David Nelson

He was born on 12 June 1943 in Seattle and came of age in the folk scene on the San Francisco Peninsula. From 1961 he and Garcia played together informally, and in 1962 they were in a string of short-lived groups: the Thunder Mountain Tub Thumpers that spring, the bluegrass band the Wildwood Boys with Garcia and Hunter, and, in November, the Hart Valley Drifters, with Garcia, Hunter and Norman Van Maastricht. From the winter of 1963 to the spring of 1964 he was in the Black Mountain Boys with Garcia, Hunter, Eric Thompson and Sandy Rothman, a band recorded at the Top of the Tangent in Palo Alto.

When Garcia’s band the Warlocks became the Grateful Dead, Nelson went electric too, with the New Delhi River Band, which by late 1966 was the house band at the Barn in Scotts Valley and lasted until early 1968. He then played guitar on three Grateful Dead albums, Aoxomoxoa (1969), Workingman’s Dead (1970), on which he plays acoustic guitar on “Cumberland Blues,” and American Beauty (1970), where he plays electric guitar on “Box of Rain.”

In 1969 Garcia, who had just taken up the pedal steel guitar, and John Dawson, another friend from the Palo Alto days, formed the New Riders of the Purple Sage, and Nelson joined on electric lead guitar, with Mickey Hart on drums and, in the early days, Phil Lesh on bass. Through the Columbia years he played on New Riders of the Purple Sage (1971), Powerglide and Gypsy Cowboy (both 1972) and The Adventures of Panama Red (1973), on which he sang Peter Rowan’s “Panama Red,” and then on the MCA albums and on Feelin’ All Right (A&M, 1981). He and the pedal steel player Buddy Cage left the band in 1982.

Alongside the New Riders he took part in the Good Old Boys, a bluegrass group with the mandolinist Frank Wakefield, the banjo player Don Reno, the fiddler Chubby Wise and the bassist Pat Campbell. Their album Pistol Packin’ Mama, recorded in January 1975 at Rolling Thunder Studio in Novato, California, and issued by Round in 1976, has Nelson on guitar and in the vocal trio on everything but Reno’s “Banjo Signal,” in a program that runs from “Ashes of Love” and “Toy Heart” to “Deep Elem Blues.”

After leaving the New Riders he wrote songs with Hunter and toured for a time with Al Rapone and the Zydeco Express. In 1987 he, Garcia and Rothman played together again in the Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band, which opened Jerry Garcia Band shows that year, including a run on Broadway; Nelson played guitar on its live album Almost Acoustic (1988) and on Ragged But Right (2010), drawn from the same shows.

In 1994 he formed the David Nelson Band, first with Bill Laymon on bass, Barry Sless on lead and pedal steel guitar, Michael “Mookie” Siegel on keyboards and accordion and Arthur Steinhorn on drums. It released the live albums Limited Edition, Keeper of the Key (1997) and High Adventure in Japan (1999), and the studio album Visions Under the Moon (1999), recorded at the Aladdin Theater in Portland, Oregon; Pete Sears and John Molo later joined, and Once in a Blue Moon followed in 2014. He also co-founded a bluegrass group, the Papermill Creek Rounders, with Lowell “Banana” Levinger.

Nelson and Cage brought the New Riders back on the road in the mid-2000s, with Michael Falzarano on guitar, Ronnie Penque on bass and Johnny Markowski on drums, and with Dawson’s blessing. Its first studio album in twenty years, Where I Come From (Woodstock Records, 2009), featured new songs written by Nelson and Hunter, and 17 Pine Avenue followed in 2012. Nelson also played electric guitar throughout Jesse McReynolds’s Songs of the Grateful Dead: A Tribute to Jerry Garcia & Robert Hunter (Woodstock, 2010), singing the lead on “Ripple.” As of 2020, when the band marked fifty years, he was still leading the New Riders, and in 2019, after Hunter’s death, he released a previously unheard song the two had written together.