by Joel Selvin
He started the band with his Mill Valley neighbor Rob Wasserman, a gifted bassist and musician with whom he had occasionally played as a duo over the previous ten years. Wasserman was a formidable figure who recorded his own unique 1988 album of bass duets with vocalists such as Aaron Neville, Rickie Lee Jones, and Bobby McFerrin. He had toured with Lou Reed and played with Garcia’s bluegrass buddy, mandolinist David Grisman, among many others. A serious, even dour artistic type ironically known as “Chuckles” around the stoner Grisman camp, conservatory-trained Wasserman favored the subtleties of the acoustic bass.
RatDog also included harmonica player Matt Kelly, a childhood friend of Weir’s. Kelly and Weir had played together in his band Kingfish during the seventies. Weir appeared on the first two Kingfish albums while the Dead were on hiatus in 1974. Kelly never left Weir’s orbit, guesting on occasional Dead sessions and remaining friends until they came together again in RatDog. They added thirty-one-year-old drummer Jay Lane just prior to Garcia’s death. A former member of quirky metal trio Primus led by bassist Les Claypool, Lane had been part of informal composing sessions that Weir had been holding at his house for a musical he was writing about pitcher Satchel Paige of the Negro Baseball League.
When RatDog returned from the East Coast swing, Weir expanded the roster to include Dead keyboardist Welnick, although he soon grew alarmed at Welnick’s mental state. Three previous keyboard players for the Dead had already died. They chose Welnick after a short audition of five candidates largely because he could sing the high notes. The band had no desire to drag themselves through the extensive process to find someone great. Someone good enough would do. With the Dead, Welnick had been an agreeable bandmate and something of an innocuous presence in the group, eager to please and capable enough. But touring with RatDog, Welnick appeared to be going through a personality change.
Riding on a bus on a string of dates through the West in December 1995, Weir found himself moving to the rear of the coach to get away from Welnick, who had taken to riding for miles staring silently ahead, a thin, eerie smile plastered on his face. Weir privately told Jay Lane that this wasn’t the same Vince that he knew from the Dead. When he auditioned for the Grateful Dead, Welnick had been sleeping in a barn and planning to move to Mexico. He had enthusiastically embraced his leap into the major leagues and the exciting world of touring with the band, but since Garcia’s death, he had fallen into a dark, depressive tailspin. He had been stunned by the band’s decision to retire the name and close the book, and he was hit with instant financial problems. Deeply in debt, without the band’s plush touring income, Welnick was having problems meeting his responsibilities. His world was coming unraveled.
On the five-hour daytime ride from Santa Barbara to Santa Cruz, Welnick retired to his bunk about forty-five minutes into the drive. When the band arrived for the sound check at the concert, Welnick didn’t show. Weir sent someone to wake him up, but the roadie returned without Welnick. “He’s hard crashed,” he told Weir. “I can’t wake him.”
Weir knew instantly what had happened. Calmly, he told the roadie to call an ambulance. The paramedics arrived and found an empty Valium bottle. Welnick had taken fifty-seven pills, the entire contents of a fresh bottle, and went to the hospital accompanied by the roadie. The band returned to the sound check and the concert. Welnick never played with RatDog again. He had violated one of the unspoken laws of the road. In the world of the Grateful Dead, it was permissible to be weird, but only so far. Suicide attempts on the band bus, no matter how lame, were over the line.
3
Johnny B. Goode
WEIR HAD determined that playing music as hard as he could was the only way to deal with Garcia’s death. After finishing the RatDog tour in December (and taking an uncharacteristic month-long vacation traveling in Southeast Asia), Weir hit on a truly inspired idea for bolstering the blues bottom end of RatDog—recruiting a new pianist, one of the founding fathers of rock and roll, seventy-two-year-old Johnnie Johnson.
This little-known figure chiseled a huge mark in music history as the musical partner of Chuck Berry since the beginning of Berry’s career. He helped fashion young Berry’s music and provided a sturdy boogie-woogie framework to all Berry’s storied fifties hits, chapters of the rock-and-roll bible like “Maybelline,” “School Days,” “Rock and Roll Music,” “Johnny B. Goode,” and “Roll over Beethoven,” a collaboration that lasted for the twenty most productive years of Berry’s career.
