From WEFT press release: Fans of WEFT, Americana, and The Grateful Dead will be in for a special evening hosted by WEFT 90.1FM Friday, May 25th at 8 PM, at The Iron Post. The benefit concert for WEFT features Grateful Dead Hour producer, songwriter, music journalist, and author, David Gans. He will perform alongside the increasingly popular Champaign-Urbana Americana group (folk, swing, jazz and blues), The Curses with Benjamin Spoden (vocals, slide guitar), Chris Strand (vocals, upright bass), David Garcia (drums, percussion), David Tcheng (vocals, sax, flute, trumpet, melodica, double bell euphonium), and Claire Canon, vocals and violin.
Based in Oakland, CA., Mr. Gans is on tour and will stop off for the WEFT benefit at The Iron Post in Urbana, before heading out the next morning to Chillicothe, IL. for a 12-1 PM Saturday, May 26th performance at the Summer Camp Festival.
Tuesday, May 22, listeners can tune in for an interview with David Gans and his music on WEFT’s “From The Joshua Tree Inn” program, with guest host David Witzany. The station broadcasts Mr. Gans’ nationally syndicated program, The Grateful Dead Hour, Saturdays, 8-9 PM.
- YouTube Videos of David Gans
- Discography of David Gans
- Books by David Gans
- Other Writings by David Gans
- Photography of David Gans
- Music and Videos of The Curses
- The Curses on facebook
David Gans started out as a musician in 1970, playing guitar, writing songs and performing both as a soloist and as a member of various bands around the San Fracncisco Bay Area. He became a music journalist, working for BAM, a free San Francisco-based magazine, worked for Rolling Stones founder and publisher, Jann Wenner’s Record, a music magazine, from its beginning to its end, and was music editor of Mix Magazine for a while. As he says, “Writing for music magazines gave me access to musicians and producers and record company publicists. I got a million-dollar education from interviewing Leo Fender, Randy Newman, Fleetwood Mac, Steve Goodman, T Bone Burnett, Warren Zevon, Ted Templeman, and people like that. I spent time in recording studios, learned how the music business operates, rode in limos with the Doobie Brothers, got lots of records for free, and got paid for all of it.”
Magazine work gave way to book work. In 1985, his first book, Playing in the Band: an Oral and Visual Portrait of the Grateful Dead (co-authored with Peter Simon) about his long-time favorites, the Grateful Dead was published to critical acclaim. While he was working on his second book, Talking Heads: The Band and Their Music, he merged his talents and interests with the emergence of his first “Grateful Dead Radio Hour” on a local station, and found that he enjoyed the work. The program was syndicated on dozens of stations across the United States. Today he hosts the nationally syndicated radio show, “The Grateful Dead Hour“; “Tales from the Golden Road” on Sirius/XM Satellite Radio with co-host Gary Lambert, editor of “The Grateful Dead Almanac”; and the local weekly show, “Dead To The World,” on Berkeley’s KPFA. WEFT broadcasts The Grateful Dead Hour Saturday evenings at 8PM.
In the mid-1990’s, he resumed performing and writing songs. With the radio show paying his living, he the put out a duet album with Eric Rawlins, and released a topical single in 1997, “Monica Lewinsky,” that got a lot of airplay and publicity. All this enabled him to expand his touring base After more than twenty years of performing in the San Francisco Bay Area as a solo singer-songwriter and with various bands, Gans began touring nationally, which he continues to do today, including many festivals across the country. He has performed onstage with members of the Grateful Dead, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, Donna the Buffalo, Peter Rowan, Ollabelle, The Waybacks, Blueground Undergrass, Dark Star Orchestra, Keller Williams, moe., Hot Buttered Rum, the Rowan Brothers, and Henry Kaiser.
(Above taken from WEFT press release)