In true Jerry style, the Fender pre-amped a McIntosh 250 power amp and a 1x12 Baltic birch cabinet loaded with a JBL E120.

While the two axes may be the crown jewels in Logan’s collection, there’s a lot more going on with Grateful Guitars.

Logan has developed relationships with many of the luthiers that designed and built the custom guitars made famous by Garcia and Weir.

He’s commissioned Kevin Burkett at Travis Bean Design, former Modulus man Rich Hoeg and Leo Elliot of Scarlet Fire Guitars to build instruments for players including Jeff Mattson and Rob Eaton of the Dark Star Orchestra and Mik Bondy of the Garcia Project.

Logan has also shared his Garcia originals and re-creations with a pair of his heroes: Alex Jordan, who hosts Grateful Thursdays at Club Fox in Redwood City, California, and has a close relationship with highly regarded Gryphon Stringed Instruments in Palo Alto, California, where they help tweak and take care of Alligator and Jerry’s Herringbone; and Stu Allen who has played extensively with Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh and currently leads Mars Hotel.

Allen and Jordan are uncanny at playing the Garcia and Weir roles, respectively, and their dedication is most evident when they perform recreations of Grateful Dead concerts from specific historic shows.

With Logan’s gear and their eager ears, the two delve into the granular details of the dynamic Dead duo’s sound and style.

Best of all, anyone can fill out an application to become a Grateful Guitars player or builder at gratefulguitars.org.

“What the builders create is an incredible gift for players and fans,” Logan says.

Alligator

“There was speculation it was Franken-Strat with a ’57 neck on a ’63 body,” Logan says, “but we were excited to learn it’s a ’55 through and through when we took it apart.”

Writing inside indicates that the unique one-piece ash body was made in February and the neck in March of ’55.

Alex Jordan adds, “The neck sign-off is by ‘TG,’ meaning Tadeo Gomez, who famously carved the neck for Eric Clapton’s 1954 ‘Slowhand’ Strat.”

The guitar has been heavily modified with replacement Schaller tuners and lots of brass hardware, including a second string tree for the lower four, a scalloped brass nut and an Alembic U-Channel bridge.

During refurbishing, Rick Turner countersunk the bolts so that they could go down into the brass, lowering the action to a more player-friendly height.

The frets have clearly been replaced and are very wide. “They’re quite worn down, especially on the treble side, which makes it rather difficult to play in the first place,” Jordan says, “and it was very difficult with the high action before the bridge modification.”

Other Garcia mods include a hammered brass pickguard and a vintage Alembic Strat-o-Blaster output jack, gifted from Mike Wald, who makes buffers and modded Twins for Garcia-style players.

“It basically punches up the signal like a guitar with active electronics,” Logan says. Adds Jordan, “It buffers the signal and increases the output, which was important to a player running long cords into a few effects pedals. It drives the amp harder, like the humbucking pickups Jerry was using in guitars prior to Alligator.

“The Strat-o-Blaster has its own adjustable tonal characteristic as well.”

Alligator has an interesting origin story, and left an influential legacy. Logan says, “Alligator first appeared on December 31st, 1970, and then became the full-time axe in May 1971 and is most famous for being used exclusively during the legendary Europe ’72 tour.

“Jerry got it from Graham Nash, who got it from a pawnshop in 1967. At first, we weren’t sure if the pickups were original, given the Dead’s propensity to modify gear.

“However, Fender has since confirmed that they are the original 1955 pickups. Interestingly, it does appear that they did tweak the pole heights.”

As for the famous alligator graphic, Logan informs, “[the Grateful Dead’s] Steve Parish told me [roadie] Sonny Heard put on the alligator sticker in June of ’72.”

Curiously, it’s not scratched up at all, appearing perfectly clear as if it were put on yesterday. Jerry was a precise picker! According to Logan, “The last Grateful Dead show Alligator did was [New Jersey’s] Roosevelt Stadium on August 1st, 1973. Wake of the Flood was recorded later that month and featured the Doug Irwin–built Wolf.

“Much of what Garcia learned through Alligator went to Wolf and subsequent instruments, including the Fender scale length, scalloped brass nut, active electronics and buffered circuit.”

Jordan adds, “Alligator is part of Jerry’s legacy of having modified and eventually fully customized instruments that helped create the need for a boutique guitar industry.”

Click here for Jimmy Leslie's acoustic guitar lesson on the Grateful Dead classic “Friend of the Devil.”

Visit the Grateful Guitars Foundation online here.

Andy Logan’s 501(c)(3) nonprofit Grateful Guitars Foundation provides historic Dead-centric axes to worthy keepers of the flame.

Bringing Dead dreams to life and giving gig-worthy players cause to feel grateful, the avid collector is putting top-shelf copies of the makes and models Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir played – and sometimes the original articles – in the hands of special talents who help carry the jam band tradition forward.

Logan’s arsenal includes many custom builds, as well as two of Garcia’s all-time most historic instruments: his 1955 “Alligator” Fender Stratocaster and this 1943 “Jerry’s Herringbone” Martin D-28.

