Fare Thee Well

by Joel Selvin

  Tensions spread from the front office to backstage. At the Raleigh, North Carolina, stop the first week, Mickey Hart told manager Cameron Sears he didn’t want to see Weir on his bus that night. In the middle of Hart’s spaghetti dinner, however, Weir climbed aboard Hart’s bus and started making his way down the aisle. “Don’t you RatDog this band,” shouted Hart.

  Weir unceremoniously dumped Hart’s plate of spaghetti on his lap. Judo black-belt Hart leaped out of his seat, slapped a quick move on his erstwhile bandmate, threw him down to the floor—“You understand that I love you,” he told Weir—and escorted him off the bus. Nobody said a word.

  The next night was an off night in Virginia Beach, and Hart sent a room service spaghetti dinner to Weir and his girlfriend, Natascha. “I love you more than spaghetti,” read the note. When he joined them for the dinner, they sat down talking like nothing had ever happened the night before. Brothers will fight.

  The Crowes came with bad habits of their own. Dropping by the band’s trailer with his girlfriend to discuss that evening’s jam session, Weir found himself in the middle of a Pulp Fiction revival of an overdose victim. It didn’t take long for Weir to commence to revisit his own bad habits from the past.

  Robert Hunter joined the troupe for a few dates on the West Coast. At Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View—as close to San Francisco as the tour would get—Hunter rattled off a pitchy but heartfelt half-dozen songs, accompanying his off-key vocals on acoustic guitar. Backstage after, he was enraged with himself for not hitting the notes, while Hart chuckled at Hunter’s frustration. Later that afternoon, Bruce Hornsby coaxed all the extant Dead on site onto the stage during his set—Weir, Hart, and Phil Lesh. With Bonnie Raitt on bottleneck guitar, they ripped through an inspired version of the Dead staple “Jack Straw” that left all involved ecstatic. “Ooh-wee,” exulted Raitt as she left the stage having blasted molten steel into her guitar solo on the song. “I was in the Dead.”

  Phil Lesh watched all this with benign amusement. Joining the Furthur scene at Shoreline and playing “Dark Star” at the Fillmore with David Murray were the only times Lesh had played music in public all year. He had long since given up on producing a new Grateful Dead record, although he did spend some time combing the archives to assemble a release on Grateful Dead Records, which had turned into a gold mine after Garcia’s death. He contemplated a long-held project—a symphonic piece based on instrumental themes drawn from Grateful Dead music to be called “Keys to the Rain.”

  For so long, he had been the bitter, drunken, and neglected member of the band until he met his wife Jillspeth Johnson in 1981, a waitress at his morning breakfast restaurant, the Station Café, in San Rafael, where the whole band liked to eat. She sobered him up, brushed him off, and polished him up. They lived the hippie rock-star dream in the exclusive Marin County enclave of Ross, raising their two sons, Grahame and Brian, ages nine and six when Garcia died. Since 1990, after being diagnosed with the incurable hepatitis C, Lesh had cut out drinking and become a vegetarian. Still, his health was precarious. Touring had become tough. He was glad to be off that merry-go-round, but he couldn’t really find purchase in his new life as a stay-at-home dad and house husband.

  During the band’s lifetime, the members of the Grateful Dead had mixed feelings and a decidedly complicated relationship with their fans. While the Deadheads often presumed that the band members were just like they were, the musicians had no such idea. Despite their devotion, the view from the Dead and their crew ranged from bemused confusion to thinly veiled contempt for the unwashed hippies who followed them from town to town. They simply didn’t understand them. “Stay away from the kelp dancers,” Mountain Girl always warned her children at the concerts.

  As a result, they paid little attention to the parking lot scene and the sprawling Deadhead culture in their wake and had no idea how pervasive it had truly become. Off the road for the first time in his adult life, Lesh watched with growing fascination the determined Deadhead response to Garcia’s death. They would not let this community they so identified with perish. He slowly began to glimpse the full breadth of the band’s impact on its following and began to think about ways he could find a place for himself there.

