Shaggy Dawg Stories

As told by David Grisman to Mike Parrish

[From Dirty Linen #48 Oct/Nov '93]

In the nineties, Grisman is busier than ever, touring with the newest version of his quintet, keeping up an active collaboration with Jerry Garcia, and forming his own record label. After producing bluegrass recordings for Folkways in the early sixties and working with other companies as both a musician and producer, Grisman found himself at the end of the eighties, frustrated with the vagaries and inequities of the recording industry. With his wife, Pam Grisman, and long time friends Artie and Harriet Rose, he established his own label, Acoustic Disc. A handmade operation, staged out of the Grismans' house on the side of a hill in Marin County, the label has produced eight recordings, including a sampler (100% Handmade Music [ACD-8; 1993]) featuring parts of all the other projects. The partners in Acoustic Disc have combined musical skills, recording expertise, and business acumen to produce a small label that is artistically rewarding for the participants, acclaimed by the musical community, and financially successful.

In early June, Grisman and I sat down in his cozy office/home studio to discuss his career as a musician, bandleader, producer, and record company mogul.

I wanted to start by talking about the whole concept of Dawg music. Going back through your recordings, it seems like it was about the time of the Muleskinner project that you seemed to veer off into your own instrumental compositions?

Yeah, that's the first recording of Dawg music that ever came out, "Opus 57." In fact they just put out a video of that. It was fun but it was short-term; just sort of an album project and a TV show.

Had you been composing that sort of stuff earlier?

I had a list of tunes. I discovered early on when I was trying to become a bluegrass mandolin player that all of my heroes, like Bill Monroe and Frank Wakefield, wrote original tunes, so I figured that was just part of the package. I didn't really have a vehicle. I played in some bluegrass bands early on, but bluegrass is largely a vocal style, so you might get one or two instrumentals per show, and one would be a banjo tune. I started writing tunes but they mostly remained on a list. It's interesting, there's an album called Early Dawg on Sugar Hill. Simultaneous to my playing career I had a record producing career, were I started editing records and working on album projects for Folkways and County Records. My good friend Artie Rose, who I've known for at least 30 years and is now one of my partners in Acoustic Disc, was the first Dawg guitarist. He would come up every Friday night and we would play these original tunes that I was writing. That was what kept me going. Some of those were taped and are on that record, like the first version of "Opus 57" which was later on the Muleskinner record. I started writing those tunes in the early to mid Sixties.

Those bands [Great American String Band and The Great American Music Band] started with a gig at the Great American Music Hall. If you were to pinpoint the beginning of Dawg Music it was probably at that gig. It was Richard Greene and me and Vassar Clements. We had different guys in the band on different nights, ranging from Taj Mahal on bass, Jerry Garcia on guitar. David Nichtern, who had just left Maria Muldaur, was learning my tunes; he was real interested in my music.

This was the first time that I had played with Vassar since Old and In the Way. We played "Dawg's Rag," a lot of these original tunes. Once I had a vehicle for getting these tunes played, I started playing them more and more. Richard Greene and I kept getting called for these odd jobs, but we never really had bands at the time. We fell into it by accident. Since neither of us really sang very much or wanted to sing, we noticed that we were going over without singing. We just endeavored to put as much variety into it as possible.

You also had Jerry (Garcia) there for some of those shows?

