Album Notes

> Includes "New Speedway Boogie," featured on The Grateful Dead Hour radio show and in Acoustic Guitar magazine August 2010
> New from Homespun Tapes: the companion DVD, Learn Seven Grateful Dead Classics for Acoustic Guitar, with complete transcriptions and detailed instruction for all six songs on Dead to the Core plus "Friend of the Devil"

“Speaking as a nonmusician who loves Grateful Dead music, I can’t help but think that being able to play this music we love is about as good as it gets. Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers sure can play the music—listen to his 'Stella Blue' and you'll know what I mean. Better still, he can teach it. All you people out there with more talent than me—uh, that'd be all of you—check this out!”
—Dennis McNally, Grateful Dead publicist and author, A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead

ABOUT THE RECORDING

The music of the Grateful Dead is part of my DNA as a guitarist and songwriter. As a teenager I wore out LPs of Workingman’s Dead and Reckoning in particular and copped many songs for an acoustic duo with my brother and for my high school band. In the ’80s, I caught the Dead when I could during their swings through the Northeast, marveling at how the band was like a car with six guys’ hands on the wheel—anyone could steer in a new direction at any time. Their structured-chaos approach to group improvisation inspired many happy nights with friends trying out our own space jams, exploring sounds with no set roles and no plan for what key to play in or chords to use. Just start playing, listen closely, and go where the music wants to go: that is as close to an M.O. for songwriting (or life) as anything I’ve encountered.

As it happened, my love of writing and music merged into a career as a music journalist and editor of Acoustic Guitar magazine…which led eventually to an opportunity in 1993 to interview Jerry Garcia along with David Grisman—another musical hero of mine. In this final chapter of Garcia’s life, these old pals were having a blast revisiting folk and jug-band tunes and more in Grisman’s northern California home studio. During the photo shoot (where Jay Blakesberg took the portrait of Garcia that later wound up on the cover of Blair Jackson’s biography Garcia: An American Life), Grisman and Garcia jammed on “Jack-A-Roe” on mandolin and a vintage archtop guitar. I will forever feel privileged to have been in the room that day.

Fast-forward another 15 years, and I had another golden opportunity: to spend an afternoon with Bob Weir, in a hotel room in Pennsylvania during a tour with his band RatDog. Cradling an Alvarez-Yairi guitar originally built for Garcia, Weir generously shed light on the idiosyncratic approach to the guitar that has thrilled and mystified players like me for decades. He picked apart “Cassidy,” “The Music Never Stopped,” and other songs and sent me back to the woodshed with many new ideas to ponder.

These recent experiences have brought me full circle, revisiting music of the Grateful Dead after years of focusing on my own songs. I began to experiment with new solo acoustic arrangements inspired by the band’s collective sound, stretching on guitar to play both rhythm and lead while maintaining a strong groove. Excited by the results, I started mingling these songs with my own in live shows, and the positive response from audiences led eventually to recording Dead to the Core—and also taping the companion DVD Learn Seven Grateful Dead Classics for Acoustic Guitar (Homespun Tapes).

The songs on Dead to the Core are not only stripped back to one guitar but are all recorded live in the studio. It’s just me singing and playing, with my friend Hanna Richardson singing harmony on two songs. No overdubs. No tricks. Just great songs from a great band… I hope they bring you as much pleasure as they bring me.
—Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers

More about the songs at:
www.deadtothecore.com