[TI4-1009]

Waldo makes a valid point.

And as expected the crew falls in line.

No reason to troll

Exactly. This thread is a troll.

[hippieguy1954]

Waldo makes a valid point.

And as expected the crew falls in line.

No reason to troll

Exactly. This thread is a troll.

"Exactly" is incorrect in as I did not say this thread was a troll. This thread is not a troll. You are the one who likes to step on posts and troll. You are the one attacking me as "falling in line" which is total bullshit. Sounds like you have a personal problem. Carry on ya old fart!

[lightningbolt]

The only two that know the truth here are Doug and Tom.

The other reality is that Tom does work for the Garcia Estate and that work I would assume is with Doug's permission. Doug has a relationship with Tom and obviously doesn't mind Tom using his name. Maybe Doug even get's a piece of the action.....that is just my speculation.

But whatever the reality or the relationship, nothing in the quotes in the above post by Doug say he was the guy that did the sticker removal. None of them say that Doug was alone or alone with Jerry and no one else was present. I would think most artists would not credit their apprentice for anything typically.

What I do know is this dirt is out of "left field". Tom didn't make a ridiculous claim and the facts are that Tom being Dougs apprentice has the provenance to talk about most of this stuff from his first hand experience and has the relationships to prove it....something for all his research, which I respect....Waldo cannot claim.

And as far as Wolf's provenance...I never heard Jerry claim it was an Alembic regardless of the logo on the original headstock. Garcia always said it was an Irwin in any conversations that I have heard reported. He mentions buying Eagle and then having Doug...not Alembic build him Wolf.

Just my 2 cents....and lets all remember the name of this website.

[waldo041]

Once again Mike thrusts his age-old hardon against Tom Lieber.

Yawn.

Give it a rest.

Once again Mike thrusts his age-old hardon against Tom Lieber.

Yawn.

Give it a rest.

Thank you...this whole post/thread is really sort of weird and inappropriate.

I just want to add that I started a discussion pertaining to the actual design and details of instruments that were always stated as being made by 1 person, and it did not include a second until Doug had a bicycle accident that ended with a very traumatic brain injury. The money he made from the instruments at auction went for his medical bills and recovery. If he could make an instrument or any other instruments, he probably would because he could make a mint if he could produce them. However he cannot because he has a very traumatic brain injury! But Mr. Lieber is taking this unfortunate situation and has now sprung upon the scene(about 10'ish years ago) with all kinds of stories that sound exactly like the interviews Doug has had. He has no real substance in building either Wolf or Tiger for that matter at his own self admittance. He Left with Tiger in just pieces. But it's my hardon for the truth that is the problem, that is the troll? What kind of world do we live in? Am i really being a bully when I challenge fact from fiction? Is this some old article with this statement made? Or is this a new article with some pretty relevant information if it was actually verified. But HE, Thomas Lieber, personally told me when i dug in for information about Wolf that he had NOTHING to do with Wolf's rehab.

Personal attacks upon me were neither needed nor appropriate. If you have something to add to the discussion, like maybe actual verified accounts or the like, then by all means lets discuss the issue raised. But instead the real playground bullies show their face and it just gets pushed aside as some bullshit issue waldo is ranting and raving over! Did Lieber Build Tiger? Nope he was gone, claims a lot more but maybe only cut the wood as he stated. HE never rehabbed Wolf and now claims he in fact took the sticker off when Doug came up with the brilliant idea to inlay it! Really? This guitar is over 40 years old and this information just now rises to the top with no one ever verifying the information. No one can talk to Doug, ONLY Lieber! So He gets a second chance at rewriting his own history and actual attachments to each instrument. Like changing Lennon/McCartney to McCartney/Lennon, however, only Lieber's name has NEVER been associated to Jerry's Irwin's guitars until he associated himself with them. Doug himself never mentions Tom in any way shape or form in any of his interviews. Neither does Jerry. So if Tom is so instrumental in the design of "The Garcia" as he calls it, the Irwin Logo and all these prominent design and build ideas to these instruments was he really only an apprentice? He really does not deserve credit for the work he actually did? He is claiming it now, and ya'll have no problem with it. cool. , Doug never acknowledged his existence and neither did Jerry. You hear about the work Turner, Fuller, Ramroad, Parish, Cutler, Brawer OR what Irwin did to his instrumenst. But none of them state anything about Lieber. Until one of them do, or someone else states they were there when Tom was doing the work he has claimed he has done to Jerry's guitars. I am not buying it, as for the haters, i am having a discussion about the Grateful Dead!

https://www.rukind.com/viewtopic.php?f=359&t=12851

~waldo

[waldo041]

The only two that know the truth here are Doug and Tom.

The other reality is that Tom does work for the Garcia Estate and that work I would assume is with Doug's permission. Doug has a relationship with Tom and obviously doesn't mind Tom using his name. Maybe Doug even get's a piece of the action.....that is just my speculation.

