by Joel Selvin
Emerging from the rock underground, Phish was, at that moment, reaching a kind of critical mass in the culture. When Garcia died, the Vermont-based rock quartet had already been selling out concerts at Madison Square Garden and other East Coast basketball arenas, but after Garcia’s death, the band shifted into another jet stream. In the absence of the Grateful Dead, Phish became a fevered obsession across a large demographic of college-aged fans. They even got their own Ben and Jerry’s ice cream flavor, Phish Food, following in the illustrious footsteps of Cherry Garcia, anointing them in the popular culture.
Phish’s popular breakthrough represented the emergence of this new generation of jam bands that had been stirring in the underground beneath the shadow of the Dead for some time at little preserves like the Wetlands in New York City. Quietly, without many who didn’t belong to the scene noticing, this pocket of the music world had been scraping along for years, slowly building a solid yet loyal constituency whose tastes ran the gamut from world beat Afropop to guitar-heavy Southern blues-rock.
Even while the Dead were still active, a younger generation of jam bands had begun to define this scene on their own. Banding together for a summer 1992 amphitheater trek called the H.O.R.D.E. tour (Horizons of Rock Developing Everywhere), Phish was part of a daylong program that included contemporaries such as Blues Traveler, Spin Doctors, Widespread Panic, and Col. Bruce Hampton and the Aquarium Rescue Unit. These were a new raft of jam bands with one thing in common—a fundamental admiration of the Grateful Dead and dedication to their spirit of improvisation.
Phish, determined to create their own identity in the jam-band scene, had long been wary of specific Dead associations and consciously steered away from any connection to the band. They had begun life as something of a Dead cover band, but in 1986, deliberately decided to no longer play Dead songs. In August 1998, on the third anniversary of Garcia’s death, the band did play the Dead’s “Terrapin Station” during an encore, and in the weeks before coming to California to rehearse with Lesh and play the Warfield Theatre shows, Anastasio tried out an acoustic version of “Row Jimmy” with his solo band in a small club in Vermont. Tapped by Lesh to accompany him on his return to performing, the two Phish men, Anastasio and McConnell, were thrilled. Lesh’s invitation was a kind of ultimate acknowledgment of their own trajectory, being invited to participate in what would be a jam-band summit meeting and certainly a keystone performance in the career of the original Grateful Dead bassist.
At the Warfield, Lesh and Kimock came out in front of the curtain to open the show, trailed by Lesh’s sons, Grahame, thirteen, and Brian, ten, whom their father introduced to the crowd as “my best friends.” They added little choirboy harmonies to Lesh singing the sentimental Eric Clapton song “Hello Old Friend,” which Lesh pluralized to “Friends” for the occasion. Bringing out his kids was the exact sort of show business stunt the Dead always assiduously avoided.
Turning on a dime, Lesh parted the curtain and cranked up the electric rock band portion of the program flat-out with a thirty-plus-minute version of “Viola Lee Blues,” a song the Dead had not performed in the past thirty years. More interesting is that Lesh had transformed the cornerstone track from the band’s 1967 debut album into a sleek, reconfigured platform for an entirely different kind of jam than usually associated with the number, allowing Kimock to lead the piece into spacey, atonal sonic pastures and omitting the classic dramatic return to the final chorus that used to blow minds at the Fillmore and Winterland. Phil and Phriends—as it was spelled on the marquee—took it straight into the zone right out of the gate. It was a sensational show that mingled some Phish material amidst reimagined Dead classics, such as an epic Afrobeat-propelled “Uncle John’s Band,” a walloping “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad,” and an ecstatic “Not Fade Away.”
The next night, Lesh dusted off “Alligator” for the first time since Pigpen died and dedicated Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” to Garcia. They opened the third night with a monumental mashup of “Dark Star” and “Days Between.” Vocalist Donna Jean Godchaux McKay, who belonged to the Dead during the seventies glory years, joined the band each night. It was during this run that Lesh introduced what came to be called the “Donor Rap,” where he appealed to audience members at the end of every show to become organ donors. This speech would become a feature of every subsequent show by the ever-earnest Lesh, grateful not to be dead.
