photo: Bob Minkin

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“When we started, I joked that our goal was to see a Wolf in every bar,” Grateful Guitars founder Andy Logan says with a laugh, referencing the instrument that luthier Doug Irwin created for Jerry Garcia in the early ‘70s. “We’ve actually done a pretty decent job of getting a lot of them out there in a relatively short amount of time. In 2019 we started in earnest, but we were officially founded in 2021 as a 501(c)(3) and that’s when we launched.”

The organization references this goal in its mission statement, affirming that the nonprofit “obtains world-class musical instruments for talented players who seek to carry on the tradition of jamband music into the 21st century and beyond. We identify musicians who thrive in live settings and we secure the gear they need to reach their fullest musical potential. Through the powerful connection between the skilled player and the highest quality instrument, our aim is to ensure that jamband music thrives for generations of live music fans.”

As a result, Grateful Guitars has gifted instruments to high profile artists such as Steve Kimock, Oteil Burbridge, Rob Eaton, John Kadlecik and Jake Brownstein. In addition, the organization has assisted numerous adept local performers who are fixtures in their communities. More recently, through the suggestion of Logan’s colleague Jack Barton, the organization is “rolling out a program seeking to support music instruction in schools to seed the next generations of talented players in the Bay Area and beyond.”

Logan, who like Barton is a longtime Deadhead, describes the Foundation’s objectives in elevated terms. “I feel like the Grateful Dead showed us a road map to inclusivity, empathy, kindness and acceptance,” he says. “We love the music, we love gifting instruments and we love supporting music instruction. But on the highest level, we love high-core values and we believe those high-core values are an integral part of this scene. If we can help people make those connections and have them spread and grow, that’s what we want to get behind and hopefully combat some of the insanity that we’re seeing out there today.”

What initially prompted you to collect guitars?

ANDY LOGAN: After Jerry died, I was 25 and wrecked; all of us were wrecked. For a lot of us, it was like losing a parent. I remember being relatively unconsolable in my high-tech job—so much so that some co workers looked at me like, “What is his deal?”

I’d always wanted to play an instrument, and after Jerry died, I was like, “OK, it’s time.” So I picked up the drums and started learning that. In high school and college, I had tried to learn guitar, but my fingers aren’t that long and it was a real challenge.

Then my wife also wanted to learn an instrument and she gravitated to the guitar, so I told her, “OK, I’ll get one for you.” I picked out a Takamine because Jerry had played Takamines and I figured he knows best. So I bought her a Takamine, very similar to the one he played from the mid-‘80s until the end of his life. Then, when she went electric, I got her a Stratocaster. I knew Jerry loved those and had that Sunburst Strat. So I truly started, in a way, collecting Jerry-style guitars in the late ‘90s with her.

Then I read a book called Mindset by Carol Dweck. She’s a Stanford researcher, and it was one of those books that changes your life. It’s basically saying that we all have a growth mindset or a fixed mindset around aspects of our own lives. For me, I have a fixed mindset around my inability to do mathematics and I had a fixed mindset about the guitar. So after I finished the book, I was like, “OK, I need to learn the guitar. I have a fixed mindset about this, and I need to approach it with a growth mindset. All my heroes play guitar. It’s time for me to do it.”

So that launched me into playing the guitar and also collecting guitars in earnest. At first, I just followed the same line as far as buying instruments that Jerry would want or owned. I ordered my first replica Wolf from a guy named Matt Moriarty, who is a wine seller now. He was one of the early luthiers making Doug Irwin-inspired Wolf guitars because Doug was MIA at the time. No one knew where he was, so you had to go to somebody else for that. From there, I started buying guitars that were replicas or the same models that Jerry played and it was really fun.

At what point did you extend your ambit into instruments that Jerry actually owned or had been built for him?

AL: The more I started seeking out those replicas and models, the more I started to find the niche ones and really go down the rabbit hole. I liken it to Close Encounters, where Richard Dreyfus starts making the Devil’s Tower everywhere he goes.

At that time, the internet was amazing—this was before AI destroyed internet searching. You could easily find a small shop in Pennsylvania selling a guitar.

So I started doing that and then, in 2013, I was on this Cripe Guitars website—I’d gotten some Cripe replicas—and there was a for-sale notice for a Steve Cripe guitar that was intended to be for Garcia. It said, “Private Inquiries Only.”

I was like, “Well, I’ll reach out to this person. It’s probably going to be a million dollars, but I’ll ask.” It turned out the guitar was intended for Jerry and that Cripe finished it after Jerry died as a tribute. It’s called Saturn or Tribute now. [Editor’s Note: Cripe built Lightning Bolt, which Garcia played at the end of his career.]

I ended up buying that instrument, and it was the first guitar that I started loaning out to players. I bought it from Adam Palow, and I said to him that I would only buy it if he was cool with me sharing it because I couldn’t imagine owning something like that and just having it be on a wall or in my collection. He totally loved the idea, so I loaned it out to Stu Allen and to Jeff Mattson, and that really started my loaning out instruments.

