“We Are Everywhere”: Rich Mahan’s Musical Journey from Sweetwater to the ‘Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast’ 

“I feel incredibly fortunate to have been doing this as long as I have,” Rich Mahan says of a life immersed in music. Mahan is a guitarist and singer-songwriter, whose latest solo album—the follow-up to 2018’s Hot Chicken Wisdom—will be released in 2024, preceded by a single in December. He also takes on a variety of radio promotion and marketing projects for Rhino. In addition, over the past few years, Mahan has utilized his skill set as an audio producer and engineer along with his vocal facility to create and co-host podcasts, most notably the Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast with Jesse Jarnow.

Mahan takes a moment to reflect on the evolving popularity of the band he first saw as an 18 year old in 1985. “Grateful Dead has sort of become its own genre of music now, which is kind of cool,” he says. “If you go to a bar, there’s a singer-songwriter night, there’s an open mic night, there’s a blues night and there’s a Grateful Dead night. That speaks to the wide appeal of this music, and the longer it’s out there, the more people keep getting on the bus. They’re really more popular now than they ever have been. The Grateful Dead are a band, but the Grateful Dead are also a culture. I can’t go to a new town without running into a Deadhead. Instantly, we’ve got something to talk about and I walk away with a new friend. I know it’s almost a cliché, but we are everywhere.”

As he then considers the full scope of his career, Mahan adds, “It’s a blessing to be sure, and I love it. To be able to spend your life working with music, either playing music or telling people about good music, is just wonderful. It feels good.”

What was your entry point into the music industry?

Just a love of music, really. I started out playing music when I was a kid. I took piano lessons and then switched to guitar as soon as I saw a band at the junior high talent show play “Since You’ve Been Gone” by Rainbow and the place went upside down. I was like, “Oh, I’ve got to get in on that action.” So I switched to guitar and then started playing in bands in high school and through college.

I just kept going, and when I got out of college, I moved up to Marin County. That was in 1991, and the Dead were still in full swing. Bobby and Jerry would pop into the Sweetwater where I worked in Mill Valley—the original one on Throckmorton. It was a killer club.

I was totally immersed in this amazing music scene. Then when the dotcom thing hit the Bay Area, everything slumped pretty hard up there and I moved back down to LA. That’s when I got in a band called Shurman and we were signed to Vanguard Records. We played Red Rocks and toured with Blues Traveler, as well as Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers. I saw the country that way. That was also my first time in Nashville, where I live now.

After I split with Shurman, I went back to LA and a friend of mine named Rick Camino, who was working catalog at Capitol Records, asked me if I wanted to come over and help him for a little while. So I started doing radio promotion with him. Within about 18 months, I was over at Rhino running the radio department. It just made sense to me. It clicked.

Can you talk about your time at Sweetwater?

Sweetwater was the cool club in Mill Valley. Jeanie Patterson was the owner, and she did all the booking, too. She was from Texas and she knew all these killer musicians from Texas and Oklahoma. Little Village played there. JJ Cale, John Lee Hooker, Stephen Bruton, Anson Funderburgh & The Rockets all would play there. I saw so much good music. I worked the door first and then they trained me as a bartender but I didn’t like it, so I didn’t stick with it.

When Jeanie decided she was going to retire [at the end of 1998], everybody was telling her: “Don’t do it; don’t do it.” I wrote her a letter saying, “I want to thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to work with you and see all these great bands.” Then I listed all the bands and I said, “Here’s what I learned from Anson Funderburgh… Here’s what I learned from Ry Cooder while hanging out working the soundboard…” I thanked her for everything and she wrote me the most beautiful letter in response. I can’t say enough good things about Jeanie Patterson—rest her soul—the old Sweetwater scene and the crew that worked there.

I saw RatDog at Sweetwater—I’m pretty sure it was their first show, although they didn’t call it RatDog yet. It was Bobby, Rob Wasserman on standup and Jay Lane on drums. Then after that show was over, Bobby invited us up to his house to hang out and party. If I had a time machine, I’d go to Marin County back then. It was amazing.

Here’s something that speaks to Jeanie’s character. My band Avocado Sundae— we still get together and play once or twice a year in California—had the Halloween gig at Sweetwater and it was on a weekend. Well, Sammy Hagar came in one day when I was working and he was like, “Hey, Jeanie, I want to play on Halloween.” She told him: “Sammy, we already have Avocado Sundae playing.” He said, “Come on, reschedule them. I want to come in. We’re going to do this cool thing.” She was like, “I’m sorry, Sammy. Avocado Sundae is great and they pack the house.” So she turned down Sammy Hagar. He didn’t realize I was standing there or that I was in the band.

