For Immediate Release:

BOB WEIR OF DEAD & CO. PLAYS D’ANGELICO ON STAGE TO HELP PROMOTE CHARITY AUCTION Weir Performed “Peggy-O” with the Signed, Customized Guitar in Worcester, MA Last Night

WORCESTER, MA – With Dead & Company getting rave reviews across the Northeast, continued a relatively-new tradition of playing a signed guitar on stage to help boost a charity auction.

Last night at the DCU Center in Worcester, MA, Weir played “Peggy-O” with a D’Angelico guitar signed by all the members of Dead & Company. The one-of-a-kind EX-SS guitar, which also features the Dead & Company logo on its pick guard, is being auctioned on the tour to benefit more than a half- dozen charities. Currently, the high bid sits at $11,500.

The guitar will be “Truckin’, up to Buffalo, ”on display and open for bidding tonight on the concourse as the First Niagara Center, and then will continue across the country with stops in Columbus, OH, Greensboro, NC, Atlanta, GA and more. HeadCount, a non-profit organization that promotes civic engagement and voter registration through music, organized the auction and is bringing it to most cities on the Dead & Company tour. The person with the highest bid by the end of the tour – from any city – will become the guitar’s proud owner.

Weir first played a D’Angelico guitar on stage during the 's Fare Thee Well shows last summer. That guitar sold at auction for $526,000, making it the 18th most expensive guitar ever sold and netting nearly $30,000 each for 17 different charities. Weir then played a similar guitar on stage at the Lockn’ Festival in Virginia in September, which fetched $65,000 in an auction. He also has been playing two other D’Angelico regularly throughout the Dead & Company tour.

The auction will benefit the organizations that were part of ‘Participation Row,’ a social action village put together by HeadCount at ’s recent Madison Square Garden concerts, and other charities invited by the band. The beneficiaries include the a charity established by members of the Grateful Dead in 1983; Love Hope Strength; a bone marrow donor screening organization, the Multidisciplinary Associations for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS); the Hawai’i Alliance for Progressive Action (HAPA); the environmental groups Mom’s Clean Air Force and Rock the Earth; and Reverb, which is running the greening efforts for the Dead & Company tour.

The auction also features a signed Dead & Company drumhead, and a signed tour poster.

Dead & Company is a new collaboration that includes Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir and drummers and . They are joined by singer-songwriter and guitarist , bassist of the Allman Brothers and Aquarium Rescue Unit, and keyboardist of RatDog and Furthur. Dead & Company’s first nationwide tour kicked off in Albany on Oct. 29th and culminates with a New Year’s Eve show in .

www.HeadCount.org 104 W 29th Street, 11th floor [email protected] New York, NY 10001 ph (917) 509-5572 fx (917) 522-9672

Founded in 1932 in New York City, D’Angelico Guitars is a world-renowned designer and builder of high-quality guitars and bass guitars.

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Contacts: Aaron Ghitelman, AaronG@.org, 718-938-5325 About HeadCount: HeadCount unleashes the power of musicians and fans to make a difference. Since 2004 we have registered over 300,000 voters, and motivated millions to be informed, vocal citizens. We turn the power of musicians, the passion of fans and the hard work of volunteers into organized efforts to drive participation. We make it easy for people to get behind things they believe in, so that the next generation of music fans will shape the future.

www.HeadCount.org 104 W 29th Street, 11th floor [email protected] New York, NY 10001 ph (917) 509-5572 fx (917) 522-9672