Johnson, who was never accorded the recognition (or songwriting credits) Berry enjoyed, was working as a bus driver in St. Louis when his obscurity was disturbed by his role in the 1987 film Hail, Hail Rock and Roll. In the movie, Keith Richards conducted a sixtieth birthday celebration concert for Berry and featured Johnson, dragging him out of Berry’s shadow for the first time. Johnson subsequently enjoyed a modest late-career reprise with concert appearances and new recordings featuring him playing with an array of musicians such as Eric Clapton, John Lee Hooker, Bo Diddley, and George Thorogood.
RatDog’s Matt Kelly contacted Johnson, whom he knew from blues circles, and he joined the band in rehearsals at Weir’s treehouse studio in his Mill Valley home. Johnson had never heard of the Grateful Dead, but Weir and the rest of the band loved having this deep connection to the heart and soul of rock and roll playing in their band. Johnson was the master of playing a left-hand shuffle against a straight eight with the other hand, the very basis of the original rock-and-roll style. Weir was thrilled to be learning at the feet of the master.
Johnson made his RatDog debut at a raucous Mardi Gras show in February 1996 with New Orleans’s Neville Brothers at the Henry J. Kaiser Auditorium in Oakland, sentimental scene of so many great Dead shows. With bluesman Taj Mahal sitting in, as well as the Nevilles joining the set-opening “Iko Iko,” RatDog celebrated the band’s new member by playing his tune “Tanqueray” from one of his recent solo albums and “Promised Land” from his days with Chuck Berry as the encores.
In April 1996, Weir was still the only band member doing public performances when three of the former Dead members finally took the stage together for the first time since Garcia’s death to play music. Both Lesh and Weir joined Bruce Hornsby in his concert at the Fillmore. Weir strolled onstage with a guitar in the middle of “Sugaree.” Three songs later, Hornsby brought out Phil Lesh for “Truckin’.” The crowd cheered ecstatically when those voices blended on the opening line. They stayed for “Turn on Your Lovelight” and “Not Fade Away” before returning with an encore of the Band‘s “The Weight.”
Unlike Weir, Mickey Hart hadn’t been grieving in public. Like Weir, Hart also dealt with his grief by burying himself in work. He went into hiding, sequestering himself in the vast recording studio at his fifty-acre Sonoma County ranch, where he was finishing a massive recording project, already more than three years in the works when Garcia died, tens of thousands of dollars over budget and ambitious beyond anything the fearless, ferocious drummer ever dared attempt.
Hart trained his intense intellectual curiosity on his bliss. The project began as an extension of his Grammy-winning 1991 Planet Drum album, an all-percussion collaboration by a group of percussionists drawn from different cultures that would become the biggest-selling world beat album in history. The Dead drummer had a long history with his own independent recording projects. He made his first solo album, Rolling Thunder, in 1972 and, over the years, did extensive recording work as an ethnomusicologist with Egyptians, Indians, and even New Guinea rain forest dwellers. He wrote best-selling books about percussion throughout world cultures. He composed and recorded portions of the soundtrack to Apocalypse Now for director Francis Ford Coppola. He was scheduled to lead a team of more than one hundred drummers playing his compositions at the opening ceremonies of the 1996 Olympic Games that July in Atlanta. Hart and associates Zakir Hussain, Giovanni Hidalgo, and Sikiru Adepoju began recording the Planet Drum follow-up in 1992. When the Dead were not on the road, he would hole up in
the studio, recording extensively, almost compulsively. He logged thousands of hours.
When Dead lyricist Robert Hunter joined the project, writing songs to skeletal percussion tracks, the album began to take a different direction. Garcia had recommended the Mint Juleps, six Jamaican sisters he saw sing on a Spike Lee–directed PBS special. Now Hart moved them into the ranch and submerged them in the madness. He had them sing some songs hundreds of times, saving each version to later painstakingly assemble impossibly intricate composite vocals (what studio professionals call “gnat surgery”). He filled more than two hundred and fifty tape reels. There were more than fifteen hundred tracks recorded. Hart was awash in the music, lost in a sea of takes. He plowed ahead furiously after Garcia’s death, often breaking into uncontrollable tears in the studio, once when recording an overdub with drummer Carter Beauford of the Dave Matthews Band.
