Fare Thee Well

by Joel Selvin

  Lesh had a long list of beefs with his bandmates, extending back to rejecting his wife for the Rex Foundation board. Most recently, he had taken up arms against Bandwagon with a fury. He raged against McNamee and the suits in Silicon Valley, accused McQuaid of taking bribes from bankers, and told interviewers the other band members wanted to sell the Vault, which was never under consideration. A serious financing proposal was in negotiation and McNamee was reaching out to other acts, from the Dave Matthews Band to Pearl Jam to U2, about joining forces with the Dead on the Internet, but Lesh’s early enthusiasm for the project had turned to an outright antagonism that no one understood, especially given he was no longer keeping abreast of developments or attending any meetings since recovering from the liver transplant.

  As Lesh’s understanding of the Dead culture grew from his experiences in Phil and Friends both with other musicians and the audience, he took bold, definite steps to capture the banner that the others left where it fell when Garcia died. With RatDog, Weir had gone looking to find himself. Mickey Hart was really an activist musicologist whose work was more conceptual art than anything else. With Phil and Friends, Lesh waved the flag and rallied the troops. He was willing to super-serve his core audience and they responded wildly. Hungry for the Dead-like experience Phil and Friends provided, an eager minority of Deadheads embraced the band—and Lesh’s repertory concept, which (kind of) solved the guitar problem—with breathtaking speed.

  Following the smashing success on the Dylan tour, Phil and Friends were booked into multiple nights in April 2000 at big-city East Coast theaters where Lesh sold out six shows at New York City’s Beacon Theatre, four nights at Boston’s Orpheum Theatre, and three nights at the Tower Theater in Philadelphia. He was suddenly a certified attraction.

  However close they had been before, since the transplant, Phil and Jill Lesh were welded together into one. To others who knew her as the scrupulous, caring mother and calmly supportive wife on Dead tours, her transformation into fierce music business administrator and Phil Lesh guard dog came as a surprise. Her steely drive and cold ambition were a rarity in Dead circles, where such values were never considered cool. The life-or-death ordeal of Lesh’s liver transplant (not to mention Jill’s thyroid cancer surgery) undoubtedly fused their intimacy. Indeed, nobody doubted that the Leshes spoke as one person. Lesh had frequently sulked in the background during his time with the Grateful Dead and for years had quietly nurtured his resentments against his bandmates. He did not want to suffer fools any longer. After his transplant, he would not. In the collapse of the long-standing leadership in the Dead world that followed Garcia’s death, Lesh had finally navigated himself into a position of power. His days of standing in the corner were over. He clearly decided to take over as master of the legacy, and his wife was determined for him to have it.

  Lesh no doubt thought: who else could it be? He could well have determined that it couldn’t be benighted Bobby Weir, drunken, dysfunctional, dreamy, and fumbling. Or hardheaded Mickey Hart, the pseudo-intellectual drummer who was losing his hearing and couldn’t keep time. Brutish Billy Kretuzmann, who was busy picking pineapples and dropping acid in Hawaii? No, Lesh alone was suited to take the lead. Only he could restore the soul of the Grateful Dead.

  Lesh had largely cut off his contact with the other band members when he called a meeting at his house. It was a summons, really. Weir and Hart left after a business meeting at Bel Marin Keys with Peter McQuaid. Phil and Jill sat together on their couch, holding hands, fingers entwined. While Phil stayed largely quiet, Jill explained the new world order to her astonished guests.

  She began by telling them it was clear that she and Phil now were the protectors of the spirit of the Grateful Dead. The Leshes had become the true champions of the band’s legacy. There was no longer any need on their part for further association with the rest of the band. Phil would carry the banner. They would take it from here. Caught up in her fervor, she summarized with a stunning pronouncement. She told the other lifelong members of the original band: “You don’t know anything about the Grateful Dead.”

  Bob Weir exploded off the piano stool, where he had been sitting. He stood up and shouted. “Wait a minute,” he said. “How many Grateful Dead shows have you played?”

