Photograph by Jeff Kearns
David Gans plays his acoustic-electric guitar on the porch of his Oakland home. Gans, who hosts the nationally syndicated "Grateful Dead Hour," has been touring the country with a repertoire of his own songs. He plays Blue Rock Shoot on Dec. 18.
David Gans comes to Blue Rock Shoot
By Jeff Kearns
For the last couple years, David Gans has avoided the interstates as much as possible.
Although most people who know him recognize his velvety voice as the one behind the nationally syndicated Grateful Dead Hour, Gans also is quietly building a reputation as a singer-songwriter. He zips back and forth across the country, playing an aggressive schedule of shows at various venues--and, when there's time, he travels from gig to gig on the two-lane highways where America is actually visible.
After spending the past dozen years hosting Dead Hour, which is broadcast by 85 stations nationwide each week, Gans last year began touring as a solo musician in earnest. Instead of promoting the sounds of the Dead--on the airwaves and in Dead cover bands--Gans now sings original songs as a solo artist. On Dec. 18, he'll bring his brand of American songs to Blue Rock Shoot on Big Basin Way.
Even with all the touring, Gans still hosts Dead Hour, as well as Dead to the World, a two-hour version of the syndicated show that's only broadcast in the Bay Area (Wednesdays at 8 p.m. on KPFA-FM 94.1).
Gans's musical career started in 1969, when he was a teenager at Branham High School in San Jose.
"My older brother had a guitar, and he set a couple of my tortured teenage poems to music and taught me the chords, and that was it for me," recalls Gans, 46, as he noodles away on his guitar in his Oakland living room. Thousands of CDs and LPs in racks line the walls behind him. "That was a time when it made everything possible for a kid like me. I was about 15, and I started playing to the exclusion of everything else."
By the time he graduated from high school, Gans had put together a band with some friends, and played a graduation-night show at Frontier Village.
Gans was a big Beatles fan when he started playing, but a new world opened up to him in the early 1970s, when he started going to Grateful Dead shows. Over the years, Gans performed in several Dead cover bands, including Crazy Fingers and the Reptiles, and attended so many Dead shows, he's lost track of the actual number.
After studying for a couple years at San Jose State University, Gans later landed a job with BASS, traveling around the country teaching other employees how to use the ticket-seller's computer system--and giving him the chance to attend as many concerts as he could handle.
He later spent 10 years as a music writer for now-defunct BAM (Bay Area Music) magazine; he started in 1976, when the magazine was founded in San Jose. He also wrote for Record Magazine, which was owned by Rolling Stone, from its first issue in 1981 to its last one five years later, and he has freelanced for several music magazines, including Rolling Stone, over the years.
He's also written for Wired magazine and was one of the early pioneers on the WELL, the unique online community that started in the North Bay in 1986. From the very beginning, the WELL was a tight-knit community of mostly local writers, artists, academics--and has had more than its fair share of Deadheads. Gans is still the host of the WELL's conference on the Dead.
Gans' first book, Playing in the Band: An Oral and Visual History of the Grateful Dead (with Peter Simon), was published in 1985. He followed it with by a book on the Talking Heads that disappeared almost as soon as it was released. He later wrote two more about the Dead: Conversations with the Dead (1991) and Not Fade Away: The Online World Remembers Jerry Garcia (1995). Gans also helped to put together the five-disc box set So Many Roads: 1965-1995, a compilation of unreleased songs and rarities spanning the Dead's entire career that was released this month.
His break into radio came in 1984, when he filled in for a DJ at KFOG-FM by spinning rare Dead songs and live material. By the next year, he had his own show on the station, and two years later other stations were calling to ask if they could pick up the show. In 1987, Gans began producing the syndicated show himself and still does today. Gans produces Grateful Dead Hour on a Macintosh computer kept upstairs in his home and burns a CD of the final product. That disc goes to National Public Radio, which distributes it via satellite to all of the show's subscriber stations around the country. However, Dead to the World is broadcast live from KPFA's studio in Berkeley.
"I've got a great gig," Gans admits. "I get paid to listen to Grateful Dead music and send it out into the world, where it's very much appreciated."
These days, Gans hints that the day he gives up the Dead Hour to follow his own music career may not be far off. He says that he's thinking about releasing a live album of recent material and that one of the things he'd really like to do in 2000 is score a record deal.
Gans, along with his friend Eric Rawlins, put out a CD in 1997 titled Home by Morning, which featured some tracks with legendary bluegrass/folk mandolinist David Grisman. The release is a country-tinged walk through songs penned mostly by the two singers and performed with different combinations of musicians and instruments.
Given the songwriting talent Gans displays on that album and in the songs he performs on the road, that record deal may indeed come soon.
David Gans performs with Jim Page--a folk singer-songwriter with an activist bent, who Gans says has the remarkable ability to compose a song on the spot--on Dec. 18 at Blue Rock Shoot, 14523 Big Basin Way, Saratoga. Call 408.867.3437. For more information on David Gans, check www.trufun.com.
Saratoga, California Since 1955