Right, but after a few months we decided that it was a great concept but we needed our own sidemen. We had all these great people sitting in but we couldn't count on them consistently at gigs. Both Richard and I found different guitar players at the same time. I found this guy John Carlini who had come to San Francisco as part of the show Grease. He was one of the first guys who had absorbed both the bluegrass and jazz mentalities, and could appreciate them both on their own levels. He started writing these tunes out and we started hanging out and working on these then. I called up Richard and told him we had a guitar player, and he told me he had found a guitar player named Ellen Kearney who had been working with Maria Muldaur and was quite a good rhythm guitar player. Then we found a bass player named Joe Carroll, so we had two guitars, a fiddle, mandolin, and bass. That lasted about a year or nine months and then Richard got an offer to go with Loggins and Messina. He took off and I was left with sort of a concept, and a lot of these musicians kept showing up at my doorstep. There was the bass player, Joe Carroll, and then I was teaching mandolin lessons in Sausalito, and my ace student was a guy named Todd Phillips. I stopped giving the lessons but he kept coming to my house and I would trade him mandolin lessons for mandolin bridges. I liked the sound of two mandolins, and one thing I always missed in bluegrass was playing rhythm, the rhythmic role of the mandolin as laid down by Bill Monroe. I was in a couple of bands where the rhythm kind of sagged whenever I took a solo, so I kind of missed that backbeat behind me. I had this idea where I would have a rhythm mandolin player. I dug it, and so did Todd Phillips. One day Todd brought over this young fiddle player named Darol Anger who had apparently taped some Great American Music Band shows and had learned all these tunes -- all of Richard Greene's parts note by note. So then we had two mandolins, fiddle, and bass.

Along about that time, the spring of 1975, Bill Keith, the banjo player, called me up and wanted me to play on his album in Washington, D.C. I showed up there and met Tony Rice for the first time. I played him a tape of the Great American Music Band and he flipped out over it. It was like eight in the morning, a roomful of people, and nobody else could care less, but Tony Rice just about said "take me." I think he said "I'd give my left nut to play this music." He was just completely smitten with it and made me come home with him to Lexington, Kentucky, where he was working with J.D. Crowe and Ricky Skaggs in the New South. He was going to do a tour with J.D. Crowe which was to be his last tour, so I said, "Why don't you come a week early to rehearse and we'll see what happens." So he did that and he called me one night in the middle of the night from Japan and said, "I've just given J.D. Crowe my notice." He went back home, packed his bags, drove out to California, and moved into my basement. We rehearsed for about four months before we ever played a gig. That band came out, the first gig was sold out, and there it was. We were all into rehearsing, the real work ethic.

When Tony left it was Mark O'Connor who came in as the guitar player. He was 17 when he joined the band, but he was 18 before he played his first gig with us.

It seemed after the first group you brought in a whole different group, with people like Mike Marshall.

Mike was in the group before Tony left. You see, Todd Phillips had always been mostly a bass player. When I met him he was taking up the mandolin, but he always had this part of him that wanted to play bass. Ultimately Mike Marshall showed up and he became the mandolin player and Todd became the bass player. Then I got a tour with Stephane Grappelli, just a three week tour for which my band would back him up. So I came to a rehearsal and thought everyone would be thrilled to be playing with Stephane, and Tony said, "I'm not gonna do that. I came out here to play `Dawg's Rag.' I'm not gonna play `Sweet Georgia Brown'." It had been four years and Tony and I never really clashed but Tony had a very rigid concept of what that music was. He was so great at what he did. He never wanted to play long solos but I wanted guys to just explore on some tunes.

I always liked playing a swing tune like a swing tune. Contrary to what people might infer from my recordings, I was never trying to achieve a mishmash of styles. I was always trying to get a Latin tune to sound like a Latin tune, or a swing tune to sound like a swing tune.

I knew I could never fire Tony Rice, so his declining this tour sort of gave me an out. Plus I had all these guys calling me up -- they must have smelled that gig. Russ Barenburg -- several guitar players. And I made Mark audition. I had never heard him play my music on guitar. He came out and learned 20 of my tunes in one day. At one point, I asked him if he could play something a little different, something about the rhythm. I asked him to play something else and he said "Sure." Mark was a lot more flexible and open to stuff. He could play anything.

Then this other guy, Rob Wasserman showed up. He showed up at my manager's office about three years before, so I mentioned to him that we might have this gig with Stephane Grappelli. I had started my second Dawg album, Hot Dawg, and I had developed this severe case of tendinitis because I decided to play all the rhythm parts myself. I just burned off my left arm doing that.