These were wonderful, glorious nights. Phish bassist Mike Gordon cheered his bandmates along from the audience. Deadheads were in heaven with Phil and Phriends. The small theater reverberated with the fans’ joy. Not only did the band make the Dead songs come alive again in new and powerful ways, but the entire enterprise shined a light pointing forward. It was joy, but it was also hope. A jazzed-up Lesh spoke afterwards about releasing “every note” of the three nights on a ten-CD set, although that never happened.
Two weeks later, Lesh joined his Other Ones bandmates Bob Weir and Mickey Hart, along with Hart’s pal Sammy Hagar, slide guitarist Roy Rogers, and a raft of others, at a benefit that had been organized by Hart’s environmental activist wife, Caryl Orbach Hart, in Santa Rosa to save some nearby redwood trees. Nobody knew it at the time, but it would be years before these three would play together again.
Returned to strength, with the vigor of a man with the liver of a teenager, Lesh went on a tear. In May, he took Phil and Friends featuring guitarist Warren Haynes to the Mountain Aire Festival in the Sierra Nevada gold country, another familiar Grateful Dead hunting ground. Haynes, a longtime associate of the Allman Brothers, would prove to be one of the most enduring and crucial of Lesh’s musical collaborators. In June, Lesh returned to the Warfield with yet another lineup featuring Jefferson Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen with Kimock and, again, in July with the David Nelson Band—longtime Dead associate from the New Riders of the Purple Sage—with guest Bill Kreutzmann on drums.
Lesh kept Kimock on guitar and Molo on drums, but he was swapping around bands like he was trying on different suits of clothes, drawing from different camps of the jam world—Allman Brothers, Hot Tuna, New Riders. He was testing out the material in different contexts.
In August, he was offered his first real out-of-town Phil and Friends opportunities, eight Western amphitheater dates as part of a repertory company called “Summer Sessions 99” featuring jam bands Gov’t Mule, String Cheese Incident, moe., and Galactic. Jonathan Levine, a booking agent for Monterey Peninsula Artists, the agency that also represented Phish, heard about the Phil and Phriends shows at the Warfield and made a cold call to the Lesh household. Since they had no manager or agent, he made the arrangements with Lesh’s wife, Jill. Lesh took Kimock and drummer Molo and pulled his other Friends for the occasions from the different bands on the bill.
“I discovered this massive pool of musicians out there who love the Dead’s material and get off playing it whenever they can,” Lesh told the Denver Post in advance of the show at Red Rocks Amphitheatre. “I’m trying to tap into that concept of treating it as repertoire material, and finding new doors, as it were, from these guys and myself.”
While they still used Cameron Sears at the office to make and take calls on their behalf, the business strategy behind Phil Lesh’s career began to emanate more and more directly from his wife, who finally underwent her thyroid cancer surgery in June. With Lesh absent from his official duties and the office more frequently, McQuaid would often volunteer to take copies of minutes or other documents over to his house. Explaining his absence from the office and meetings, Lesh complained about the stress, so McQuaid would show up, only to find his wife acting as a surrogate. Interestingly, Jan Simmons had run into Jill at the baby shower for Natascha Muenter (Weir’s future wife) in late 1997 before Lesh’s transplant. Simmons had left the Dead office to go to work with Deborah Santana, the wife of the lead guitarist, who had started managing her husband’s affairs. During the conversation, Simmons couldn’t help but notice that when Jill realized that Carlos
Santana’s wife was officially acting as his manager, her eyes lit up.
Shortly after Garcia died, Lesh expressed an interest in serving as chairman of GDP and was given the post. He was closely overseeing the Dead’s reissue program, deeply involved in Terrapin Station, and initially supportive of the Bandwagon project at the time, not playing music with Phil and Friends. The band’s business advisors had difficulties with his obsessive reluctance to sign documents; however, he did chair board meetings and took an active role until his veto power was overruled.