Hunter showed up at the studio with a new song. Uncharacteristically, he insisted on singing the rough vocal. He refused to allow anybody to see the sheet of paper with the words written on it. The song was called “Down the Road” and it envisioned encounters with a procession of fallen heroes—Joe Hill, John F. Kennedy, John Lennon, and Martin Luther King Jr. The King verse never worked out to Hunter’s satisfaction, so he had recently substituted a new final verse:
When the smoke and thunder cleared, enough to look around
I heard a sweet guitar lick, an old familiar sound
I heard a laugh I recognized come rolling from the earth
I saw it rise into the skies like lightning giving birth
It sounded like Garcia, but I couldn’t see the face
Just the beard and glasses and a smile on empty space.
When Hunter finished his vocal, everyone in the control room was weeping. The album was growing into a magnificent animal, something far beyond any of Hart’s previous works. Bruce Hornsby, who put an accordion part on “Down the Road,” told Hart it sounded like soul music to him and he should contact Robin Millar, the British producer behind the Europop pseudo-soul hits by songstress Sade (“Smooth Operator”). Millar miraculously pieced together a supple final mix from the chaos and Hart prepared to take the Mystery Box band on the road after the album’s June release.
Like the rest of his bandmates, Hart saw this transition as an opportunity for a clean break with the past. Like Weir, he was intent on reinventing himself. “I don’t have to be Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle. “This is a breakout, new energy, a new horizon. It’s new growth, new life. It’s not a retread. I’m not trying to play songs like the Grateful Dead. In fact, I went out of my way not to sound like the Grateful Dead. I want to keep the spirit, but I want it to be me. No guitars—just drums and voice.
“The audience is the Grateful Dead now,” he said. “They’ve got the power to make it a Grateful Dead concert once the groove starts and the lights go down.”
The Mystery Box album took on special meaning in the wake of Garcia’s passing. No longer some sideline enterprise to occupy his restless creativity outside the Dead, now the album crystallized as a launching pad for a new musical life for Hart. There was a lot of optimism surrounding the record’s release. It had the scent of something almost entirely foreign to the Grateful Dead world—a potential hit record. “What do I know about pop music?” he said. “We’re going to find out. I’m not trying to copy any particular style. It’s an experiment. If this becomes popular, then it will be pop music. If not, then it will be another one of my enthusiasms.”
Three days before Hart and Weir launched their respective solo bands on the Furthur Festival tour in June 1996, the first official performance by assembled members of the Grateful Dead after Garcia’s death took place in San Francisco. Weir, Hart, Phil Lesh, and Vince Welnick made a bizarre cameo appearance at a new music festival with San Francisco Symphony maestro Michael Tilson Thomas, the celebrated conductor. Deadheads roamed the aisles of Davies Symphony Hall, hung around the sidewalk outside begging for spare tickets, and filled the restrooms with pot smoke. Even if the band members were only going to play a few largely indecipherable passages in the thirty-six-minute piece, eager Dead fans mingled with the blue-haired symphony regulars in an environment where they were distinctly out of place, only slightly more so than the Dead members themselves.
Lesh, of course, was the source of the infiltration. He had studied experimental classical music in college under composers Darius Milhaud and Luciano Berio and maintained an interest in avant-garde compositions. Under Lesh’s influence, the Rex Foundation, the Dead’s philanthropic arm, became one of the most generous supporters of new music composers in the grant world. He attended the symphony occasionally and came to know conductor Thomas through charity events involving music education. When Thomas proposed Lesh and his associates play the parts he envisioned for a rock combo in a John Cage performance at his upcoming Youth Symphony American Festival, Lesh readily agreed and corralled his colleagues.
Thomas planned to perform two pieces by Cage—“Apartment House 1776,” a relatively straightforward piece commissioned to celebrate the nation’s Bicentennial, and “Renga,” a more free-form composition involving drawings by Henry David Thoreau with large sections of improvisation. For “Renga,” Cage simply transposed stray marks and little drawings from Thoreau’s notebooks on a time graph that was intended to serve as the score. It was up to the individual musician to interpret the marks. The two pieces would be played simultaneously.