We need places like that. Musicians need those safe spaces where they feel supported, because let’s face it, when we’re by ourselves and we’re doubting ourselves, we can have really fragile egos. You’ve got to have supporters of the arts like that.

Thinking back on that time, what’s the first Sweetwater show that comes to mind?

 John Lee Hooker. The band was up there doing “Boom Boom.” He wasn’t onstage yet and John Lee comes out of the back and walks down that hallway because the green room was downstairs. It’s an old Victorian building—I think it’s a clothing boutique now. He comes down the hallway, just walking slowly. Then they help him up on the stage, he walks over to the mic, looks around the room and goes, “Howwww, howwww, howwww, howww!” The place blew up. It just blew up. I’ve never felt a wave of energy like that. It was pretty badass.

Stepping back to your first Grateful Dead experience as a fan, how did that come about?

My folks liked the Dead. I wouldn’t call them Deadheads, but they caught the November ‘73 shows at the Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis, and they had some Grateful Dead vinyl. My dad had a pretty good record collection, including Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty. Where I grew up, which is in Palos Verdes, people liked one of two bands—the Stones or the Dead. So there was a big contingent of Deadheads in my hometown, and it was unavoidable that I was going to get sucked into it. So my parents had that knowledge of what the Dead were and what the scene was like.

It got to the point where the Dead were playing in LA a few times a year, and in November ‘85, I caught the shows at Long Beach Arena. I was 18 years old. Those were my first shows and I’ve got to say I was taken by the scene, the people and the vibe more than the live performance. That’s what got me coming back to the next one. I think my next shows were at Irvine Meadows. Once it clicked, though, it was off to the races.

How did the Dead influence you as a musician?

The thing that I had in common musically with the Dead, right off the bat, was the blues because my dad was really into blues-rock music, and he had a couple of cassettes that got me going on roots and blues music. One of them was The Beano Album, Eric Clapton with John Mayall and the Blues Breakers, which is a textbook of great blues-rock playing. Also, Delaney & Bonnie On Tour with Eric Clapton.

My dad was a Clapton fan and both of those albums started me woodshedding lead guitar. So then when I got to the Dead—I heard “Little Red Rooster” that first weekend [on 11/16/85]—I thought it was cool. So I started getting into the Dead and that opened me up to a lot of stuff.

I really resisted country music when I was a kid, and all my uncles were like, “You’re going to love it.” Eventually, I did come to love classic country music—all the stuff that twangs real hard. The Dead did, too—they played a few Merle Haggard tunes and made it cool to investigate classic country. I found a bunch of great music that way.

Then their whole approach to improvisation, jamming and just being fearless makes you such a better musician. If you’re not afraid to get off book and just play, it expands your musical vocabulary in a way that no other approach will.

I play every other week with a Jerry Garcia tribute band here in Nashville down at Acme. They have Grateful Mondays, which alternates between Hooteroll?, which is the Jerry Garcia band that I play in, and Stolen Faces, which is a Dead tribute band. Our other guitar player in Hooteroll? is Mike Lawson, who played with Merl Saunders and The Funky Friends—Avocado Sundae got to open for Merl once, which was great. If you look at the song list that Jerry played over his career in his solo bands or with Merl or Legion of Mary or any of the other lineups, you can tell what a music fan he was by his vast song list that dipped into all these different worlds of music.

The Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast is not your first podcast. How did you get started in the medium?

As I mentioned, I had been working radio. Back in the day when FM hit, they came up with these things called radio specials. You’ll still hear them occasionally on terrestrial radio—“Tune in Saturday night to hear how Led Zeppelin II was made, featuring new interviews with Jimmy Page and Robert Plant.” It was an hour pre-produced radio show that would play whenever a radio station wanted to do it.

So when podcasts started happening, me and a fellow named Dennis Scheyer started The Rhino Podcast. We were like, “We’ve got access to all these artists, why don’t we interview them and do our own podcast every other week?” We did that for five or six seasons— it’s on hiatus now.

In between that, I was talking with Doran Tyson, who was running the Grateful Dead thing at Rhino, and was like, “There’s not a Grateful Dead podcast. We have to have one.”

So we worked on it for a while and tried to get things together. It was Doran’s idea to bring in Jesse Jarnow. I’ve got to give full credit to Jesse because without him, this podcast would not be what it is. Jesse is a great writer and he’s painstakingly exact with his research.

After Jesse came on board, we started putting things together and trying to figure out what the format was going to be. In 2018, we took a trip to the Bay Area for a week and interviewed Bob Matthews, Steve Brown, David Gans, Blair Jackson and a lot of other people about the Dead.

