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.”

The Gibson Les Paul has been a mainstay of Warren Haynes’ guitar arsenal since his days as a fledgling player in his native Asheville, North Carolina.

And it’s partly thanks to Haynes that the company has a Les Paul 12-string in its catalog. The model dates back to approximately 1990, when Haynes was performing at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville.

“Rick Gembar, who was head of the Gibson Custom Shop at that time, was at the show and sitting next to one of his employees,” Haynes tells Guitar Player. “I played an Epiphone 12-string — it was a 335 shape, not even a Les Paul — and Rick turned to his employee and said, ‘Uh, what the hell is Warren doing playing an Epiphone?!’ kind of half-joking.

“The guy with him, also half-jokingly, answered, ‘Well, we don’t make a 12-string Les Paul.’ And Rick said, ‘We do now!’

“They came backstage and Rick walked straight to me and said, ‘Warren, if you’ll put that Epiphone away, I’ll build you a 12-string Les Paul.’ And I said, ‘You got a deal!’”

Gibson handed over a pair of the guitars to Warren in 1990. In 2012, more than 20 years later, the company finally added the model to its lineup.

“I think they only made two of them for a long time, so that conversation turned into me having a one-of-a-kind — or two-of-a-kind — instrument,” Haynes explains.

Differentiating Haynes’ 12-string from the mass-production model, he says, is that “the headstock is enormous, and in return it’s fairly heavy.” But like any of those instruments, he notes, it has a unique sound from others.

“Most 12-strings are a little airier, or brighter,” Haynes explains. “Twelve-strings in general are designed to get that kind of shimmery sound, like the Rickenbackers or the Epiphones, which is great. Having a 12-string Les Paul, you get that thick, chunky Les Paul sound. And so to offset that a bit, there’s a coil-tap switch for the pickups that turns them into single-coils and makes it a little brighter, if you want that sound.

“I use the brighter setting quite a bit, but I also use the chunkier setting. It’s more like a throaty sound— bluesier and heavier.”

Haynes used the 12-string to record Gov’t Mule’s “Railroad Boy” and “So Weak, So Strong,” among others. These days, he says, he keeps it “in the truck” whenever he hits the road.

“I play it every now and then,” he notes, “but not a ton, because the set’s different each night. It’s there for when we need it, and I really enjoy playing it. And everybody that’s played it really loves it.”

Through a career that’s included the Allman Brothers Band, Gov’t Mule and his own projects, Haynes has never been short of interesting electric guitars to play — his own and others’.

“It’s cool to play some of these different instruments,” he acknowledges. “I’ve played a bunch of iconic guitars here and there, and there’s something there that’s different and inspiring. They all have unique sounds that inspire you to play differently, which is always a nice challenge. Just to have that opportunity is very cool.”

Haynes outdid himself, in a way, when Gov’t Mule — teamed with the Tedeschi Trucks Band — played in Chicago recently, on September 9. The night before the show, he visited Timeless Gem Studios to sample some of its collection and wound up taking Jeff Beck’s 1959 “Yardburst” Les Paul to the venue for a rendition of “Freeway Jam,” as well as Doug Irwin’s #24, which he used for “Ruby.”

“I really loved playing it,” Haynes says of the Beck guitar. “There’s some serious energy in that guitar. They told me that Beck apparently took the original pickups out, which in hindsight would’ve been PAFs, and replaced them with ’60s pickups, so it sounds different than a normal ’59 largely due to that.

“Back then,” he continues, “nobody knew that those guitars were going to be worth a fortune, so people were just making changes based on what they were hearing and what they wanted it to sound like. I guess he was looking for a little different sounds. The ’60s pickups probably have a little more aggressive midrange or something. Usually the ’57, ’58, ’59 pickups are pretty smooth-sounding and beautiful, so maybe he was looking for something a little different.”

The Irwin guitar, meanwhile, was not one of those ever owned by Jerry Garcia but did serve as a prototype for the iconic Tiger, Wolf and Rosebud that came in its wake.

“It was on its way to being similar to Tiger, but not there yet,” Haynes says. “I don’t mean as far as quality or good or bad. Some of the main elements that made Tiger had not been established yet.

“I played the actual Tiger at one of my symphonic shows, at Red Rocks. It’s a fantastic instrument. I also played Wolf on a whole tour, which was fantastic.

“Those guitars instantly sound like Jerry Garcia — they put you one step closer to that sound. Whatever they did in designing those guitars to work for him became just an iconic thing.”

The #24, Haynes adds, “was still a little bit more like a Gibson, so it was kind of like in between a Gibson and Tiger. It still has some of that chunky, meaty Gibson sound, but it also had some of that high-fidelity kind of Garcia-esque Tiger sound as well.”

The Chicago experiences add to Haynes’ formidable checklist, which is likely to only grow over the years. Among his other greatest memories are playing Eric Clapton’s Fool SG from his Cream days, as well as a Jimi Hendrix Fender Stratocaster the guitarist gave to producer Al Kooper, which now resides with a collector in Japan who brought it to a show for Haynes to play. Haynes calls it “a beautiful-sounding guitar.”

And then there’s the litany of vintage Allman Brothers axes that both he and Derek Trucks have had access to over the years. They include the Les Paul goldtop that Dickey Betts stripped and painted red, and the 1957 goldtop Duane Allman played on Derek and the Dominos’ Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs album that was brought to the Allmans’ performance at Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival during 2013 at Madison Square Garden in New York.

