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Here is the latest news from David Gans, producer and host of the Grateful Dead Hour.

DG’s musical diary: guitar edition

I had a slightly weird summer, musically. I had tons of solo gigs – festivals, house concerts, and a couple of club gigs – and Sycamore Slough is off to a great start. My guitar developed some neck problems after I changed string gauges early in the summer. I started getting some general buzzing, and by July my G string had a pronounced sitar effect. Drove me nuts. I had two east bay luthiers make some attempts to do emergency surgery to get me through imminent gigs, and when I had time I took it back to its maker for more work. Twice. Even after those two trips to Rick Turner’s shop, my guitar was playable but not nearly as smooth as it was for the first 14 years of its life, and one side effect of all the work was that the response of the piezo pickup was stronger in the lower strings than in the higher ones, meaning that some single-note runs would tend to sort of drift away as the pitch got higher. I tried to hit the higher strings a little harder while fingerpicking and soloing, and that proved to be sort of distracting as well as ineffective. For several weeks I felt sort of depressed about my playing. I have some recordings in which the song choices are inspired, the singing is very good, and the accompaniment and soloing are pretty damn good – but the buzzing and hissing from the strings render the recordings unusable. I even had a couple of fans mention the weird guitar sounds wen I saw them at later gigs. (I have ordered a new Renaissance, with my logo inlaid in silver on the fretboards (surprisingly inexpensive at $150), reinvesting some of the nice bucks I made from the house concerts. I’m really excited about the new one, which will have both the piezo and magnetic pickups available at all times (instead of on separate circuits as my current guitar has ’em), with a fader pot that allows continuous blending between the two. This will allow me, for example, to start a loop piece with the “acoustic” rhythm and dial in more “electric” sounds as I develop the piece. This guitar will also have a Roland synth interface, allowing me to play sampled sounds and synthesizer sounds when I get the hardware/software together, somewhere down the line.) All the weird feelings I had about my guitar disappeared this weekend. I played two farmers’ market gigs, Oakland on Saturday and San Rafael on Sunday – a total of eight hours of playing. Both gigs were just pure delight: perfect weather, friendly crowds (much more actual attention paid to this incidental music than I would have any right to expect), toddlers dancing, dollars in the bucket, friends and even a colleague or two stopping by. My singing felt great, and more importantly, I was extremely happy with my guitar playing. I had lots of fresh ideas in my loop pieces and in the solos I played in regular songs; I had fewer spuds, clams, and blunders (those are all actually three different words for the same thing: mistakes). My song selections included newly-revived pieces I’ve been doing all summer, such as “Watching the Detectives,” “Eve of Destruction” (just half of it, segueing into “It’s Gonna Get Better”), and “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight.” I brought out the often-neglected “San Rafael Swell” at both gigs (and opened with it at San Rafael). I made up some new arrangements on the spot of Grateful Dead songs I want to bring to Sycamore Slough (and emailed MP3s to my bandmates right away). I brought out some old favorites, as I always do at the farmers’ market gigs. In short, I gave my songbook a thorough workout over two four-hour performances, made a few bucks, sold a few CDs, and had a blast doing it. And the mechanical problems with the instrument just didn’t seem so troubling. Everything worked really, really well.
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SSSB’s 9/19 Freight show to be webcast

Sycamore Slough String Band plays the Freight and Salvage in Berkeley on Wednesday, September 19 at 8pm. The performance will be webcast via Concert Window for the low low price of $3.00!

This will be a LIVE video broadcast, presented in HD with no commercials. Buy your ticket now and you’ll have reserved access for September 19.

Of course, we’d rather have you come to the show in person! And to entice those for whom that is a possibility, we’re going to give a free copy of our debut studio CD First Rehearsals to anyone who buys a ticket to come in!

To recap: Adavance tickets for the Freight are available here; “tickets” for the webcast are available here.

The blurb on the band:

Brought together by an affinity for the music of the Grateful Dead, the musicians of the Sycamore Slough String Band gathered in an Oakland recording studio early this year to discover where the music would take them, and where they would take the music. One result is their new album, First Rehearsals, “a superb collection of mostly Dead covers,” in the words of the Grateful Dead Archive blog. The album “showcases the magic that can happen when fine musicians well-versed in the Dead’s unique approach to small group improvisation get together to play their favorite tunes from the Grateful Dead songbook. The band’s bluegrass/ newgrass arrangements tease out new layers of meaning to chestnuts long familiar to Deadheads, making this one of the most exciting revisits of Dead music in many years.”

Another result of those sessions in the studio is this show, which promises to be hugely entertaining for fans of rich, complex music played with know-how and joy. With David Thom on mandolin, guitar, and vocals, Fiddle Dave Muhlethaler on fiddle, mandolin, and vocals, Roger Sideman on bass and vocals, and David Gans on guitar and vocals, the band boasts four sterling musicians, each with a gift for exploring, jamming, and sharing a collective vision. David Thom worked for two years as a guitarist with the David Grisman Bluegrass Experience, has led the David Thom Band since 1996, and also plays in Grandpa Banana’s Band. Fiddle Dave was a co-founder of Cornmeal, has toured with the Artimus Pyle Band, and recently spent a year playing in The Fall Risk, a band led by Furthur’s Jeff Pehrson. Bassist Roger Sideman has performed with Michael Kang of String Cheese Incident and bluegrass legend Frank Wakefield, and currently performs with The China Cats. David Gans tours nationally as a “solo electric” performer, as well as pursuing a host of Grateful Dead-related activities on the radio, online, and in books. These folks don’t just have an affinity for the music of the Dead — everyone in the Sycamore Slough String Band loves the music, and the love comes through when they play.

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