I spent about a year battling with tendinitis. I just had to take a break at that particular time and not play. I hired Mike Marshall to play rhythm parts on my record. Mike was a tremendous mandolin player, but mostly lead. What I didn't realize was that the rhythmic concept is deeper than the lead concept, and it's not that these guys didn't have it in them, it was that I had more experience and knew what I wanted. Plus I had written the tunes, so I was kind of a pain in the ass to those two mandolin players because -- at least in Mike's case, he wanted to be out there soloing. Just what I needed, some guy out there each night blowing me off stage with my own axe, but it was all my own music, so I loved it.

If somebody had that kind of talent, at the time that band was one of the few places you could use it. Here's some guy who wanted you to get up there every night and blow your brains out, within reason. It was a great thing for everybody and I attracted those like-minded musicians who thought this is for them. They were young and didn't care about making a lot of money or supporting a family.

It seemed like this whole instrumental boom in the eighties could be traced back to the stuff you guys did in some ways.

Well, we did our part.

How did you feel about that?

Having trained all my competition? Or New Age? Well, I thought the New Age was sort of lame. There's an awful lot of music I've heard through my career that I thought was pretty lame and most of it has been pretty popular, so I tried not to think about it too much. I think a lot of New Age was -- I probably shouldn't be saying this -- a lot dumber than what I was trying to do. Similar sounds, but it was like musical wallpaper or whatever. It's just another trend, and I didn't really feel any connection to it except that some of my associates were involved with it. For example, Mike and Darol were on the Windham Hill label.

This current group seems to be one of the most durable you've worked with. Has it been together for three or four years?

Jim Kerwin's been with the group for eight or nine years, and I guess Joe Craven has been in the group for at least three years, and the other two guys for at least two. It's gone through the acid test of Dawg groups, all the problems that might crop up, and I addressed them. It's a lot of fun -- they know my music as well as any group does, and they're dedicated.

I have cut down on the amount of work I do for any number of reasons. The record company, a three year old kid, and I like playing but I also got tired of having a lot of lame gigs -- low paying, I got ripped off, certain kinds of gigs just got tiresome after 30 years. I know that the guys in my band would like to work more, and I would work more if there was more work at the level that I want. And they want it too -- who wants to go play dumpy clubs after you've played Carnegie Hall? Who needs it?

It's always nice to play more than one gig though. I don't mind playing a week or two. But that kind of work has kind of dried up, or I've raised my price to the point where it's got to be a classier gig for them to be able to afford me. If the demand ever comes back for more, I'll be there.

Even though you've been developing Dawg music over the years, you've come back every couple of years and done a bluegrass project. You seem to be drawn back to your roots, so to speak.

Yeah, I love bluegrass. Why put so much work into something and then abandon it? It's nice to have another thing to do. I really dig it - I wish there were some guys I could play it with on a more regular basis in the area.

I'll bet you're glad you were able to do the Bluegrass Reunion record now.

I was in touch with Red [Allen] pretty much until the end of his life. In fact, I made some tapes back in 1963 when I first met Red, of him and Frank Wakefield in Frank's kitchen, and they recorded 30 songs in one sitting, and we're going to put it out as the start of our archives series. It's kind of low-fi, but it's all there. It's sort of a glimpse of these two guys that no one's ever had -- just the two of them alone.

The nice thing about digital technology now is that you can probably clean it up pretty well.

Well, I haven't tried yet, but we'll see. It is what it is -- it was recorded on a Wollensak tape machine, but it's great playing and singing, and that's the important thing.

As you were saying earlier, you've been doing production throughout your career. Was it 1990 when you started Acoustic Disc?

We started in late 1989, but the first record came out in 1990.

I've essentially been making records for a long time. I just get to make more records now and have to help figure out how to sell them, which is a different type of work. It's been an ongoing, interesting experience, and it's worked out real well so far.

