So Many Roads

by David Browne

  The letter made the rounds and made a degree of impact. “They were coming without a ticket,” says Hart. “There would be more people outside than inside. And we said, ‘You’re going to kill the thing you love the most—you’re going to put us out of business. We can’t go out there and fight cops and gate-crashers.’ So we made a real appeal to them, and they responded. They actually calmed down.” But not all of them knew there was a problem. At Alpine Valley in Wisconsin, one of the Dead’s cherished regular venues, over 40,000 fans showed up nightly for their July 17–19, 1989, residency. Afterward the Dead were banned for the foreseeable future.

  Scher says he didn’t freak out when he heard about the venues that no longer wanted them: “There were always other places to play,” he says. Still, the message had to be stronger. When the next batch of mail-order tickets went out, for fall shows in New Jersey, Miami, Charlotte, and Philadelphia, a sterner letter was stuffed inside those envelopes: “We’ve all seen how the camping and vending have attracted people there for a party, not for the music—if the outside scene interferes with the music inside, it’s gotta go.” Then in capital letters no one could miss on the page, the anvil came down: “AND IT’S GONE; THERE WILL BE NO VENDING AND NO CAMPING ON THE TOUR.” The letter (written, again, by McNally but credited to the band) ended with: “If you’re a Dead Head and believe in us and this scene, you will understand what the priorities are. Thanks for understanding.” Kidd Candelario was now charged with enforcing rules against bootleg merchandise outside the venues, and he would get injunctions to go after anyone doing so. “A lot of people were doing simple stuff from show to show, and that was okay,” he says, “but there were Jamaican gangs and fucking criminals who were bootlegging.” Ironically, with the help of the law, Candelario would have the illicit, unauthorized goods impounded.

  In general, though, the band was befuddled and unsure what to do, and overcrowding became more of a discussion at their board meetings. “We’re getting that same rap from nearly everywhere now,” Garcia told Relix’s Steve Peters that fall. “There’s very few places that welcome the way the shows, the way the audience and so forth, has defined itself previously.” Eliminating the problem without offending Deadheads was becoming trickier than anyone thought. During a radio interview to talk about the edict, McNally, in his role as band spokesman, received a taste of what the band was facing in laying down any sort of law. On the air he made the band’s case: Deadheads weren’t living in a bubble, there were consequences for their actions, and the “Shakedown Street” area was subject to the law of the land just as much as anyplace else in the country. As fond as he was of Deadheads, McNally was still stunned that they could walk around outside the venues yelling “Doses! Doses!” and not expect any repercussions. During the interview McNally finally blurted out he thought the fans were “just plain dumb” (or words to that effect) to ignore that reality.

  When the interview ended, McNally didn’t think much more about it. After being in the job five years and having attended Dead shows even before he worked for the band, he thought he could gauge the temperature of the crowd. But this time he was wrong. In the growing world of online chat rooms, McNally was excoriated by Deadheads, who compared him to a spokesman for a malevolent cigarette company. McNally was completely taken aback by their vitriol; like the crowds at the shows, it was another new aspect to the scene that few had witnessed before. (In fairness, the rules were new to fans, too.)

  By year’s end other problems would plague them. In October the body of nineteen-year-old Adam Katz was found near an overpass outside the Brendan Byrne Arena in New Jersey after a Dead show. During an investigation it was determined that Katz was killed by a “blunt instrument,” but little else was clear: two medical examiners’ reports had conflicting information about the drugs in his system (one said he had them, another didn’t), and allegations that overzealous security had played a role in the death were never proven despite a statement by a sixteen-year-old who said one of the guards told him security had smashed Katz’s head against a van and “just dropped him off someplace.” At the Inglewood Forum in California in December Patrick Shanahan, a nineteen-year-old business major at the University of California, Santa Barbara, walked outside to go to a medical tent; he’d taken some LSD and wasn’t feeling well. Police said Shanahan was being difficult—“yelling and rolling around,” in their words—and had to be restrained by eight cops, but in the van on the way to the police station Shanahan stopped breathing. Later it was determined he’d died of “compression of the neck during restraint,” strongly implying homicide. No criminal charges were brought against the police, but the Inglewood City council settled a lawsuit by Shanahan’s family and paid them $750,000. Although the city denied any wrongdoing, some saw the money as an admission of guilt.

