by Joel Selvin
Lesh, Weir, Hart, and Kreutzmann would take the stage together for the last time in their lives. The four musicians constituted one of the greatest and most original rhythm sections ever. Without Garcia at the center, their gyroscope had wobbled for twenty years, righting just long enough to pull off this extraordinary coup of a finale. Whatever personal problems had plagued them would now be put aside for the music one last time. They owed this to the fans—and themselves. This was anything but just another gig. This needed to be their finest hour. Their emotions ran high as they took the stage with serious looks of intent on their faces.
Cameron Sears had a car waiting for his wife and family at the airport that morning and she rushed with them to the concert, walking in backstage almost at showtime. Cassidy Sears immediately saw Trixie Garcia, with whom she had grown up backstage, and another Dead kid friend, Sage Scully, the daughter of the band’s first manager, Rock Scully, who had died only the previous January. She was instantly caught up in the flush of the happy family reunion, besieged by dear old friends she hadn’t seen in years, but couldn’t stay backstage and catch up because the band was about to start. She hurriedly made her way out into the crowd, getting into place as the band began to play. As soon as they struck up the music, she burst into tears and bawled through the entire first song. She was not the only one weeping in the crowd.
Today, as they went onstage, Lesh summoned everyone to the center to take a bow. The seven acknowledged the crowd, both in front and behind, and basked in the prolonged reception, finally falling into a group hug before taking their places and picking up their instruments. The opening song, “China Cat,” has been paired practically since its 1968 introduction with “I Know You Rider,” a number in the songbook from the band’s earliest days. Anastasio took the Garcia vocal on “China Cat” and the band roared through a lively jam that quickly segued into the inevitable “I Know You Rider,” although the musicians stayed on the appealing groove for a long time before Weir stepped forward to sing. The entire stadium sang along—I know you rider gonna miss me when I’m gone.
Weir took “Estimated Prophet,” his great song from Terrapin Station, at a lazy gait over the reggae beat. The song might have fit more comfortably on the second-night set list at Levi’s, but Weir gave the song a strong and passionate reading. Anastasio vamped on Garcia’s envelope-filter part through a lengthy heated instrumental passage before the band migrated into a spacey jam that brought the song to a close. Hornsby pulled out the surprising “Built to Last,” title song of the Dead’s final album that the band played a handful of times in 1990 and then discarded, only to have Lesh reprise the number with both Phil and Friends and Furthur. Hunter’s lyrics were weirdly appropriate:
All the stars / Are gone but one
Morning breaks / Here comes the sun
Cross the sky / Sinking fast
Show me something / Built to last
“Samson and Delilah” was one of the songs Weir used to bring down the walls at Winterland. He can command the old blues song with the authority of a Viking. At Chicago, he snapped the house to full attention every time he stepped to the mike on a song the band traditionally saved for Sundays. Lesh sang “Mountains of the Moon,” a piece from Aoxomoxoa the Dead played a few times over a couple of months in 1969, which was primarily a vehicle for a long, spacey jam that gave way to Weir singing a lusty “Throwing Stones.” The instrumental passage built to a driving climax, Weir and Anastasio locking together for a piercing, stinging fusillade that had the crowd waving their arms and dancing. With that, the band broke for intermission.
Fireworks covered the sky at the end of set break. As starbursts exploded above them, the band filed onstage to watch. Jill Lesh held baby Levon, wearing protective earphones, in her arms, pointing to the skies. As the last streaks of fireworks disappeared from the sky, the band rumbled into “Truckin’.” Unlike the version they played in Santa Clara, the band nailed it hard this time—vocal harmonies on the mark, band pumped up, Chimenti’s organ finally fully in the mix, steaming down the groove at a crunching tempo. Anastasio lit up a stinging, piercing guitar solo. The whole band came out on fire. They stretched the song past the ten-minute mark.
Weir sang his song “Cassidy” with his most earnest conviction, the band wrapping around him and lifting him up as he sang, then pouring themselves into a long, fiery jam. In the crowd, Cassidy Sears burst into tears again. It was her birthday song and was also steeped in close personal associations for Weir. He had sung the song several hundred times, but never with any more feeling than he did in Chicago.
