“E.M.D.”, often written “EMD,” is a David Grisman tune in E minor, first written for Eat My Dust!, the 1976 Roger Corman production directed by Charles B. Griffith and starring Ron Howard, for which Grisman is credited with the music. The letters are the film’s initials, and several bands have since recorded the piece as “EMD (Eat My Dust).”
The tune’s first record was made by the David Grisman Quintet at 1750 Arch Studio in Berkeley, California, in October 1976: Grisman and Todd Phillips on mandolins, Tony Rice on guitar, Darol Anger on fiddle and Bill Amatneek on bass. It opened the band’s first album, The David Grisman Quintet (Kaleidoscope F-5), released in 1977. Grisman calls the music he made with the group “Dawg music,” his own mixture of bluegrass and the jazz of Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli; the nickname came from Jerry Garcia.
“E.M.D.” stayed in Grisman’s repertoire for decades. The Quintet played it at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco on 6 March 1979, when the line-up included Mike Marshall and Todd Phillips had moved to bass. Grisman played it with Doc Watson in a 1998 concert at the Mello Performing Arts Center in Watsonville, California, issued on Acoustic Disc, and recorded it with John Sebastian at his Dawg Studios in Mill Valley in 2007 for their Acoustic Disc album Satisfied. Bluegrass bands took it up too; Mike Mitchell recorded it as “EMD (Eat My Dust)” on Thirteen Hours (Mountain Fever, 2008).
