Some songs of the Grateful Dead will take time and several listenings to appreciate. Other songs of them give you the goose-bumps at first listening… Wharf Rat is such a song. The band never released a studio version and the song featured here is from a beautiful cd bootleg called Floating Celestial. It’s the complete recording of the new year’s eve concert of 1991 in Oakland in crisp and crystal clear soundboard quality. The first (and only) new years concert without famous rock-promoter Bill Graham who died that year in a tragic helicopter accident.
It’s these lines that make this song work so good for me:
… I know the life I’m livin’s no good I’ll get a new start live the life I should …
When Bob Mayes and myself followed the band on the german and english concerts in the ninetees, I still remember the gig in the International Congress Halle in Berlin. There were a lot of US DeadHeads present at that concert. Maybe even more americans than european fans. It was a great concert and when the first notes of Wharf Rat emerged I was thrilled! But american fans react very different at the dead’s music and I was really pissed off when they began shouting and yelling at the song’s most sensitive moment…! Now, twenty years further along the way, i realise it’s the same emotion. It’s just another way of showing it… Above is a picture of August West by Jerry Garcia. Below is the YouTube video I made of the song from the ‘Floating Celestial’ bootleg, lyrics included.
Irwin mixed exquisitely detailed, intricate brass work with dense, exotic hardwoods in his designs. He also incorporated a lot of special features Garcia himself devised, like a loop that ran the signal back through the guitar so he could control his special effects with knobs on the body of the guitar or a built-in pre-amp hidden beneath Irwin’s inlays. “Jerry knew more about his guitars and equipment than anyone,” said Parish. After a Roland synthesizer was successfully attached to Wolf, Tiger went back to the shop for retrofitting. Garcia used the synthesizer attachment to make his guitar sound like a trumpet or other instruments.
on the guitar bodies. After Jerry’s death, the guitars returned to Doug Irwin, the master guitar maker who’s work Jerry Garcia so admired. In his will, Garcia left the guitars to Mr. Irwin who had devoted many years of his life creating them. Irwin sold his guitars, the Tiger and the Wolf, at auction on May 8, 2002. The Tiger was purchased by Jim Irsay for USD 850,000.