“It had a bite and this midrange that was different than a lot of them. It was very aggressive,” Haynes reports. “I walked back into Eric’s dressing room to show it to him, and he turned around and said, ‘Wow, is that a replica of Duane’s old guitar?’ and Derek said, ‘No, this is Duane’s guitar.’ And Eric played it and was just fascinated. He said, ‘I haven’t seen this guitar since we made Layla.’”

“They all sound different and they all have a unique thing about them. All those guitars from that time period did sound a little different, and they all sound unique — mostly great. Occasionally you hear one that doesn’t sound great, but not very often. Mostly those eras’ guitars sound fantastic.”

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.”

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.

The 1960s gave us the fuzz box, the treble booster, the wah-wah and a handful of other cool pedals, but the ’70s delivered the real boom in stompbox-sized effects, with creative designs busting out in all directions.

Arguably, none of the decade’s early developments offered the same combination of wild sonic melding and creative usability as the envelope filter, best captured in the seminal Mu-Tron III, which Musitronics unveiled in 1972.

Pioneering effects inventor Mike Beigel founded Beigel Sound Lab in 1971 to develop musical electronics, and notably was in early development of a groundbreaking synthesizer for Guild, which was shelved when the parent company went bankrupt.

Beigel then invented the Mu-Tron III in 1972, and founded Musitronics to manufacture and market the product, which was a near-instant hit.

The sound of the Mu-Tron III (and other similar envelope filters) is perhaps best described as a watery, wah-wah like effect that’s controlled by the strength of your playing.

Given these characteristics, envelope filters are often mislabeled as “auto-wahs,” although these two effects are differentiated by the ways in which their sounds are enabled.

A peaking filter produces a “wah” sound common to both, but this effect is triggered differently in each of them. In the envelope filter, a voltage-controlled filter circuit reacts to the intensity of the incoming signal – which is to say, the strength of the guitarist’s picking – to determine the depth of the wah sound. 

In the auto-wah, a modulation circuit, not unlike that in a tremolo or phaser pedal, determines the preset rate at which the effect is triggered.

Cast your mind’s ear back to classic funk tunes, and it’s not hard to conjure up the distinctive sound of an envelope filter. Chances are, if that sound was recorded in the ’70s, it was produced with a Mu-Tron III.

Ironically, some of the most notable examples feature instruments other than the guitar. Stevie Wonder’s hit “Higher Ground,” from his 1973 album, Innervisions, was recorded by tracking his Hohner Clavinet through a Mu-Tron III.

Just about anything bassist Bootsy Collins did had Mu-Tron III all over it, and his Parliament-Funkadelic keyboard cohort, Bernie Worrell, played plenty of his own riffs through the effect as well.

The granddaddy of envelope filters crossed over into many genres as well. Frank Zappa displayed a deep appreciation for the effect, as did Grateful Dead main man Jerry Garcia.

Steve Vai has often carried one in his pedal rack, and a young Larry Coryell made waves with the effect when he was a rising jazz star in the ’70s. Musitronics even hired him to record a Mu-Tron III demo album, which was released in 1975.

The seminal envelope filter wasn’t the only classic to come out of the Musitronics stable. In 1974, Beigel developed the Mu-Tron Bi-Phase, and in 1977 he invented the Mu-Tron Flanger, both of which now fetch major bucks on the collectors’ market.

The Mu-Tron lineup was manufactured by Musitronics until synthesizer maker A.R.P. purchased the brand in 1978, a deal inspired partly by Musitronics’ losses from the failed effort to develop the Gizmotron, a device invented by Lol Crème and Kevin Godley of the English band 10cc.

Beigel himself continued to invent and develop effects under other guises afterward, notably re-working the Mu-Tron III formula for Mike Matthews in 1996 as the Electro-Harmonix Q-Tron, an envelope filter that has flown the funk flag high and proud ever since.

Beigel founded Mu-Fx to produce more compact renditions of his ’70s classics in 2013. His products are once again being manufactured and sold under the Mu-Tron brand since he reacquired the name in 2018.

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.

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.

Peter Rowan’s 60-year career weaves like a thread through the vast bluegrass tapestry, from its traditional roots through the progressive movement and onto the modern landscape.

Rowan has never been a flashy player. He’s a subtle guitar hero, renowned for his artistic rhythm accompaniment full of meaningful bass runs and purposeful passing chords, setting the stage for his signature vocals and a lengthy list of virtuosic soloists.

Equally adept as a flatpicker or fingerpicker, Rowan has probably played alongside as many all-time acoustic greats on every conceivable instrument as anyone who’s ever donned a guitar.

The iconic list includes Bill Monroe’s mandolin in the Bluegrass Boys, Jerry Douglas’s Dobro, Tony Rice’s dreadnought, and Jerry Garcia’s banjo in the extraordinarily popular Old & In the Way, which in the mid ’70s also included mandolin master David Grisman, fiddler Vassar Clements and string bassist John Kahn.

Old & In the Way made Rowan a star on the jam-band scene, and recently he’s been celebrating it on tour, backed by Railroad Earth. That stint saw him present a Grandstand Stage performance at the High Sierra Music Festival over Independence Day weekend.

