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Neal Casal on Playing Garcia’s Wolf

Casal with Wolf backstage at the Great American. Photo by Jay Blakesberg via Facebook

This past December, one of Jerry Garcia’s famed guitars- known by the moniker Wolf for the cartoon image of the animal at the base of the instrument- reemerged onstage in the hands of Neal Casal during a Chris Robinson Brotherhood show at San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall. Casal played it throughout the band’s two sets before giving it over to Robinson for the group’s encore. However, this isn’t the first time the guitar has come out to play- so to speak- since Garcia died in 1995. To whit, some back story.

In May 2002, nearly 200 Grateful Dead-related items went up for auction, among them Wolf and another famed Garcia guitar, Tiger. Both guitars were custom built by luthier Doug Irwin who first met Garcia in the early ’70s when he was working for the San Francisco-based guitar and bass maker Alembic.

After purchasing Irwin’s first custom made guitar for Alembic in 1972, Garcia asked him to make another one, offering a few specific requests with regard to its pickups. Wolf, for which the guitarist paid $1,500, was unveiled in October 1973. Garcia played Wolf through the first half of 1975, switched to playing Travis Bean guitars for the next two years, and then returned to Wolf full-time in the fall of 1977 through the summer of 1979 before moving onto Tiger almost exclusively for the next 11 years.

In his indispensable book Grateful Dead Gear, Blair Jackson quotes a Jon Sievert Guitar Player interview with Garcia describing Irwin’s guitars. “There’s something about the way they feel with my touch- they’re married to each other,” Garcia said. “The reason I went with his guitars in the first place was they just fell into my hand perfectly… I’m not analytical about guitars, but I know what I like. And when I picked up [his first Irwin guitar], I’d never felt anything before or since that my hand likes better.”

Wolf went for $700,000 to Hyatt-family heir and Sonia Dada band member Dan Pritzker while Tiger fetched $850,000 and went to Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay. (With commission price, the price tags were $789,500 and $957,500, respectively.) Pritzker’s father Jay, and his uncle John, are both longtime Deadheads and presumably passed along their musical tastes to the youngster who also happened to attend Wavy Gravy’s Camp Winnarainbow as a child.

While never quoted publicly, it would appear that Pritzker believes in the idea that Wolf should be played- not simply stowed away and gawked at in private. To that end, he used it on the majority of the group’s 2004 release Test Pattern and, prior to lending it to the Chris Robinson Brotherhood for a night, let it be played by other musicians in public on three other occasions: Ryan Adams with Phil Lesh (7/14/05), Jimmy Herring with Phil Lesh & Friends (7/15/05; first set only) and John Kadlecik with Dark Star Orchestra (10/05/06) during which Bob Weir came out for the entirety of the band’s second set. The Brotherhood instance is the first to not have a Dead member involved in some capacity.

As has been the case with Wolf’s previous appearances, fans’ reactions online have been mixed, with some seeing it as sacrilege while others seeing it as a natural evolution in the guitar’s existence.

We spoke with Casal a short while after the Great American gig to get his reflections on playing the hallowed guitar and his reaction to the fans’ responses. What follows is an edited version of that conversation.