Actually that first record was recording Frank Wakefield and Red Allen for Folkways and basically getting them to the studio was a large part of it. I called up Mo Asch because Red Allen had sold him a tape of theirs and I had heard the material on the tape and felt they had stronger material, especially for a folk music label like Folkways, so I talked to Red and he said "Talk to Mr. Asch and see if we can do it." So I just called Mo Asch out of the blue and he gave me three hours in a studio in New York on a Sunday evening. A friend of mine, Peter Siegel, and I were involved in the production of that, and he was a more experienced recorder and engineer and producer at the time. He taught me how to edit tape. Peter went on to become a producer for Elektra Records and then become president of Polygram for a while in the seventies. Anyhow, we recorded Red and Frank for Folkways, and actually went on to start a small record label, Silver Bell Records. We put out three 45 singles. Back then it was in mono and you got what you got. If you wanted echo on, you put it on during recording. And those records are still in print too, those Folkways things.

Have you produced all the Grisman band records?

Yeah. I never found anyone who knew what I wanted more than me. I needed an engineer, and I definitely have my perspective on what sounds good to me. And having my own studio -- this equipment was the guts of an old studio called 1750 Arch where I made many records.

Was that your studio also?

No, it was a studio in Berkeley that I found in 1975. The first thing I did there was a soundtrack for a film called Capone and then I made the first quintet album there. My Rounder album before that was made in Nashville, but after that one experience, no record company has been involved in any of my production, nor will they ever be.

Did you have a producer for that record?

No, I was the producer, but (Rounder President) Ken Irwin was there, putting his two cents in. I took the master tapes with me. I was pretty smart by the time I got to Rounder. I had already been through Elektra and I had negotiated record contracts before. I wrote the contract with Kaleidoscope Records and we had to renegotiate the contract because I had written one that they couldn't make money on.

When I started Acoustic Disc, I decided that the basic record deal in the music business is unfair. It makes the artist pay for everything by making it an advance on his royalties, which I think is unfair. In fact, for the first two records on Acoustic Disc I did make my record company pay for the entire production of the album, which I deemed was also unfair, so now we do fifty-fifty.

This way the production costs just get taken off the top. Whatever sales occur first go to pay that off and then you're into royalties, whereas the standard record deal makes you pay the entire recording budget out of the tiny share of royalty that the performer gets. By the time you pay back your budget out of royalties, the record company guys are already in fat city. They've financed their second house! Recording never paid off for me that much until I started this company.

My basic premise is quality over quantity. I don't want to become a slick music packager that just spews out stuff. I looked at the independent record racket and said, "There's two things to avoid here." One is not getting paid, so I solved that by making the product COD and no return. The other thing to avoid is putting out too many records, which I think almost every record company does. I always thought you ought to try to sell what you put out. You see, I'm on both sides, so I try to keep it pretty balanced. If I see something that's unfair for the musician, I can adjust it, and if I see something's not fair for the record company, I can adjust that.

Have people adjusted pretty well to the no returns policy?

They're always resisting that, but it's getting better. Everybody here understands this music. We're almost having to define ourselves by what we're not. That's one thing that sort of upsets me about the music entertainment business, which is really the entertainment business. I saw this little blurb on CNN business news a few months ago that said that last year had been a record year for the CD business -- more CDs had been sold than ever before. It said that 33% was rock and roll, 17% was rap and soul, and 17% was country. Period. If you add that up, it amounts to 67%. The other 33% wasn't even mentioned or acknowledged. That's all the real music in the world -- classical, jazz, folk, bluegrass, dawg music, ethnic music. It doesn't even get mentioned, even get acknowledged. I think there's something wrong with that because, to tell you the truth, that 33% is as large as anything else. I think it's kind of a conspiracy to sell a bunch of crap down the public's throats. It's been going on for a long time. They don't want people to find out about this other music; they might lose some customers!

It forces us to define ourselves by what we're not, because people are more familiar with that. But I'd rather be right than president, that's my attitude. Certain things mean more to me than numbers.

Another nice thing is that it gives you the opportunity to, in addition to your own stuff, put out things that you deem are valuable. I thought that releasing the Jacob de Bandolim stuff was a real public service, because you just couldn't find it in this country.