For years, the Dead had operated under unanimous rule. Only policies universally approved by band members would be adopted. In that way, at their eighties peak, Lesh had been able to keep the band from making new studio albums for more than six years, declaring the recording studio too clinical a place to make music, and at a time when the band was playing before stadiums full of fans and demand for their records had never been greater. The other band members finally settled the argument by renting Marin Veterans’ Memorial Auditorium, bringing in recording equipment, and recording an album there without an audience. At this, Lesh relented, and the band cut In the Dark, the Dead’s first million-selling album, in 1987.
After Garcia’s passing, the political climate in the GDP boardroom was not so harmonious. In the ongoing debate over Bandwagon, which Lesh had inexplicably started to back away from, the other members finally had enough of Lesh’s uncompromising positions. They reluctantly passed a motion placing the board under majority rule, essentially stripping Lesh of his cherished veto power. It only served to strengthen Lesh’s resolve. Lesh broke with the other band members openly after the vote. He abruptly stopped attending board meetings. He spoke only infrequently to the other band members, which left him ill-informed on details of projects.
No one, not even other band members, knew the scope of Lesh’s alienation since his transplant. The other members had waited for Lesh’s recovery from surgery to plan a summer tour with the Other Ones. Lesh held back, giving excuses for not making a commitment only to decide instead to test-drive Phil and Friends out of town with the eight dates on “Summer Sessions 99.” By the time he informed his bandmates of his plans, it was too late for them to mount tours of their own, leaving them without a tour or income for the summer.
Lesh posted a statement on the Dead’s Web page: “I enjoyed playing with each and every musician in the Other Ones last year, but the tour was extremely stressful due to business and creative differences. I honored my commitment and made no promises for future shows. After my surgery, I was approached about doing another tour, but it became clear that the same unresolved issues were still haunting us.”
At least, that was true for him. The other members were caught off-guard by Lesh’s announcement of the divorce. He was asserting his dominance and abandoning even the pretext of all-for-one. He drew a line in the sand. “Everyone was more interested in doing their own thing,” Lesh told the Denver Post, “so we decided to give it a rest.” And he did.
Undaunted, when plans for any Other Ones tour evaporated, Mickey Hart moved ahead. His latest version of his solo group Planet Drum was built around the talented Latin musician Rebeca Mauleón, and everything was splashed in Caribbean and African flavors and rhythms. Mark Karan played guitar. Hart released a new Planet Drum album, Spirit into Sound. A book of quotations about rhythm and percussion with the same title was about to be published (his third book as an author). Hart had also been named that May to the board of trustees of the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center. Hart liked to stay busy. He took his new large band on a brief August tour that included a not-so-sentimental stop at Woodstock ’99, where Hart and John Entwistle of the Who were the only two veterans of the historic 1969 festival.
As Phil and Friends played their monthly concerts and built up steam in Deadhead circles, Weir, for the first time since Garcia’s death three years earlier, retreated from constant touring to the relative obscurity of the recording studio. All year, Weir had been largely buried in the studio with RatDog, playing just a handful of dates and many of those with only bassist Wasserman and drummer Lane. The recording sessions for the debut RatDog album dragged endlessly, as the band and engineers struggled to learn digital recording, moving from pre-production in Weir’s home studio to Bel Marin Keys. Mark Karan joined the band after the Other Ones tour, so RatDog finally had a lead guitar. Both Weir’s Dead collaborator (and childhood friend) John Perry Barlow and Robert Hunter contributed lyrics, and Weir spent countless hours fiddling with the recordings. He was also drinking heavily again.
Weir felt challenged by Lesh, whose Phil and Friends had abandoned Weir after he had played every show with Lesh’s band the first year of its existence. Lost, at first, a competitive spirit soon stirred in his head. He needed to develop a program of his own. Weir thought he could take the advantage by producing a new album of original songs, forging ahead with fresh creative ideas, extending his band’s identity, and making a serious effort at establishing RatDog as a recording act. While the Internet was only months away from punching a hole in the record business’s bucket, devoting the time to make a credible RatDog album made a certain strategic sense.
