The improbable happened last night. I played a set of Grateful Dead music! Ever the stylist, Bill "willy" Lynch, put out a plea to play Grateful Dead music based on his admiration of the Dead Doc streaming on Amazon Prime. This was totally in the wheelhouse of Ronnie Doo Wop. Since Jay Gabbard is no longer on the trip, i had to dep on lead guitar (all similarities to myself and John Mayer end there). Jack Skinner as always pumped up the bass with his entourage in tow and The Hawk looked happy sipping scotch and saying dag.
I remembered Andy Partridges claim to have learned lead guitar from the early Dead albums: pentatonic and dorian scales played slowly. This approach worked rather well on a Epiphone SG i acquired at a yard sale last October tuned to open G. For those who care about such things, i ran it into my VOX tone bender and Electroharmonix organ pedal. The guitar tone went to a Doctor Z amp, while the organ notes went to an Acoustic amp. Kids- keyboards can blow your regular guitar amps. Use protection!! We played about 6 tunes in 3 hours, among them "Stella" and "Fire on the Mountain" and the pigpen inspired "Good Morning Little School Girl".
As Ronnie said: "Let's do this again but not too soon". We might have been the greatest jam band playing last Saturday night but eh "we're better than that."