But whatever the reality or the relationship, nothing in the quotes in the above post by Doug say he was the guy that did the sticker removal. None of them say that Doug was alone or alone with Jerry and no one else was present. I would think most artists would not credit their apprentice for anything typically.

What I do know is this dirt is out of "left field". Tom didn't make a ridiculous claim and the facts are that Tom being Dougs apprentice has the provenance to talk about most of this stuff from his first hand experience and has the relationships to prove it....something for all his research, which I respect....Waldo cannot claim.

And as far as Wolf's provenance...I never heard Jerry claim it was an Alembic regardless of the logo on the original headstock. Garcia always said it was an Irwin in any conversations that I have heard reported. He mentions buying Eagle and then having Doug...not Alembic build him Wolf.

Just my 2 cents....and lets all remember the name of this website.

Let us first clear up the misnomer you have stated. Doug Irwin was Hired by Alembic as an apprentice to Frank Fuller and Rick Turner. When Jerry walks into Alembic he finds a guitar on the wall that he likes that belongs to the apprentice Doug Irwin whom is already into the build for Wolf before Jerry even buys Irwins Eagle made at Alembic whom i am also sure took a nice cut of the funds paid for that Alembic sold guitar. Jerry commissions another instrument on the spot from him and wanting to keep all the money he takes Jerry, the instrument he was working on and creates Irwin guitars up into the hills. Now Lieber attempts to get an apprenticeship at Alembic but does not get the job and is told to go look for Irwin in the hills. So the wanna be apprentice finds the Alembic apprentice in a van down by the river. The latter is sarcasm.

Anyway, Wolf already has the Alembic Logo and Peacock and gets the final touches before getting delivered to Jerry. So Irwin an Apprentice of Alembic who has pretty much the entire Wolf guitar done and inlayed, puts some strat electronics in it and delivers it to Jerry as a what? A guitar made by an APPRENTICE at Alembic. Did Doug just magically learn the Alembic techniques used in Irwin guitars? Same damn Lennon/McCartney McCartney/Lennon argument. Wolf is an Alembic guitar, made by one of their apprentices who got greedy and got exiled and it did not work out for him in the end. When wolf was rehabbed with the broken neck it gave Doug the opportunity to remove the Alembic history of the instrument and only use his Eagle logo for the inlay and replaced the sticker. In Fact i rememeber Lieber specifically telling me he had no idea if the blaster was in or not in wolf he did not handle it. And that if there anything in there Alembic Irwin would have gotten rid of it because he hated them and vice versa. Unfortunate, but he is alive and can Verify any thing, but with a traumatic Brain Injury how can anyone put him into any duress to get a taped interview including Lieber in on all the info stated? Lieber has had that access the whole time, and has been asked to get that done several times. It does not happen, more and more info comes out that just puts Mr. Lieber into this position he has now. The Garcia Estate has never stated any of the information he never built Wolf or Tiger so tell me how being a part of the Garcia Estates benefits him? No one is not saying he was not there. I AM NOT SAYING THAT! And why would the Garcia Estate NOT endorse him? he got those guitars out of the GDP's hands so they can now use them for their benefit. Nice Photos of Jerry's girls standing behind the ones in the wild being played! i am sure it helps with revenue. Lieber is an asset to them, but i call bullshit on what he actually did and did not do because i grilled him when he first came on the scene before all his cross-talk began. That was part of my research. So my apologies if i want the world to know the truth on what is really happening with this fuckening.

~waldo

[milobender]

I second Waldo's commitment to the truth. This thread a troll? Hmmm...
I became suspicious of Tom's Tiger claims when he stated that Tiger was indeed hollow, and still weighed in at 13-14 pounds. I make 'em, and that is not possible, unless he planted lead weights in it somewhere...

I don't know anything first hand, but in this day of image/perception vs. fact, I like all the facts I can get.

[TI4-1009]

And why would the Garcia Estate NOT endorse him? he got those guitars out of the GDP's hands so they can now use them for their benefit.
~waldo

Well, that and Jerry's Will stating specifically that he wanted the guitars to go to Irwin. More slander.

[waldo041]

And why would the Garcia Estate NOT endorse him? he got those guitars out of the GDP's hands so they can now use them for their benefit.
~waldo

Well, that and Jerry's Will stating specifically that he wanted the guitars to go to Irwin. More slander.

No, he left them to Douglas Erwin, get your facts straight, he also built Rosebud and Wolf Junior that a Judge did not award him!

~waldo

[augustwest1]

I'll come at all this from a slightly different angle, and stipulate from the get-go that I know nothing about the actual facts.

Memory is an odd thing. People manufacture memories all the time, and there is no convincing them that those memories are wrong. And the longer they hold to those memories, the more vivid they become. I've experienced this with my own "memories." And in my line of work, I've seen it time and time again. Sometimes, it concerns utterly trivial details about meaningless events. Sometimes, it is much, much more serious and consequential. Sometimes, it's stuff like this -- important to people like all of us who really want to know as much as we can about what went down nearly a half century ago, but nobody is doing a life sentence based on Lieber's memories of who pulled the sticker off Wolf...