“Although it was listed as a 1941 Martin at auction, the serial number and the ebony truss rod clearly indicate a wartime instrument created in 1943,” says Grateful Dead devotee Alex Jordan, who hosts Grateful Thursdays at Club Fox in Redwood City, California, and has a close relationship with highly regarded Gryphon Stringed Instruments in Palo Alto, California, where they help tweak and take care of Alligator and Jerry’s Herringbone.

Logan and Jordan conclude that this is the same acoustic long misidentified as a D-18. 

“There are no herringbone D-18s,” Jordan explains.

This guitar’s back and sides are made from very distinguishable streaked Brazilian rosewood, and the top is Adirondack spruce.

The whole guitar has an extra coat of finish sprayed over it. There’s also a hole from a primitive sound hole pickup installation and battle scars from where an oddly placed output jack on the lower bout didn’t work out very well. Photographs suggests those jobs were from a previous owner.

A defunct dual-element pickup system added much later remains, which Logan feels is likely from recording the 1991 album Jerry Garcia/David Grisman.

A drop-in saddle replaced the original through-cut saddle in order to accommodate an undersaddle piezo. The other element is an interior microphone.

The guitar is surprisingly light, especially considering the remaining pickup elements, although Garcia must have used some sort of external element to power the internal ones.

In addition to the above alterations, a set of Rotomatic tuners replaces the originals, and a piece of Scotch tape is stuck behind the bridge.

“The instrument first appeared on the Festival Express tour in summer 1970,” Logan states. “It was onstage for a bunch of the acoustic sets that followed and was played on many firsts, including the debuts of ‘Truckin’’ and ‘Ripple.’”

Logan is unsure when or where Garcia acquired the instrument, but he and Jordan presume he traded in either the Martin 12-fret 00-18 or 000-45 or both that he had been playing to purchase the D-28.

It’s quite possible the 00 was traded in for the 000, which was then swapped for the D-28, since, like many players of the time, Garcia was gravitating toward the dreadnoughts that he would then favor for the rest of his career.

The D-28 made the famous trek across Europe in 1972. In the last-known photo of Garcia playing it, he is alongside Bob Weir in what appears to be a church, presumably during an off-day jam session with members of the New Riders of the Purple Sage.

Peter Rowan told Logan that Garcia generously bestowed what he dubbed “Jerry’s Herringbone” to him to record Old and In the Way and play it on subsequent tours in 1973.

Click here for Jimmy Leslie's acoustic guitar lesson on the Grateful Dead classic “Friend of the Devil.”

Visit the Grateful Guitars Foundation online here.

It was the 1960s, and everything was groovy. Musicians pushed the boundaries of sonic expression and experimentation, with guitarists boldly leading the way.

The hallucinogenic effects of mind-altering drugs, most notably LSD, are credited to have contributed to the creation of a new “psychedelic” sound, with guitarists developing a unique and colorful palette of fuzzed-out – and sometimes just plain weird – tones, inspiring generations of players to come.

While we don’t encourage you to indulge in hallucinogenics, we do suggest you grab your guitar, as we begin our adventure into psychedelic guitar playing.

One simply cannot revisit the 1960s without paying tribute to the Beatles, who began as a mop-topped pop quartet, but soon morphed into a psychedelic songwriting juggernaut with multiple iconic album releases spanning 1966 and 1967, including Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Magical Mystery Tour.

On 1966’s Revolver, George Harrison can be heard going into full bizarre mode, adding time-warped backward guitar (lead guitar lines that are recorded and then played backwards during the song) on “I’m Only Sleeping.”

In addition, Indian music’s heavy influence on Harrison and the psychedelic sound in general can be heard in his sitar-like motifs from “She Said She Said,” also from Revolver.

See Ex. 1 for a riff inspired by this song, and pick near your guitar’s bridge to emulate the sitar’s timbre.

Along with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones ventured into this brave new world with album releases like 1967’s Their Satanic Majesties Request, featuring the track “2,000 Light Years from Home.”

After a 40-second intro of some rather terrifying processed atonal piano musings, Keith Richards enters with a palm-muted single-note guitar riff, which sounds as if it could be the persistent ticking of a clock from an imaginary episode of the bizarre 1960s TV series The Twilight Zone. (In fact, a similar guitar line, albeit less rhythmical, appears in the show’s actual theme music.)

No fuzzy tones here – Richards simply goes with an understated clean electric guitar sound, allowing the staccato jabs of his palm-muted notes to do the talking.

See Ex. 2 for a line inspired by this same track.

Try moving it around the neck in various keys and octaves to experience different shades of mystery. 

March 1965 was a monumental month for the up-and-coming British guitarist Jeff Beck. Upon Jimmy Page’s recommendation, Beck was asked to join the Yardbirds, famously replacing Eric Clapton.

Those were big shoes to fill, but Beck did not lack confidence or imagination. And while his stint with the band lasted just 20 months, his influence from this period, as well as his solo career that followed, would be felt by scores of guitarists.

A great example of Beck pushing sonic boundaries can be heard in the Yardbirds’ 1966 single “Over Under Sideways Down.”

Here the guitarist adds a wildly strange melodic motif, which, while initially met with some skepticism by his bandmates, came to be widely regarded as the song’s signature hook.