Rowan is such a bona fide Americana treasure, he was actually born on the Fourth of July. The 80-year-old is still sharp as a tack and cutting tracks with his tight bluegrass quintet. Rowan’s new album, Calling You From My Mountain (Rebel), is a deep mix of covers and originals, and it features the current prince and princess of bluegrass, Billy Strings and Molly Tuttle, on a total of four lovely and diverse songs.

Rowan also continues to tour with his electrified bluegrass ensemble, Big Twang Theory, and its country-fried Texas cousin, the Free Mexican Airforce, as well as perform solo acoustic.

What keeps you coming back to the guitar after so many years and miles?

The guitar is an endless exploration of its own language, everything from flamenco to Hawaiian slack key to the blues.

I first got interested in Hawaiian music because my uncle taught me a few songs on the ukulele when I was about five years old.

The tune that has jogged my imagination for years is “Bye Bye Blackbird.” I’ve never really settled on a definitive version, but that song influenced the way I hear passing chords. Libba [Elizabeth] Cotten, who wrote “Freight Train,” was a huge influence as well.

I started out by strumming in a Buddy Holly kind of style on a Telecaster with my rockabilly band, the Cupids, but when I was about 15 and heard Libba Cotten, I was touched by her lyrical fingerpicking and wonderful songs.

I begged my father for a Martin, and he bought me an 0-17. That enabled me to get going as an acoustic fingerpicker.

Lightnin’ Hopkins was a tremendous fingerpicker, and everything changed for me when I heard him.

I also studied the music of Lead Belly, and I cover his “Penitentiary Blues” on my new album. But back then I realized that I didn’t have the life experience to be a blues man.

I used to go to a record store in Harvard Square [in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near where Rowan grew up], where you could listen in a booth. When I put on Bill Monroe’s “In the Pines,” I heard the connection to Lead Belly and the blues, but I felt closer to it culturally, so it seemed my best entry was to adopt a bluegrass approach.

I put aside fingerpicking for a while, found myself a big ol’ Martin and started flatpicking.

By 1963 you were in Bill Monroe’s band. What did he impress upon you?

Bill Monroe impressed upon me the importance of rhythm guitar and leading with bass-note runs. He said that the Black man who taught him to play guitar, Arnold Shultz, could play the prettiest runs of all.

Apart from the hot picking leads that have become so popular, the unique thing about bluegrass guitar is the bass runs. That goes all the way back to people like Eddie Lang [known as the father of jazz guitar], and the way he would lead a bass run into a chord.

That’s what bluegrass does in the traditional sense, from the style I play right up to Billy Strings. The beauty is in the way it lifts from the bass run into a chord or an arpeggiated type of solo passage.

I spent so many years playing rhythm guitar that bass runs became a big thing for me, and it’s still a wonderful exploration.

Where are you at as a rhythm guitar player now?

I’ve gone back to playing with my fingers, even when doing bluegrass. I practice flatpicking all the time, but in order to keep the continuity between the blues and Hawaiian music and fingerpicking, I’ve gone back to the way that Carter Stanley and Lester Flatt played bluegrass rhythm guitar, which is with a thumbpick and one or two fingerpicks.

That way I can play “Freight Train” as I do in the middle of “Panama Red” [Rowan’s signature song] and have all the worlds of guitar at my fingertips.

What guitars are under your fingertips the most?

The guitar I played on the new album that’s featured on the cover was made for me by Casey Cochran. It’s a dreadnought in Style 28 made out of koa for that sweet, Hawaiian sound.

I write a lot of songs on my old ’37 sunburst [Martin] 000-28 that I got years ago in a series of trades. That’s the most intimate guitar with the most beautiful sound. I also inherited Charles Sawtelle’s 1937 D-18 [the Hot Rize Martin dreadnought].

Preston Thompson Guitars is currently building a commemorative model for me as sort of a lifetime achievement award for my longstanding relationship with them. It’s a troubadour model 0000-28 with all sorts of inlays of mantric syllables and Buddhist designs.

I was actually the first person to buy a triple 0 from Preston, and Charles Sawtelle set that up. When Preston got into making guitars, he based his first two models on Charles Sawtelle’s vintage Martins.

Preston made a triple 0 in style 42, and the other was a dreadnought. I still have the triple 0 that I bought and the dreadnought in Style 28 that Preston gave to me.

The main acoustic I use on the road is a Martin D-18GE Golden Era, which is a single luthier guitar made about a dozen yeas ago. Man, its sound has come in beautifully! Martin has perfected the D-18 as a kind of all-accomplishing instrument. You can really fingerpick it, and it’s great for [flatpicking] bluegrass.

How has your approach evolved?

My way of thinking about bluegrass guitar now is “light touch.” Let the instrument speak, rather than bearing down on it hard, like when I was with Bill Monroe. He simply wanted such solid rhythm that there was only one way to go in my mind at the time. And every time I’d lighten up, he’d look askance, you know?

But now I find that it’s easier to sing using the thumbpick and the fingerpick. There’s no pressure on my arm to move, so I can sort of caress the strings with my fingers.

Fingerpicking is basically just a downward stroke on the thumb and a backwards strum on the forefinger, which is interesting because that backwards stroke is a flamenco technique called a rasgueado.

It’s the second half of a motion that starts with a downward strum and then goes backward from the high strings to the low strings.

