Jerry Garcia | Jerry's original Travis Bean guitar neck

Property of Steve Parish

Jerry Garcia

TB1000A guitar neck, ca. 1975

Ebony fretboard with mother-of-pearl block inlays, aluminum neck and headstock with 'T' cutout, number “164” die-stamped on rear of headstock.

An innovation when introduced, Travis Bean described their aluminum-necked instruments as “the first new developments in guitars since the 1930s.”

“I'm the kind of player who generally plays one guitar at a time so I can learn its idiosyncrasies...the guitar that doesn't have idiosyncrasies is the one I like... No other production guitar is like that – they're all completely different. That level of consistency in the Beans means a lot to me...As far as I'm concerned, the Travis Bean is the finest production guitar on the market” (Jerry Garcia, from a 1978 Guitar Player interview).

Jerry Garcia’s used Travis Bean models TB500 and TB1000. His TB1000 was heavily gigged throughout 1976-1977, including shows at Golden Gate Park and the Orpheum. Always up for customizing an instrument, Garcia eventually tried a new Bean neck on the guitar. 

“Big Steve” Parish: “I had to go to Draper’s in Palo Alto for a snare drumhead and the owner wanted to know where Jerry was as he had these new guitars to show him. These were the Travis Beans. I took one to Jerry and he thought that it was going to be too heavy when he looked at it, but he loved it when he played it. Jerry kept that one Artist model and played it for years afterward. One of the things he liked was how quickly you could change the neck out and that’s what he did after playing it for months, swapped out the neck, but this was his original one on that guitar and it got played a hell of a lot. I just hung on to this first neck.”

REFERENCE

Photograph © Ed Perlstein. To purchase a print, or view more of Ed Perlstein’s work, visit https://www.musicimages.com/.