It’s been pointed out by several astute observers that, contrary to what I wrote (since corrected) in a previous post, Jerry Garcia was playing his “Wolf” guitar and not a Stratocaster at Winterland in 1973.
My point is unaffected, though: the pickups in the Wolf were similar in design and wiring to the Fender Stratocaster Jerry had played previously, and my characterization of his sound as “crystal-clear” is still very much the point.
Here’s what Jerry told Blair Jackson and me about his guitar sound in 1981:
Gans: How come you gave up Les Pauls?
Garcia: I got bored with them. I felt that I really didn’t have any place else to go on them.
Gans: So you switched to a Strat?
Gacia: Yeah. It was more of a challenge. It wasn’t that I wanted to lose the SG part of my playing, but my reasoning was something along the lines of “I think that no matter what guitar I play I won’t have any trouble getting a sweet sound,” you know, even though the most difficult thing to produce on a Strat is a sweet sound. What I really wanted was to be able to get some of the metallic clang that strats have. I like that first position, the clankiness–
Gans: You can fingerpick Fenders betters too.
Garcia: Yeah. Well, they have better string-to-string separation because–they don’t mush up on you the way Gibsons do, and it was that clarity that I was looking for, too–that crispness that you associate with country-and-western guitar players. I was wanting to have something in between those two worlds.
Blair’s excellent book Dead Gear is a good place to look for more info on this and other technical matters.
Thanks to Jerry Moore and the others who noted my error. I stand corrected!