  In September, Lesh accepted an invitation from David Gans of radio’s Grateful Dead Hour to join him and his band, the Broken Angels, at a little Deadhead scene Gans had been developing in a small club called the Ashkenaz, a uniquely Berkeley multicultural establishment that featured folk dancing and fruit juice. Lesh had been casually jamming privately with Gans for some time, feeling the need to get back up to speed on the bass and missing that connection between musicians. For the past year, Gans and his revolving cast of guest musicians had been practicing what Gans liked to call the musical vocabulary of the Grateful Dead every week, drawing an enthusiastic audience glad to pull together their community again, even on this modest scale.

  It was not an altogether new idea. The Zen Tricksters, one of the first of the tribute bands, had been playing Dead covers since 1979 around Long Island and had only recently broken out in metropolitan New York through appearances at the Tribeca nightclub called Wetlands that was catering to the Deadhead crowd. The Dark Star Orchestra was a Chicago-based outfit that caught on quickly, performing entire shows from the Dead archives song by song with a remarkable Garcia imitator named John Kadlecik in 1997. Cubensis, another tribute band, started in Los Angeles the same year.

  Lesh, whose wife was out of town, only let Gans know he would be attending that morning, arriving by himself. Lesh and Gans stood in the back watching the first set. It was Lesh’s first time hearing Grateful Dead music from the audience. He was stunned. He stared as the audience danced and Gans narrated the scene. The Grateful Dead is a language that many people speak, he told Lesh. There was a recognizable style that could be isolated, distilled, repurposed. It was a brief conversation, but for Lesh it was nothing short of a revelation. “This is really something,” he said.

  In front of this casual, small audience with Gans and his semiprofessional musicians, Lesh felt comfortable enough to sit in with the band and jam on a few songs. The place went crazy. Lesh not only strapped on his bass and joined the band for most of the rest of the first set, he agreed to appear with Gans’s band again and to allow it to be advertised. With that inducement, Gans was able to move to the two-thousand-capacity Maritime Hall in San Francisco, an upstairs former union hall that drew such a resolute hippie crowd that the smell of marijuana and body odor filled the hallways outside. In November, a packed house danced to Dead songs by an augmented edition of Broken Angels including their distinguished guest bassist, who played two complete sets with the band before retiring from the third. Lesh phoned Gans the following morning to compliment the musicians. He was captivated.

  Lesh went back to the Maritime Hall with another idea. He had been thinking about this Deadhead community spirit and wanted to try to figure a way to harness it. With Christmas coming up, he booked the hall in December 1997 for what he called “Philharmonia” as a kickoff benefit for the new philanthropic charity he and his wife were launching, the Unbroken Chain Foundation. Jill Lesh had tried to join the board of the Grateful Dead’s charity, the Rex Foundation, while Garcia was still alive, but was turned down. Lesh was furious and wrote to the other band members, “If you don’t love my wife, you don’t love me.” Much had happened since then, but the Leshes never forgot the snub. In a further step away from the band, the Leshes were now starting their own foundation.

  Lesh’s novel idea was to gather a group of his musician friends onstage, hand out lyric sheets to the audience, and hold a Christmas carol community sing-along. With Bob Weir, Mickey Hart, Bruce Hornsby, Graham Nash, Edie Brickell, even Michael Tilson Thomas from the San Francisco Symphony in the choir, the show was an instant sellout with scalpers asking $100 for tickets outside in the pouring rain. “People like to see us just standing together,” Mickey Hart told the San Francisco Chronicle. “We don’t even
have to play music.”

  With sponsorship from the Hilton Hotel arranged by a close friend of Jill Lesh’s who worked there as an executive, the after-party moved to the Hilton, where the Broken Angels took the bandstand with Lesh, Weir, Hornsby, and others. Weir and Hart, emboldened by the congeniality of the evening, suggested to Lesh he join them on tour next summer. “I’d love to go out with you guys,” Lesh told the astonished pair, “but instead of some forty-five-minute jam at the end of seven hours, why don’t we make a real band of it?”

