by Joel Selvin
After Garcia gave the guitar magazine that quote about Kimock being his favorite unknown guitar player, Kimock knew it was a compliment, but he also felt it was something like a piece of gum stuck to the sole of his shoe. He deliberately began to avoid comparisons, changing equipment, not playing certain songs, finding other voices for his solos, but the association never went away. He was well-known in Dead circles, if nowhere else. He played briefly with Missing Man Formation, keyboardist Vince Welnick’s band after Welnick’s departure from RatDog.
Phil and Friends were headed out for a month in October, beginning with a three-show weekend at the Denver Fillmore, before hitting the road as opening act on seventeen dates with Dylan through the Midwest and East Coast. To round out his little rhythm section of Molo and Kimock and himself, Lesh invited guitarist Paul Barrere and keyboardist Billy Payne from the fabled Los Angeles rock band Little Feat. Even with extensive rehearsals in Marin, there was too much material for the Little Feat fellows to learn, which meant they were taking music stands onstage and reading sheet music while they played for the first time in their lives.
The weekend in Denver was stressful for Steve Parish and his partner Ram Rod. They hadn’t been out on the road in the recent past and neither cared to make excuses for how the strain affected them. Parish was snapping at other crew members, surly to one and all including the Leshes. Jill Lesh was now officially acting as manager and she had opinions on a wide range of production issues, going so far as to include how the equipment should be stowed and unloaded. Parish and Ram Rod looked at Jill Lesh and didn’t see a manager. They saw a former waitress who once served them breakfast, but married their boss and now lorded over them, making what they considered uninformed decisions about key touring issues from routing to what was acceptable attire onstage. She banished headbands and other forms of hippie-wear. Parish fumed that Garcia never wore anything for anyone else’s pleasure. He didn’t bother to control his temper. At the end of the three-night run at Denver, the Leshes presented both with airplane tickets home.
Kimock spotted the pair lingering backstage with the tickets in their hands. He had spent most of his time with the crew, where he felt more at home. Parish was humiliated because he knew he had brought this on himself, but he was also angry. He wanted to cause some trouble. “Are you still making five hundred dollars a week?” he asked Kimock. “Jerry would have paid you five thousand. Go in there and ask what’s up with the money.”
Kimock had been growing increasingly uncomfortable with the atmosphere surrounding the enterprise. He felt himself being subjected to loyalty tests and subtle inquisitions, and Kimock had no taste for politics. He was there for the music. He had been questioning Jill Lesh making more and more decisions that weren’t necessarily hers to make, stepping outside of established protocols, but sending Parish and Ram Rod home seemed like a last straw to the guitar monk. He decided to address his issues with the Leshes and, egged on by Parish, went to their dressing room.
It did not go well. Jill Lesh went into a tirade. After listening to her rant about his lack of respect and loyalty, he left their dressing room. Lesh, who was watching TV, closed the door behind him. Minutes later, Jill Lesh charged into the crew food buffet, still yelling at Kimock, who was standing in the stairwell. She confronted him, enraged, and threw crumpled dollar bills in his shocked face. “You want money?” she said.
Kimock took his gear off the truck, slept with it locked in his room, got up the next day, rented a truck, and drove back to California. A few days later, he left a cryptic post on his Web site:
Dear Friends & Family:
We regret to announce that Steve Kimock has chosen to flee the Bob Dylan / Phil Lesh Tour.
We apologize for any inconvenience, pray for your forgiveness, and look forward to your continued support.
“I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s Farm no more…”
Signed,
running & shooting behind him as fast as he can…
—Steve Kimock
While most had little difficulty understanding the reference to the Dylan song (“He hands you a nickel, he hands you a dime, he asks if you’re having a good time…”), the “running & shooting” line was more obscure. When he first contemplated going to work with the guys in the Other Ones, he had consulted Robert Hunter, longtime lyricist for the Grateful Dead who knew Kimock from his songwriting for Kimock’s band Zero. “Run,” Hunter had told Kimock, “and keep running and keep shooting behind you as fast as you can.”