Beck combines some deft single-string playing with a gnarly tone. See Ex. 3 for a similar line, inspired by this song. 

The next stop on our magical musical tour brings us to the legendary Jimi Hendrix. His trippy songwriting combined R&B-influenced rhythm playing with soaring guitar solos, steeped in blues and drenched in fuzz.

Jimi somehow managed to control, at will, the beast that is amplifier feedback, creating new tripped-out sonic journeys for his audience.

Hendrix regularly summoned, as if by magic, all manner of new sounds from his guitar. With the song “Fire,” from the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s debut 1967 album, Are You Experienced, he introduced himself with a guitar solo consisting of a veritable onslaught of stinging string bends and vibratos.

Ex. 4 brings to mind this face-melter. Note that I’ve added an octave-up doubling effect to further capture Jimi’s sound, as this is something he employed frequently via his Octavia pedal.

This pedal, designed specifically for Jimi by his sound technician, Roger Mayer, doubled every note one octave higher, while adding fuzz. It often sounded as if Jimi’s guitar was tearing apart at the seams.

While discussing Jimi, let’s give a nod to another great guitarist from a later generation who was influenced by Hendrix’s psychedelic sound, namely Prince, whose musical legacy continues to live on despite his untimely death in 2016.

An iconoclast, Prince often fused his R&B/funk/soul foundation with elements of pop, rock, jazz or whatever suited him in the moment.

One of his 19 top-10 hits, the single “When Doves Cry,” off of 1984’s smash album, Purple Rain, went to number one on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, where it stayed for five weeks.

Prince notably played every instrument on the track. The song bursts through the speakers with a virtuosic unaccompanied electric guitar line, which seems to answer the question “What would Jimi Hendrix sound like if he were still alive today – after having taken a trip to Mars?”

Prince tips his hat to the master more directly with his choice of tone, as he employs Hendrix’s signature combination of fuzz and octave doubler.

The entire intro solo is masterfully played, darting around in fits and starts, and Ex. 5 is inspired by Prince’s wicked opening statement.

We return to the 1960s with another purveyor of the psychedelic movement: the San Francisco–based band Jefferson Airplane.

In the classic song “White Rabbit,” from their seminal 1967 release, Surrealistic Pillow, songwriter Grace Slick’s lyrics evoke 1960s drug culture while guitarist Jorma Kaukonen weaves sinewy lines over a brooding rhythm.

Kaukonen accomplishes this by deftly employing an exotic scale, another element of the psychedelic sound. While the song is broadly in the key of A major, the intro and verses center around a chord progression of F# to G, which is technically out of key.

Kaukonen navigates these chords using the 5th mode of harmonic minor, commonly referred to as Phrygian-dominant.

Harmonic minor (1, 2, b3, 4, 5, b6, #7) is nearly identical to natural minor (1, 2, b3, 4, 5, b6, b7), the only difference being its raised 7th scale degree. Note how this creates an unusual augmented 2nd interval (one and one half steps) between the 6th and 7th degrees.

The term “5th mode” simply means that Phrygian-dominant’s root is the 5th degree of the harmonic minor scale. This is the note that will sound like “home.” 

In “White Rabbit,” Kaukonen employs F# Phrygian-dominant (F#, G, A#, B, C#, D, E), the 5th mode of B harmonic minor (B, C#, D, E, F#, G, A#). But you can take off your thinking cap and mellow out to Ex. 6, a trippy line inspired by this song.

Note the aforementioned augmented 2nd interval between the G and A# in the last bar.

Many critics consider the release of the Byrds' 1966 single “Eight Miles High” to be the dawn of the psychedelic era.

Influenced by the music of sitarist Ravi Shankar and jazz saxophonist John Coltrane, it is led by the twang of Roger McGuinn’s signature 12-string Rickenbacker electric.

The song as a whole juxtaposes droning instrumental sections with hauntingly beautiful vocal harmonies in much the same way that McGuinn’s playing ebbs and flows between sitar-like melodies and fiery bursts of single notes.

Ex. 7 is reminiscent of his alternately melodic and frenzied playing throughout the song.

Note that you can use an octaver, set to double an octave higher, to approximate the sound of McGuinn’s 12-string, as I have done here. 

In 1966, along with his brother Sly, guitarist Freddie Stone co-founded the dynamic psychedelic funk ensemble Sly & the Family Stone. 

The band drew inspiration from a myriad of styles – R&B, rock, church music and beyond – and Freddie’s nuanced playing was an integral part of their rhythmic foundation.

But rather than in-your-face raucousness, he preferred to pick his spots, his guitar often peeking out from inside the band to add subtle textures.

For example, in their 1968 hit single “Everyday People,” a cry for racial harmony which still resonates today, Stone interjects just a few fuzzed-out bass notes here and there. They never fully grab the spotlight, but they make an important sonic contribution nonetheless, adding a touch of psychedelia.

In 1969’s “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” the guitarist fires up his wah pedal and alternates between funky strummed 9th chords and staccato single-note phrases.

Ex. 8 is not unlike his approach throughout the song. A master of understatement, Stone could convey so much, often with just a few notes. 