That's why I put it out, because I wanted it.

So is there going to be a Volume Two?

I have selected the material and we've been waiting for the tapes to come up from Brazil. That's in the works. There's a bunch of other stuff that I'm trying to license; great music that's been neglected. It's actually easier to license foreign things than American music for some reason.

From a contractual standpoint?

From the way they look at it. I guess if it's from another country, they just go "who cares?" It's like all those Bear Family Records reissues. Why doesn't MCA put out the complete Bill Monroe? It doesn't make sense to have to go to West Germany to get our own music. And if I wanted to put it out here, I probably couldn't.

At least Columbia put out their Bill Monroe material.

They put out a great set, but it is badly flawed. Actually, I felt like writing that guy a letter when the Monroe box came out. Oddly enough, a week later I got a letter from him, complimenting me on the Jacob de Bandolim set. Someone had turned him on to that and he thought it was the greatest, so he wrote me this nice letter. I called him up and thanked him. I did ask him about why the Monroe box was incomplete and he said, "Hey, it was hard to get them to put this much out." But somebody at CBS didn't have their thinking cap on, because in that size package they could have included three CDs. The book would've been no bigger, and everybody would have bought three CDs instead of two, and they would have had it all, a great document. I made my own DAT because I had it all on record, so I made the tape that's got it all in sequence.

I enjoyed the Radim Zenkl disc. It's the most "out there" of the records you've put out.

He's got some new stuff that's even more out there and yet not so gimmicky. That album was sort of dictated by a theoretical conceit -- the tunings followed a certain pattern. In his next stuff, he's going into his roots pretty deep. Radim is one of the bright stars on the mandolin horizon. He's a very dedicated guy, and his music is going to express a lot of that eastern European influence.

That type of mandolin sound doesn't get heard so much over here, but it's a big part of some Eastern European music.

Well it's balalaikas and stuff like that. The mandolin sound is one that's in every culture, whether it's a bouzouki or a balalaika. I guess they have some mandolins there, but I don't think it's that big a tradition in Europe. Well Italy, certainly. It's just an instrument, you can play anything on it.

Enrique Coria's disc is really great.

It's one of my favorites. He's in the group Sukay, and they did some recording here on their last record. I did two cuts with them. During a break he was playing this music, and I just thought it was the greatest. It turned out to be his lifelong dream to make an album of this stuff. So he came in for about five days and we laid down that album. I'm real proud of that one because I engineered it, and I've gotten real good compliments on the sound of it. It's really his sound.

That was all recorded with microphones? You didn't use any direct input?

Oh, no.

When Jerry Garcia started coming over here, he had an acoustic guitar with one of those pickups on it. We had three channels, and one of them was the pickup, and I'd come in and erase that track.

I'm pretty much of a purist about microphones as opposed to pickups. There are some compromise things -- these small mics that mount on instruments. But basically, the whole concept behind acoustic instruments was that these sounds had to be transmitted through the air. They were built to be heard by people sitting in a room. They weren't built to be heard by having your ear mounted on the surface of the soundboard or the bridge or inside the instrument. That can only produce a false sound. I think that acoustic sound is the best, and it's the only situation that enables the musician to create the sound with his hands.

I think part of musicianship should be tone production on an acoustic instrument, and when that's missing from one's musical experience, I consider them less than a complete musician. However, there are many musicians who I admire greatly who have overcome that obstacle to create their own sound. I certainly wouldn't demean their musicianship in any way. But I still prefer the acoustic experience.

Do you work with distributors?

