I think it’s great that David Nelson Band is very much a band with songwriting contributions from the other players, like Bill Laymon’s ‘Kerouac’ and Mookie Siegel’s ‘Haunted Man.’ Comment on how you feel about their contributions.

Oh yeah. I really love their songs. I think Mookie’s song is a really different kind of a thing to have for the band. It just broadens the scope of what we can do.

Like ‘Keeper of the Key,’ ‘Visions Under the Moon’ includes a Dylan cover and a collaboration with Robert Hunter, two of the most acclaimed living songwriters on the planet. Of course, your relationship with Hunter is more of a personal nature than with Dylan. But comment on how you like having songs by both Bobs on your albums.

I’m really happy to have them on there because it’s quality material. We really like playing them. I always loved Dylan’s songs. I love trying to find a song that suits me, that I can sing.

What does it have to have to suit you? What are some of the common characteristics?

That’s really hard to say. I can never tell what I’m going to sing. It’s a surprise sometimes what your voice is good for. There can be a song that you really like and you feel real strongly about, but you just don’t seem to be able to deliver it right.

So it’s more from a vocal standpoint rather than an emotional standpoint.

That’s all the same rolled into one.

You go way back with Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia as a member of The Wildwood Boys, a pre-Grateful Dead band. Comment on your fondest memory of The Wildwood Boys and how the relationships made in the band lasted.

We were learning to play bluegrass and learning to play music. It was the spirit of and enthusiasm about the whole scope of American traditional music, especially the Appalachian tradition. We were really on the case. We were studying it to do it right. It has a lot of depth to it so being culturally removed, you have to really dig for it. You have to do research. We’d go in record stores and search the bins. And we’d go to people’s houses who were record collectors. We’d go to this guy’s house Adams Otis who lived over in Stanford. His father was a professor at Stanford. But we’d go his house because he had this incredible collection with live tapes of the Stanley Brothers and Flatt & Scruggs and Bill Monroe. We’d sit there and listen to the stuff. It was just really great. Hearing all that good music all at once was just a tremendous source for me.

Did it make you want to be a professional musician?

I didn’t know that there was any chance of that. It seemed to me that we were just struggling artists just struggling along. It didn’t seem like it was going to pan out professionally. The idea seemed pretty chancey.

What kept you close with Jerry and still close with Hunter after all these years? So many people form initial bands who end up going their separate ways. What kept you guys linked together for so long?

I think it’s because it was just the first thing, the formidable years. You have the interests so you make a bond there that becomes the ground floor of everything that you do.

You were on the early Dead albums “Aoxomoxoa,” “American Beauty” and “Workingman’s Dead.” What was it like going from the spacy experimentalism of the first album to the sparse rootsy sound of the other two?

The songs that Hunter started writing were more rootsy. They were closer to that Appalachian tradition. It seemed to be like going back. You don’t have to make a transition when you’ve been playing that music all along anyway.

You formed New Riders of the Purple Sage with Jerry, Mickey Hart, Phil Lesh and John Dawson. What was it like pioneering country-rock in the early ’70s with the Dead, the Band, the Byrds, Flying Burrito Brothers, Neil Young and Poco. What was that scene like?

It was pretty wild for me because I was just learning electric guitar. I was switching from acoustic to electric so I had my hands full. There’s so much more that you have to handle with an electric guitar. You actually have to stop the note or it will just go on forever. There was a lot of technique that I was having to learn at the time so for me, it was a whole new ballgame.

Going around to places opening for the Dead, I was always surprised that people would listen to us because it wasn’t like the normal thing that was going on at the time which was to get loud and feedback and go into these wild, crazy jams. We just weren’t doing that. It was a little bit scary, thinking, ‘I don’t know if they’re going to dig it or not because we’re not going to do that climatic kind of thing.’ As it turned out, everybody was really ready for that. The audience was really loving it. It was a refreshing change for everyone.

It’s happened again as a reaction to grunge with the country-rock No Depression scene of The Jayhawks, Old 97s and Marah. How does it feel to have been an influence on that especially since like the early ’70s scene it’s too country for rock and too rock for country?

That’s interesting. That’s great. Another surprise, you know. It was just like back in the early ’70s. We didn’t know anybody was going to like that at all.

How much did Bob Dylan’s ‘John Wesley Harding’ and ‘Nashville Skyline’ influence those early ’70s country-rock acts?

We really liked ‘John Wesley Harding.’ I remember living in John’s house for a short time in Menlo Park (Calif.). We were listening to that album quite a lot when it came out. It was just timing. It happened to be when I was there when it came out, and we’d listen to it over and over again. But it’s hard to say if it was an influence. That was the exact same time John was finishing up ‘Garden of Eden’ and most of the songs on the first album. He was writing most of those songs at that time. So he was already working on it. Influences are hard to trace. You don’t ever try to ‘write one like that’ because it just doesn’t work.

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