Spanning decades, with some original band members still going strong as Dead and Company, the Grateful Dead’s music inspired an intense devotion from their Deadhead fans, who faithfully followed the band from show to show as they crisscrossed the country.

The band’s songs, often crafted to be long jams when played live, left plenty of room for late master improviser Jerry Garcia to work his magic.

While many of the players above utilized varied and often strange tones, Garcia often chose a simple clean tone for his electric musings, allowing his colorful note choices and imaginative rhythmic sense to hypnotize audiences. 

Ex. 9 is inspired by Garcia’s effortlessly fantastic playing throughout “Dark Star,” the Grateful Dead’s 1968 single, and showcases one rhythm – the quarter-note triplet – throughout the four-bar phrase, with only occasional respites.

Tension is certainly created by the sheer repetition, but more subtly, it is the way its lilting rhythm sits atop and “rubs” against the song’s straight-eighths feel that grabs our attention and keeps us hooked for the duration.

It’s the sort of magic Jerry Garcia could seemingly conjure on demand, night after night.

The 1960s psychedelic movement, spearheaded by a wave of innovative guitarists unafraid to break down traditional norms of playing and tone, directly reflected the tumultuous political and social times they inhabited.

Many more recent iconic bands, such as Red Hot Chili Peppers, Smashing Pumpkins, My Morning Jacket and the Flaming Lips, owe a debt of gratitude to the risks these players took as they created music that often seemed to be the stuff of dreamscapes.

Have a question or comment about this month’s lesson? Feel free to reach out to Jeff Jacobson on Twitter @jjmusicmentor or at jeffjacobson.net.

Jeff offers private guitar and songwriting lessons virtually.

Brothers and Sisters: The Allman Brothers Band and the Inside Story of the Album That Defined the 70s by Alan Paul is a deep dive into the time before and after 1973’s Brothers and Sisters.

It was not only the band’s best-selling album, at over seven million copies sold, but it was also a powerfully influential release, both musically and culturally, one whose influence continues to be profoundly felt.

Celebrating the album’s 50th anniversary, Brothers and Sisters the book delves into the making of the album, while also presenting a broader cultural history of the era, based on first-person interviews, historical documents and deep research and a trove of never-before-heard interviews conducted by the band’s “Tour Mystic,” Kirk West.

The five-year period between Duane Allman’s 1971 death and the Allman Brothers Band’s 1976 breakup was a remarkable run for the group that helped define the era, rock history and American culture and politics.

They played a major role in electing President Jimmy Carter; were intimately linked with the Grateful Dead; and inspired the Marshall Tucker Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the entire Southern Rock genre.

Gregg Allman’s marriage to the iconic star Cher also put the couple at the vanguard of a newly emerging celebrity media culture.

A wide range of fascinating, crucial characters pass through the pages of Brothers and Sisters. Not only Jimmy Carter and Cher, but Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, actress Susan Sarandon and Native American activists.

The book includes several extensive chapters on the Jam at Watkins Glen, the concert featuring the Allman Brothers Band, Grateful Dead and The Band that drew over 600,000 people to a small town in upstate New York and will celebrate its 50th anniversary the week of the book’s July 2023 release.

Brothers and Sisters includes the deepest reporting and writing yet about the bond between the Allmans and the Dead and just what drove them apart.

There are also chapters about the making of Gregg Allman’s Laid Back and Dickey Betts’ Highway Call, solo debuts that have been largely overlooked.

The book also contains the complete inside story behind Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, which was largely based on his experiences touring with the Allman Brothers Band for a 1973 Rolling Stone cover story.

Brothers and Sisters is enlivened by content from Kirk West’s never-heard interviews.

“Kirk was researching a book while the band was broken up in 1986 and 1987 and he interviewed all the surviving members extensively: Gregg Allman, Dickey Betts, Jaimoe and Butch Trucks, as well as many other friends and associates,” says Paul.

“The subjects were talking to someone they deeply trusted, the band was twice broken up with no plans to reunite and everyone was bracingly honest and deeply reflective and insightful.

“The interviews were an absolute gold mine, most of which not even Kirk had ever listened to. I am thrilled to get them out to fans of the band. I can’t wait to share this book and start talking about it!”

Pre-order Brothers and Sisters: The Allman Brothers Band and the Inside Story of the Album That Defined the 70s by Alan Paul (St. Martin’s Press; July 25, 2023) here.

Grateful Dead are due to drop a bumper compilation of six previously unreleased concert recordings captured in New York during the early ‘80s.

Titled In And Out of the Garden: Madison Square Garden ’81, ’82, ’83, this mammoth 17-CD set is available exclusively from dead.net – the band’s official website.

Numbered and limited to 12,500 copies, this awesome collection looks back at Grateful Dead’s storied association with the hallowed grounds of Madison Square Garden and invites listeners to enjoy a front-row seat during an all too often overlooked period of the band’s history.

High-quality audio will also be available as a digital download in Apple Lossless and FLAC 192/24 formats.

Ahead of the September 23 release date, today the band dropped a teaser track, “Feel Like A Stranger (Live at Madison Square Garden, New York, NY 3/9/81).”

