Did you find much of a problem regaining your acoustic touch for the Fox-Warfield and Radio City gigs?
    Well, I play a lot of acoustic guitar at home and write a lot of songs on acoustic, so I didn't have to start from the beginning again.  It took me a while to get some of the chops back, but we had a lot of shows to work on it. Once you start doing something like that every night, you fall back into it even after a few years' break.  It did take us a while to learn how to balance our instruments with drums and electric bass.

What kind of instruments were you using?
    Garcia was playing on electric/acoustic Takamine, and I had an electric/acoustic Ovation.  I tried a FRAP pickup on my Martin 000-21, but I just couldn't get the feedback down to an acceptable level, even though it sounded good.

By actual count, you played something like 95 different tunes during 15 nights at the Warfield.  How did you decide what you were going to play when?
    Well, we had two or three nights' worth of acoustic material worked up and we knew, generally, that we would close that part of the set with "Ripple," though not always.  As it turned out, that was the only song we did every night.  For the electric set we had about four nights of material ready, and we just kept revolving it.

How did you keep track of it?  Did you work with a set list?
    No, we didn't.  We very rarely even discuss what we are going to do before-hand.  It's all pretty much done on the spot.

Does anyone in particular decide what the next tune will be?
    It's up to whoever's turn it is to sing.  Generally we stagger the singing to give our voices a chance to cool out after a song.

I read somewhere that you once a guitar student of Garcia's back in the early days.  Is that true?
   No.  I hung around him and picked up a thing or two, but I never really took any formal lessons from anybody except Reverend Gary Davis back in 1971.  I was a longtime fan of Davis's and always really liked his approach to guitar because he played the whole instrument and only used two fingers to pick.  Being blind, he didn't know what you can't do.  Notes and lines just seemed to come at you from all different directions, and he seemed to have a way of tying them all together.  He was just about to the end of his days when I met him and took a couple of lessons from him.

Did you start playing on your own?
    Yes, more or less folkie stuff.  When I became conscious of popular music, Joan Baez was a big hit.  It was really impressive to me that you could make all the music with just your guitar and your voice, or maybe a couple of friends and their instruments.  I started fingerpicking and did a little bit of flat-picking.  Now, I mostly use flatpick, but I catch strings with two fingers quite a lot.  That's been a holdover since I started.

Who were some of your major musical influences?
    Well, I mentioned Gary Davis, but I haven't really emulated anybody's guitar style in particular. [Pianist] McCoy Tyner influenced me a lot as far as chording goes -his voicings and tonalities.  Virtually all of the old rock and roll greats have influenced me fairly profoundly, but then so have Igor Stravinsky and Debussy.  Right now I'm working on some Prokofiev string quartets.

What do you mean "working on them"?
    I'm just trying to glean from his approach to harmonic development and voicing.  I find that string quartets fall fairly aptly in hand for guitar for at least suggesting the whole piece.  Of course, sometimes it may take two guitars or a whole band to really make it happen, but you can get it going on a certain level if you're persistent enough.  If I have to cover a certain area of tonality, I'll just learn to do what it takes.  I'll just adopt a hardheaded approach to making my hands do something that, maybe, they don't want to do. When I'm going for something, I'll generally keep at it until I get it, though oftentimes it can be a long and ciruitous route, because I might get sidetracked on something.

What was your first band situation?
    I had a four-man group that wasn't much of a band - we performed, I think, once.  We called ourselves The Uncalled Four.  I was going to Pacific High School then, and I actually met Garcia for the first time that night backstage at the Tangent in Palo Alto.  It was a real brief thing.  I didn't really meet him on concrete terms until two months later on New Year's Eve.   I was walking past the back of Dana Morgan Music and heard banjo music coming from the inside.  The light was on so we knocked on the door to see what was happening, and it was Garcia waiting for his students to show up, so he was just playing banjo.  We talked for a while and then broke into the front of the store and got a buch of instruments out and played for the rest of the evening.  I think it had occurred to us by the end of the night that there was enough amateur talent around to start a jug band, which was a current popular trend in folk music.