One of the great all time albums of the early 1970’s, and arguably the best Grateful Dead collection of tunes ever was Workingman’s Dead… Embedded in the illustration above is a link to a very nice Guitar Player magazine article about the Grateful Dead, particularly about Jerry Garcia’s quest for the perfect guitar during his playing days, when he was alive. There are, within the article, some excellent links to Youtube videos of the Dead during that era and later. Unlike Facebook, where an article can be easily linked with an attractive image, I had to find an image myself and then embed the link… WordPress, the platform for this blog gets weird about copyright protection.
The rule rather than the exception for a professional guitarist on stage is to have multiple guitars with varying set-ups, woods, pick-ups etc that may be used for different tunes. Garcia, according to the article, sought for much of his playing career a single perfect guitar that would suffice throughout the epic concerts that the Dead performed on the road… It is an interesting read… and suggests why so many of us who love guitars seem to think buying one more will get us the sound palette we seek.
I saw the Grateful Dead once, outdoors, during that time in the early 70’s when they were playing extended sets based on Workingman’s Dead and the excellent sequel American Beauty. It was a beautiful Saturday afternoon in North Carolina during the Spring late in the school semester. I was an undergrad at UNC, and with the collusion of my frat brothers we managed to evade security and get into the concert at Duke University. It was one of those late afternoon mild Spring days that only occur in North Carolina. The band was one of the most “dead-on” professional bands I ever saw and I was right up next to the stage. Almost 50 years later I remember clearly. It was astonishing how good they were.