  Usually easygoing and slow-talking, Weir was furious. He had been holding back his anger and resentments toward Lesh for some time. Years actually. Lesh had always been a stumbling block, a sarcastic older brother figure who had not been averse to slapping around teenage Weir in the band’s earliest days. If the emergence of Phil and Friends had sparked some competitive impulses with Weir—prodding him into adding a lead guitarist and more Dead songs to RatDog—he had been able to largely ignore Lesh’s complaints or at least write them off as the understandable irritability of somebody going through a major health crisis. But this pronouncement from Jill Lesh was something he could no longer ignore.

  This was a battle for the soul of the Grateful Dead. Band members’ wives did not dictate band policy. Jill had not even come along until the band had been through two of the most tumultuous, creative, and momentous decades of their career. The Dead have long memories. Keyboardist Brent Mydland played in the band for more than ten years and was still “the new guy.” For Jill Lesh, the waitress his bandmate married, to lay claim to the mantle of all that Weir had struggled to achieve, the tens of thousands of miles he traveled; the thousands of gigs he played; the blood, sweat, and tears spilled over many long years, was simply not acceptable. He wrote many of the Dead’s greatest songs and sang even more. Lesh wrote exactly one of the band’s great songs and if Weir had sung it instead of Lesh, “Box of Rain” would be one of the best-remembered Dead songs ever. Listening to Jill’s crazy rant made him sick to his stomach. Even more unacceptable was his bandmate sitting beside this upstart, nodding his tacit approval. The meeting ended quickly and badly.

  A torrent of mean and angry emails followed, Weir blasting the Leshes in long, passionate letters, even going so far as to blame Jill’s thyroid medication for creating a personality disorder. War had broken out into the open.

  In June, Lesh headed out on a second Phil and Friends tour with Bob Dylan, this time as co-headliner. The plan called for each act to alternate closing, but after watching Lesh close the first show in Portland to an audience teeming with Deadheads, Dylan decided he would rather take the opening slot. The Deadheads turned out in droves to see Phil and Friends and Dylan didn’t mind being the opening act. He could get back to the hotel earlier.

  On the April tour of East Coast theaters, Lesh had taken guitarists Jimmy Herring of Dead cover band Jazz Is Dead and Jeff Pevar, whom he met sitting in with David Crosby. For the summer tour, he brought back bluesslinger Robben Ford and the Little Feat guys, guitarist Paul Barrere and keyboardist Billy Payne, who showed up exhausted coming off eight straight weeks on the road with the Feat.

  Bill Kreutzmann had moved back to Marin County. He had married again and his new wife, his fourth, was tired of living in Hawaii. He bought a house in Ross, a few miles west of San Rafael. Even from a long distance, Kreutzmann had been dismissive of Lesh’s complaints and supportive of Weir and Hart’s perspective. He had made a show-of-strength appearance at the 1999 New Year’s Eve show by RatDog and the Mickey Hart Band at the Warfield Theatre (and the GDP Christmas party the night before at the Fillmore) before moving back to town. He sat in with both bands, all three bandmates playing together at midnight at the Warfield, while Phil and Friends sat idle that New Year’s.

  It was summer 2000, after he had bought the house in Ross, that Kreutzmann found himself at the Bel Marin Keys rehearsal hall. The latest edition of the Other Ones had assembled to begin rehearsals and start seeking a second drummer to play a summer tour, since Molo would be going out with Phil and Friends. Kreutzmann took the empty drum chair next to Hart on a lark for one song. Instead of Lesh, the band had drafted Alphonso Johnson of jazz-fusion greats Weather Report, although more importantly, since 1998, bassis
t with Jazz Is Dead.

  Jazz Is Dead was a high-concept instrumental act put together by a booking agent around Dixie Dregs keyboardist T Lavitz and Miles Davis drummer Billy Cobham. Jimmy Herring was the band’s original guitarist. The band played jazz-inclined interpretations from the Grateful Dead songbook, yet another example of how musicians were approaching the Dead as repertoire. Alphonso Johnson knew how to walk the thin line between playing the root at the bottom end and keeping the flexibility for improvisation. Also, unlike Lesh, he did not mind coming down on the one. The drummers loved him, if only for that. Sometimes Hart thought Lesh would be buzzing like a bee around the bottom, never sure where to land. Sometimes, if Lesh was in a particularly foul mood, he might fool with the drummers purposefully, coming down on the sixteenth note after the beat just to throw off the groove.