Take a listen here...

“As Jerry Garcia famously said, Madison Square Garden was ‘juiced.’ It had an energy unlike any other venue the Grateful Dead played,” said Grateful Dead legacy manager and archivist David Lemieux.  

“The Dead didn’t play the Garden until 1979, almost the midpoint of their performing career. But once they got rolling, they made it a home away from home, playing 10 shows in the next 15 years.

“These performances from 1981, 1982, and 1983 are six of the best the Dead played at the Garden, any of which could have been released on their own.”

A 3-CD release titled Madison Square Garden, New York, NY (3/9/81) is also available to pre-order from dead.net.

Browse the Grateful Dead catalog here.

Scott Metzger is known for kicking out Grateful Dead grooves and whooping up cosmic electric licks in Joe Russo’s Almost Dead tribute act, as well as jamming with improv maestros like Nels Cline and John Scofield.

But when the live scene went dark due to COVID, Metzger followed a vintage Martin down an acoustic rabbit hole to create a cool, understated solo album.

Too Close to Reason (Royal Potato Family) is mostly moody and spacious, rather than chock full of burning chops, although Metzger is capable of conjuring fire.

Check into the Showdown Kids to hear his proficient gypsy jazz hands, as well as those of his violinist wife, Katie Jacoby, who also happens to hold down the fiddle gig in a little British Invasion band from London led by Pete Townshend.

To hear Metzger’s electric howl, turn an ear to his power trio WOLF! On the other hand, his new solo acoustic album is a truly singular effort. He plays every note, except for Jacoby’s delicate violin on “Only Child.”

Too Close to Reason is simply a lovely listen, and a departure from run-of-the-mill guitar showcases. Metzger is not trying to juggle five parts simultaneously or worried about pulling it all off alone onstage.

To cut the album, he simply followed his acoustic muse, either melodically or rhythmically, and then typically threw in a complementary track, plus another for texture. The result is kind of like a duo with himself, with some sauce on the side.

It’s refreshing to hear an electric guitar player taking a stab at an unplugged album in his own style, completely for its own sake.

Performed with a plectrum, Metzger’s effort falls outside the realm of flashy fingerstyle fabulosos or the jam-jazz world he usually inhabits.

The first single, “Don’t Be a Stranger,” is a slice of Americana built on a lilting melody that downloads direct to memory.

“Café Hidalgo” is a haunting minor mystery, and “When Katie Smiles” is classically inspired.

Metzger excels at playing in 3/4 time, and the latest release, “Waltz for Beverly,” has a wistful bounce.

How does your acoustic guitar approach compare to electric?

The acoustic is a completely different instrument that has to be approached completely differently, but hopefully I have a similar voice on both.

I try to incorporate more open strings and let them ring out to maximize resonation on the acoustic. The idea is to highlight its beauty by featuring the overtones and other elements that you can’t get out of the electric.

Two of your primary influences, Django Reinhardt and Jerry Garcia, blurred the lines between acoustic and electric styles. How did you get into Django?

I got to Django through the jazz guitar players I admired that he inspired. I grew up reading interviews with players like Jim Hall and Wes Montgomery, who would mention Django, so I picked up one of his CDs.

I think it was the third volume of Djangology, which was a lucky choice, because some of that stuff is stronger than others, and I fell in love with it immediately.

The feeling of swing and forward momentum in the groove was unbelievable, and his control over the guitar seemed impossible, covering such wide spans with so many arpeggios and other methods on the fretboard.

And then I found out he was doing it with only two fingers on his left hand, which led to more disbelief and deepened my obsession.

I formed Showdown Kids with Simon Kafka on guitar and my wife, Katie, on violin essentially as a vehicle to get my version of gypsy jazz out of my system, because I love that music so much. It’s a great way to blow off steam.

How awesome is it to have a wife that can play Stéphane Grappelli to your Django?

Well, that was a big moment in the courting process, I’ve got to be honest. When she picked up a violin and started playing the Grappelli solo on “Minor Swing,” I was like, “Oh, wait a minute. This has potential.” [laughs]

I definitely did a double take.

What element of the Django inspiration carries over into your own album?

The biggest thing for me is the way he emotes. He could sound angry or gentle, or anything in-between. His ability to set the mood made it very obvious.

It’s in his approach to dynamics, his sense of rhythm and all of the fundamentals involved with playing the guitar. I don’t think there’s a better example of a player having mastered them all.

What do you love most about Jerry Garcia’s playing?

Actually, Jerry would always mention Django Reinhardt in interviews as well, and I think it’s the Django influence in his playing that I love most.

That’s obviously more apparent in his acoustic playing, due to the nature of the instrument, but I don’t claim to be an expert on all things Jerry. I tread lightly when I get into Garcia’s stuff. I tend not to study it too much because I do so much of it with Joe Russo’s Almost Dead, and I don’t want to end up sounding like a watered-down version of Garcia.

I did get a chance to play his [Doug Irwin–built] Wolf guitar after it was auctioned off in New York City. Joe Russo put together a stacked lineup of players, including Nels Cline, John Scofield, Neal Casal, Cass McCombs and Tom Hamilton Jr. [from Almost Dead].

