Photo by Scott Peterson

JPG: I read your essay in the album’s booklet. You chose songs that mean something to you. Were they numbers that developed meaning prior to recording them?

DG: Oh, I’ve been playing all these songs for years. The first choice in making a record is you have to pick the songs that are appropriate with the format you are working in. So, I began with songs that I perform in my solo show because essentially the mission of the record was to document what I do in my solo guise. It’s fundamentally solo performances with the additional overdubs that are made possible by my use of looping in my live show.

The selection criteria already left out a whole bunch of songs that I don’t perform. If I’m playing with a band I’ll do a bunch of other songs that are not possible or that don’t sound good performed solo. I’ve never tried to work up a solo acoustic arrangement of “Help on the Way” and “Franklin’s Tower” is too long and monotonous a song for a solo performer. Maybe I’ll play that one sometime.

So, the selection criteria were what work in this format and then what are the strongest performances. I tracked 15 songs and wound up leaving out two of the more upbeat ones just because they weren’t working. I have a solo arrangement of “Keep Your Day Job” but it just works better with a whole band. I’ll record it later with a full band. It sounded kind of cheese-oid with me doing a rhythm guitar then overdubbing kind of Chuck Berry style guitar over it without a rhythm section. So, I had to leave it off. I had some friends and colleagues listen to it and give me feedback. There was one particular guy who thought it was too weak a track. He became the veto.

It’s just, basically, the songs that worked in my format, which means that it was fairly heavy on the ballads and didn’t have as many upbeat tunes. I couldn’t figure out a way to make “Shakedown Street” work as a solo song either. It’s what works and they are all songs that I love. I didn’t have to stretch to put any of these on. They’re songs that I perform with relative frequency. Some of them I do every show or close to every show. Some of them I do in rotation. But, I just picked the ones that I loved the most that I perform regularly.

JPG: I didn’t know if there was something on it that you may not have done before and recorded it now as a bit of a challenge, say “Dark Star.”

DG: That could have been a possibility but I just went with stuff that I was comfortable with. When you go in the studio and spend a lot of money you don’t want to have to do a lot of trial and error. You want to go in with solid stuff that you already know really well. You want to be well-rehearsed. Since it’s just me I went in there and laid down the stuff.

I had a pretty good time recording because I do know my stuff and I was working in the studio with a guy that I really trust (Jeremy Goody). You don’t want to waste a lot of time trying to get it right. You go in with stuff that you already have solid.

JPG: Back to the book, when putting together the oral history in This Is All a Dream… after you wrote previous books on the Grateful Dead, was there anything new that you personally discovered or was revelatory for you?

DG: Our job was to present a whole book full of discoveries for other people. My reaction to it is less important than what we are delivering to the reader. Blair and I spent a year gathering material, collecting new interviews, going through our files, looking at things from other sources and accumulating scraps of paper, as it were, in a google document. Then, we started stringing them together into order to tell the story. We knew where we were going with a lot of it but along the way we heard lots of new stories we hadn’t heard before and so we dropped those in.

The book is full of those. I couldn’t single one out for you. That’s what it’s all about. It’s not meant to be a definitive and exhaustive biography because it’s an oral history. We wanted it to be a collection of stories that deepen your understanding of what you already know about these people. So, it’s less about laying out the facts and more about painting the colorful details. It’s loaded with those things.

JPG: When I think about the book and all the interview subjects and their different perspectives on events it made me think of Akira Kurosowa’s Rahsomon .

DG: Exactly. It’s not so intense as seven different people’s version of the same crime. We figured since the Grateful Dead was a tribe of people sharing experiences and building a collective story, it made perfect sense to tell the story that way and let everybody participate and let everybody tell a piece of the story exactly the way Grateful Dead music relies on everybody telling a piece of the story.

JPG: Because you had past interviews, and added new interviews, was it like putting together a major puzzle?

DG: It wasn’t a difficult task in any way. The only problem is that we had to cut things out. We strung together a huge document, spent quite a bit of time sitting together in my living room reducing it to a manageable size. We turned in a manuscript of 220,000 words, which was probably double what he was expecting. Bob, the editor, was kind enough to say, “Well, we love this but we can’t print all of it. Would you be willing to cut 40,000 words?” We agreed to do that, which we both agreed improved it by making it more concise, and wound up with a document that was still significantly longer than they were expecting. But, we thought that it did a really really good job of telling the story in this multiple point of view kind of thing.

There was no aspect of struggle to it at all. Blair and I have been friends for 40 years. We’ve been colleagues for 40 years. We have very similar styles of writing. We handed material back and forth. I wrote the first draft of the intro. I gave it to him. He rewrote it, handed it back to me. We bounced it back [and forth] four or five times, and then wound up with a document that we both agreed on from every single jot and tittle of it.

JPG: The book finishes with a number of codas. How did those come to be?

DG: We had several set pieces like that that we thought would be important to have but they were too long to put into the regular narrative. We called them sidebars but some of them were too long to even be sidebars. So, the designer had the idea of “Why don’t we put them all in at the end as codas to a musical document?” That worked out by agreement. If we put them in the flow of the text they would be too long and they would interrupt the narrative. So, we stuck ‘em in at the end where they can be read as individual vignettes without disturbing the flow of the main story.

JPG: I saw you at the second night of Fare Thee Well. What are your thoughts on those shows as well as the next chapter in Grateful Dead history in Dead & Company?

DG: I have not seen any Dead & Company live. I had a great time at Fare Thee Well. I wasn’t really expecting the music to be particularly memorable. I thought it was really good. I thought they did a fine job for what it was, and what it was was a last…a fare thee well from all those guys. And I think they had mixed feelings about playing together at all and I think they worked hard enough at it to make it good and gave everybody a wonderful excuse to gather one more time and have a good time.

Everything else about it was incredibly sweet. The whole city was welcoming. Everywhere you went there were Deadheads on street corners. I was having breakfast with a colleague and this guy at the next table picked up my tab because he recognized me; strangers stopping strangers all over town.

The stadium was fun and doing the broadcast was fun. When they told me we were doing three hours of pre-show every day I thought, “Oh God, kill me now.” [Laughs] But it wound up being just great fun because people kept falling by and we’d grab ‘em and pull ‘em in and interview them on the air. Just having a wonderful time. I had a gig in the afternoon. I had a gig in the evening. I had things to do every day over and above being part of the Fare Thee Well thing. So, I got to play my own music. I got paid by SiriusXM to be there and I got to enjoy the show from the press box. I just had a completely glorious weekend.

As for Dead & Company we broadcast one of the shows. I listened to it all the way through and I really enjoyed it. I’m looking forward to hearing more from what those guys do. John Mayer has really gone to work learning this music and he’s doing a pretty good job with it.

JPG: It seems that popularity and awareness has shot up again with Fare Thee Well and now Dead & Company.

DG: The Grateful Dead “brand” is probably stronger today than it was while the band existed. Not sure exactly what caused it, but the marketing of that 50th-anniversary “reunion” was ingenious and I think it stoked things amazingly well. The John Mayer collaboration is carrying it forward yet again, with another expansion into the mainstream culture. It’s fascinating.

Also worth noting is that the music has a life of its own. Younger players are adopting these songs and this way of collaborating. I find that tremendously gratifying.

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