“Everyone in the room thought I was buying it. Maybe it helped – people weren’t bidding the way they were on some of the other guitars!” What Derek Trucks made of Jerry Garcia’s $11m Tiger guitar
The slide icon explains why he was really in the room at the record breaking guitar auction – and reflects on the lessons learned making Future Soul
Tedeschi Trucks Band’s sixth album, Future Soul, containts plenty of guitar-driven fun, but it arrives with lessons learned. “Sometimes you throw ideas out there and get rid of them before they’re finished,” Derek Trucks says. “There’s no harm in writing a song that doesn’t see the light of day – and there’s a lot of those!”
He adds: “More often than not you stumble across something that sounds like it’s worth chasing down. There’s lots of great writers in this band, and I always trust the collaboration.”
Trucks – one of the most accomplished players of his time – keeps his playing fresh. “You’re always looking to refine a sound that you’re familiar with, but you’re also always looking for inspiration and to dig into that.
“When you’re playing using tube amplifiers, you’re chasing shit down every single night. There’s never two nights in a row where you go, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s it – Great!’ It’s a never-ending search.
“Some nights you feel you can play anything, but some nights you’re pushing a boulder uphill. But that’s the charm of it: it’s never easy and you can never take it for granted. But that’s a common thing for guitar players – it’s a lifelong search.”
Did you mostly write your parts for Future Soul on acoustic or electric guitar?
It’s a mix for me. You’ll hear a line or a melody in your head and you find it where you can find it. When we get into writing mode and I pick up a guitar, I follow it where it leads me.
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From a guitar perspective, what signals you’re on the right track?
When you know, you know. There’s a tune on the record called Who I Am, which was one of the first ones we wrote, and you could tell right out of the gate that the riff sounded great. But other ones are slow burns; they grow on you. When you finish writing it you end up liking it more than you did with first instincts.
Were you mostly leaning on your SG while writing and recording?
I write mostly on my SG, just not plugged in. I have a few small Fender Princetons in the room that sound incredible – I wrote with those too. I used an old ’58 or ’59 Flying V on a few tracks, a lot of acoustic guitars, and a few Les Pauls, which I don’t play all that often.
I used the Flying V on the track Future Soul. I wanted a super-aggressive sound, and the V is just incredible. I had this Octavian peal and just overdrove the shit out of the amp. It’s a lot of fun to play an instrument you’re not used to and getting a sound you’re not used to. So that track stands out.
I used a 1960 Les Paul on the outro of I Got You, which almost has a Duane Allman or Dickey Betts sound – I was kind of hearing that “family sound” in my head.
For new listeners, which track would you say best reflects where you and the band are at now?
I Got You feels new and fresh, and I think Future Soul is great. For me personally, the really simple guitar solo on What in the World is fun. That was one of the last ones I tracked.
There was a blank space for a solo – that’s always the most daunting, because you don’t wanna play some shit that sounds silly. You have to live up to the rest of the track. The longer you wait to play the solo, the more daunting it seems.
But when I finally got around to doing it, just kind of happened, and I felt like, ‘That feels like it belongs here,’ which was a relief! But I really like this record. You can start at any spot and it’s a good representation of the band.
A couple of months back you had the opportunity to play Jerry Garcia’s Tiger guitar.
You could tell everyone in the room thought I was buying it. Maybe it helped!
My buddy Bobby Tseitlin was involved with buying that thing. I happened to be in New York with a night off, so I went down to the show. I was sitting next to Bobby. I was actually trying to bid on the John Coltrane horn because the estimate looked kind of reasonable.
It ended up being maybe ten times the estimate, so I was not involved with buying that! I was kind of dreaming about sitting on my couch playing John Coltrane’s alto – maybe it’s better that I didn’t get it! But I went in with that dream in my head.
The rumor was that you were buying Tiger.
Bobby ended up buying it for Family Guitars. Because I was sitting beside him, you could tell that everyone in the room thought I was buying it. Maybe it helped – people weren’t bidding the way they were on some of the other guitars!