I remember that the guitar was very heavy, had a lot of switches and played great. It was amazing and nerve racking to hold such a piece of rock and roll history. All I could think about as it was handed off from player to player to take a solo was, I don’t want to be the guy that drops it. [laughs]

I had a chance to check out his 1943 Martin D-28 and had a similar feeling. Wasn’t it a vintage Martin that triggered your recent run of acoustic material?

Yes. Around late May of 2020, when it became clear that I wasn’t going to be touring that year, I decided it was a good time to fulfill a lifelong dream and add a nice vintage acoustic to my collection.I shopped around online and wound up buying a 1955 Martin 000-18 from Carter Vintage Guitars in Nashville.

I live in Brooklyn, so the salesman played a few chords over the phone and sent me a photo. It sounded good and I thought it looked cool. I actually wanted an instrument that had been played and looked beat up, not some collector-grade guitar.

When I received the package, it was perfectly in tune right out of the case. The clear, chimey tone pops right out. It doesn’t take much effort with the plucking hand to make it project. You can really feel the guitar doing its thing.

All of these melodies almost started playing themselves on this guitar. I couldn’t put it down, and there was nowhere to go anyway. I wrote over 30 songs within a few weeks.

The most unusual song with the most unusual sound is actually the opening track, “Appropriate Wattage.” Are you playing that acoustic with an EBow?

Yes, you’re absolutely right, well, it’s actually two acoustic guitars playing counterpoint off of one another. I used an EBow on both. There’s no pickup, just a microphone in front of the guitar.

To me, the sound is like when you rub your finger around the outside of a wine glass. It’s a very pure, crystalized sound. Every now and again the string would catch the EBow a little bit and make a sharp, metallic sound. I liked the contrast of those two things.

During the mixing process, [engineer] D. James Goodwin added in a lower-octave effect and drenched it in reverb. The concept was to have an off-center introduction that didn’t really have anything to do with the rest of the record.

The title comes from a conversation I had with Nels Cline about the appropriate amps to bring to a gig we were doing together.

The rest of the record has more of a rootsy vibe, and the first single, “Don’t Be a Stranger,” sounds like perhaps there’s a bit of a Chet Atkins influence?

The melody is nice and simple, almost like a Christmas song that’s hopefully catchy and has a bit of metric modulation in it on the back half. I was trying to highlight the dynamics of the guitar on the bridge.

It’s very quiet compared to the following melody as well as the outro, where there’s certainly a Chet Atkins influence. I went through a very big Chet Atkins phase years ago, and while I would never try to make an entire record in that style, it’s definitely a nod to that phase.

You just released a video for “Waltz for Beverly.” What’s the story behind that tune?

I was kicking around that melody, which is like an Irish reel, with no harmony supporting it at all. So I put that down and then worked up some changes behind it. I’m not a huge fan of playing to a click track, but it was necessary for this situation in order to put the pieces together cohesively.

What’s great about playing over a waltz rhythm?

The great thing about a waltz is that the feel can be either very sad or very happy. It can sound lonely or like you’ve got a spring in your step walking down the street, depending on the feel.

I’d like to think “Waltz for Beverly” threads the needle between both of those. It’s got a little bit of sentimental melancholy as well as a hopeful, very major diatonic sound.

There are three tracks: one straight rhythm, one straight melody and then a third track for atmosphere, with lots of harmonics, open strings and clusters of very close-voiced chords ringing over the top.

“Only Child” is a lovely lullaby in waltz time with your wife Katie on violin, and “When Katie Smiles” has an interesting feel because it sounds like a waltz with a rest on the third beat, like two inside three, right?

Simon is going to play second guitar on the gigs I have coming up and he said the same thing, so there must be something to it, but I think of “When Katie Smiles” as being in four.

It’s also interesting that the foundation sounds rather basic, and yet you play some of the most flowery melodies and almost classical-sounding flourishes over the top, wouldn’t you say?

Sure. And a lot of the chords are slash chords [with the bass note different from the root]. I went to see the Who a bunch of times because my wife plays with them, and Pete Townshend uses so many slash chords in his writing. That influence definitely came through there.

 The single-note stuff you’re talking about is playing upper harmonics and extensions over a different bass note [than expected].

How fun is it that you get to hang out at Who gigs?

It’s unbelievable. I don’t even know what to say. Sometimes I can’t believe my life.

Order Too Close To Reason here.

He doesn’t get the credit bestowed on legends like Les Paul and Eddie Van Halen, but the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia was key to the development of the custom guitar industry.

And he was using rack-mounted amps and effects in the mid 1970s, 10 years before the heyday of rack rigs.

As Chris Gill revealed in Guitar Aficionado’s May/June 2014 issue, Garcia started out in the 1960s playing a variety of production models. By the 1970s, however, he found off-the-shelf electric guitars were unsuited to his need for a broader tonal palette.

And while most guitarists were happy to switch guitars during a set, Garcia preferred to play just one.

It was Rick Turner at Alembic who, in 1970, gave Garcia his first custom guitar, featuring a mahogany and walnut body of his own design, mated to the neck from an early 1960s Les Paul/SG Custom and featuring three pickups and stereo wiring.