I still study flamenco music with my buddy Carlos Lomas, in Santa Fe. I appreciate playing the guitar with a more delicate touch to allow the singing to come forth a little more.

Can you speak to Tony Rice’s touch?

A normal person would make every string buzz on his guitar, but Tony’s touch was so incredibly light that it was really beautiful.

And if you listen to Tony’s music, you’ll realize that he didn’t try to take a lot of extensive solos when he was singing. It was when he experienced some throat problems that his guitar playing came to the fore, and he explored some unusual tonalities.

How did it feel to have him accompany you?

It’s a subtlety, but his accompaniment guitar is inspiring, because his use of suspensions and passing chords is so beautiful. We only scratched the surface, because the pressures of touring kind of limit what you can do.

If I had those days to live over, I’d probably use more open tunings, because of the tonal possibilities. We managed a few. There’s one called “Shirt Off My Back,” which is in open G and played in the key of D.

So much is possible on the guitar, and my love right now is trying to tie those runs in with the passing chords in emotional ways, not just playing them in a slick way.

“Uncle Pen” is a classic example. I play that song on almost every bluegrass set because it settles us into a traditional thing, and that’s my love. On the original record, Jimmy Martin used a dead-stringed Gibson to play that run, and yet it’s the definitive statement of the G run pattern. But it’s still tricky. It’s not just a straight-ahead thing at all, and you get so nervous that it’s easy to make a mistake.

Everybody knows the mistake “Uncle Pen” guitar run, when you land on the B string instead of the G. [laughs] It’s a classic joke among guitar players, because it’s happened to everybody.

What’s so magical about the music of Old & In the Way that it still resonates to such a broad audience to this day?

Jerry Garcia is immortal, and it carries the weight of his spiritual intent. In spite of mortality, the spiritual intent is immortal, and that’s pretty much all there is to latch onto.

How did you come to play his herringbone 1943 Martin D-28?

He had that guitar at his house when we were getting together. I only had a triple 0 at the time, the same ’37 that I have now. He brought out his dreadnought and said, “Hey, do you want to play this one, man?” I did because it’s an unmistakable guitar with a great sound, and that’s the one on all of the Old & In the Way stuff.

When I got to play that guitar [through the Grateful Guitars Foundation] at Terrapin Crossroads a few months ago, I was reunited with that lively, resonant sound.

A week later I was in Nashville, and Billy Strings was in the studio with me. He had just bought a vintage D-28 from the same time period, and the two-toned Brazilian rosewood is exactly the same as the back and sides on Jerry’s guitar.

They’re only a few serial numbers apart, so the wood that you hear on my record from Billy Strings is from the same woodpile as Jerry Garcia’s D-28.

Billy Strings is seemingly everywhere these days. What do you appreciate most about his playing?

I like how he plays for emotion, not for flash. I didn’t want him for just his extraordinary solo capabilities. We played the tunes a couple of times and he played fabulous rhythm/lead guitar. He put a couple of Tony Rice’s patterns in his runs and fills to honor him.

I love the feeling he put into his playing on “A Winning Hand,” which is like an Irish ballad. Billy took a natural approach and simply played the music, which is what I wanted.

How about Molly Tuttle’s contribution?

Emotion is what strikes me about Molly Tuttle as well. When she came into the studio and sang the title cut, she didn’t try to sing it with a bluegrass style; she sang with something that is the essence of Molly Tuttle, which is tremendously moving to me.

I’m always struck by her voice. It’s tender and vulnerable, not clichéd at all. She also sang a wonderful part on “The Red, the White, and the Blue” and she played lovely clawhammer banjo on that too.

I feel so grateful to still be playing bluegrass for such a broad audience with my band. We’re playing the music as straightforward as we can, and that’s all we were doing with Old & In the Way. We’d practice every night, just for the joy of doing it.

The idea of going out and playing came afterward. This band has that same joy. We’re not some fabrication of somebody’s imagination, with a bunch of tour posters and merchandise. We’re just a bluegrass band, and that’s all it’s ever been.

Order Peter Rowan's Calling You From My Mountain here.

The Fender Custom Shop has just launched what just might be the ultimate collector’s item for Jerry Garcia superfans – a replica of the late Grateful Dead guitarist’s heavily modded Alligator Strat.

Masterbuilt by Austin MacNutt, who will make each of the custom electric guitars to order, the Alligator Strat replicates every detail of Garcia’s original, from the eponymous decal on the pickguard down to the hammered-brass control plate and Schaller tuners, and the battle scars from a life on the road.

Graham Nash gave Garcia the original Stratocaster in 1970. It would not stay stock for long, and soon lit up Garcia’s imagination when it came to customized electrics. Garcia would regularly hand it over to Rick Turner and Frank Fuller of Alembic for modifications. 

There were Raytheon volume knobs to start off. After the merciless cold of an East Coast winter made the control plate frigid, causing it to fracture and spill the guts of the Strat’s wiring mid-set, the guitar was then fixed up with Masonite before ultimately being upgraded with a custom brass plate.

• Here’s Why Jerry Garcia Was an Electric Guitar Innovator

More mods would follow. There were Schaller tuners, a brass nut and retainer bar, the brass bridge with rosewood reinforced base plate, a refret job, and of course the stickers – the Harley Davidson and ‘Policeman Helper’ stickers on the upper horn, and the ‘gator on the ‘guard. 