  6

  Phil and Friends

  PHIL AND Friends made their debut February 27, 1998, at the Fillmore Auditorium, site of so many epochal evenings for the Grateful Dead. For the occasion, Lesh simply borrowed RatDog—Weir and all—and added a lead guitarist, Weir’s friend Stan Franks. It was a calculated return to performing by Lesh, who, assuming the role of bandleader, had never been a bandleader before in his career.

  Lesh only picked up the bass in the first place to join the Grateful Dead at the suggestion of Jerry Garcia. He had not even been in a rock band before. He was a classical music nerd who played violin in the Youth Symphony before switching to trumpet.

  In the Dead, he was never a major songwriter or much of a lead vocalist. His wheezy, pitchy vocals were always an issue with the band. But as an instrumentalist, he made a considerable contribution to the band’s sound. Jack Casady of the Airplane, who arrived in San Francisco having played Fender bass in rhythm and blues bands around the tri-city area of Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC, for years, watched Lesh impressively learn the instrument on bandstands they shared and was astonished at what he saw.

  Classically-trained Lesh pioneered a personal style on the instrument that employed a lot of the contrapuntal underpinnings he learned from Bach. Rather than concentrating on rounding off the bottom end, Lesh was constantly orchestrating the band from the lower ranges. But he never acted as the front man or took center stage. Although not without personal charm, Lesh was not a natural entertainer or a charismatic personality.

  Now encountering Grateful Dead music through the Broken Angels, Lesh was like a fresh convert. He had finally and irrevocably discovered the power of their music, the language, as Gans described it. Pumped, he had played two more exploratory shows a month apart with Gans’s sprawling, revolving repertory company.

  In January at the Fillmore, Gans had brought a raucous cross-section of local musicians to a feverish capacity crowd. Jazz vocalist Kitty Margolis sang “Friend of the Devil.” Steel guitarist Joe Goldmark added the twang. Vince Welnick joined the fray. As he routinely did, Gans videotaped the show. He did not realize the rules had changed, the taper code was no longer in effect, and now he was required to ask permission of the Leshes before making decisions. When the Leshes discovered the videotape, they cut off Gans without a word. He never heard from Lesh again.

  Lesh was beginning to see the light. He quickly understood the Dead in new terms. Unlike Weir, Lesh was not a musician seeking to express himself in some meaningful personal way. Lesh was responding to his discovery of the demand for Grateful Dead music. But it wasn’t simply the songbook; it was a community built around the music. People didn’t want to give it up just because Garcia was gone. Lesh had seen what he needed to see.

  Also unlike Weir, he was not conflicted about the legacy. He could play the psychedelic classics even the Dead hadn’t touched for years. He could use the songbook for even longer improvisations. The idea of using a rotating cast meant each performance was a unique event, adding another level of improvisation to the enterprise.

  Lesh knew he needed a lead guitarist and he wasn’t hung up about it. He had played with Stan Franks and Weir when they sat in with saxophonist David Murray and did “Dark Star” at the Fillmore the previous March. At that strange gig, Murray and his three jazz horn players were set up on one side of the stage, with Lesh, Weir, and Franks arrayed on the other side. To Lesh, it sounded like two different bands playing the same song at the same time, entirely different approaches that never blended, a dizzying cacophony that didn’t resolve. But both Lesh and Weir had been blown away by Franks that night.

  David Murray grew up down the street in Berkeley from Franks, who was the first talented musician Murray ever knew. When they formed their first band in junior high, the Notations of Soul, Stan had already recorded a folk version of “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In” for a local hootenanny album when he was twelve years old. He went to Berkeley High School before the jazz program was established that produced Dave Ellis and so many other young jazz musicians, but later he played frequently with Berkeley High classmate Peter Apfelbaum and the Hieroglyphics Ensemble, a landmark maverick jazz unit.