Anastasio stood up next to sing “Althea.” He had expected the song to show up on the first set and, when it didn’t, assumed the number was being dropped entirely. He was somewhat relieved not to have to perform this particular Garcia vocal in front of a million Deadheads, especially after watching Weir and Lesh battle over the song’s tempo the day before at sound check. He drew a breath, stepped forward, and—having seen Garcia play this song from the audience a thousand times—counted off the song at the proper tempo while staring Weir straight in the eye. Behind him, the band slammed into the song and he turned and delivered his best vocal performance yet, his confidence having grown immensely seemingly overnight. The band took off on another soaring excursion that led way to the opening notes of the “Terrapin Station” suite, one of the most complex and delicate compositions in the Dead repertoire, where they hit the first speed bump of the set—Lesh’s vocals on “Lady with a Fan.”
People had tried to persuade Lesh not to attempt this vocal, but he insisted. There had been years in the eighties when Lesh didn’t sing with the band and the crew didn’t even set up a mike stand for him. Lesh’s voice lacks the range and power for truly expressive singing. He labored carefully over the lyrics, rolling on and off pitch, in a voice that was, for the most part, bland and colorless. He couldn’t articulate the melody with any precision. He approached the lyrics tentatively and swallowed his consonants. With his stiff delivery and limited skills, he left little room for nuance. And play what you want, a band is only as good as the singer. When Weir took the mike for the main body of the song, the difference was instantly apparent. Weir sang his heart out, crafting each line with supple care.
Even the drum solo by Kreutzmann and Hart was super-charged, the two drummers stirring up a storm of high-powered rhythms on their drum kits before Hart moved to his sequencers, sonifications, and The Beam, the strange giant percussion instrument of his own devising he once described as “doorbells from Mars.” Using a driving rhythmic loop, Hart dropped dancing, swimming, flying sparks over the beats. Kreutzmann retreated from his stool and joined in the crazy assortment of percussion instruments and drums arrayed on the stage in the cagelike assemblage known as The Beast. Hart even dragged out the train horns he used to blast out twenty-five years before to announce “Casey Jones” at Dead shows. He got on The Beam and led the reconvened ensemble in a dazzling fog of noises and sonic inventions that paved the approach brilliantly to the ending reprise of “Terrapin Station,” Lesh, once again, alas, on vocals.
A stunning, mesmerizing jam where the sound mix and band arrangement finally put Hornsby’s piano playing in the foreground gave way to “Unbroken Chain,” a Lesh song introduced to the band’s repertoire in the final months before Garcia died. Lesh adopted the song, not only as the name of his charity, but as a kind of signature number with Phil and Friends and Furthur that his fans rallied around. Weir followed with the emotional high point of the show, a wrenching version of “Days Between,” which the band gave a magnificent, epic thirteen-minute performance.
The song, probably the last Garcia-Hunter masterpiece, introduced by the band in 1992, was a melancholic Hunter ruminating over the past (and there were days I know/when all we ever wanted/was to learn and love and grow). The bittersweet mood of the song—whatever is the opposite of nostalgia or a fond feeling for the past—perfectly underscored the moment. The song was autobiography as Weir
was singing it. He delivered the sermon with surgical precision and gospel intensity; he was nothing short of amazing. He seized the moment with every ounce of his abilities, his blazing eyes staring intently into the night.
As the last note of “Days Between” hung in the air inviting a solemnity to the proceedings, the drummers began to pound out a familiar jungle tattoo—bump-debump, debump, bump, bump—the call of the introduction to “Not Fade Away.” The song’s original author, Buddy Holly, borrowed Bo Diddley’s beat, and the Rolling Stones compressed his plaintive plea into a tidy rocking beat. But the Dead found the spiritual center of the song and opened it up long ago into a broad, rollicking tribute to everlasting spirit. In the hands of the Dead, the song was no longer about trivial romantic affections. It took on cosmic dimensions.