  In the aftermath of those horrific events as well as the Pittsburgh situation, the Dead were eventually banned from Maryland’s Meriwether Post Pavilion and UC Berkeley. Their annual shows at Stanford were canceled; the school cited camping, drug arrests, and “general unruliness” as reasons why. During shows in Foxboro, Massachusetts, the National Guard, with the approval of the Pentagon, conducted drug raids; several dozen Guard troops, wearing night-vision goggles, spread out around the parking lot and stadium, and forty people were arrested.

  Even as their performances sharpened and stayed on track, the Dead were attracting their two least favorite forces—police and ill-equipped newcomers—and were caught in their crossfire. Such was the result, at least for the Dead, of having a taste of popular success. “In the end it backfired,” says Scher. “Once ‘Touch of Grey’ hit some people were there because they had a hit single and everyone says they’re cool. The amphitheaters couldn’t take that pressure of thousands and thousands of people without tickets outside. The security line is a fence, and there’s no fence in the world that’s gonna keep a couple of thousand kids from bringing it down.” Employees of the Warfield in San Francisco would grow so tired of the inundation of Deadheads during a run of solo Garcia shows that they hung a Garcia doll from the rafters in the kitchen and beat it with sticks to vent their frustration.

  After the second and last night in Pittsburgh the Dead returned to their hotels, largely unaware what had happened at the venue. They had to keep moving, as always, but no one could deny that the mania that had started nearly two years before, with MTV’s “Day of the Dead” broadcast, was affecting them in ways no one had predicted or wanted; the only question was whether it was permanent. “From then on it was just a matter of holding on for dear life and appreciating any show in which only ten or twenty people got arrested,” says McNally. “The fact that it was going to be a constant recurring pattern—I don’t believe we were aware of it at that time.”

  Garcia and Bruce Hornsby onstage, May 1991.

  © ROBBI COHN

  CHAPTER 14

  BOSTON, SEPTEMBER 20, 1991

  Any other night Bruce Hornsby would have been more than content to spend time chilling out in Garcia’s backstage space. Since joining up with the Dead about a year before as an official unofficial member, the earnest, ever-eager pianist and singer had wiled away many an hour in Garcia’s room. The two men couldn’t have looked more different: Hornsby clean cut and chisel faced, favoring crisp, white shirts onstage, and Garcia chunky and graying, sporting one of his ubiquitous black T-shirts. But then Garcia would crank one of his Jerky Boys or Henny Youngman cassettes, and the two men, separated by thirteen years, would yuck it up together over the Boys’ prank phone calls or Youngman’s Borscht Belt one-liners.

  On this first of six nights at the Boston Garden, as in other arenas or stadiums that hosted them, each member of the Dead has his own separate room behind the stage thanks to the “pipe and drape” setup common for convention trade shows. No matter the venue, the arrangement was always the same, with Lesh’s room on the left, Hart’s on the right, and everyone else’s in between. “Everything was set up the exact same way,” recalls a
family member who frequented backstage. “Everyone had their exact room, and the same pattern of how they did things. Each room was the same size, set up the same way, with the same stuff in it. Nothing changed. Here on one hand was a band based on freeform music, with nothing planned, and yet every other single aspect of what they did was completely choreographed.” (Adds Hornsby, “It’s almost like they had this detailed schematic to recreate it—it was so meticulous.”) Thanks to the setup the musicians didn’t have to wander far during set breaks or the inevitable Drums and Space segments; Garcia in particular was still grappling with swollen feet and ankles. “There were times,” says promoter Jim Koplik, “when it was easier for Jerry [to visit his tent] than to take a walk all the way to his dressing room and back.”