Then, in 2015, Stu started playing these recreation shows with Phil at Terrapin, where they’d go back from ‘65 to ‘95. Terrapin was magical for a million reasons, but one of them was these recreation gigs that they did over the course of about two years.

So I started loaning Stu all of my Jerry guitars. By that point, I had also acquired a couple of Bobby guitars, which really gave me a kick in the ass to start collecting those as well.

When fans thank me for bringing this guitar or that guitar, I always tell them that there is a selfish aspect, as I was born in 1970. So for me to hear a Travis Bean being played at a ‘76 or ‘77 show is just as much of a treat for me as it is for anybody else because I would never have been able to hear that tone live. You can hear live recordings and they’re phenomenal, but to hear Gator played live is another thing altogether.

I’ll give you an example. In August of ‘71, for a few shows in Berkeley, Jerry played this Les Paul Deluxe. I don’t know if Gator was being refretted or what was happening. But Stu Allen did his own recreation run at Ashkenaz in Berkeley, and I brought that guitar, which is a vintage one. Stu was playing it, and this woman came up to me and she said, “Are you the guy that brought that guitar?” I told her I was and she said, “I have to thank you because I was at this show back in ‘71, and I haven’t heard this sound since. It just means so much to me.” She said it with teary eyes, and it got me emotional, too.

These tones evoke emotion, and I think the band had that in mind back when they were looking for the guitars to play and the gear they wanted. When you think of the Wall of Sound, for instance, they didn’t want any layer between what they wanted to convey and what you were hearing. So to have a fan who had seen it be touched by that was just so validating for me. It’s cool to go through the experience of collecting these instruments and getting to sense what it was like.

What led you from there to launching the Grateful Guitars Foundation?

AL: As I started loaning these guitars out, I quickly came to appreciate how hard all these musicians work. You’ll see them loading in, then they’ll soundcheck, and they’ll be sweating at three in the afternoon, long before they’ll be playing at midnight.

It’s quite a long day, with all that heavy lifting. In some cases, with someone like Garrett Deloian from Jerry’s Middle Finger, his SG had a broken headstock, and I was thinking, “These guys don’t have the gear they deserve.” They all started playing when they were kids and put so much work into their career. The imbalance really struck me. Having worked in high tech, you might see a Google spreadsheet expert making a million dollars or more. And then these musicians who have worked on their craft their whole life might not have the tools they deserve.

It really broke my heart to see that, so I started gifting guitars. I just started handing them to players. Travis Bean’s widow started a company called Travis Bean Designs, and Kevin Burkett is the luthier there. So I ordered one of these TBs for Stu Allen, and I don’t think it sunk in right away because there had been so many times when I’d bring a guitar for him to play for the night. Then, this time, when he thanked me and asked about giving it back at the end of the night, I was like, “No, man, it’s yours. This is your guitar now.”

So I get to see the joy of their experiences and then the fans’ faces reflecting that back to the stage. Again, selfishly as a fan, I want to see Stu dig in deeper on that “Jack Straw” jam. So all that reflected back, and it was really rewarding and fun.

That’s when it struck me that I should make this thing bigger. I realized that there should be a nonprofit so that we can gift guitars to lots of musicians all over the country.

I worked on a documentary that has not gone public in which we interviewed hundreds of luthiers and players in tribute bands. One thing we found was that Grateful Dead is a not a band, it’s a genre. Bob Minkin has a line in the documentary where he says it’s just like going to see Beethoven. I’m sure seeing Beethoven or Mozart themselves was amazing, but thank God, we still play their music hundreds of years later. That’s what I believe is going to happen here and I think we’re already seeing evidence of it. There are so many Dead bands out there.

In addition to recreating classic guitars, you’ve also started gifting custom instruments.

AL: In the beginning, it was about getting a lot of Jerry and Bobby style guitars to a lot of players all around the country. More recently, it’s gone to a place that I’m really thrilled with, which is a lot of custom guitars that are riffs off of an instrument like Tiger. For instance, Jeff Mattson’s Woolly Mammoth guitar is a Tiger guitar that, instead of being fashioned about a tiger, is about Jeff Mattson’s favorite animal—the woolly mammoth. It has a woolly mammoth over the battery cover, and it has a Pleistocene scene on the back instead of the little floral thing that Jerry had on the back of Tiger.

Another really neat part of this is that, while we are a nonprofit and we give to players who are playing bars and clubs, we are also really knowledgeable about luthiers and what’s going on in the whole scene. We know where to make one of the better Wolf-style guitars or Tiger-style guitars and who’s doing that. So we’re getting approached by players about the gear that evokes the tones they seek. It’s very niche, but it’s really exciting for us. Beyond the renowned players who are already familiar to you, Grateful Guitars also solicits applicants.

Ellie Sanders, Jack Barton, Andy Logan, Rich Hoeg, Rob Eaton, Ed Reines, Rebecca Logan (photo: Bob Minkin)

Can you talk about the process of identifying GGF recipients?