Garcia’s Alligator was a hot-rodded Strat before hot-rodding was officially a thing. The Alligator Strat played a pivotal role in Jerry Garcia revolutionizing the custom guitar industry.

His guitar tech Steve Parish got in on the act too. Fender might have built it in 1955 but Garcia crowdsourced the guitar’s evolution throughout its time in service. 

“There’s a lot I can tell you about this guitar,” said Parish. “I’m very lucky because I got to work with Jerry to take care of his guitars… Jerry played a lot of guitars and a lot of Strats but he never had a favorite. Fender, Fender, Fender everything. He played Fender Twin Reverb because he loved it, and we collected every Fender we could buy. But this guitar quickly became his favorite.”

MacNutt digitally scanned the original Alligator Strat to profile its Soft V profile neck, comprised of a single piece of rift-sawn maple. It was in doing so that he dated the Strat to 1955, not ’57 as was previously thought. 

The Alligator Strat ships with medium vintage frets on its 7.25” radius maple fingerboard. It has a swamp ash body housing a trio of custom-wound Josefina ‘55 style single-coils, with five-way switching and standard vintage Strat wiring and custom replica “Blaster” clean-boost output jack.

As you can see from the pics, the alligator decal has been aged, the collar and cuffs matching on the similarly aged three-ply parchment ‘guard. Other details include a custom birdseye maple back plate.

“This guitar is a piece of American history,” said MacNutt. “There is so much history behind each alteration and modification made to the guitar; to have the opportunity to have the original for a day, take it apart, look inside and replicate it has been an honor.”

It ships in a custom hard-shell case, is made to order, and is priced a cool $20,000. But, as MacNutt says, it is a piece of history. When the original sold at auction in 2019 it fetched over half-a-million dollars, which puts things in perspective a little.

The Jerry Garcia Alligator Strat is available now. See the Fender Custom Shop for more details.

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.

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.

Electro-Harmonix has unveiled the latest incarnation of their long-running Q-Tron envelope filter – the Nano Q-Tron. As its name suggests, this diminutive stompbox occupies little in the way of floor space (at least compared to the overly capacious Q-Tron/Q-Tron+ units of the ‘90s and ‘00s.)

Though EHX have been making envelope filters since the ‘70s (including the excellent Doctor Q stompbox) their Q-Tron pedals were developed in the mid-‘90s with assistance from Musitronics co-founder and electronics engineer Mike Beigel. Beigel takes the credit for designing perhaps the most esteemed vintage envelope filter of all – the Musitronics Mu-Tron III – and it is this expertise he took to EHX when originally developing the Q-Tron.

Since then, Q-Trons have appeared in various guises of seemingly ever diminishing size. Which is probably good thing. One of the biggest gripes about the older units is the amount of space they take up on pedalboards, which is a fair comment considering how infrequently most electric guitar players use the effect.

That said, the auto wah sound can be used to literally great effect when applied tastefully. Larry Coryell and Jerry Garcia both favored the Mu-Tron III back in the day, while in more recent years Q-Trons have been spotted at the feet of John Mayer and Flea.

Touted as a compact version of the Micro Q-Tron, the Nano Q-Tron measures just 4.5 x 2.75 x 2.1 inches and is fitted with a simple set of control knobs including Volume, Drive (sensitivity) and Q (peak bandwidth.) The pedal features three Modes or filter types, namely LP (low pass), HP (high pass), and BP (band pass.)

To order your Electro-Harmonix Nano Q-Tron head over to Sweetwater where you can make a saving of $35.10

Ask any guitarist for a short list of players who dramatically changed the way the electric guitar is made and played, and inevitably names like Les Paul, Jimi Hendrix, and Eddie Van Halen will be mentioned. But one player who only occasionally gets similar credit, even though he certainly belongs among the list’s top five, is Jerry Garcia.

From his pivotal role in helping to establish the custom guitar industry to his very early adoption of rack systems for amplification and effects, Garcia pushed modern electric guitar technology and innovation forward in ways that few other players have since, thanks to his passion for creative freedom onstage and in the studio.

During the late Sixties and Seventies, a cottage industry grew in the San Francisco Bay Area to support the Grateful Dead’s discriminating demands for sophisticated instruments and state-of-the-art sound systems. Many of the people that the band worked with early on formed companies that are still going strong today, including Alembic, Furman Sound, and Meyer Sound. 

In the Dead’s early days, Garcia played mass-produced guitar models by Fender, Gibson, Guild, and Martin, but from the early Seventies onward, he generally preferred instruments made by individual luthiers, like Doug Irwin and Stephen Cripe, or fledgling, visionary local companies, like Travis Bean.

Raised in a musical family — his father was a professional musician who played reed instruments in swing bands, and his mother played piano and listened to opera — Garcia started taking piano lessons early in his youth. In 1947, when he was only five years old, his father died in a fishing accident, and shortly afterward Garcia moved in with his grandparents, who introduced him to country music. 

Sometime in the late Forties, he heard Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs’ Mercury recordings and decided to learn to play bluegrass banjo. Even though he had lost the tip of his right hand middle finger in an accident when he was only four, Garcia managed to master the intricate right-hand fingerpicking technique required for playing bluegrass banjo, using his thumb, forefinger, and ring finger.