  One song was all it took Kreutzmann to decide whatever these guys were doing, he wanted in. He said so. “The original drummer?” said Johnson. “Oh yeah, let’s take him.”

  Hart was juiced anyway. He had just returned from the Democratic National Convention, where he had pounded tom-toms onstage while his friend Al Gore was nominated for president. Hart and Weir had played a few big-ticket fundraisers in Silicon Valley for the campaign backed by Roger McNamee’s band, the Flying Other Brothers, but Hart had come to know the vice president and his wife, Tipper, over the course of the Clinton administration. Tipper was not only a drummer, but a big Deadhead. She sat in on congas with the band at venture capitalist billionaire John Doerr’s home. Al Gore and Hart had spent considerable personal time together, and offstage and at ease, Gore was an entirely different person than the stiff public face. They became friends. Hart’s frenetic energy could be contagious to many; he was a late-life sailing partner of television newsman Walter Cronkite.

  The federal government was filled with Deadheads. President Clinton had been seen wearing Jerry Garcia ties. Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont had been a fan for years. But Wall Street firms were also stacked with Deadheads. This was not as surprising as it may seem. Not all Deadheads were hippies. During the eighties, East Coast prep schools were a hotbed of Dead tape traders, and the culture incubated among the nascent upper class. Like they say, politics makes strange bedfellows. Hart came back from the Los Angeles convention having hobnobbed with pol pals like Senator Harry Reid, the Mormon lawmaker from Nevada whom Hart came to know through his work with the Library of Congress.

  Mickey Hart parlayed his political enthusiasms into a board seat of the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center, where he was deeply involved in sound preservation. Rooting around the archives, Hart found a 1938 recording by fiddler Al Gore Sr., the vice president’s father, and presented Gore Jr. with a copy. He and Weir appeared in April at a Library of Congress bicentennial concert also featuring Pete Seeger, Tito Puente, and others. He also joined the board of the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function to further pursue his studies of the seat of music in the brain. His wife, Caryl Hart, was appointed to the state Parks and Recreation Commission in March after having been recommended for the job by Vice President Gore.

  Hart spent all May on tour with his new Mickey Hart Band featuring former Dead keyboardist Vince Welnick, whose Missing Man Formation had fallen apart and who was glad to have the opportunity to be back in the fold. He showed up with fresh vigor for the Other Ones, pumped to be reunited with Kreutzmann, his partner in rhythm since 1967. With Johnson replacing Lesh on bass, the bottom end was contoured to a more conventional approach, but Kreutzmann and Hart combined for a signature drum sound that instantly spelled Grateful Dead. Saxophonist Dave Ellis was gone—he left RatDog the previous December, a victim of clinical depression and too much road. They worked up a couple more of Hornsby’s numbers (“The Way It Is,” “The Valley Road”) and kept the new Robert Hunter songs from the previous tour. Rehearsals were mainly devoted to tightening up the new rhythm section on the existing repertoire. “It’s basically a new band, but I have the benefit of knowing the songs,” said Kreutzmann.

  The debate about how much rehearsal is good before it robs the band of spontaneity has been going on as long as there has been a Grateful Dead. During the band’s 1975 hiatus, they never rehearsed and the few gigs they did play were highly satisfactory to band and audience alike, evidence invariably cited in almost all future arguments against too much rehearsal. Hart picked up the refrain with Hornsby, explaining he didn’t want the songs too tight.

  “No,” Hornsby said, “we want to get them as tight as possible and take off from there.”

  “I just don’t want all those guitar players tripping over each other,” said Hart.

  “101 Strings,” said Hornsby, laughing.

  “My worst nightmare,” said Hart. “At least there’s no saxophone.”

  That August, this time, the tour was greeted with enthusiasm from the start by the Deadheads, who thronged the sheds the band played. They occasionally brought out opening act Ziggy Marley, Bob’s son, to sing one of his father’s songs like “Stir It Up” or “I Shot the Sheriff.” Hart added an electric kalimba to his arsenal during the nightly drum solos. If the response to the shows lacked the surprise element that the previous Other Ones tour supplied, the shows sold out and the band was greeted like conquering heroes.

