Grateful Dead

David Grisman is a mandolin player who was a longtime friend and collaborator of Jerry Garcia's. According to Dennis McNally in A Long Strange Trip, Jerry and David met and picked together at a bluegrass festival Sunset Park, Pennsylvania in June of 1964 (during the summer Jerry and Sandy Rothman spent traveling the country with a tape recorder!). Grisman later gave the Warlocks their first press mention, in Sing Out! magazine, calling the not-yet-GD "the best rock-and-roll group [he] heard in California." When Grisman moved to California permanently in 1970, he told me, he happened upon a baseball game between the Dead and the Jefferson Airplane, whereupon Jerry invited David to add some mandolin to the record the band was working on. That's how Grisman came to play on "Friend of the Devil" and "Ripple." (Grisman tells this tale, with musical accompaniment, in the excellent documentary Anthem to Beauty, available on DVD.)

In 1973, Garcia (banjo) and Grisman joined with guitarist Peter Rowan (who goes back to the early '60s with Grisman as well), bassist John Kahn, and fiddle legend Vassar Clements to form Old and In the Way, a bluegrass-plus band whose first album, released on the Dead's Round Records label in 1975, was for many years the best-selling bluegrass album in history. "Dawg Music," the name Grisman gave to the stylistic hybrid he has developed over the last 30+ years, comes from the nickname he had in O&ITW. (Jerry was known as "Spud," by the way.)

Jerry and David lost touch for many years, but reconnected in 1990 through a chance encounter. After getting together to play some music in Grisman's Marin County studio, they did some recording and put a band together for some gigs. Jerry Garcia and David Grisman was released in 1991 on Grisman's Acoustic Disc label, and the pair (backed by Joe Craven and Jim Kerwin of the David Grisman Quintet) recorded and performed together many times in the last five years of Jerry's life. Visit jerrygarcia.com and/or the Acoustic Disc web site or the CDs (Not For Kids Only is a favorite of mine).

David's daughter, Gillian Grisman, made a film called Grateful Dawg, a warm portrait of the men's friendship and musical collaboration - well worth checking out on DVD. (You'll find the Grateful Dawg soundtrack in the DeadNet store, too.)

This interview with Grisman, recorded live at KPFA in May of 1994 and broadcast on the national GD Hour the week of June 27, focused on Tone Poems, the first of a series of recordings in which Grisman and a partner - guitarist Tony Rice in this case - assembled a collection of vintage instruments (including, according to the Acoustic Disc web page, "a 1939 Martin D-45 guitar (valued at $100,000) paired with a priceless, one-of-a-kind 1923 Lloyd Loar Gibson A-5 mandolin") - making the point that "It ain't the car, it's the driver, folks.... Musicians tend to sound like they sound; it doesn't matter that much what the instrument is...."

Grisman was also kind enough to bring in some unreleased live Garcia-Grisman, recorded at the Warfield Theater in May of 1992, and a duet with Eric Thompson on "Rain and Snow" that was later released on the expanded CD edition of Thompson's Real

Enjoy!

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Thanks for listening!

David Gans

gdhour [at] dead.net

Program time 53:40

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