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This popped up this morning.....I know there are a lot of mixed feelings re the Dead. This popped up this morning and made me chuckle, re the time a band that had already disbanded was booked without our knowledge to play at a gig way out in the sticks. Our former lead singer booked us at a place we had played months before. He mentioned the name of our band...."No, we want someone different!" Scott thought a moment and the first name he could come up with was "The Warlocks"...."Cool, book them".......The real Warlocks had been touring the west coast playing anywhere they could. We were most definitely NOT them. Well, we no longer HAD a band and our English lead guitarist (and the only one with any measurable talent) had left for the Navy (Viet Nam era). But we were booked. We got together with a local wunderkid who was 19 but was playing like Jeff Beck. Did not even have a singer. (Drummer: "Our singer has the flu and is home puking his guts out". Drops mic.....) So we just jammed all night. Everything from Green River to Greensleeves. Surreal. We actually DID get paid. Anyway, you might also chuckle.....No, I DID NOT type all that follows! Ron McKernan suggested the band go electric. 1965. Palo Alto, California. A small folk band called Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions was playing acoustic shows around the Bay Area. Their members included a guitarist named Jerry Garcia, a rhythm player named Bob Weir, and a young man on harmonica everyone called Pigpen. Pigpen had grown up on the blues. His father had been an R&B DJ — one of the first white DJs on Black radio stations on the West Coast. The kid had taught himself harmonica and piano listening to his dad's records. Acoustic folk wasn't doing it for him. He wanted electric blues. He wanted volume. He wanted what Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf had. He suggested they plug in. They did. They renamed themselves The Warlocks. Then the Grateful Dead. Eight years later, on March 8, 1973, Pigpen's landlady walked into his apartment in Corte Madera and found him dead on the floor beside his bed. He'd been there for two days. He was 27 years old. The band he had pushed into existence had replaced him a year and a half earlier. The next morning, Jerry Garcia spoke at his funeral. "After Pigpen's death we all knew this was the end of the original Grateful Dead." Here's how he got there. Ronald Charles McKernan was born September 8, 1945. San Bruno, California. Irish-American family. His father Phil was a radio DJ who specialized in blues and R&B. The McKernan house was full of Lightnin' Hopkins records, Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf. Young Ron taught himself harmonica. Then piano. Then a little guitar. At 14, he got a job at Dana Morgan's Music Store in Palo Alto. That's where he met another kid who liked the blues. A guitar nerd named Jerry Garcia. They played in folk bands together. Jug bands. Bluegrass. Ron tried out the name "Blue Ron" for a while. It didn't stick. A girlfriend started calling him "Pigpen" because his approach to hygiene reminded her of the Peanuts character. That name did stick. In 1965, he convinced Garcia to plug in. The folk acoustic band became an electric blues band. The Warlocks. Then the Grateful Dead. In the band's first years, Pigpen was the frontman. Not Garcia. He had the voice. He had the harmonica. He could work a crowd in a way no one else in that band could. Mickey Hart, who joined later as second drummer, said it this way: "Pigpen would come out and he'd get people up. Jerry couldn't do it. Bob couldn't do it. Phil certainly couldn't. But Pigpen could. As soon as Pigpen got up, everybody got up and danced." He sang the songs that drove the early Dead. "Turn On Your Love Light." "Hard to Handle." "Big Boss Man." "Mr. Charlie." Songs that were less about wandering jam-band exploration and more about Saturday night drinking. In 1969, Warner Bros. — the band's label — ran a Pigpen Look-Alike Contest. He was that famous. The biker hat, the leather vest, the mustache. But the band was changing under him. The other members were taking LSD constantly. They were turning into psychedelic explorers. Long jams. Free improvisation. Garcia and bassist Phil Lesh were pulling the music away from the blues and into deep space. Pigpen didn't touch psychedelics. He drank. Whiskey. Cheap fortified wine. He drank like the bluesmen he'd grown up listening to. His role in the band started shrinking. The new music didn't need a blues frontman. It needed a more conventional keyboardist who could keep up with Garcia's guitar. In 1968 they brought in a second keyboardist, Tom Constanten. Pigpen's musical contributions dropped. Then his body started giving out. By his mid-twenties he had liver damage. Cirrhosis. He also developed primary biliary cholangitis — a rare autoimmune liver disease unrelated to drinking. The two together hit him hard. In August 1971, he was hospitalized. Doctors told him to stop touring immediately. The Dead hired Keith Godchaux to replace him. But Pigpen wouldn't disappear. He kept coming back. In December 1971 he rejoined the band to play harmonica, percussion, and organ alongside Godchaux. He toured Europe with them in spring 1972 — the famous Europe '72 tour. He was visibly sick. Pale. Thin. His tour manager Sam Cutler later admitted he kept Pigpen supplied with alcohol on the road, because Pigpen wouldn't get on stage without it. On June 17, 1972, the Grateful Dead played the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. Pigpen walked offstage that night and never performed with the band again. He went home to his apartment in Corte Madera, north of San Francisco. A small place. He lived alone. He stopped drinking. The Dead's biographer Blair Jackson said he didn't drink for the last 17 months of his life. It didn't matter. The damage was done. He stayed mostly inside. Read books. Played acoustic guitar and piano to himself — instruments he'd rarely used in the Dead. Some of those recordings would surface later as a bootleg called The Apartment Tapes. He ate almost nothing in his final months. On a day in early March 1973, Pigpen got into bed. He was half-dressed. He started to lie down. A blood vessel near his liver — already destroyed by years of drinking and the autoimmune disease — burst. He bled internally on the floor beside his bed. His landlady came by two days later. She had noticed his car hadn't moved. The lights were on. The back door was open. She walked in and found him. Cause of death: gastrointestinal hemorrhage. Liver failure. Age 27. He joined Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison — all dead by 27 in the previous three years. Pigpen had been close friends with Janis. They had shared a love of whiskey. He was buried at Alta Mesa Memorial Park in Palo Alto. A few miles from the music store where he had first met Jerry Garcia. Here's what makes this story matter. Pigpen wasn't a junkie like Hendrix. He wasn't a poet like Morrison. He didn't have the public meltdown Janis had. He was a quiet, kind, introspective guy who happened to be the only member of the Grateful Dead with any real blues credibility at the start. It was his idea to plug in. It was his voice that drove the early shows. His harmonica that gave the band texture. His friendship with Garcia that made the whole thing possible. Jerry Garcia later said: "Pigpen was the only guy in the band who had any talent when we were starting out." Then the band moved on. They followed the acid and the long jams away from his blues roots. They replaced him with another keyboardist. They kept making records. He kept showing up. Kept singing the songs he could still sing. Kept drinking on tour just to get through the night. Then he died alone in a small California apartment. The Grateful Dead would tour for another 22 years. Sell millions of records. Become a multi-generational institution. Most Deadheads who came along after 1973 don't think about Pigpen at all. But Jerry Garcia did. He said it at the funeral. The original Grateful Dead died with Pigpen. Ron McKernan. Founder. Frontman. Replaced. Forgotten. His crime? Drinking like the bluesmen he loved. His legacy? A band he started that outlived him by half a century and barely mentions his name.

