Dark Star Palace: Year of the Tiger

Artifact of the week: Replica of Jerry Garcia's Tiger Guitar
(w/ one of Jerry's original pickups installed)

Tape of the week: 2/13-14/70

Well, it's 40 years to the day of the start of the Grateful Dead's historic 2/70 run at the Fillmore East. Since these shows go down as many-a-heads favorite tapes and/or early introduction to the band (due to the LP "Bears Choice" and the soundboard tapes of both nights that leaked into most folks collections), it seems like a perfect choice for this blog's first "Tape of the Week." Of course, the Dark Stars that were played on both nights are epic (during the electric set #2 on the 13th, and in electric set #1 on the 14th)... and as this song is Dark Star Palace's namesake, well... everything is just exactly perfect, isn't it? It sure is! Tomorrow night is a new moon (aka "little Dark Star")... which also happens to be Valentines Day. And, that also happens to be Tibetan New Year! Whoa! So it's a heavy weekend and a perfect time for Dark Star Palace to kick things off.

Speaking of heavy, did you know that Black Sabbath's debut LP came out on 2/13/70 (kicking off heavy metal) and that The Who recorded Live at Leeds (kicking off the hard rock live LP) on 2/14/70? What a weekend for great music! Anyway, I can't link up to a stream of these shows since the Dead won't allow released material to be posted, but I have found an official stream of Dark Star from the 13th that they put out on the wonderful Dicks Picks #4 CD. For those in the know though, it would be worth your while to hunt down the juicy master soundboards (7" 1/2 track reels recorded at 15 inches per second) that were mastered straight from the master analog tape direct to digital and expertly transferred by the great Charlie "Miller-Time" Miller in February 2009 (I'll help you below!). Get them! Absorb! Enjoy!

Ok! On to the Palace's Artifact of the Week... Jerry Garcia's mighty and elusive Tiger guitar (as this weekend does kick off the "Year of the Tiger").

Of all the Dead's gear, what captures the essence of the band more than Jerry's favorite guitar? From the time he first used it on stage with the band (11/4/79 in Oakland), until using it for the final Grateful Dead show (7/9/95 in Chicago...though new research states that 80,000 Deadheads may have been hallucinating that Tiger was actually used at this show...still TBD!), this guitar led millions of people on some amazing musical journeys. I don't need to jump into all the technical details of Doug Irwin's masterpiece (see links below for that), but this axe does stand as an act of inspired genius.

Dark Star Palace owns a replica of Tiger that was hand built by a luthier who has built guitars for Bob Weir, Phil Lesh and Jerry Garcia's family. The Six-Stringed Saint of San Francisco, Gary Brawer, did the electronics, custom made some additional parts and blessed it with some original Jerry magic (Gary, if you did not already know, was Jerry Garcia's guitar tech and worked on his famous Wolf, Tiger, Rosebud, and Bolt guitars... Photos of him with the Palace's Tiger below). It weighs in at nearly 13 pounds (no wonder Jerry never moved!), and has some fancy tricks up it's sleeve. As with Jerry's, our Tiger has the Garcia-invented unity gain-buffered effects loop, as well as the "hippie sandwich" of various exotic woods (such as cocobolo, curly maple, etc.). There is brass from top to bottom, front to back and side to side. The Brawer-cut brass nut was designed after the one he did for Jerry.

One freakish addition are the custom cast brass knobs. These were cast from the type of heavy knobs Jerry had (which were similar to the custom Starz Guitars knobs from San Francisco from around the mid-70's). The ones on our Tiger were hand cast by Jim Springer based on Jerry's set. Jim also happens to be the guy who fabricated Luke Skywalker's and Darth Vader's Lightsabers for George Lucas in 1976 for the film Star Wars. Pretty frickin' cosmic eh Obi-wan?!? Two of the pickups on this beast are classic Jerry (Dimarzio Super II and SDS-1), but the third one is quite special as it is one of Jerry's actual pickups that he helped design with Gary Brawer and had hand wound by Lindy Fralin. It was put into Jerry's guitar but only used for a few Dead shows. But that is a story for another edition of Dark Star Palace. For now, welcome to the Palace and Happy New Year of the Tiger!