The cryptic notations Cage supplied “Renga” amounted to little more than suggestions by the composer. “When you have seventy-eight people improvising together, “Thomas said to The Chronicle, “it requires an enormous amount of imagination. It also requires terrific restraint, to listen for the precise moment to play.”
At rehearsal, the four Dead men were flanked by four vocalists who sang “Apartment House 1776,” four different versions of music Cage imagined Americans would have heard in 1776, each sung independently of the orchestra and each other. Soloists stood arrayed in the balcony and Thomas presided over the full San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra on the stage. The first run-through was a cacophonous auditory barrage. Thomas held his finger to his lips and dropped his voice. “Have the courage to play softer,” he said.
Lesh worked with the members of the Youth Orchestra for two weeks before the performance, trying to instill some of the basics of improvisation into young musicians trained only to play what they read. “Improvisation starts off with imitation,” Lesh said to The Chronicle. “You imitate what you hear and elaborate on what it suggests to you. So you have to be listening very carefully. That’s what we always did when we were collectively improvising in the band—we were always listening harder than we were playing. Any musical context, a song, for instance, is like a labyrinth. It has lots of branches, but it’s closed on itself. And we were always searching for the thread that was going to allow us to find our way out of that labyrinth into open territory, or maybe even another labyrinth.”
In the carefully calculated thirty-six minutes, scrupulously counted down by television monitors onstage, the Dead musicians may have played a total of two minutes—a couple of squawks on keyboard, some screechs on guitar, a few flamadiddles on the drums—and could barely be detected above the orchestral din that surrounded them. After the unsatisfying performance, Bob Weir stopped on his way home to jam at the tiny Mill Valley nightclub Sweetwater and played the rest of the night in front of a dozen drunks.
A day later, Weir and Hart left town for the summer tour. After short, hurried rehearsals in Georgia, the Furthur tour opened June 20 in Atlanta. The show was a seven-hour ordeal featuring at least eight acts, and a grueling thirty-one-city march across the country. Instead of the deluxe travel arrangements and accommodations of the Dead tours, the pack moved like a traveling circus in fifteen buses and vans, stopping, when they did, at motels and an occasional Marriott. The duration of the show meant crews and musicians spent all
day and most of the night at the concert site. Hot Tuna, who opened the shows in broad daylight often before a scant few hundred fans, stayed to participate in the show-closing jam session at the end of the night like bit actors in Macbeth called to play parts in the first and fifth acts.
While Bob Weir and Mickey Hart may have set out to reinvent themselves, the producers of the Furthur Festival, John Scher and Cameron Sears, sought to surround their new incarnations with as much of the conventional trappings of a Dead concert as they could muster. If this tour was about new life for the Dead musicians and crew, for the Deadheads it was about the passing of Garcia and a combination celebration of life and grief-counseling session. Quickly, the audience’s attention migrated from the Dead solo acts to the half-hour jam tacked onto the end of the RatDog set that closed the show.
Backstage didn’t look much like a Dead show. It was all business, no party, not even much pot in evidence. No dancing was allowed in the wings and there was a lot of pressure to adhere to a strict schedule. New regulations in the parking lot led to grumbling on the part of many long-standing vendors, accustomed to a more free-wheeling scene before the shows. Intermission acts singer-songwriter John Wesley Harding, bluesman Alvin Youngblood Hart, and juggling troupe the Flying Karamazov Brothers shared dressing rooms and buses. Weir and Hart had buses of their own, but they routinely ate with the crew. Only a part of the old Dead crew was on this trip; the well-oiled way of doing things on Dead tours had been replaced by a disciplined, professional hierarchy that featured a lot of new faces.
With Garcia’s death, New York–based producer John Scher, who had worked with the band since the early seventies and acted often as a quasi-manager, faced losing as much as 40 percent of his business. Deeply worried, he had moved quickly behind the scenes that fall to put together something to pass through the amphitheaters the next summer, even before December when the band dropped their name. Grateful Dead Productions declined to finance the venture, so Scher and Cameron Sears pooled resources and went into business together as the tour producers. Some GDP board members would later grumble over Sears’s participation as tour producer, claiming it would be overstepping his duties as the band’s manager.