His curiosity whetted, in 1971 Garcia asked Turner and Alembic’s Frank Fuller to modify his “Alligator” Strat, a gift from Graham Nash built with a ’63 ash body and a ’57 maple neck, and so named for a cartoon alligator sticker Garcia placed on its pickguard.

Turner and Fuller gave it a brass bridge, tailpiece and control panel, as well as an Alembic Strat-o-Blaster preamp that boosted gain.

For Garcia, a new era of bespoke axes had begun. 

The following year saw him begin his long relationship with guitar maker Doug Irwin, who in 1973 delivered Wolf, a custom axe with a neck-through-body design, the Strat-o-Blaster and three Strat pickups on a plate that could be swapped for another loaded with humbuckers.

Irwin would go on to create additional groundbreaking custom guitars for Garcia, including Tiger – a dazzling piece of luthiery with three pickups, coil taps, a five-position pickup selector and more – and Rosebud, which boasted a Roland GK-2 hexaphonic synth pickup and internally mounted MIDI and synth controls.

They are but two of many epic instruments from Garcia’s – and the guitar’s – long, strange trip.

"All I want for Christmas is a rock ‘n’ roll electric guitar," sings Chuck Berry (1926-2017) – a sentiment shared by many a guitarist since the father of rock ‘n’ roll released his recording of “Run Rudolph Run” in 1958.

A Gibson devotee, Berry became synonymous with the company’s thinline semi-hollowbody electric guitars launched that year. Already known for playing an ES-350T thinline hollowbody electric, Berry was an early adopter of the ES-335, -345 and -355 instruments and continues to help popularize these iconic guitars to this day.

Indeed, earlier this year Gibson introduced the Chuck Berry 1970s ES-355 to their ES (Electric Spanish) line alongside the Chuck Berry 1955 ES-350T.

Berry’s cut of "Run Rudolph Run" made it well into the Billboard Hot 100 in December 1958. It eventually became a top ten-selling single earlier this year – several decades following its original release.

Over time, “Run Rudolph Run” has established itself as a firm seasonal favorite, with countless artists having recorded their own version of this generations-old rock ‘n’ roll Christmas classic.

We’ve compiled a playlist of ten of our favorites. Everyone has theirs, so in no particular order…

Brian Setzer

Lemmy, Billy F. Gibbons and Dave Grohl

Keith Richards

L.A. Guns

Lynyrd Skynyrd

Grateful Dead

Foo Fighters

Cheap Trick

Sheryl Crow

Dwight Yoakam

We hope you enjoyed listening. Stay tuned for more over the Christmas period, and from all of us at Guitar Player - happy holidays!

Imagine it’s the Summer of Love in San Francisco’s storied Haight-Ashbury district. Hundreds of people have spontaneously gathered in Golden Gate Park to listen, dance and vibe to a five-piece combo onstage, whose members are deftly playing a bewitching blend of rock, blues, folk and psychedelia.

Those with even a basic knowledge of rock and roll lore might rightly envision the Jefferson Airplane or the Grateful Dead as the artists at this historical cultural epicenter. But on any given afternoon, the band in question was just as likely to be the Ace of Cups, a pioneering all-female outfit that was as prominent on the scene as its more famous peers but which has, until recently, been nearly lost to history.

The Ace of Cups were formed in 1967 by guitarist/bassist/harmonica player (and graduate of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters) Denise Kaufman, lead guitarist Mary Simpson Mercy, bassist Mary Gannon, drummer Diane Vitalich and keyboardist Marla Hunt.

They divvied up vocal duties and co-wrote their own genre-bending material. They even shared stages at the Fillmore West, Winterland and the Avalon Ballroom with Jimi Hendrix (who enthusiastically name-checked them in a December 1967 Melody Maker interview), the Grateful Dead, the Band, Jefferson Airplane, Mike Bloomfield and other legends of the era.

The Ace of Cups members also contributed their talents to albums by Bloomfield and Jefferson Airplane.

Unlike many of their contemporaries, however, the Ace of Cups never inked the major-label deal that would have given them national exposure. By the early ’70s, the band had lost momentum and dissolved.

For the next several decades, its members stayed in contact with one another, but the only publicly available recordings of the Ace of Cups’ groundbreaking music were a few brief but memorable appearances in the documentaries West Pole and Revolution and the posthumously released It’s Bad for You But Buy It! (Ace Records), a 2003 compilation CD of their various recordings.

Fast-forward to summer 2017, the Summer of Love’s golden anniversary, when Kaufman, Simpson Mercy, Gannon and Vitalich were asked to reunite for the 75th birthday celebration of legendary peace activist Wavy Gravy. “We made a concerted effort to rehearse and get a set together,” Simpson Mercy explains. “While listening to us perform, George Wallace, the owner of High Moon Records, decided he wanted to give us the opportunity to make our first proper album, so we subsequently held practices for a few months and then began recording with producer Dan Shea. Our goal was to recall the spirit of the ’60s, but with a modern flair.”