“For me, the banjo is kind of the gateway to music,” Garcia told Relix magazine. “That’s how I found my way into music. I liked the sound of the music that was made with a five-string banjo — the incredible clarity and the sparkling brilliance of it. I was attracted by the intensity of the Mercury [Flatt & Scruggs] album with ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown’ and ‘Pike County Breakdown.’ I couldn’t believe the sound of it. It was startling.”

In 1953, when Garcia was 11, he moved back in with his mother and new stepfather. During this time, his older brother Clifford introduced him to rock and roll and blues music, and the two sang doo-wop harmonies together. Garcia soon found the sound of the electric guitar irresistible, but he didn’t start playing the instrument until a few months after his 15th birthday, in 1957. Having received an accordion from his mother as a gift, he eventually convinced her to trade it for a Danelectro guitar and a small amp.

“I learned by ear, mostly from records,” Garcia told Jon Sievert in a 1978 Guitar Player magazine interview. “I listened to Freddie King and B.B. King extensively. That was my first exposure, mostly because the Bay Area didn’t have that many guitar players back when I started playing.”

During the early Sixties, Garcia played in a variety of musical settings that foreshadowed the stylistic diversity of the music he later played with the Grateful Dead. He performed as a solo artist, accompanied by a 12-string acoustic guitar, and in 1962 he started playing banjo and guitar with a variety of old-time string and bluegrass bands. One of those bands, Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, also included keyboardist Ron “Pigpen” McKernan and guitarist Bob Weir as members. After discovering the Beatles, Garcia, McKernan, and Weir decided to change musical direction, abandoning bluegrass and performing rock and roll in a new band they formed in 1965 called the Warlocks. Eventually, they changed their name to the Grateful Dead.

With the Warlocks, Garcia played a stock circa-1964/’65 cherry-red Guild Starfire III with a thinline single-cutaway body, a pair of Guild humbucking pickups, and a Bigsby B-6 vibrato. This remained his main guitar for the next two years, and he used it to record the Grateful Dead’s eponymous debut album. He played the Guild through a Fender Twin Reverb combo while with the Warlocks, but by 1967 he had expanded his rig with the addition of a Fender Showman head and a Fender 2x15 speaker cabinet.

After the release of The Grateful Dead, Garcia began to acquire and play a variety of different Gibson solidbodies for the next three years. At first he played a black 1957 Gibson Les Paul Custom with P-90 single-coil pickups and a Bigsby vibrato, but he soon switched to a mid-Fifties Les Paul “Goldtop” fitted with a Tune-o-matic bridge and a nonstandard trapeze tailpiece. 

During the summer of 1968, Garcia was seen onstage with another late-Fifties Les Paul Custom, but this one had a standard stop tailpiece instead of a Bigsby. These P-90–equipped Les Pauls were likely the guitars that he used in the studio to record the Dead’s Anthem of the Sun and Aoxomoxoa albums. As the venues that the Grateful Dead performed in became larger and larger, so did Jerry’s rig, which by this point in his career consisted of three Fender Twin Reverb amps driving two 4x12 cabinets loaded with JBL D120 speakers.

By late 1968, Garcia switched allegiance to humbucker-equipped Gibson SG Standard models. His first SG was a Bigsby-equipped 1967 model that he purchased new. Garcia used this SG, which also featured a round American flag sticker and large “double” pickguard, for the concerts recorded for the Grateful Dead’s first live album, Live/Dead, as well as for the group’s performance at Woodstock Festival on August 16, 1969. In 1970, he acquired an early Sixties Gibson Les Paul Standard with an SG-style body, which had its original “sideways” vibrato unit replaced by a stop tailpiece.

Garcia also started playing Fender guitars around this time. A performance filmed at New York City’s Fillmore East on February 14, 1970, shows him with a sunburst 1963 Fender Stratocaster. During the summer of that year, when the Grateful Dead and Delaney & Bonnie were on tour together in Canada, Delaney Bramlett loaned Garcia a rosewood Telecaster previously owned by George Harrison. However, the most famous Fender associated with Garcia is a hybrid Strat with a 1957 maple neck and a 1963 ash body that Graham Nash gave to him in 1971. Nicknamed Alligator for the cartoon alligator sticker that Garcia affixed to its pickguard, this Strat marked the beginning of Garcia’s radical departure from the mostly stock, off-the-shelf guitars he had used previously.

Increasingly dissatisfied with the limited tonal palette of most production guitars, Garcia sought a single instrument that could provide him with a wide variety of tones and textures at will, allowing him to obtain any sound he pleased during the band’s extended jams. Unlike most guitarists, who simply changed guitars between songs when they needed different sounds (and justified their habit of acquiring an ever-growing collection of instruments), Garcia preferred to use the same guitar for an entire set, changing instruments only when necessary, if a string broke or a technical problem arose.

The first attempt to satisfy Garcia’s wishes was a guitar made by Rick Turner of Alembic, which at the time provided the Dead with sound reinforcement, recording, and instrument support. During the late Sixties, Turner built a guitar featuring a neck from an early Sixties Gibson Les Paul/SG Custom, his own mahogany and walnut body design (similar to that of Turner’s later Model 1 guitar, sans cutaway), three pickups, and custom two-channel/stereo wiring. Garcia played Turner’s guitar for only a few months before switching to Alligator, but from that point onward, his preference for customized guitars never faded away.