Never did the song make more sense for the band, never was the message more appropriate. And, for once, Weir set the tempo at a strong, stirring, almost martial upbeat. Off at a gallop, this one he would not slow down. He turned to the crowd and stroked the loud, stinging chords that announced the first verse and, in that instant, pulled the crowd together as one. The three vocalists stepped to their mikes and sang. At the end, as the band faded the song onstage, the audience took it over, clapping the beat behind the singers as the musicians slowly stopped playing, then taking over the singing when they stopped. The drummers jammed with the crowd, adding the beats between the crowd singing “You know our love will not fade away.” Eventually, they also stopped and left the stage. But the crowd did not stop. They kept singing, clapping between the lines themselves to keep the beat now. They sang loud and lusty, an entire stadium full of people, and they didn’t stop until Lesh reemerged from backstage.
An obviously moved Lesh came out to deliver his donor rap. “Now we’ve arrived at the point,” he said, “we never thought we would get here. I’d like to think of it as a crossroads rather than an ending. I know everybody here is going to walk out tonight and move on with their lives and hopefully, as I am, energized by all the love we’ve seen in these shows. God bless you. I mean that. We’re going to do that. Take some tangents, move in different directions. It’s been a long time coming, but I’m grateful for it.” He made his standard plea for the audience to pledge to become organ donors. “Long live Terrapin Nation,” he said.
The crowd again picked up the chant: “You know our love won’t fade away.”
Weir emerged from backstage wearing a T-shirt reading LET TREY SING and started snapping off the chords to the introduction for the final song as Anastasio, a huge smile spreading across his face, stepped forward to sing “Touch of Grey.” Hornsby handled the second verse, then Weir took over and sang the rest of the song. Photos of the band in their youth splashed on the video screen, as their lives flashed before their eyes. This was it—the last Grateful Dead song at the last Grateful Dead concert. Weir made the most of it.
Lesh always planned to end the concerts with the angelic chorale, “Attics of My Life.” It would have been much better if they had taken the time to rehearse the difficult three-part harmonies. Anastasio kept waiting to try out the song in San Rafael, but they only ran it once around a piano. The next time they tried the song, everybody had forgotten their parts and nobody was singing the Garcia part. They ran the song a couple of times in sound checks, but Anastasio was panicked. He called his New York arranger Jeff Tanski and asked him to write charts based on the record. He handed charts to Hornsby and kept one for himself. While a montage of old photos of the band members—living and dead—paraded across the stadium video screens, Weir led the vocal ensemble on acoustic guitar, Chimenti eased in a little organ and sang the melody from his charts. Nobody came in together crisply and the timing, breathing, and pitch varied through the first verse as the little choral group picked up steam. They finally caught up with each other in time for the final crescendo and put the song—and the concert, and the Grateful Dead—to rest.
Lesh summoned the band to center stage for their bow. He and Weir hugged and kissed. Hart slipped under Lesh’s other arm as the entire ensemble took their bow. The musicians stood on the stage, talking and hugging, culminating in a giant group hug, broken up by a cheer. The audience picked up the “Not Fade Away” clapping again.
That left it to Mickey Hart to offer the benediction. On his way off the stage, he stopped at the microphone. “Please, the feelings we have here,” he said, “remember them, take them home, do some good. Hug your husband, your wife, your kids. I leave you with this—please be kind.”
If the entire series at Levi’s Stadium began with a rainbow, this was the pot of gold at the end. It was a triumph. The closing set had been everything it needed to be, everything it should have been, everything everybody wanted it to be. It was rich with emotion, hot licks, imaginative improvisations, inspiration, some great singing, and, most of all, the magnificent songs of Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, whose name was not mentioned from stage once during all five concerts. Hunter didn’t mind. Hunter knew how unsentimental those guys were. He didn’t attend the concerts anyway. Despite everything, the musicians had succeeded. Perhaps in the final set they at last did what they came to do. They managed to evoke the mystery, the magic, the adventure of a Grateful Dead concert as well as anyone since the Grateful Dead.