Well I can tell summer time is here. Out in my garage practicing and suddenly some neighbors cats come snooping around. I think while I’m practicing my bends, they must think some other cat is in heat! Stupid guitar.

I might add.....Things like this do make you think about mortality. And all the more so as I did have a bit of a health scare myself 2 weeks ago. Released and sent home with no restrictions, but the 30 hours in the hospital with very little sleep did sorta "concentrate my mind". I really DO need to think about why I have so damn many guitars and other gear. WAY too much money tied up in all that stuff......Pretty sure I will be identifying many pieces and upping my efforts to move some along. I expect I will be posting some things here, as well as calling some folks that have asked for dibs.....I just don't want to get ahead of myself as a "teaser" until I have a definite list and can set asking prices.

I am sure a few of you have heard about my "jazz guitar buddy". A very talented guy, worked hard at it. Settled down after years on the road. Moved from SoCal to Portland. Readily admitted he had the luxury of a wife with a real job. So, he could stay at home, be house hubby to their daughter, give lessons, play local gigs. We were in SoCal at the same time but did not meet until we were both back in the Portland area.....I was probably jamming with a musical Captain in the BHPD about the same time the PD was harassing him for looking homeless as he drove through town nearly living in his car hitting gigs from San Diego to San Francisco and piling up tens of thousands of miles a year. Michael answered an ad for a vintage ES-335 I was selling. Expected he might be able to jam me on price if he was lucky. Admitted it was a failed hope when I answered the door. But we became friends. He taught me things about music, I taught him things re financial planning and funding his daughter's PHD path from Portland to Las Vegas to MIlwaukie. Shared out love of gear and did some swapping. Two very different people, but we became friends. Hard to not like someone as full of stories as Michael. Not too many weeks ago, I told him I was pondering getting outta the state that seems to be getting more and more radicalized. He immediately informed me I should move to Nashville AND he would fly out to the west coast for a road trip moving a truckload of musical gear to Tennessee. His not so secret hope----Maybe he had better chance of getting into the more exclusive part of the collection at Gruhn Guitars if we brought along a few of my more interesting guitars. 😉Whether or not that made any sense, it is not to be. He died of a heart attack 2 days ago in Wisconsin. Michael (Gargano) is not likely someone you have heard of. And likely not the music you would have on your playlist, though he went from hard rock and drugs to big bands and solo/small band jazz over his 60+ years of playing. But if anyone is interested, here is a bit of his music posted again today. I am sure I have other recordings somewhere. Joe Pass-like Christmas album. Fingerstyle versions of Beatle classics and jazz standards. Not gonna say I could ever play like him. But I DO play a bit better as a result of his influence. RIP Michael.

Looks nice. Better than my Duo-Tones? I am guessing not.....

What I would be inclined to do (NOT myself!) is find someone that could use a router to remove a deep layer of wood from the back of the guitar (mainly behind the bridge), leaving a "ledge" around the edges, then cutting a thin piece of wood to fit the cutout. It might be a bit trial and error to get to the amount of wood to remove and get the right balance and not affect the tone too severely. The back might end up something like this (OR you could try to get a matching wood). That would preserve the rounded edges of the guitar and avoid the need to then have to match the finish. (This example has the back extending to the edges, part of the original build, rather than inset after the fact).