When Parish and Ram Rod returned to Bel Marin Keys, they held a festive barbecue to celebrate their firing. A sign on one of the vans in the lot read “Welcome Home.” They fired up the Weber outside the eyesore production trailer that served as their office in the parking lot and entertained the crew and staff. Mickey Hart, who was working in the studio, joined the celebration. Peter McQuaid couldn’t help but notice the encroaching rivalry, a fierce divide emerging. There was an us-against-them mentality breaking out beyond the boardroom, he thought.
On the road, the Leshes scrambled to get guitarist Derek Trucks to fly in and join the tour, although he missed the next three dates and Lesh, Molo, and the two Little Feat guys with their music stands had to fend for themselves. Trucks was the twenty-year-old nephew of the Allman Brothers drummer who played a lot of hot Duane Allman licks. The next night, the revolving cast again rotated. The Little Feat guys were gone—replaced by guitarist Warren Haynes and keyboardist Rob Barraco of the Zen Tricksters and the October Warfield run. Jefferson Airplane lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen also joined the band for the final few dates.
Dylan was a remote presence on the tour. His band would do the sound check without him. His RV would arrive backstage shortly before showtime. He would emerge, walk straight to the stage, play his show, and leave without any further interaction. Dylan was no stranger to borrowing the Dead’s audience. In 1987, when he was at a low ebb creatively and commercially, he joined forces with the Dead as his backup band to make a triumphant summer tour of packed football stadiums he could have never even half-filled on his own. Dylan was extremely fond of Jerry Garcia and attended the funeral. He had genuine respect for the Grateful Dead. On the road with the untried Phil and Friends, from the first night it was clear that the audience was packed with Deadheads; the opening act was pulling its weight at the box office. By the end of the tour, Dylan was calling out Lesh to play bass on a Dead tune like “Alabama Getaway.” That was as much jamming as Dylan was going to do.
The same day Lesh started the Dylan tour, RatDog hit the road until December, a killer thirty-date tour headlining largely three-thousand-seat theaters and adding more Dead songs to the set almost every night. The battle of the bands was under way on the road.
Back home behind the scenes, the antagonism between the band members was boiling up to a horrifying peak, as Lesh chose to publicly break with the other three over the Bandwagon project, one of the most promising possibilities the Dead ever contemplated. McNamee was getting ready to poise the Dead at the forefront of the Internet explosion. Plans called for participation to be spread throughout the Dead organization, which would have meant more than saving jobs; it would have been an investment they all shared. As venture capitalists met with the band to investigate ways of financing the ambitious undertaking, Lesh got cold feet. He completely ignored, or chose to forget, McNamee’s stated insistence on not putting the Vault on the table. He lashed out at McNamee and his bandmates in a carefully prepared statement released to the press in December 1999: “The Grateful Dead have never accepted corporate sponsorship or venture capital money, and I remain unalterably opposed to any deal that would lease, license or otherwise collateralize the music in the vault,” Lesh wrote. “The Grateful Dead have a history of mismanagement and bad business decisions, and I fear that this current plan will become the crown jewel in that collection.”
Openly breaking with his band members raised their conflict to a new level of hostility and violated their brotherho
od in a new and particularly traumatic way. Lesh had always strictly observed the band’s code of silence, even when called to testify in the widows’ lawsuit, and for him to take his internal disagreements into the open was evidence of how the principles at the core of the Dead’s life for all these years, the basic agreement by which the members lived and worked, had broken down. “This situation is very sad for me on many levels,” his statement concluded. “It has brought me to the realization that the Grateful Dead is now only a corporation, with whose directors I no longer share a common vision.”
It was the opening public salvo in a simmering feud that had been going on undercover for more than a year. Lesh’s outburst caused such a stir among the fans that the other three members felt obligated to post a statement “To the Deadheads” on the band’s Web site signed by Weir, Hart, and Kreutzmann: “There has never been—nor will there ever be—any discussion of selling our Vault, our music, our name, our legacy. Not to Microsoft. Not to anyone. The Vault is part of our heart and soul… and yours. We’re taking steps to preserve it for all time.… We have an opportunity to take the lead as music and the Internet converge. Opportunities like this come along very, very rarely.”