  He tended toward the challenging and exotic, never restricting himself to one kind of music. Playing behind a local Filipino group called Maharika, he opened for the Jackson Five at the Oakland Coliseum. He played reggae with the Caribbean All-Stars, an East Bay band, and was one of the first Americans to appear at Jamaica’s Reggae Sunsplash, where he backed vocal group the Mighty Diamonds. He dipped into the rising hipster jazz scene around San Francisco’s Up & Down Club, where Dave Ellis and Jeff Chimenti also played. He played on the platinum debut album by his friend, rapper Tupac Shakur, and taught heavy metal guitar at Cazadero Music Camp. He didn’t appear on Murray’s record of Grateful Dead compositions, but he played in the band touring behind the release.

  Franks, who grew up poor, rejected the starving artist life. A quintessential Berkeley proletariat artist, Franks was married—his wife worked as a photographer—and they were raising a family. He managed a modest stock portfolio, loved to cook, and was a skilled organic gardener. He owned a small apartment building that he bought with hard-earned money he scrupulously saved and, in addition to playing music, always worked steadily at home maintenance and car repair. Franks was an extremely self-reliant, well-liked, grounded man who had spent years improvising on guitar in a variety of contexts. He certainly was anything but just another rock guitarslinger.

  Franks proved inspiring in rehearsals and convincing both musically and personally. He was easy to be around, a forthright, loose guy who could interpret the Garcia parts, not mimic them. That would be too creepy for the band—they wanted a fresh, live musician who could make his own voice work in their music. The presence of Jerry Garcia was so powerfully embedded in the music there would be no way to make him disappear. They needed another interpretation of Garcia, a virtuoso with his own voice, someone not afraid to be his own man, yet who could understand and respect the legacy. Franks appeared to be exactly that guy.

  In February at the Fillmore for the first Phil and Friends show, the music bubbled up out of the dark from a gaggle of squawks and squeaks and an unlikely belch of Coltrane from Dave Ellis on saxophone, as the band tumbled into “Hell in a Bucket” with Weir on vocals, Franks fumbling around in the background with some wah-wah effects. The second song, “Sugaree,” with Lesh taking the lead vocal, found Franks loosening up, starting to unpack his sound, zigzagging across the loping beat. With every song, he grew stronger, more confident.

  And what a set list. Lesh dragged out songs fans thought they would never hear again, like “The Other One” or “Dark Star,” with Franks trying out some of his avant-garde jazz moves where the Dead would have resorted to space-rock noise. He began to assert himself on the material. By the time the concert was two and a half hours in, Franks was coaxing rolling waves of electric flames out of his guitar, crashing down on the finale “Not Fade Away.”

  Back behind the amp, Garcia’s roadie Steve Parish felt the hairs on his arms standing on end. “We found another one,” he thought. The audience showered applause on Franks when Lesh introduced him and the band retreated to the dressing room, collapsing in a happy, sweaty, triumphant celebration.

  Three days later, the next summer Furthur tour was announced. Instead of a repertory company this year, however, the bill would be topped by a band called the Other One
s featuring three of the four of the living Dead men. Taking the Garcia guitar chair would be the unknown Stan Franks, along with Dave Ellis, Jeff Chimenti, and Bruce Hornsby drummer John Molo (Kreutzmann would be sitting out this tour). The six-week, twenty-five-city tour would start in June. The musicians were coming to terms with the Dead’s music. “I put it away,” Mickey Hart told The Chronicle. “When it was over, it was over—for everybody, I think. Nobody was thinking about Grateful Dead music.”

  Weir praised Franks, acknowledging he would be taking on a hot seat. “He’s a wonderful guitar player, “said Weir. “He’s also nothing like Jerry, which is, I think, the exact right place to look. The only way he is reminiscent of Jerry is that he’s wide open. He is willing to and capable of exploring any direction.”

  They showed up at Bel Marin Keys in Novato and rehearsed daily. All this was new to Franks—the facility, the staff, the equipment. As Franks struggled to learn the massive amount of material, especially the country-and-western-oriented pieces, and the starting date of the tour loomed closer, he began to falter. Just coming up to speed on the vast, diverse repertoire, which, on any given night, could touch on blues, jazz, country, folk, and rock, was a Herculean task. Also, the Grateful Dead was no nursery school; Franks would not be coddled. But he made friends easily.