Dark Star Palace: Phil Lesh's Alembic F-2B Tube Preamp

Artifact of the Week: Phil Lesh's Alembic F-2B Tube Preamp

Tape of the Week: Video of 6/21/71 (Le Chateau d'Herouville, France)

This week's Artifact of the Week comes directly from the Grateful Dead's equipment vault! Originally housed at the Dead's Front Street rehearsal studio and equipment storage facility in San Rafael, the "gear vault" moved north to Novato in the early 1990's, just a few years before Jerry checked-out. When that facility closed down in 2006 after the Dead finally dissolved and resolved their business issues, it seems that the band decided to give a sort of "severance package" to key crew members in the form of the band's old gear (this is my theory anyway).

I originally saw a few interesting pieces of gear start to trickle up on ebay by the same seller up in Santa Rosa, California. The items included old Alembic gear, custom Hard Truckers amp cases, McIntosh MC2300, MC275 and MC75 tube amps, Hard Trucker PA cabinets, Meyer bass cabs, etc. It sure LOOKED like this stuff came directly from the Dead...especially as most of the items had old backstage passes, Steal Your Face logos, etc. all over them. And.... they were all beat to hell like they had been on the road for 30 years! Well, after winning one of the McIntosh amp auctions, I drove up to Santa Rosa to pick it up and to scope out the rest of the gear to see if this guy's stash was in fact... the real deal.

When I walked into the seller's house, my jaw dropped to the floor. Everywhere I looked, it seemed like there was a page from the Grateful Dead Gear book come to life. After taking with the seller, it seems he had bought the entire stash in a lump sale directly from "a guy who worked for the Dead." He said he had forgotten his name. It sounds like the crew member didn't have room to store all the gear, and wanted to sell it en mass. This guy had seen a craigslist ad for the gear by him, and while not into the Grateful Dead at all (I've dumped a slew of tapes on him since that time!), he was a film score composer who owned his own recording studio and wanted the gear for his studio. He was selling off the extra pieces that he didn't need.

Over the course of the next 3 years, I did everything in power to try to buy the rest of the Dead gear from this guy. He had sold several of the pieces before I met him, so I was unable to try to do a large purchase all at once. In retrospect, he wouldn't have done that, and actually, I wouldn't have had the money to buy it all anyway. So month after month, I'd check in with him and see if he "needed some extra cash" and wouldn't he "want to make more room at his house by getting rid of that large MC2300!" To make the story short, we ended up being great friends and now trade cds of our band's latest studio experiments. By the end of the 2009, Dark Star Palace had been able to scoop up a good chunk of the Grateful Dead's old PA/amp systems from the late 1960's - 1980's: (2) MC2300s, (2) MC75s, (1) MC275, (2) custom PA cabinets, (2) custom ESS Heil tweeter cabinets, various experimental UltraSound rack equipment, and of course, one of Phil Lesh's old Alembic F2B tube preamps! Look forward to future posts on the rest of this gear.

The stereo preamp that the Palace owns is serial number 105. When I discussed this with Alembic, they believe this to be one of the first one's manufactured (likely #5 as they started at 100). They didn't have records of which serial numbers were sold to what band/individual. The circuit board inside the F2B seems to date the preamp to October of 1972...which is much later than I had expected. Perhaps earlier F2B's were custom made and un-numbered? In any case, the first photos of Phil Lesh using the F2B as a replacement for his trusty old Fender Dual Showman amps was in November / December 1972, before he switched over to the Alembic preamp 100% by early 1973. This unit is all original and still includes the original tubes. It was manufactured at Alembic in San Francisco on Brady Street...before they moved north to Santa Rosa.

There are some great shots of Phil's rack of F2B's (he had 4 units that were paired with 4 MC2300 amps) in the Winterland 1973 box set that came out on Rhino recently. He seemed to use channel A with more treble than unit B (see photo). The unit was missing a few red knob caps when I got it, but Alembic hooked me up with some new old stock..last of their original order! You have to love those guys.... Anyway, Phil loved this preamp and used it for both studio sessions and on tour with the Dead from late-1972 until 1979 when he changed his entire bass rig. This F2B is loaded up in my current studio and bass rig and paired with an Alembic Superfilter. For more info on the Alembic F2B, please see:

This week's Tape of the Week is actually from a VHS tape. In a very interesting twist of events, I was just getting a digital copy of this video last week (when this began to hit wider circulation in the trading community) when a member of my band sent me a text that "I must check this video out!" Check it out I did..and wow! Bobby looks like he's 16 years old. Pigpen is skinny but doesn't look super-sick yet. Jerry looks relaxed and like he is having a ball. Many folks know of this video, but it seems the new version is an upgrade. I had it up-scaled on my PS3 to 1080p and all I have to say is, check it out! Here is some more info:

Grateful Dead
Le Chateau d'Hérouville (a.k.a "The Honky Château), France
June 21, 1971

The group's "most exotic gig in 1971 was a one-shot in France."

"We went over there to do a big festival, a free festival they were gonna have, but the festival was rained out. It flooded. We stayed at this little chateau which is owned by a film score composer who has a 16-track recording studio built into the chateau, and this is a chateau that Chopin once lived in; really old, just delightful, out in the country near the town of Auvers sure Oise, which is where Vincent Van Gogh is buried. …" --Jerry Garcia--

"We were there with nothing to do: France, a 16-track recording studio upstairs, all our gear, ready to play, and nothing to do. So, we decided to play at the chateau itself, out in the back, in the grass, with a swimming pool, just play into the hills. We didn't even play to hippies, we played to a handful of townspeople in Auvers. We played and the people came — the chief of police, the fire department, just everybody. It was an event and everybody just had a hell of a time — got drunk, fell in the pool. It was great." --Jerry Garcia--

Some of the Grateful Dead show at Hérouville was broadcast in France by the "The Second Channel" of the ORTF (French Radio and Television Broadcasting) on the July 24, 1971 edition of the rock program "Pop 2." A second part of the show was broadcast in Black & White on the November 27, 1971. Audio has been captured in Mono.

Part 1
Black Peter
Interview
Hard To Handle
Interview
Sugar Magnolia
Interview
Deal

Part 2 (in B&W)
Morning Dew
Sing Me Back Home
China Cat Sunflower
I Know You Rider

For more info on the audio and video, check out: