GRATEFUL GUITARS
left to right: ● Steven Savage, founder of Blue Bear Music School, receiving a $ 5,000 GGF grant in support of music education, San Francisco. Photo: Bob Minkin. ● Jerry Garcia with Wolf( MIDI unit mounted), Brendan Byrne Arena, October 1989. Photo: Bob Minkin.
ticed when he handed a Travis Bean to Stu Allen in 2015, scaled up and formalized.
There is a therapeutic dimension to this that Logan takes seriously. He spent 20 years as a psychotherapist before stepping away from practice, and he thinks about what the music does to people in the way a clinician thinks about outcomes. The improvisational structure of this music demands full presence from the listener; you track it the way a meditator tracks breath. A three-hour show of that quality, he argues, is a
genuine respite from the ordinary accumulation of anxiety, obligation, and grief that most people walk around with.“ You leave feeling reborn and refreshed,” he says.“ And that is something really helpful to all human beings in this crazy world.”
He is more concerned about Gen Z’ s relationship to this tradition. The epidemic of loneliness, the smartphone-era spike in anxiety and depression that began around 2008, the loss of the kind of intergenerational community spaces where Garcia could hang out( like Kepler’ s Books in Menlo Park), talking to Stanford PhD students as an equal— all of it concerns him. The music education funding that has been cut from public schools concerns him. The tendency toward passive, scrolling consumption concerns him.
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