David Nelson, Jerry Garcia’s ‘perfect sidekick,’ heads to Novato’s HopMonk Tavern (2024)

At the opening of the new Jerry Garcia exhibit at the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame and Museum, David Nelson was showered with some long-overdue recognition as one of Garcia’s earliest bandmates in the years leading up to the founding of the Grateful Dead.

Located on the Ohio River in Owensboro, Kentucky, the museum shines a light on Garcia’s starring role in the seminal California bluegrass scene in the early 1960s, when he and Nelson were both young bluegrass aficionados who played together in two of the first Bay Area bluegrass groups, the Wildwood Boys and the Black Mountain Boys. In those bands, Garcia picked a five-string banjo and Nelson strummed a vintage Martin guitar that Garcia gave him in a trade. He still has it.

“There were no young bluegrass bands on the West Coast in those days,” Nelson says. “It was our enthusiasm for bluegrass music that brought us together.”

Dennis McNally, author of “A Long Strange Trip,” a definitive history of the Grateful Dead, was on hand for the opening of the Garcia exhibit in March and saw firsthand the respect Nelson was accorded from the younger bluegrass and jam band musicians who performed with him that weekend. He points out that Garcia’s first professional gig was with Nelson at San Francisco State. He likes to think of the soft-spoken Nelson as “Jerry’s perfect sidekick.”

In that role, Nelson would go on to play alongside Garcia in the New Riders of the Purple Sage, one of the original California country rock bands, and in the Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band, a group known for its two-week run of sold-out shows at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on Broadway in New York.

“David is cut from the same musical cloth as Jerry, his close friend,” says Pete Sears, bassist for the David Nelson Band, which performs June 16 at the HopMonk Tavern in Novato in a show celebrating Nelson’s 81st birthday.

Garcia, who died in 1995 at age 53, would have been 82 in August.

Although Nelson was never an official member of the Grateful Dead, Garcia enlisted him to play guitar on the Dead’s first three albums, “Aoxomoxoa” in 1969 followed in 1970 by “Workingman’s Dead” and “American Beauty,” classic records with songs by Garcia and Robert Hunter that would form the foundation of the band’s repertoire for the rest of its 30-year career. His salient contribution is his guitar solo on “Box of Rain,” a poignant ballad co-written and sung by bassist Phil Lesh.

The New Riders of the Purple Sage

Garcia figured in Nelson’s career again when he brought him together with singer-songwriter John “Marmaduke” Dawson to form the New Riders of the Purple Sage, a band name inspired by a Zane Grey Western novel.

“Country rock was a new thing then,” Nelson says. “There were only about three bands that played it — the Byrds, the Eagles and us. That’s about it.”

Garcia saw the New Riders, aka NRPS, as an opportunity to hone his skills on the pedal steel guitar.

“We practiced at Jerry’s house on Magnolia Avenue in Larkspur most every night for quite a while,” Nelson says. “Next thing you know, we were opening for the Dead on tour, going on the road for the first time.”

Garcia dropped out of the band after its eponymous first album — a major label release on Columbia Records in 1971 that peaked at No. 39 on the Billboard charts — to concentrate on his growing responsibilities with the Dead and the Jerry Garcia Band.

Nelson would stay with the New Riders for 13 years, enjoying his biggest success in 1973, singing the lead vocal on “Panama Red,” a rollicking single written by Peter Rowan that became a gold record. A staple on FM radio, the song was a kind of in-joke in the counterculture, the character of Panama Red being a thinly veiled stand-in for a potent strain of marijuana.

“Pot was very much illegal at that time, and so it was really something to be able to sing that song and not be arrested,” Nelson says and laughs.

The Garcia exhibit, which will be open for two years at the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame and Museum, includes photos and memorabilia from the New Riders, including a Garcia pedal steel guitar. It was curated by Carly Smith, a 46-year-old Deadhead.

“For me,” she says, “The New Riders fill the gap between bluegrass and the Grateful Dead.”

The David Nelson Band

In the early ’90s, while touring in a Grateful Dead cover band called Dead Ringers, Nelson played some of his original songs for a bandmate, guitarist and pedal steel player Barry Sless, a prominent member of the Grateful Dead’s extended family.

“I said, ‘Wow, this stuff is really cool,’” Sless says. “’What are we doing playing in a cover band? We should be playing your music in your band.’”

Nelson was hesitant about that prospect at first. In his career, he’d been sidekick to Garcia and second fiddle to John Dawson in the New Riders. So he wasn’t sure about fronting a band of his own. But Sless convinced him that he had what it takes to step out on his own, advising him to “just be yourself.”

In 1994, Sless built the band around Nelson and booked its first three-week tour. Thirty years and four albums later, Nelson has proven to be a colorful frontman in his signature tie-dye headbands and T-shirts. He continues to feature select Grateful Dead covers, particularly those that connect him to Garcia, as well as songs he wrote himself or co-wrote with Hunter, Garcia’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame lyricist, notably “Suite at the Mission,” a moving ballad written after Hunter once visited Garcia in the hospital.

For Sless, who’s also a member of the band Moonalice as well as the Wolf Bros with Bob Weir, playing with Nelson has been what he calls “the fabric of my life for 30 years. It’s home, my most comfortable place to be musically.”

He points out that Nelson is one of the few working musicians who played with Garcia before the Grateful Dead.

For Nelson, one of the hardest parts of being an elder in the Bay Area music community is that he’s outlived many of his contemporaries

“The main thing about it is your friends are dying off, people you’ve known for years,” he says. “It’s really rough.”

At the same time, he’s grateful to be celebrating three decades with his own band. Asked how he feels about that at this point in his life, he answers with a string of superlatives: “Incredible, unbelievable, wonderful, excellent, fantastic.”

• Details: The David Nelson Band performs at 6 p.m. June 16 as part of the 11th annual Cookout Concert Series at the HopMonk Tavern at 224 Vintage Way in Novato. Admission is $49.50 in advance, $55 on the day of show. More information at hopmonk.com/novato.

More: The David Nelson Band will also perform at the Summer Solstice Campout on June 22 and 23 at Le Vin Winery at 33151 CA-128 in Yorkville. Admission is $55 to $250. More information at nelsonband.com/2024/04/david-nelson-band-summer-solstice-campout-2-at-le-vin-winery-in-mendicino-june-22-23.

Contact Paul Liberatore at p.liberatore@comcast.net