That's probably about 90-95% of our business. We probably would have thought a lot more sales would have taken place through mail order, at gigs or whatever, but as soon as we put out the Garcia-Grisman record, people started latching onto our program, and now they're on it. There are basically two types of distributors: those who will pay you and those who won't. We have basically eliminated the ones that won't. And my attitude is, "Hey, this puts you more in touch with your bank account. If you can afford this, do it." You don't have to buy 500, buy 25. If you don't think you can sell it, don't buy it. Why make me press up 5,000 of something when you figure you can send them back if they don't sell? In the three years we've been in business, I've seen three distributors go belly up. I've been in this business for 30 years and it's the same people floating around. I know there'll always be someone around to sell the stuff, and I don't really care if it's this one or that one. It's a very simple decision for me to make. Who's got the bread? Who wants to do business? That's just math. I think I've got something that people might even need. I know they want it, but they might even need it. It's not for everybody, but I think there should be enough people out there who enjoy what we're doing. I deal with a lot of music that slips through the cracks. That's difficult to deal with, I'll concede that, but it's worth doing.

From a marketing standpoint, the problem the radio stations and record companies have is "What section do we put this stuff in?"

I have a solution for that. I want to make our own divider cards. I think we should have a divider for each product, and it should have our little 100% Handmade Music logo. There can be Acoustic Disc music in almost any category - - classical, jazz or whatnot. On the back of the divider, you can say, for example, "Enrique Coria - file under classical, ethnic, folk" or "Bluegrass Reunion - file under bluegrass, country, folk." You have to lead them by the hand because they won't know by themselves. We're just trying to inch our way there. We're doing a little radio promotion now, taking out ads. We're working on it, but we have to move slowly. But, hey, we have a 50% Grammy-nominated success rate. And that's what's really kept me going through the whole thing; peer recognition. A musician that I admire saying that he appreciates what I'm doing goes a long way.

Do you want to talk about what's in the can?

Sure. There's Jacob de Bandolim Volume 2, whenever that can happen. We're working on a record with Jerry Garcia of kids' songs. Not for Kids Only is the working title.

Is that the second Garcia/Grisman album then?

Yeah, I guess so. So far it's just the two of us. It's very simple. We've also recorded a bunch of material for a Garcia/Grisman II, but we want to put this kids' album out first, because it's kind of a different concept. Neither of us has ever made a children's record, although I've worked on a few. We both have young kids.

Also, I've recorded a project with Tony Rice of 14 duets using 28 different great old mandolins and guitars. The concept is the sound of the great vintage instruments. We're trying to turn it into a coffee table book and a video as well. Radim is ready to make another record. I've been doing an ongoing projects of duets. Mike Seeger was just here to record a duet. Mark O'Connor, Vassar Clements, Edgar Meyer, Doc Watson. I've got a lot of stuff with Doc Watson that could get turned into an album. There are a bunch of licensing things that we're pursuing that I shouldn't mention. I've got about 60 duets that Jethro Burns recorded with Don Stiernberg, Jethro's last recordings, that Don made at his house that are pretty good. There's some Stephane Grappelli recordings, and I'm talking to him about a project as well. There's great music out there.

At least you seem to be enjoying it.

I don't want to get an ulcer or anything. As long as it's fun and profitable. Jerry kind of takes care of the profitable part. His participation has been really important. We've known each other for a long time, and we have a big common base of music that we both came out of. We've gone different directions, but it's all there. It's just real enjoyable, and I think for him, too.

You probably stretch him in some ways, providing some acoustic outlets.

The acoustic guitar is a stretch for him. It's more rigorous. I had him all the way up to medium gauge strings. Now he's back to lights, but at least it's not extra lights.

It's a whole different thing, playing acoustic guitar. It's a lot more physical.

He obviously enjoys it, and he sounds good. He's one of the few guys that's gotten electric where you can hear his guitar playing and know it's him. He's sort of carried that over to acoustic. He's got that distinctive tone.

I thought the acoustic guitar tone on the Garcia/Grisman record was really great. I'd heard some of those acoustic sets with the Dead, and it ended up sounding a lot more like electric guitars.

Nothing like going through microphones. It's so simple, but the industry has kind of gotten away from it. The technology is the same -- hi-fi recording hasn't really gone anywhere in about 30 years. They had it figured out in the fifties, how to record an acoustic instrument or a voice. All the great microphones were developed in the fifties. Automation, millions of tracks, it's all about other stuff. I've gone into studios where they say "this has a great violin sound" and then they bring in some horrible fiddle player. If you want a great violin sound, get Vassar Clements.