Here’s where my Pro Tools experience really came in handy. I brought my mobile rig up and we recorded people all over the Bay Area. Then we came back with all this content and started to put it together. Eventually, we came upon the idea of “We’ve got 2020 coming up and it’s going to be the 50th anniversary of Workingman’s Dead, so maybe we can there.”

So we went song by song through the album and it really worked well. We’re kind of working on a 50th anniversary timeline, so we’ve got another 12 years of 50th anniversaries, but there’s all kinds of other things that we’ll cover in between, too. We’ll find an interesting topic and dive into it. There’s kind of a mini-series we’ve run called “Bear Drops” where we focus on Owsley and talk about something people may not know about him. He was a multifaceted character.

By this point, I wouldn’t say we’re a well-oiled machine, but we’re kind of greasy. [Laughs.]

How long in advance will you begin work on an episode or a season?

Generally two to three months before the first episode’s going to come out and sometimes longer. We’ll have a weekly Deadcast call where we get together and talk about what we think. For instance, we’re coming toward the end of our eighth season right now and we’ve got to plan out the next season. Generally during this time period, the Dead were releasing a studio album a year and we do two seasons a year. We’re doing the 50th anniversary of Wake of the Flood now, and it’s pretty obvious what one of the seasons next year is going to be about [1974’s From the Mars Hotel]. But we are not sure what the other one is about yet, so we’ll say, “OK, this would be cool to cover. Who would be great to talk about that? Who do we need to get an interview with?”

We’ve amassed quite a few interviews at this point, so we may already have some things that will work for that season, but we have to do a search through our interviews to see what content we have that could apply to it. For instance, we’ve done plenty of interviews with Donna Jean at this point. She’s great and she remembers all kinds of stuff. Mickey’s always a good interview, he’s super fun. We’ve talked to Bobby a few times. We’d really like to get Phil for an interview about Mars Hotel. Obviously, he’s got a couple of songs on this one and we want to let him talk about his art.

Do you have a favorite interview you’ve done for one reason or another?

The one that just popped into my mind was Alice Cooper for The Rhino Podcast. I know that’s not the Deadcast—I’ll get back to the Deadcast—but he’s the nicest guy and he tells the best stories. If people have a couple extra minutes, I’d encourage them to tune into that episode.

I also loved sitting down with Bob Matthews at his house in Sebastopol before he passed. He was slowing down for sure, but the cancer wasn’t at the point where he was incapacitated, and he was really into talking. He told us some great stories and was getting into the nuts and bolts of early Grateful Dead.

Bob was the original bass player for the New Riders of the Purple Sage. He said, “I was doing that and I was recording for the Dead. Then Jerry took me aside and said, ‘Bob, what do you want to do? You’ve got to do one or the other. Do you want to be an engineer or a bass player? You can’t do both. You’re not going to excel at either one if you keep doing both.’”

Bob obviously chose to be an engineer, but I loved hearing him talk about that and asking him questions about how he felt about certain things with the Grateful Dead. It was just so special.

Do you have a favorite episode or season?

I really liked the Europe ‘72 season because we would keep up with the tour. Each episode would cover the shows that happened in Europe 50 years ago to the week. I loved that.

It was hard though, because when you’re doing these Deadcasts, they take a long time to write and they take a long time to produce. Meanwhile, I still do the radio marketing and promotion for the Grateful Dead’s music via Rhino, along with some of their other releases. So it’s busy, but it’s very gratifying work.

Something else I enjoyed was editing together the “Dire Wolf” supercut [which presents a version of the song that unfolds chronologically, beginning with the first performance in 1969 and ending with the final one in 1995.] That was great fun. I enjoyed seeing people respond to that the way they did and we’re doing it again.

We’re able to get into individual songs because we have access to the stems of these studio recordings. So I came up with an idea for something that we now call Playing in the Band. Doran Tyson and I developed it. It’s an online mixing board for Grateful Dead music that allows you to go in and mute or solo different players. So if you want to study what Bob does rhythmically and get a great understanding of how he plays guitar, you can go in and solo Bob’s parts on these songs.

The new version has songs from Wake of the Flood in conjunction with the release of the 50th anniversary of the album. Before that, we did a bunch of songs from Sunshine Daydream, the Veneta show in August ‘72.

I love playing along with it. I’ll mute Jerry and be Jerry on “China Cat.” Or I’ll go in and hear what each guy is doing separately. A lot of times, when you listen to each of those individually, you’re like, “How is this even part of the song?” But then you put all the parts together and, boom! So I encourage people to go to dead. net/playingintheband. Even if you’re not a musician, it’s really fun to play with and there’s plenty more to come. I’ll say that in general, as well.