With Dead & Company getting rave reviews across the Northeast, Bob Weir continued a relatively-new tradition of playing a signed guitar on stage to help boost a charity auction.
Last night at the DCU Center in Worcester, MA, Weir played “Peggy-O” with a D’Angelico guitar signed by all the members of Dead & Company. The one-of-a-kind EX-SS guitar, which also features the Dead & Company logo on its pick guard, is being auctioned on the tour to benefit more than a half-dozen charities. Currently, the high bid sits at $11,500.
The guitar is now “Truckin’, up to Buffalo,” and will be on display and open for bidding tonight on the concourse at the First Niagara Center, and then will continue across the country with stops in Columbus, OH, Greensboro, NC, Atlanta, GA and more. HeadCount, a non-profit organization that promotes civic engagement and voter registration through music, organized the auction and is bringing it to most cities on the Dead & Company tour. The person with the highest bid by the end of the tour – from any city – will become the guitar’s proud owner.
Weir first played a D’Angelico guitar on stage during the Grateful Dead's Fare Thee Well shows last summer. That guitar sold at auction for $526,000, making it the 18th most expensive guitar ever sold and netting nearly $30,000 each for 17 different charities. Weir then played a similar guitar on stage at the Lockn’ Festival in Virginia in September, which fetched $65,000 in an auction. He also has been playing two other D’Angelico guitars regularly throughout the Dead & Company tour.
The auction will benefit the organizations that were part of “Participation Row,” a social action village put together by HeadCount at the band’s recent Madison Square Garden concerts, and other charities invited by the band. The beneficiaries include the Rex Foundation a charity established by members of the Grateful Dead in 1983; Love Hope Strength; a bone marrow donor screening organization, the Multidisciplinary Associations for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS); the Hawai’i Alliance for Progressive Action (HAPA); the environmental groups Mom’s Clean Air Force and Rock the Earth; and Reverb, which is running the greening efforts for the Dead & Company tour.
The auction also features a signed Dead & Company Remo drumhead, and a signed tour poster.
Dead & Company is a new collaboration that includes Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir and drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann. They are joined by singer-songwriter and guitarist John Mayer, bassist Oteil Burbridge of the Allman Brothers and Aquarium Rescue Unit, and keyboardist Jeff Chimenti of RatDog and Furthur. Dead & Company’s first nationwide tour kicked off in Albany on Oct. 29th and culminates with a New Year’s Eve show in Los Angeles.
Founded in 1932 in New York City, D’Angelico Guitars is a world-renowned designer and builder of high-quality guitars and bass guitars.