David Grisman Quintet
Dawgwood
Acoustic Disc CD ACD-7 (1993)
Various Artists
100% Handmade Music Vol. 1
Acoustic Disc CD ACD-8 (1993)

Dawgwood is the second Grisman Quintet release on Acoustic Disc. It retains the same personnel as on Dawg '90, except that Rick Montgomery has replaced John Carlini in the guitar slot. It covers the usual wide range of acoustic textures expected on a Grisman recording, with such innovations as the be-bop outing "Jazzin' (with Joe-Bob)" and the Samba "Sea of Cortez," which features some nice percussion from Joe Craven. The title tune features an engaging melodic hook and a great counterpoint by flautist Matt Eakle. Two covers are included, Django Reinhardt's "Bolero de Django" and Jacob de Bandolim's "Assanhado." One of Grisman's early signature tunes is revived here as "New Dawg's Rag." The current version of his quintet is one of the most versatile and capable of his many aggregations, and Dawgwood is a fine showcase for their abilities.

100% Handmade Music Volume 1 is a sampler containing two tracks each from the seven Acoustic Disc releases to date. It is thus a good introduction to the various artists on the label, and offers listeners a chance to be exposed to unfamiliar names like Enrique Coria and Radim Zenkl without significant financial investment. A bonus track unavailable elsewhere is "Louis Collins," a traditional tune recorded by Grisman, Jerry Garcia, and Tony Rice during a jam session at Grisman's studio.

-- Mike Parrish (St. Charles, IL)

David Grisman -- A (very) Selected Discography

Even Dozen Jug Band Jug Band Music and Rags Elektra EKS-7246 (1963)
Red Allen and the Kentuckians Bluegrass Country Country 704 (1965)
Red Allen and the Kentuckians Red Allen Country 710 (1966)
Earth Opera Earth Opera Elektra EKS-74016 (1968)
Earth Opera Great American Eagle Tragedy Elektra EKS-75010 (1969)
Muleskinner Muleskinner Warner Bros. BS-2787 (1974)
Old and In the Way Round Records RX-103 (1975)
David Grisman Rounder Album Rounder 0075 (1976)
David Grisman Quintet David Grisman Quintet Kaleidoscope F-5 (1977)
David Grisman Hot Dawg A&M Horizon SP-731 (1979)
David Grisman Quintet '80 Warner Bros. BSK-3469 (1980)
David Grisman Early Dawg Sugar Hill 3713 (1981 [rec. 1960s])
Stephane Grappelli/David Grisman Grappelli-Grisman Live Warner Bros. BSK-3550 (1981)
David Grisman Mondo Mando Warner Bros. BSK-3568 (1982)
David Grisman/Andy Statman Mandolin Abstractions Rounder 0178 (1983)
David Grisman Acoustic Christmas Rounder 0190 (1983)
David Grisman Dawg Jazz/Dawg Grass Warner Bros. 1-23804 (1983)
David Grisman Acousticity Zebra Acoustic ZEAD-6153 (1985)
David Grisman Quintet Featuring Svend Amundsen Svingin' with Sven Zebra Acoustic ZEA-42108 (1987)
David Grisman Home is Where the Heart Is Rounder 2 LP Set 0251/2 (1988)
David Grisman Dawg '90 Acoustic Disc ACD-1 (1990)
Jerry Garcia/David Grisman Garcia/Grisman Acoustic Disc ACD-2 (1991)
David Grisman, Red Allen, and others Bluegrass Reunion Acoustic Disc ACD-4 (1992)
David Grisman Quintet Dawgwood Acoustic Disc ACD-7 (1993)

Other Acoustic Disc recordings

For further information, or to obtain recordings, contact Acoustic Disc/ Box 4143/ San Rafael California 94913. 1-800-221-DISC.

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