Still, the brain works basically the same way in all those situations (trauma aside).

All of which is to say: Lieber could be recounting a seminal period in his life, which probably only becomes more seminal as time goes on, and doing so in ways that are inaccurate large and small. Yet, he may still truly believe those memories are absolutely accurate. That's the way the brain works folks. (Pause long enough to reflect on your own brain, and I'm sure you'll agree. Or think about grandpa's tall tales...) Or, he could be recounting the facts with absolute accuracy.

On the other hand, Waldo has raised questions about Lieber's account, and not without reason. But that's different than saying the guy is an outright liar or fraud. He might just be wrong, and his memory inaccurate. Waldo makes his case with the information he has. If Waldo has said the guy is just plain lying, then sure, he's overplayed his hand. But I don't think he's said that. He's called Lieber's memory into question, and explained why.

As I see it, it's a conversation about things that happened 45 years ago that none of us were witnesses to. Judge for yourself. But it seems to me this is something we should be able to ponder, and even debate intelligently, without attributing any ill will, and without making any moral judgments, about the debaters.

[milobender]

Very well put. I've been dealing with my own issues of memory... Reality is a messy place.

[ac4468]

Very well put Bob. BTW.... I once caught a fish thissssssssss......... big

[TI4-1009]

Good point Bob. I was at Woodstock, but I've seen the Woodstock movie so many times over the years that sometimes I'm not sure exactly what I experienced (and I was stone cold sober) and what I am "remembering" via the movie.

"All the years combine
And melt into a dream."

[old man down]

Several questions.

From the interview, as directly quoted from the article attachment, we have:

“He grabbed me and told me to wait, while he traced it and explained he wanted to do an inlay of the image,” Lieber said. “When we brought it back to Jerry, he looked down at the guitar a few times and then asked how we saved the decal. Doug told him that we didn’t. It was maybe the happiest I’d ever seen Jerry and it was a great surprise for him. From that moment, the guitar truly became Wolf.”

1) Wasn't it a "sticker, and not a "decal?"

Decals are slightly transparent, and since Doug always had the beautiful through-body neck all the way down to the bottom of the guitar, it is hard to imagine him then putting a decal (or sticker) over his luthier woodwork, and delivering that "result."

2) When Irwin first delivered the guitar, 1973 sometime, did it have a nickname other than Wolf?

3) Who put the original "sticker" on? (Jerry, someone else?)

If Jerry had put it on, you'd think he would have recognized immediately that the inlay was not "blue" anymore, which was the color of the sticker.

4) On closeup pics of Wolf, there is a small "black" hole on the bottom left of the guitar. Anyone know what that is for?

[DeLuisguitars]

I’m going to chime in just to offer my two cents, so I want to introduce myself. I’m Greg DeLuis, I apprenticed with Tom Lieber. To get to the point, Tom has many artifacts and anecdotes from his time with Doug Irwin, particularly surrounding the inception of Tiger. He is absolutely a resource for the history of those instruments as well as the construction techniques that are a direct lineage from the 70s OG Alembic crew. I have a lot of respect for Tom. As for the arguments surrounding this, I guess for Waldo, old beefs die hard. It seems like an attempt to
discredit someone who was part of the OG scene. To his credit, Waldo is also contributing to the scene in a positive way, his preamps are regarded as top notch, although because I worked for tom he refused to sell me any haha. For me and many people here, we are fueled by the love for the music and I think that’s where this forum should reside, in love and positivity. Take a look at this link, it’s trailer for a documentary about Tom, which includes interviews from people that were a part of the scene during this time (Doug Irwin, Pete Sears etc). We also made a guitar for the Jerry Garcia Family while I apprenticed. In every way Tom Lieber has played and still plays an integral and positive part of this community.
https://vimeo.com/178219680?fbclid=IwAR ... dQG4q25Z-I

[Jon S.]

I feel a bit guilty even posting in this thread because I believe the best thing might be for it to reach its natural ending and for us to move on to other more uplifting topics. But as it's already at the top of the Active Topics page, I guess I'm not doing too much further harm in chiming in, too.

I come at this, too, as someone with no personal knowledge of any of the specifics.

I agree that historical accuracy is important and worthy of clarifying.

I also believe there is more interpretation to most historical renditions - even the best of them - than we often realize.

I further agree that everyone is entitled to post his or her historical views and interpretations freely when they're relevant to the issue at hand and eschew personal sidebars that don't contribute to a better understanding of the issue at hand.

I look forward to viewing the Lieber documentary when it becomes available even if it turns out, in the end, to contain the sorts of historical revisionism that soured me on Bohemian Rhapsody.