Story of the Pretzel Guitar 7/27/2020 from Relix

The Grateful Dead’s legendary Europe ‘72 tour—Sam Cutler’s magnum opus as the band’s tour manager—nearly killed him. “When we returned to America after the tour, I had a bleeding ulcer,” he says, calling from his current home country of Australia. “I went into a hospital, and nearly died.”

After Cutler recovered, he was given a gift by Jerry Garcia, perhaps because the guitarist had not visited his tour manager in the hospital. “To tell you the truth I think he felt a bit guilty, in a way, that he hadn’t come to see me,” Cutler admits. The gift was not get-well flowers or a card; it was a guitar, nicknamed “Pretzel” due to its pretzel-like body shape, that was one of the first built instruments by Alembic’s Rick Turner.  Cutler says that the guitar was “built for Jerry.” Turner remembers it slightly differently; he never mentions that it was built specifically for Garcia, but he does confirm that Garcia owned the guitar. “I mean Garcia saw it, thought it was cool,” 

Just a couple years later, the guitar vanished. It was stolen after Cutler put the guitar in storage around 1975, and its whereabouts were a mystery for a number of years.  He got a call from Turner saying that the guitar had resurfaced. “It must’ve been last November, this guy gets in touch with me and says, ‘I have a guitar that I think you might have made,’” says Turner. To confirm, Turner requested pictures of the guitar, and when he got the images back, he knew he had found Cutler’s instrument.

The guy was very nice actually, to tell the honest truth. He was very sweet about it. He said that he’d given 10,000 dollars for it, it was the only guitar he’d ever owned, it had been in a closet in his house for 25 years, which seemed highly improbable to me, but what the hell. I just wanted it back.”  As Cutler was not in the United States, he then enlisted his friend Jason Scheuner, who is himself a collector of Dead-related instruments including Phil Lesh’s “Mission Control” bass guitar, to handle the process of recovering the guitar. “Sam mentioned to Rick Turner that he wanted me to take the lead and sort of act on his behalf,” explains Scheuner. “He knew that I understand the intricacies of something like an instrument like this.” Scheuner also loaned Cutler the money to acquire the guitar.

While the guitar was never used on stage by Jerry Garcia, it is still an incredibly important piece of history. Many of its features—the stacking of different types of wood, the scalloped brass nut, the hand-wound (by Turner) pickups—became staples of the Alembic build style. “This instrument is a history lesson in the development of Alembic instruments, and all of the exotic instruments that stemmed from that,”  “It has all of these elements that became the signature elements of Alembic and Doug Irwin.