Graham Nash was reunited with the 1957 maple-neck Fender Stratocaster “Alligator” guitar he gifted to Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia over 50 years ago. The guitar was brought to Nash’s concert at Freight & Salvage in Berkeley, California on Monday, July 10 by Andy Logan, the founder and president of Grateful Guitars.
Logan also brought the Martin acoustic guitar used by Garcia to record the Grateful Dead’s 1970 album, American Beauty. Garcia came into possession of the famed Strat around the time that album was recorded, having received it as a gift from Nash. Garcia had played pedal steel guitar on “Teach Your Children,” the hit song that appeared on the 1970 Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young album Déjà Vu, which necessitated payment that came in the form of the ‘57 Strat.
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Later called “Alligator” due to a sticker placed on the pickguard, the Fender guitar was Garcia’s primary instrument for several years in the early 1970s. JamBase contributor Steve Silberman spoke to Nash in 2020 about “Teach Your Children,” Garcia’s involvement in the recording and how Garcia came to own Alligator. An excerpt from that article follows:
On October 24, [1969], Garcia made his first attempt at laying down a steel track for the song at [Wally Heider’s studio in San Francisco].
“I actually fucked it up in a couple of places,” the humble guitarist told Nash abashedly. “Can I try that again?” Nash assured Garcia that the take was beautiful but invited him to take a second pass.
“The first take was way better,” Nash recalls. “It was fantastic in its expression. I thought the song might be a hit before Jerry recorded the track, but I knew it would be after hearing what he played. It was perfect. It felt totally complete.”
Nash was right on two counts: “Teach Your Children” became one of CSNY’s most enduring hits, and Garcia’s first take instantly became one of the best-loved pedal steel recordings of all time, to the chagrin of some old-timers who’d been plying their trade in Nashville for decades. But Garcia shunned the usual country-and-western clichés, influenced by [Ralph] Mooney’s use of idiosyncratic tunings on a custom steel with a banjo neck. And he had his own inimitable “cry” on the instrument, heard to most heart-wrenching effect on “Laughing,” the emotional peak of Crosby’s 1970 masterpiece If I Could Only Remember My Name.
Nash would go on to invite the guitarist to play steel on “I Used To Be A King” and “Man In The Mirror” on his first solo album, Songs for Beginners, also recorded at Heider’s, and released in 1971.
Garcia wasn’t paid in cash for his priceless contribution to “Teach Your Children,” but Nash rewarded the guitarist with a 1957 maple-neck Stratocaster that, after being modified by audio wizards like Frank Fuller at the Dead’s gear-building company Alembic, became one of his most celebrated instruments.
Dubbed “Alligator” owing to a sticker that Garcia applied to the pickguard, the Strat enabled him to emulate the incisive twang of the other guitarist in Buck Owens’ Buckaroos, Don Rich. (It can be heard it its full psychedelicized Bakersfield glory on the Dead’s Europe ’72).
As noted by photographer Jay Blakesberg, Monday’s encore at Freight & Salvage featured Nash’s guitarist Shane Fontayne playing Alligator and Nash playing Garcia’s Martin acoustic on a memorable performance of “Teach Your Children.”
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