  The precision of their backstage design, complete with surf-and-turf dinners, Asian cuisine, or whatever the Dead might want to eat that night, was merely one of Hornsby’s many eye-opening moments now that he was performing regularly with the band. Five years after scoring his first hit with “The Way It Is,” recorded with his band the Range, Hornsby was no stranger to fame and its perks, and his mark was still being felt on the charts and the radio, thanks to his piano playing on Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me” and his 1989 collaboration with Don Henley, “The End of the Innocence.” Hornsby had already sat in many a limo and stayed at many swanky hotels; on tour a separate truck carted around his Baldwin grand piano. But for him little compared with the Dead experience, starting the first night he officially played with them in 1990: after finishing a show with the Range in Connecticut, he was immediately picked up by a limo and driven all the way into Manhattan, where he checked into the Dead’s residence, the Ritz-Carlton.

  Before they took the stage the band’s chef would ask each musician what he wanted to eat afterward, and no matter what city or what time of night, the order was always filled: Hornsby knew that as soon as he walked offstage after the last note a paper bag with sushi or his favorite Ben & Jerry’s ice cream flavor would be handed to him. (He always wondered what was in some of those other bags, food or otherwise, but he didn’t ask.) If Hornsby wasn’t available due to his own touring schedule, he was no longer surprised when the Dead approached the promoter of his show and, at a significant six-figure cost equivalent to a cancellation fee, would buy him out so Hornsby could join the Dead that night.

  Hornsby also knew this Boston Garden run should have been celebratory. The Dead hadn’t played there since 1982, but the city and its local businesses were now happy to see them back, especially because Boston’s unemployment rate had swung up to its highest level in decades, with over twenty-five thousand out of work. To the locals, injecting cash into the local economy by way of hotels filled with Deadheads had never sounded more appealing. (The Dead themselves had grossed $22 million on the road for the first half of 1991.) The Dead were still finding their sea legs with two new keyboardists now in the band—Hornsby and Vince Welnick, who had signed up during the same time as Hornsby—but the highs, like a storming set in Greensboro in March, made up for the bumpier nights.

  As Hornsby also knew, the previous year had been one of the band’s most trying. No one talked about it in any specifics, and certainly no one talked about what had happened with Mydland. At Garcia’s request Mydland’s B3 organ wasn’t even on stage at that point. In contrast, the lackluster sales of Built to Last, the album they’d released in the fall of 1989 after the platinum-level In the Dark, were a trivial matter. They’d all been given yet another reminder of how demanding and intense the Dead world could be. Not to mention mercurial: Hornsby truly felt something fresh and invigorating had been happening onstage between him and the Dead, but he also sensed something was beginning to fray around the edges, and the time had come to speak up. Walking past Steve Parish, Garcia’s ever-loyal and vigilant tech and right-hand man, Hornsby stepped into Garcia’s curtained tent to confront the elephant in the Dead’s room.

  It hadn’t been remotely easy, but the Dead had managed to complete their next album, Built to Last, in time for the planned Halloween 1989 release Arista had strongly advocated for. For all the struggles that had gone into its creation, the album revealed another way in which the Dead mirrored their world, this time musically. By the dawn of the nineties, pop albums had never sounded busier and more produced, slathered with synthesizers and drum machines, and such was also the case with Built to Last. The precision-tooled album wasn’t simply the sound of the modern Dead but also the sound of pop music.

  And based on the album, the person yanking the Dead into the future was Mydland, whose keyboards and synthesizers were far more prominent than on In the Dark, and he also contributed the most songs—four. Mydland’s electronic-pop touches worked well with his songs, especially “We Can Run,” which blended a soaring chorus with a pro-environment lyric by Barlow. But the same approach somewhat gummed up some of the other songs, especially Garcia and Hunter’s three contributions. “Foolish Heart” merged a bubbly melody with a lyric that warned against impending heartbreak; the elegant “Built to Last” felt like an oblique comment on the band and its ever-complex personal dynamics; and “Standing on the Moon,” of which Hunter was especially proud, injected a rare bit of political commentary into the Dead’s repertoire. But the production on all three songs was too busy for the songs’ own good. The band had managed to make a record out of “Victim or the Crime,” complete with Gerrit Graham’s use of “junkie,” but the track was still unwieldy. (Like so many other Dead songs, it managed to work itself out on stage.) Despite the quality of some of the songs—even the hooky charms of “Picasso Moon,” a collaboration between Weir, Barlow, and Bralove—the album felt weighed down, as if a heavy backpack had been slung onto it.