  For his fall tour, Lesh brought together a Phil and Friends configuration that would prove more enduring than other editions. Bringing back Molo on drums and Barraco on keys, he added guitarists Jimmy Herring, who had been playing with the Allman Brothers since his East Coast tour with Phil and Friends ended in April, and Warren Haynes, another Allman Brothers guitarist who had been playing on and off with Phil and Friends since early 1999. This lineup, which fans would come to call The Q—for quintet—started life with an October sweep through multiple nights in East Coast theaters that included a stunning seven sold-out shows at New York’s Beacon Theatre, home turf in New York for the Allmans since 1989.

  By comparison, the RatDog fall tour started in the West and moved through clubs and single nights in theaters. RatDog came through Chicago to play one night at the Riviera Theatre in November two weeks after Phil and Friends did four sold-out shows in the hall.

  After receiving word from the Lesh camp that he would be spending New Year’s Eve in Florida, the Other Ones announced an ambitious New Year’s Eve concert at the 16,000-seat Oakland Coliseum Arena, only to have the rug pulled out from under them when Lesh suddenly switched plans and booked a Phil and Friends show for New Year’s Eve down the freeway a few exits at the Henry J. Kaiser Auditorium in Oakland, a sentimental favorite with Deadheads. This was an open act of warfare. He cut down the audience for the Other Ones by half, while Phil and Friends sold out the eight-thousand-seat HJK.

  It was a mean, deliberate power play by Lesh. By planting his flag a mere five miles from his erstwhile bandmates the same night, he was making a statement. He was also taking the backstage battle into the public arena, making their fans take sides on the Deadheads’ special night. With the Phil people packed into the Kaiser and the Other Ones crowd rambling around the half-empty, antiseptic basketball arena, the victory was all Lesh’s, even if he made the Deadheads choose, like children of a divorced couple, whether to spend the holiday with Mom or Dad.

  10

  Garcia’s Guitars

  DOUG LONG became an attorney somewhat late in life. After he started his practice in the remote Central Valley town of Visalia, he phoned his ex-wife, a lifelong attorney, in Sonoma to tell her he had joined her ranks. A few days later, she called back. “Your old friend Doug Irwin is in trouble and I don’t have time for this,” she said. “Since you are just starting out, maybe you do.”

  When Long lived in Sonoma, he came to know Irwin, a luthier (guitar maker) with a shop in downtown Sonoma. Long was in public relations at the time but played in bands and commissioned Irwin to build a guitar for him around the same time Irwin was building a guitar for Jerry Garcia that would be called Tiger. Some leftover pieces o
f wood from Tiger found their way onto Long’s Irwin guitar.

  Jerry Garcia had walked into Doug Irwin’s studio one day in 1972. He paid $750 for a guitar Irwin had in the window and asked Irwin to build him a second guitar. Garcia and Mountain Girl returned with a pile of cash and Irwin and his assistant went to work on a guitar they called in the shop “The Garcia.” When he delivered the instrument in May 1973, it was named Wolf. Garcia was so pleased with the guitar, Irwin went to work on another guitar for him. The next guitar, Tiger, took six years for Irwin to make. Altogether, Irwin would build five guitars for Garcia.

  Long found Irwin in jail on an assault charge. In 1997, Irwin had suffered severe brain damage when he was struck by a hit-and-run driver while riding his bicycle. The brain damage imposed severe personality changes on Irwin, made him subject to sudden, irrational mood shifts and angry outbursts. He had been arrested after a confrontation with another motorist while on his bike had gotten out of hand. Long went and got him out of jail.

  Irwin, he soon discovered, was not doing well. He was living under a bridge. His shop had been closed and his tools were in storage. Irwin was mentally ill and only marginally able to care for himself. He was no longer capable of running his own business. Then he told Long the story about how the Grateful Dead wouldn’t let him have the guitars Jerry Garcia left him in his will.

  This was no hallucination. When Irwin consulted the will, sure enough, there it was. Not only was it the first bequest in the will, above the gifts to family members, but it was the only such mention in the entire document of anyone outside Garcia’s family. Long called the Dead office and reached Cameron Sears, who told Irwin he was the sixth or seventh lawyer to be heard from. “But I’m the lawyer who is going to sue you,” Long said.