JACK BARTON: We have a link on the Grateful Guitars website where people can go and apply. When we read the applications, it often becomes clear rather quickly, who we should support. When someone talks about “me, me, me” that doesn’t feel like a fit. Then someone else will talk about his band and the community and how they’re involved with local charities— now that feels like a Grateful Guitars person.

One of the gifts we did this year was to someone named Eric Weingrad, who goes by the name Pappy. There’s a band in Pittsburgh called theCAUSE that covers Grateful Dead music, along with a few other songs. Eric also has a Jerry Garcia cover band called Reuben’s Painted Mandolin. They often play locally to 300-400 people, but anytime I read or hear anything about this band, it always also involves what they’re giving back to their community.

When Eric applied about a year ago, I had already known about him and the band and how active they were in Pittsburgh. So I was like, “This is somebody that we absolutely need to take care of.” Then, when they did their big benefit this year to support a local organization that helps to feed the homeless, we gifted Eric a Wolf replica. We also donated $5,000 to an organization in Pittsburgh called Fostering Music that helps foster kids and gives them an instrument along with lessons on the instrument.

A few weeks later, I was looking at Facebook and saw that Eric was going around to musicians he knows in town who are not as successful as his band, and he is loaning out Wolf in the spirit of the Grateful Guitars Foundation. He was passing that on to other musicians in his community.

You mentioned the monetary donation. What led the Foundation to include that element as well?

JB: In the 1980s, when I was in my mid to late 20s, the local news in Philadelphia emphasized the violence and burgeoning drug business in underprivileged neighborhoods. What I took away from that was that we needed more people showing these kids that there was another way out of the neighborhood other than what they were seeing from people who were getting into that business, suddenly driving Cadillacs and shooting people.

There had to be something for them to aspire to other than what they were living within. At the same time, the story about the latest killing in a poor neighborhood would be followed by a report on how school districts were eliminating arts programs to save money. It was a really easy bridge for me to see that if you take that away, you’re shutting the door even tighter on these kids. So something I’ve had on my mind for quite some time is helping to fund music in schools.

Then, as we started talking about the value of giving instruments to these players and what it does to elevate their experience—enabling them to put joy back into the world—I introduced the idea of facilitating music in schools. Andy talked to the board, who thought that sounded great, and then we had to figure out the best way to implement it.

The “aha” moment came when we were approached by a woman named Janet Hunt— she puts on the June Lake Jam Fest up in the High Sierras every summer, which is very focused on Grateful Dead. She’s a longtime Deadhead, and she does this to raise money to help the Mono County school district keep music in their schools. There was a program she was partially funding and she asked us if we could help. The week before the festival, she brings up one or two artists who are playing the festival to spend a week going into the schools, and she wanted to know if we could fund their lodging and meals.

We agreed to do so and that’s when then we looked at each other and realized that setting up our own program was going to take millions and millions of dollars. However, what we can do is we can find existing nonprofits working with underserved children and help fund them. So that’s what we’ve done. Every time we gift an instrument to a player, we also find a local nonprofit that’s doing music education and we give them a $5,000 grant.

I’ll hear all these moving stories. We gave Jake Wolf a Bean. He’s in the Colorado area and plays in a few groups, including Sages and Spirits, which is an occasional band with Melvin Seals, Rob Eaton, Skip Vangelas, John Kadlecik, Rob Barraco and Jay Lane. So we went to a Sages and Spirits show in Denver to gift him this Bean, and we worked with an organization called Youth on Record. They teach kids how to play, they teach them how to put on shows, they teach them every aspect of music. But one of the most moving things for me is that their development director is one of the kids who started out in their program.

AL: Jack had that idea, which instantly became the second aspect of our mission. So we gift instruments to players, and we also seed music instruction in schools.

Grateful Guitars is a unique organization that’s very lean. I have a production company and we run a Grateful Thursdays every month with Alex Jordan. We produce different shows and a lot of funding comes through it.

The organization pays its administrative costs as far as taxes and accountants and things like that, but we don’t have a staff and we don’t have any overhead. So when someone gives a dollar to Grateful Guitars, I would venture that 90-95 cents goes to gifting guitars or seeding music in schools. When we gift a guitar in a region, we also give $5,000 to a program where that donation is going to move the needle.

I serve on a board called Fit Kids, and that organization brings sports programs to underserved youth. A lot of schools have also cut physical education out of their budgets, which is heartbreaking and truly criminal. If you took PE away from me as a young boy, I would not be doing what I’m doing today. So I lovingly supported that because it’s such a wonderful mission, but it doesn’t do the arts it just does PE and sports.

Similarly, while I have massive respect for people who can build bridges and planes, we also need the arts. It has saved so many of us. I think a lot of the best ideas come from creativity. That skill of being creative is still really important, even if you’re going to be a math major. So it’s been an unbelievable thrill and joy to be a part of this organization and watch it grow.

Our hope is that as more and more people see how important high-core values are, and the joy they get from a weekend festival, then maybe, to quote a politician, we’ll have a kinder and gentler world someday.