What was the instrumental breakdown of the band?
    One or two guitars, mandoline, sometimes a banjo.  Pigpen played harmonica and the "foot crasher," which was a hi-hat cymbal.  I played guitar, jug, and washtub bass.  Then we had a great big box full of rhythm instruments and kazoos and stuff like that.  It was a pretty fun little outfit, and we endeavored to come up with a novel approach to each song we performed.  That really established our working relationship as a band.  We stayed together as that band for more than a year.

Is that when you decided to electrify your instruments?
    Yes.  The Beatles had come out and made it real

big,  and then the Stones came out and they made it real big.  The appeal of electic music just started creeping in, and by the end of the year, I was working at Dana Morgan Music too - sort of taking some of Garcia's excess students and picking up a few of my own.  I was also working at another music store in Menlo Park, and we had access to electric instruments.  So we give in to the temptation to try a little rock and roll.  Garcia had done a few electric gigs with Pig in a band called the Zodiacs before I'd ever known them, and so they had a little experience with R&B and stuff like that.  Pig knew it very well, because his father had been a DJ at a black R&B station, so we had a leg up there.  We just sort of evolved into a rock and roll band.  Dana Morgan, Jr.,  played bass, which ensured that we got to use the instruments and amplifiers that we otherwise couldn't have afforded. That's when we became the Warlocks.

How did Phil Lesh get involved?
    We started to get a following pretty quickly around the mid-Peninsula and were getting a lot of gigs.  Dana couldn't keep up with the music store and the band, and so Phil - who was an old friend of Garcia's - came down to listen one night and we mutually decided that he could play bass with a little practice.  He had never played bass, but he'd seriously studied classical music and was a trumpet player.  He wood shedded for a couple of weeks and got good enough to hold down the low end and eventually, of course, became a hell of a bass player.  Bill Kreutz-mann had been a drum student at the music store, so that's where he came from.  At the time we became the band that made up the Grateful Dead, although we didn't actually change the name for a couple of months.

What were your first guitars?
     My first was a $17 Japanese model.  Then I got a $35 Harmony classical, and it was okay.  When I was 15, I ran away from home to cowboy for a summer and make enough money to buy a Martin D-28 from a pawn-shop.  A little later I found a really nice 1944 Martin 000-21 in a pawnshop for less than $100, as I recall.  Those were the old days.
I played that until I got my first electric, which was a Gretsch Chet Atkins model.  Then I got a Gibson ES-335, and later on tried a Rickenbacker, which was a great little guitar.  From about 1968 to '71 I used a Gibson ES-345, until I switched to a Gibson SG.  I had been playing that for about three years when I met Jeff Hassleberger from Ibanez. We hit it off real well and started working on desingning a guitar.  It was about 1975 when I got my first Ibanez guitar, and it's pretty much a continuing progression of them ever since.  They all look the same, but they're real different.

In what ways are they different?
    Well, the way it started was Jeff showed me a double-neck guitar they had built, and I really liked the way the G string sounded.  The first guitar we made was blonde and sort of a cut-down version of the double-neck.  There were a number of pictures of me playing the guitar in the Ibanez ads inside the cover of Guitar Player magazine in late '76 and '77.  That was the original Bob Weir model.  Then around 1977 Jeff and I sat down with French curves and designed another body styel.  I've always liked the look of Martin 000 guitars, so we kind of styled the bottom and the waist of it after them.  We just played with French curves until we found something we liked for the cutaways.  I guess it came out looking sort of reminiscent of a Gibson ES-345.  We played around with a sliding, height-ad-justable middle pickup on three of the prototypes until I realized, at one point, that I hadn't moved the pickup for several months.  I really had found where it worked best in combination with the other pickups, so we just fixed it in place.  From ther it's just been a matter of refinements in the bridge and electronics and things like that.