Adds Kaufman, “High Moon was primarily a reissue label. The bands that they worked with had a cache of unreleased or out-of-print material. We had never really been in the studio before, so it was a huge step for them to back our album of all-new recordings.”

Enthusiasts of late-’60s psychedelic pop and folk will no doubt marvel at the stylistic rainbow of colors presented on the band’s first official release, a double-CD titled simply Ace of Cups. “Feel Good,” the album’s driving “Steppin’ Stone”-ish opener, was a lost song rescued from a 1969 bootleg that a fan had recently sent to the band after connecting with them online.

Simpson Mercy’s “Pretty Boy,” a tune originally inspired by guitarist Dickie Peterson of the band Blue Cheer, was given a new chorus and a chugging Lennon-esque feel. The Kaufman-penned “Simplicity” has a half-step descending bass under an A minor triad that sounds remarkably similar to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” yet it was written several years before that song and is set over a lilting 6/8 rhythm. The haunting “Macushla/Thelina” draws from traditional Irish folk music, while the acoustic guitar-driven “We Can’t Go Back Again” is centered around an unusual tuning (low to high, C  F  B E G  B).

Simpson Mercy credits Shea with fostering an atmosphere of creativity and spontaneity throughout the recording process. “For ‘A Taste of One,’ he wanted me to add a slide guitar part,” she explains. “That’s something I’d never done before, but after a brief tutorial, I grabbed a glass bottleneck and tracked the melody line you hear during the song’s break.”

To record Ace of Cups, Simpson Mercy relied on an arsenal of electric guitars, including Fender Stratocasters and Telecasters, a Gibson ES-330 for the solo on “Pretty Boy,” a Rickenbacker 12-string for “Fantasy 1&4” and “Feel It in the Air” and a Guild F212 12-string acoustic guitar for “The Hermit.”

Kaufman brought her trusted flatwound-strung ’79 Music Man bass into the sessions but also found herself drawn to the more aggressive sound of the studio’s vintage Telecaster bass, an instrument that once belonged to Green Day’s Mike Dirnt. Originally the band’s rhythm guitarist, Kaufman had studied bass at Musician’s Institute in the early ’80s and wound up tracking many of the bass parts on Ace of Cups when Gannon wasn’t able to make frequent trips from her home in Hawaii.

“Listening back to our old practice and live tapes, I realized how solidly [Gannon] had nailed it,” Kaufman says. “Much of what I’m playing on the record is simply my attempt to cop the lines she originally created.”

Despite their lack of mainstream recognition, the Ace of Cups are well-respected among their musical peers. Consider the abundance of notable guest spots on their debut from musicians who played alongside them in their heyday. These include the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir, who lends his vocal and guitar skills to the newly written song “The Well,” and blues/folk legend Taj Mahal, who contributes vocals and banjo to “Life in Your Hands” and “Interlude: Daydreamin’.” Jefferson Airplane/Hot Tuna bassist Jack Casady enlivens “Feel Good,” “On the Road” and “We Can’t Go Back Again” with his driving low end, and his bandmate guitarist Jorma Kaukonen swaps lead lines with Simpson Mercy on “Simplicity.”

Simpson Mercy and Kaufman credit their time at the forefront of San Fransisco’s counterculture movement with expanding their artistic and personal horizons. “It was a deep exploration of community and freedom, where you were allowed to experiment with the breaking of social norms without judgement or condemnation,” Kaufman explains. “You have to understand what a grey and restrictive time the ’50s were in order to grasp how important it was to break all of that open and give permission to people to exist outside of heretofore established social restrictions in the ’60s.

“We were lucky to be part of a culture where no one was going to tell you your music, your poetry, your clothes or your ideas in general were too weird and shouldn’t be that way.” Simpson Mercy concurs. “At the time we were going through it, it just felt like life,” she says. “It was only in hindsight I realized how significant an experience it actually was.”

When considering their impact as a pioneering all-female band, Kaufman concludes, “All through our lives, there’s always been someone somewhere who has come up to us and said, ‘I saw your band when I was little and I made my mom go out and get me a guitar,’ or a saxophone, or some variation of that. It wasn’t necessarily what we were playing, but it was just the fact that we were playing that resonated with people. I believe that, now, more than ever, it’s important for all marginalized groups to have the opportunity to see themselves genuinely reflected in all aspects of our culture.”

Buy Ace of Cups debut album and Sing Your Dreams here.

In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Grateful Dead's landmark album, American Beauty, D'Angelico has unveiled a special new limited-edition version of its Premier SS guitar.

A 15-inch-wide, single-cutaway semi-hollow, the guitar is outfitted with an ovangkol fingerboard and Seymour Duncan-designed humbuckers with gold covers, which are said to produce tones ranging from “clean country to gritty rock" – fitting!

The guitar sports a Satin Walnut finish with custom artwork on the front and back, and a custom headstock inlay. All looks are inspired by American Beauty's artwork.

Other features on the guitar include Grover Super Rotomatic tuners and a tune-o-matic bridge with a D’Angelico stopbar tailpiece.

The D'Angelico Premier Grateful Dead SS will be available next month for $1,149.

For more info on the guitar, point your browser on over to dangelicoguitars.com.