But it was fun, man. I’ve never witnessed anything like that. I certainly couldn’t afford that guitar, but it was fun to play it and spend two or three days with it at the Beacon Theater, and see how fans of Jerry and the Grateful Dead revered that instrument.
Watching the way people reacted was pretty special – and I get it. I remember the first time I got to hold one of Duane Allman’s guitars, feeling like, ‘This is the reason I started playing the instrument.’
That guitar changed the way I thought about life and music. It’s a special thing that certain instruments have. So I understand the allure. Family Guitars are letting the people who really love and respect the guitar play it. That’s an important thing, I think.
What was it like to play Tiger?
It’s a very unique instrument. It’s super heavy and has a lot of different tones in it. It’s really articulate. It’s not a guitar where you grab the strings and bend them Albert King-style… I tried twice and broke two strings!
But by the second night I felt I could really get into it. I found some spots between the different pickup combinations where you could really get some unique sounds. And there were a few sounds where I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, there’s that Jerry shit!’
Had I not known it was a Garcia guitar, I would still have felt his vibe and sound
I went to bend a string, and I could feel it; I was like, ‘Oh, it’s about to give,’ and I backed off! I found the threshold, and I felt like we understood each other a little bit more on the second night.
It was fun having enough time to get to know the personality of the instrument. It’s a really articulate guitar, and when you listen to Jerry, he was a bluegrass player doing electric music with a dash of acid and blues. All the Jerry guitars I’ve had a chance to play have a very articulate sound from top to bottom. Every note speaks pretty clearly, which was the way he played. It makes sense to me.
You said could feel the DNA in Tiger.
Certain instruments have a sound, feel, and personality. Had I picked up that guitar and not known it was a Garcia guitar, something about it would have made me feel it had his vibe and sound.
It nudges you to play a certain way. I said, ‘I’m gonna play this thing like it’s a guitar – I’m not gonna play a bunch of Dead tunes, because everybody else that plays it will!! I’m gonna play slide on this sucker and see how it acts.’
It was really fun to play it as an instrument and then try to play it as his instrument. It seemed to react a little differently when you just played it. It wants to be played a certain way, I think.
Tiger sold for $11.56 million. Could you have ever imagined that?
I wouldn’t have guessed that would have been a thing – it’s a wild time! When Covid hit, you saw it with sports cars and Pokémon cards, and it’s happened with guitars too. But a guitar is a piece of art that you can carry with you.
I’d rather see a Duane Allman guitar go for that much than a card with art on it. But Pokémon cards are pretty cool – I collected cards growing up, so I totally get it! It’s fascinating to watch: the whole world has gone insane.
Maybe years from now, one of your SGs will auction for millions!
Maybe! But I won’t get any of it, and neither will my kids! That’s the way it goes; they wait until it’s been away from the fans or the family for years, and then they sell it. I gotta tell my kids to hide a few guitars under their beds for 10 years longer than they think!
What’s next?
We’re gearing up for a big summer tour, where we’ll be leaning into the new record pretty heavily. The band is in a really healthy spot; there’s a lot of joy coming off the stage. To be this far into being a touring band, and to have that kind of energy, is a special thing.
It can be a grind sometimes – and it still is with the travel and other stuff. But the music and the headspace on stage are really good. We’re gonna ride that as long as we can.
- Future Soul by the Tedeschi Trucks Band is out now.
Andrew Daly is an iced-coffee-addicted, oddball Telecaster-playing, alfredo pasta-loving journalist from Long Island, NY, who, in addition to being a contributing writer for Guitar World, scribes for Bass Player, Guitar Player, Guitarist, and MusicRadar. Andrew has interviewed favorites like Ace Frehley, Johnny Marr, Vito Bratta, Bruce Kulick, Joe Perry, Brad Whitford, Tom Morello, Rich Robinson, and Paul Stanley, while his all-time favorite (rhythm player), Keith Richards, continues to elude him.
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