But the full depth of the acrimony behind the scenes only broke into public view when Mickey Hart gave an unfiltered interview shortly thereafter. “Nobody’s at war with Phil,” Hart said. “He’s just out of the loop. He just hasn’t paid attention for years. He’s just in the Phil zone, God save him. Nobody pays much attention to him. He’s sort of on the outside. He’s of no consequence really.
“The Grateful Dead has always worked as a democracy,” Hart continued. “Phil’s the odd man out. So he took his marbles and split, like a little boy would. That’s his prerogative; God bless him, I wish him well. But believe me, we don’t miss him. We’re having a great time without him. It couldn’t be better. If someone doesn’t want to play with you, you don’t play with them. We have no fight with him; he’s sort of at odds with himself. I think that liver transplant didn’t go so well. He might have gotten the liver of a jerk.”
Hart quickly apologized. Apart from the politically incorrect remark about the organ donor, his comments may have been cold, but they accurately reflected the sentiments of Lesh’s bandmates at the time. They were all but entirely alienated. Lesh had concentrated exclusively on his Phil and Friends rehearsals and shows and was entirely absent from company meetings; now he was even out of social contact with the other members. The Terrapin Station project he had once championed had stalled. Cumsky had located an Orange County–based real estate development firm ready to partner. A piece of property had been purchased in mid-1998 in downtown San Francisco, and the architects made some minor adjustments to their existing plans, but Cumsky couldn’t get the band to budge. They seemed distracted with their infighting. Frustrated, he gave up trying to get their attention.
Phil and Friends was consuming a tremendous amount of Lesh’s time. At the end of the Dylan tour, Lesh had played forty-three shows with thirty-six different musicians. Few of them were that well acquainted with Dead music, which can be complex and challenging and comes with a giant songbook. After spending his life playing the same music with people who all knew the music intimately, Lesh found himself devoting endless hours rehearsing other musicians. After running through five guitarists on the Dylan tour, his next guitarist was yet another unlikely but inspired choice, blues guitarist Robben Ford.
Ford grew up in remote Ukiah, California. As a teenager, he started a blues band with his brothers and backed harmonica ace Charlie Musselwhite. At twenty-three, Ford joined the band behind George Harrison on his 1974 US tour led by saxophonist Tom Scott. He worked with Joni Mitchell and Miles Davis over the course of his long career and made a series of outstanding blues and R&B solo albums. But Lesh had never heard of him when drummer Molo brought up his name. Ford flew up to Marin from his home in Southern California and spent three days jamming with the band. He knew nothing about Grateful Dead music and the job didn’t seem to call on his expertise in blues. He knew it wasn’t a jazz gig, but he could jam. He loved playing with Molo and found the guitar-oriented music set him free in ways he couldn’t have imagined. Ford was astonished at how much fun he had. He told Lesh he was down with whatever he had in mind.
What Lesh had in mind was matching Ford as the surprise guitarist with the two Little Feat guys at his sixtieth-birthday Phil and Friends benefit concert for his Unbroken Chain Foundation in March 2000 at the Henry J. Kaiser Auditorium in Oakland, a particularly sentimental site for Deadheads. Next to Lake Merritt in downtown Oakland, the parking lot and adjacent park were filled once again with the camp followers and itinerant hippies who thronged the place on many grand New Year’s Eves past when the Grateful Dead played. It had always been one of the favorites settings for Dead shows, one of the original parking lots. The funky old hall was the scene of some indelible Dead moments, like the year the band rang in the new one with Etta James and the Tower of Power horn section singing “In the Midnight Hour.”