Garcia frequently handed Alligator over to Turner and Alembic’s Frank Fuller to perform various modifications on it between March 1971 and August 1973. The most obvious mods were the installation of a brass bridge, tailpiece, and control panel, but the most innovative feature was the Alembic Strat-o-Blaster preamp, which boosted gain and also prevented signal loss when using long cables on large stages.

In 1972, Garcia bought another custom guitar, one built by Doug Irwin. A guitar designer and builder, Irwin had, in 1970, joined Alembic, where he was trained by Fuller and Turner, but he was working on his own when Garcia approached him. The guitar Garcia purchased from him was called Eagle, and it was the first guitar that Irwin made entirely by himself for Alembic. It featured a laminated bird’s-eye maple and amaranth (a.k.a. purpleheart) body, brass hardware, and Bartolini Hi-A pickups. Garcia purchased the guitar for $850 and was so impressed with Irwin’s work that he immediately asked him to build another guitar to his custom specifications.

This was the beginning of Garcia’s long and productive relationship with the builder. Irwin completed Garcia’s first custom-order guitar in May 1973, selling it to him for an astounding (at that time) $1,500. After receiving the guitar, Garcia gave his first Irwin guitar to his guitar tech, Ram Rod, who sold it in a Bonhams auction in 2007 for $186,000. The new custom featured a neck-though-body design made of maple and amaranth, but unlike Garcia’s previous Irwin guitar it had a slimmer profile and asymmetrical shape that provided better balance. 

Irwin installed an Alembic Strat-o-Blaster preamp and three Strat pickups in the guitar with traditional Strat wiring, but knowing that Garcia would likely experiment with different pickups and electronics, he wisely mounted the pickups on a removable plate and routed a completely hollow pickup cavity. Irwin even provided Garcia with a second plate, ready to go, with humbuckers installed on it.

Garcia instantly fell in love with the guitar — nicknamed Wolf, for the cartoon wolf sticker that he affixed below the bridge — and it became his main instrument. A few years after he received Wolf, the guitar suffered a couple of falls during a European tour and was returned to Irwin for repair. While it was in his shop, Irwin replicated the wolf sticker with wood inlays and replaced the headstock overlay with one featuring his eagle logo.

In 1977, at Garcia’s request, Irwin installed an innovative buffered effect loop in Wolf. “It allows me to have all my effects pedals wired to the guitar and bypass them all with a switch,” Garcia told Jon Sievert. “I use a stereo cord, and the signal goes from the pickups to the tone controls and pickup switch. The signal then goes through the effects, back into a network box, and up the ‘B’ side of the stereo cord, back into the instrument before the volume pot, and then out to the amp. The effects always see the guitar as if it had full output voltage.”

As much as Garcia loved Wolf, he continued searching for other instruments. In 1976, while Wolf was being repaired, he discovered a new company making guitars in the San Francisco Bay Area: Travis Bean, named after its main luthier and founder. Garcia initially mocked the aluminum necks featured on Travis Bean’s guitars, but he was pleasantly surprised after trying one and eventually added two Travis Bean models — a TB1000A with humbuckers and a TB500 with single-coil pickups — to his arsenal. Garcia performed with these guitars often during the late Seventies and even had the TB500 modified with the same buffered effect loop installed in Wolf as well as a unity-gain buffer made by John Cutler.

Beginning in the mid Seventies, Garcia experimented in a similar fashion with amplification and effects. During the early Seventies, he was using a rack-mounted setup consisting of a preamp section from a Fender Twin Reverb amp and McIntosh power amps, starting with MC3500 models, which were later supplanted by MC2300 amps. He replaced the Fender Twin with a Mesa/Boogie Mark I in 1975, although he went back to using Twins onstage in the late Seventies. Garcia’s effects setup evolved dramatically as well, starting with just a Vox wah at the beginning of the decade but quickly growing to consist of an MXR Analog Delay, MXR Distortion Plus, MXR Phase 100, Mu-Tron III envelope follower, Mu-Tron Octave Divider, and Mu-Tron Vol-Wah.

Garcia continued to modify Wolf after he got the guitar back from Irwin in 1977. In 1978, he installed DiMarzio Dual Sound humbuckers in the bridge and middle positions and a DiMarzio SDS-1 single-coil at the neck. Irwin also installed coil-tap switches for each humbucker. Garcia played Wolf until July 1979, when Irwin finally completed a guitar that Garcia had ordered in 1973 at the same time that he had picked up Wolf. This guitar was known as Tiger, after the image of a tiger inlaid in the oval preamp cover, below the bridge.

When Garcia ordered Tiger, he gave Irwin complete freedom to make the best guitar he could. The result was a true work of art, with a body constructed from dazzling, contrasting layers of cocobolo, maple, and vermillion, and featuring brass binding and a floral pearl inlay on the back. The neck is western maple with a padauk center strip, its ebony fretboard featuring exquisitely detailed pearl inlays. Irwin’s electronics were as innovative as his craftsmanship was stunning. Pickups initially consisted of DiMarzio Dual Sound humbuckers at the bridge and middle (replaced by DiMarzio Super IIs in 1982) and a DiMarzio SDS-1 at the neck, with coil-tap switches for the humbuckers, a five-position pickup selector, a master volume control, neck/bridge and middle pickup tone controls, a unity-gain buffer, and a mini toggle switch for the effect loop.

