David Nelson’s long strange trip dates back just as far as the Grateful Dead’s. Nelson, Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter were all pals from the Dead’s humble beginnings in Palo Alto. He was there for the acid tests, he saw the San Francisco scene blow up only a few years later, and of course cofounded New Riders of the Purple Sage with Garcia and John “Marmaduke” Dawson.

It’s the week before Halloween and Brock Butler and Matt McDonald of Perpetual Groove are on different phones and in separate rooms within the same Atlanta recording studio. With two shows in Charleston, SC on the docket, and two more later in the year in Colorado, the band had taken to rehearsals to work out covers and dust off the tunes they’d gotten back to playing earlier in the year.

Perhaps the foremost interpreter of Grateful Dead music today and an accomplished guitarist, singer and songwriter in his own right, David Gans now shares with us his own well-crafted and heartfelt interpretations of some of the Grateful Dead’s best songs on It's a Hand-Me-Down, due out November 27th on Gans’ Perfectible Recordings label. The album is available on pre-order now on Fe