In the year since his return to action, Lesh had clearly established the Phil and Friends concept with the Deadheads and grabbed the banner with his fan-friendly repertoire, heavy emphasis on jamming and a rotating cast of guest musicians. Rumors had been flying among the Dead circles, where rumors fly easily, about what guests Phil and Friends would include on this auspicious occasion, his return to Oakland and the first show of the new century—Bob Dylan? Bob Weir? Trey Anastasio? They knew Lesh always kept the Phil and Friends lineups secret until the curtain went up. The Deadheads went along with the game. The parking lot filled up days before the show. The circus was back in town.
At age sixty, every man takes stock of his life. It cannot be avoided. It is a milestone of indisputable proportions; the gateway to old age and the end of youth. One year from a drastic, lifesaving surgery, at the absolute peak of his professional career, for the first time in his life leading his own band that, in less than two years, had grown in popularity to the point where he could now attract crowds that rivaled those drawn by the Dead themselves during the late seventies and early eighties, Phil Lesh had good reason to feel immense pride and deep satisfaction.
At the Kaiser, he was returning to celebrate at the scene of greater glories. He had psychedelic poster artist Stanley Mouse, co-creator of the skull-and-roses logo and so much more Dead emblemology, make a brilliant poster for the concert showing Lesh playing bass astride a giant dragon. He took the stage playing guitar with Mike Gordon of Phish on bass for the first two numbers, before settling into his customary role on the bass. Guitarists Ford and Barrere lit the place on fire, pianist Payne feeding the flames with his piercing, flickering solos, making for what was undoubtedly the most raucous—and least Grateful Dead–like—Phil and Friends yet.
After the concert, for an additional $150, VIPs could attend a reception in the auditorium’s upstairs ballroom, where they nibbled expensive desserts and listened to a string quartet play while a bluegrass fiddler sat atop a large wrapped gift box and sang “Box of Rain.” Wavy Gravy, the clown prince of Woodstock, dressed as Ludwig van Beethoven, sang “Happy Birthday” to the birthday boy, who was accepting his well-wishers while seated on a king’s throne on the stage, as regal as a king without actually wearing a crown.
“Don’t eat the brown strudel,” warned Gravy.
9
Soul Battle
WHILE THEIR adoring public imagined only a golden circle of love inside the band, it was, in reality, a bitter civil war. They had been able to orbit somewhat peacefully around Garcia, but they always knew peace was tenuous among a group of such dedicated contrarians. After a press conference backstage at UC Berkeley’s Greek Theater, where the Dead were celebrating the band’s twentieth anniversary in 1985, Phil Lesh was buttonholed by a reporter and asked what he thought was the main reason the band lasted so long. Lesh assumed a mock contemplative pose, hand on chin. “I think we’re all waiting for a chance to get even,�
� he said.
He wasn’t entirely joking.
Since Garcia died, the dynamics among the guys had changed so many times that nobody knew what to expect any longer. Without Garcia, nobody could find a lasting equilibrium under which the survivors could operate. In those dark days, out of grief and confusion the band let their basic product lapse. They almost deliberately dismantled the brand, making some precipitous, dubious business decisions that would hamper them for years. Retiring the name alone was a completely unnecessary shot-in-the-foot that left the band limping. There was other self-sabotage as well. In the midst of their own indecision and separate directions, they confused the public, undermined their connection with the most loyal fan base of any rock band, and did everything they could to destroy their standing in the marketplace. Even when the surviving members could finally agree to play music together again three years after Garcia’s death, they still couldn’t face using the band’s name and came up with the Other Ones dodge. Nor could they solve the guitar issue.
Without Garcia around to mediate, the four had little in common other than their fates as members of the Grateful Dead. Even Hart and Kreutzmann, the drum brothers, could be contemptuous of each other, as close as they were from all the years of sharing rhythm, psychedelics, and everything else. College graduate Lesh likely looked down on all three as his intellectual inferiors. Weir could be extraordinarily instinctual or unbelievably goofy, but he was never entirely grounded. Plus he had a tendency to drink, sometimes mixing booze with pharmaceuticals, which could make communication difficult. Cast adrift together, it had become difficult for them to find common purpose, unified direction, or even a consistently congenial relationship.