Finally, Garcia had a guitar that was capable of producing the various sounds he needed onstage from one instrument. “I’m the kind of player who generally plays one guitar at a time so I can learn its idiosyncracies,” Garcia told Sievert in an interview conducted before Tiger was completed. “I really seek a kind of universal guitar, something that will sound like anything I want it to at any given moment.”

With Tiger, he had at long last achieved that goal. “There are 12 discrete possible voices that are all pretty different,” he said. “That gives me a lot of vocabulary of basically different tones.” Tiger remained Garcia’s main guitar for the next 11 years — the longest any of his guitars enjoyed that status for a continuous run.

In 1990, Irwin completed Rosebud, which Garcia considered the guitar builder’s masterpiece. Rosebud was similar to Tiger, but it featured three humbucking pickups, a Roland GK-2 hexaphonic guitar synthesizer pickup with its MIDI and synth controls internally mounted, and hollow body cavities that reduced the overall weight by two pounds. Garcia started using guitar synths in the late Eighties, installing a Roland hexaphonic pickup on Wolf, which he brought out of retirement and used mainly for the extended free-improvisational jam section of the Dead’s concerts, known as “Space.” With Rosebud and the Roland guitar synth, he finally had a single instrument that provided him a full assortment of guitar tones and other sounds, like brass and woodwind instruments, vocal samples, percussion, violins, mandolins, and special effects.

As much as Garcia loved his Doug Irwin guitars, he was absolutely blown away when aspiring luthier Stephen Cripe presented him with a custom-made replica of Tiger called Lightning Bolt, so named for the trademark Grateful Dead design inlaid on the cover plate below the bridge. Garcia called it “the guitar I’ve been waiting for,” and it immediately succeeded Rosebud as his main guitar after Garcia had San Francisco luthier Gary Brawer replace the electronics and install a Roland guitar synth pickup and controller in it. Garcia ordered a backup from Cripe, who made a second guitar called Top Hat, named for the graphic design on the control cover, which depicted a skull wearing a stars-and-stripes top hat. Delivered in April 1995, the guitar was in Garcia’s possession just over three months before he died, so it never enjoyed significant playing time with him.

A few other electric guitars briefly passed through Garcia’s hands during his career, including a late-Fifties Gibson Les Paul Special, an early Seventies Les Paul Deluxe, and an Ibanez Musician MC-500, which was inspired by Alembic’s designs. He also frequently played acoustic guitar both with the Dead and in various side projects that included the Jerry Garcia Band, Old and in the Way, and several collaborations with mandolin virtuoso David Grisman. In the studio he preferred to play Martin D-18 and D-28 dreadnoughts, while onstage he performed with Takamine acoustic-electrics during the early Eighties and, later, various custom Alvarez-Yairi GY1, GY2, DY98, and DY99 acoustic-electric models that he helped design.

On July 9, 1995, at Soldier Field in Chicago, Illinois, Garcia performed his last concert with the Grateful Dead. Because Lighting Bolt was in the shop for repairs, Garcia played Rosebud instead. However, about halfway through the set the guitar began to experience technical problems, so Garcia finished the show with his old friend Tiger, which he had brought along as a spare. It was an unexpected but fitting twist of fate that Garcia played his last notes onstage with the guitar that was his trustworthy companion longer than any other instrument he had owned.

But perhaps the most fascinating ironic twist is that the very last guitar that Garcia may have ever played was not one of his iconic custom electric creations but rather an uncharacteristic — for Garcia — vintage archtop acoustic 1939 Gibson Super 400N that he used to record “Blue Yodel #9.” 

This performance, recorded in the studio with his good friend David Grisman on July 16, 1995, was Garcia’s last recording session before he checked into a drug rehabilitation facility a few days later. About four weeks afterward, Garcia passed away after suffering a heart attack, on August 9, 1995.

Happy birthday to Carlos Santana – the guitar legend who continues to blow the minds of fans well over half a century after he blew the minds of some 400,000 Woodstock festival goers back in the Summer of ’69. 

But it wasn’t just the fans’ minds that were blown on that fateful August afternoon. 

The “ocean of hair and teeth and arms” that was Woodstock was already looking pretty trippy to Carlos Santana when he touched down in the helicopter. And though he now had two feet on the ground, the following events were anything but down-to-earth.

Following a ‘brief exchange’ with Jerry Garcia, Carlos walked away full of the festival spirit and feeling safe in the knowledge that he had several hours to kill before the acid wore off. After all, it was to be the biggest performance of his career.

Any sense of serenity was short-lived, however, as he was soon informed, “If you don’t play now, you’re not going to play at all. You need to go on right now.” Alas, peaking on his trip, he made his way to the stage in trepidation, praying only to stay in tune and in time.

“Everything became another dimension,” he recalls.

In heroic fashion, Carlos went far beyond merely holding it together – even though the neck of his early ‘60s Gibson SG Special “felt like a snake” in his hands. But tame that 'snake' he did! 

While Carlos himself has often been quoted as finding this uncomfortable viewing (understandable) his masterful performance ultimately went down in history as one of Woodstock's most iconic moments.

Get the full Woodstock movie here.