And, of all things, he was starting a family. On July 15, he and Natascha were married by a Buddhist minister in the street in front of their house. The fifty-one-year-old groom wore a Scottish kilt and the bride, twenty years younger, was dressed in an antique white gown. She held their year-old daughter, Monet, in her arms through most of the ceremony. John Perry Barlow acted as best man. Bandmates Hart and Lesh were among the forty or so guests. “Three words we thought we’d never hear,” said Lesh. “Bob Weir wedding.” The party repaired to the Mill Valley Outdoors Art Club—the newlyweds arrived by horse-drawn carriage—to dance to the music of the Dave Ellis Quartet led by the RatDog saxophonist, who managed a jazzy version of “Terrapin Station” for the occasion. Ellis was now well beyond his youthful jazz snobbery.
8
Phylan
STEVE PARISH wasn’t sure about going back on the road. When he tried to beg off going out with Phil and Friends, Lesh would have nothing of it. “This is your life,” he told Parish. “This is what you do. You’ll be fine.”
It wasn’t that he didn’t like Lesh—Parish liked Lesh plenty—but Parish secretly sensed he was still traumatized from the sudden end of the Dead. No roadie in rock had ever been more loyal than Parish was to Garcia. He was like a soldier with shell shock being sent back to the front, although Parish, he-man that he was, banished any doubts and pressed forward.
Lesh was on a roll. Three weeks before setting sail on his band’s first serious out-of-town tour opening for Bob Dylan, Lesh wanted to warm up with some October shows by Phil and Friends at the Warfield. For these, Lesh brought out a pair of musicians from a Grateful Dead tribute band that operated largely in and around New York City called the Zen Tricksters—guitarist Jeff Mattson and keyboardist Rob Barraco. The Tricksters had been playing Dead covers since starting out around Long Island in 1978 and, since Garcia’s death, had become a hugely popular attraction in Deadhead circles. Lesh didn’t know any of this when the two Tricksters showed up in Marin County to rehearse.
In his studies of Deadhead culture, Lesh had been made aware of the tribute bands for the first time and they bothered him. “They’re making a living off our music,” he often said. Around that time, one of his associates slipped him a CD of the Tricksters doing their own original material. Lesh was impressed with how well they jammed in the studio although he was unaware of their basic premise. They sounded strangely familiar to Lesh’s ears. He invited the two soloists to play with him at the Warfield without knowing that the Tricksters were actually one of the best and longest-running Dead tribute bands. During the first rehearsal, Lesh was surprised at how well the two musicians knew the material.
Lesh opened the first of those Warfield shows with a twenty-two-minute version of Van Halen’s “Jump.” This didn’t come as a complete surpris
e to Barraco and Mattson, who were driving around that week in an extra car of Lesh’s and saw the Van Halen cassette lying on the seat, figuring it was something his young boys liked. Lesh was in a highly experimental mood that weekend. He opened the next night with Miles Davis’s “Milestones,” not exactly a staple of Deadhead repertoire, and did a fifteen-minute version of John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” during the second set opening night. Lesh was trying to expand the horizons.
Kimock played on all the shows. Since the transplant, he had become Lesh’s most trusted musical intimate. Kimock was both an easygoing, genial presence backstage and a valuable, inventive player, a highly original guitarist who could effortlessly evoke a wide range of diverse styles—from Jerry Garcia to John Abercrombie. He could play pristine, almost miniaturist arabesques or go boldly, noisily into the zone. He practiced guitar eight to ten hours a day. He could be commonly seen strolling around backstage, guitar slung over his shoulder, running scales. He had played every Phil and Friends show since Lesh came back.
Growing up in western Pennsylvania, Kimock had never been especially keen on the Dead—he was more of an Allman Brothers fan—but the other guys in his band at the time were such Deadheads, they decided to move to Marin County and Kimock went with them. Almost from his first days in California, he was compared to Garcia, especially after he hooked up with former Dead members Keith and Donna Godchaux and began playing in their Heart of Gold Band in 1980.