Backstage after the show, Jonathan Levine painfully made his way to Lesh’s dressing room. The booking agent who had been such an important part of the Phil Lesh solo career had undergone major spinal surgery six weeks before and he was only able to walk with a great deal of difficulty. He had received a note from Jill inviting him to the Santa Clara shows, but those were out of the question. He managed to pull himself together the next week and fly from Nashville for the final show in Chicago. Twenty years before, he had been changing planes at Chicago’s Midway Airport when the Grateful Dead gave their last show at Soldier Field and he briefly considered deplaning and going to the show before deciding to continue his flight. He didn’t feel he could miss it this time.
In the spacious dressing room in the bowels of the stadium alone with the Leshes after the show, Levine joined a sentimental champagne toast with Jill and Phil. They were soaking in the glow of this immense accomplishment. They were happy and spent. Levine left them alone and, when he couldn’t find a ride back to his nearby hotel, made the excruciatingly slow and painful walk back by himself.
Back at the hotel, Trixie Garcia found herself partying with members of the band, Bill Walton, and other insiders in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton. Everyone was there except the Leshes and Weir. It had been a draining series of concerts for Jerry’s youngest daughter. All five shows had been like a whirlwind. She had been continually swamped by old friends and Deadheads. She gave dozens of interviews. Growing up backstage at Grateful Dead shows, she knew the difference between that band and Fare Thee Well, but she enjoyed the music enough. Mostly, she was connecting dots and looking for some closure of her own. She had spent a lot of time with her two sisters and her mother and she was bone tired. But she was wondering where Weir was when he swooped down on her and carried her away to his own party in his suite.
This was the real after-party. Weir’s hotel room was crowded with freaks and characters. The atmosphere was loose and celebratory. Weir was relaxed, feeling good, and holding court. Trixie felt right at home. People were drinking and sharing joints. Everybody was still high from the concert. Movie star Bill Murray rampaged around the room, in a festive mood after staying late to help the grounds crew clean up the trash.
Fifty years later, that’s the way it was.
24
Coda
FARE THEE Well was an outsized, unprecedented success by almost any measure. The shows drew more than $50 million at the box office, a record for a concert by a single band. Total attendance was more than 362,000. For the third day in a row, the last Soldier Field concert broke the long-standing attendance record held by U2 with a crowd of 71,000. The band sold $8 million worth of T-shirts and hoodies at the five
shows. One concertgoer paid $526,000 in a charity auction over the weekend for a signed guitar Bobby Weir played for a couple of numbers at Levi’s Stadium. The pay-per-view broadcast also set a record for a music broadcast with 175,000 streams subscribed.
Over the Fourth of July weekend, the entire nation knew the Grateful Dead was playing the band’s final concerts in Chicago. Clubs and theaters all over the country hosted events. Peter Shapiro had crowds every night at both his Brooklyn Bowl and Capitol Theatre. Both the Sweetwater and Terrapin Crossroads held viewings. Even the Empire State Building got in the act, draping its top floors and spire in red, white, and blue lights to celebrate the show in Chicago. Given the men from the Dead had no idea what to expect from the event, the reception was breathtaking. They floated out of Chicago on a cloud.
The reviews treated the musical performances fairly. Jon Pareles, the distinguished pop music critic of the New York Times, wrote a review of all three concerts. “‘Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years of the Grateful Dead,’” he wrote, “also revived the band as an enterprise both quixotic and commercial, history-minded and fond of a tall tale, carefully plotted and forever in search of the happy accident. This briefly convened, decisively final incarnation of the Grateful Dead often managed to live up to the band’s name with songs that could turn intuitive, down-home, whimsical, haunted, elegant or euphoric.”
Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune was less certain. “Without Garcia, this couldn’t be the Grateful Dead anymore, no matter what the ticket stub says. Instead, this was—at best—a Grateful Dead tribute show, a celebration of a remarkable legacy,” said Kot. Writing in England’s The Guardian, Mark Guarino was more reasoned. “Expecting the original band would be naïve,” Guarino wrote. “Instead, the band that showed up this weekend ignited fresh sparks and induced a few lulls, both with well-intended reverence for a back catalogue that has remained poignant.”