Commence Garcia Week! There's another reason to celebrate Aug 1 as well:
Garcia: …And on my 15th birthday my mother gave me an accordion. I looked at this accordion and I said, “God, I don’t want this accordion, I want an electric guitar.” So we took it down to a pawn shop and I got this little Danelectro, an electric guitar with a tiny little amplifier and man, I was just in heaven. Everything! I stopped everything I was doing at the time[…]
Reich: Can I ask for the date?
Garcia: August 1st — let’s see, I was born in ’42 — Christ, man, arithmetic, school, I was 15 — ’57. Yeah, ’57, there you go, it was a good year, Chuck Berry, all that stuff.
Reich: I wanted to get an historic date like that.
Garcia: Yeah, well that’s what it was, August 1st, 1957, I got my first guitar.
- Garcia: A Signpost to New Space, 1971.