  The band put a good face on the record, talking up the diffuse recording process in interviews. But away from the media they were less than happy with the results. Listening to it at Arista’s headquarters in New York, executives realized soon enough that another In the Dark was unlikely. “It wasn’t as good an album,” says Roy Lott, then the label’s executive vice president. “You didn’t have to be a genius to know it wasn’t as strong. It was, ‘This is their next album—let’s do our best by it, let’s go to work.’ It sold what it should sell. It didn’t have a ‘Touch of Grey.’” The label didn’t have the opportunity to reject the album since the band’s contract enabled them to submit and release a record without any revisions from the label.

  In another sign of the way they were willing to work with the business if need be, they willingly went along with the filming of a video for the first single, “Foolish Heart.” Once again Gutierrez was recruited to direct, and he and Garcia met at the director’s studio to talk about it (and were promptly locked into the office when a latch broke). On the soundstage the Dead changed into costumes, including Victorian clothes; Garcia grabbed a black jacket to augment his usual dark T-shirt. Lesh made it clear in his body language that the last place he wanted to be was in a studio miming and lip-synching for a music video, never his favorite pastime, but Gutierrez caught a moment when Lesh began laughing from what Gutierrez calls “the corniness of him wearing those clothes.”

  During the shoot Gutierrez saw how much Garcia had aged in the two years since “Touch of Grey”: his hair was now completely white—striking for someone only in his late forties—and he was still wearing specially prepared shoes to help his swollen limbs. The director wanted to do a close-up of Garcia’s hand playing the guitar solo, a challenge in itself. “He was struggling to remember what he had done in that solo so it could match up in the close-up,” Gutierrez says. “He was struggling, but he was laughing too.” As it always had, the chance of redemption still hung in the air.

  On a late July morning in 1990 Hornsby was in Seattle, preparing for a radio interview to promote his latest album, when his production manager, who knew the Dead, broke the news: Brent Mydland had died. After the interview Hornsby was walking down the street when someone approa
ched him and said, “Hey, Bruce, are you gonna join the boys?” Hornsby was taken aback: Was the rumor mill already spinning, just a few hours after the news?

  In the decade leading up to that day Mydland had not only grown into his role as a member of the Dead; to the new generation of Deadheads who’d discovered them in the eighties, before or after “Touch of Grey,” Mydland had also become a centerpiece of the band. He was closer in age to those fans than the other members were, and his voice was stronger and more commercial sounding than Garcia’s or Weir’s (a vital consideration for music fans who’d grown up hearing more polished rock and pop). To newcomers Mydland’s songs, especially those that dwelled on romantic turmoil, were the most relatable. Mydland was the voice and face of the new Dead, and his onstage animation and energy made him a beloved figure. Within the Dead community he especially endeared himself to Justin Kreutzmann, then a teenager dealing with family issues. “My dad and I would have father-son dramas,” says Justin, “and Brent came to me and said, ‘Your dad loves you.’ Brent was the craziest guy I’ve ever met in my life, but he was sweet and loving.”

  Yet to the consternation of those in the Dead world, little of that love and recognition seemed to sooth Mydland’s increasingly troubled soul. By 1990 he’d been on a slow-motion downward slide for several years. During his time with Cantor she would notice how he was riddled with self-doubt, afraid that Deadheads were relentlessly comparing him to his predecessor. “Brent always felt like, ‘The fans hate me—they want Keith,’” she recalls. “I would say, ‘Bullshit—these guys are loving you.’ But Brent had a big fear about being the replacement guy. I kept trying to reassure him: ‘Your playing is marvelous—you rock the organ!’ Jerry would say, ‘Oh, we finally have a singer in the band!’ But Brent was very insecure.” Barlow felt the songs he wrote with Mydland weren’t well recorded—perhaps, in Barlow’s mind, because other members were threatened by Mydland’s output. “They weren’t great songs necessarily,” Barlow says, “and they didn’t get done in a way that made them as good as they were. There was a certain reluctance to let Brent step forward.”