The Genre That Has No Name
A Wolf for Every Bar
GRATEFUL GUITARS
The Genre That Has No Name
Logan bristles a little at the word“ tribute.” He understands why people use it but thinks it misrepresents what is actually happening on those stages.“ What other band has over a hundred cover bands just in the state of California?” he asks.“ And how many luthiers are making a living year-round in this country building copies of guitars that Jerry played, that Bobby played? What band has all these cottage industries?” He prefers the word genre, which captures something the tribute framing misses: these musicians are playing an improvisational tradition that lives or dies by what each individual night produces. A Dead-adjacent band playing Eyes of the World is generating a jam that belongs entirely to the players in that room at that moment. It resembles a Queen tribute in the way that a jazz quartet playing Coltrane resembles a Coltrane tribute act, which is to say not much!
Bob Minkin, the renowned Grateful Dead photographer, put it memorably in an interview for the documentary Logan has been working to get released:“ If you were alive to see Beethoven perform, that would have been a remarkable thing, but thank God all those orchestras kept it going.” Logan quotes Dennis McNally, the Dead’ s biographer and publicist, just as readily:“ If you want to be interesting, be interested.” He sees that as the ethos Garcia and Weir embodied in their musical friendship, in their willingness to absorb blues, country, bluegrass, jazz, world music, and early rock and roll without hierarchy or pretension, and
then give it all back transformed.
Logan is particularly attentive to the classically trained musicians who have found their way into the scene since the GD50 shows in 2015. Several of the strongest players now advancing the tradition studied at Berklee or CalArts and came to the Dead catalog the way a musician comes to jazz: recognizing harmonic depth, structural openness, and room to develop a voice. Nate LaPointe, the guitarist in Cubensis, went to CalArts. Stu Allen attended Berklee. The scene’ s post-2015 growth, which Logan credits partly to John Mayer’ s entry with Dead & Company, has drawn players with genuine formal training into material that rewards it.“ Since GD50, the scene is bigger than it ever was, even when the Grateful Dead were playing,” Logan says, and he doesn’ t say it like someone selling something. He says it like someone who spent years genuinely afraid the music might actually go away.
A Wolf for Every Bar
The internal motto of Grateful Guitars, Logan says with a slight smile, is“ a Wolf in every bar.” He explains,“ When you bring a replica Wolf to a regional Dead band in Seattle, something happens to the room. The guitarist playing it reaches harder. The other musicians, the drummer, the singers, the bass player … they all feel the weight of the instrument’ s associations and play harder, too. The fans who walk in and recognize the guitar shift their energy. And it goes around and around.” It is the same feedback loop he first no-
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