So Many Roads

by David Browne

  With Ratdog, especially in its first half-dozen years, Weir took the opposite approach: internalizing his grief, he threw himself into touring and decided not to turn Ratdog into what amounted to a Dead tribute band. A few Weir-penned Dead songs would enter the set—“Victim or the Crime,” “Throwing Stones”—but he rarely played his best-known Dead songs, instead relying on covers of blues, R&B, and Dylan songs. To those who worked with him, that decision was baffling. “There was this void, and we had a choice of which way to react,” says Kelly, who played with Ratdog for a period after Garcia’s death. “Everybody felt, ‘Well, we’ll never take the place of the Dead, but let’s do something to fill that void.’ Bobby took a strong stand on not doing any Dead songs. People in the audience were devastated. The audience needed so badly to be healed, and they were looking to us—you could see it in their faces. It broke my heart. It was almost unbearable. The rest of the guys were pleading, ‘Bobby, you have to do this for no other reason—they’re dying out there.’ He wouldn’t go there.” (In 1998, Weir told Rolling Stone, “I carry his [Garcia’s] memory with me.”) Early on, Ratdog didn’t even have a lead guitarist, another way of avoiding Dead comparisons.

  In 2001 Weir and Lesh played together at Sweetwater in Mill Valley under a fake name, playing rarities like the Workingman’s Dead outtake “Mason’s Children.” “It was awesome to look onstage and be standing there with Bobby and Phil but not having it called the Dead or the Other Ones,” says Herring, who joined them that night. “It made it less pressure. No one had any expectations other than friends playing together, and it was fun.” In 2001 Ratdog coheadlined a few shows with Lesh & Friends, and the following year Lesh joined up with the Other Ones for a tour that featured some of his players.

  In 2003 and 2004 the four surviving members united once again for two summer tours but now billed as the Dead. During the 2003 tour, in a quaint sign that some things hadn’t especially changed with the fans, Tampa, Florida, police seized a small quantity of chocolate lollipops that were blended with mushrooms. Musically the tours had plenty of high points, but the four founding members were still trying to adjust to life without Garcia and determine who would lead the charge. Garcia had been their bond, and without him they weren’t simply missing the musical center of the band; they were sometimes lacking the principal connection they had with each other. By the time the tour wrapped up in May 2004 at one of the Dead’s longtime favorite venues, the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California, the Dead had grossed $17.9 million, but were weary of each other. But as Hart would later recall to Rolling Stone, “We had to let this thing rest. These things take a lot of time, the ability to see beyond the struggle of being the Grateful Dead and who we are. This isn’t an easy thing. This is really hard.”

  “Everybody remembers things really well,” says Lesh as he and his wife, Jill, were driven to the next venue, the six-hundred-seat Gramercy Theatre in midtown. “It’s in our bones now.”

  As they always would, reparations between the musicians after the 2004 tour eventually arrived, with one more bump along the road. Around 2005 Grateful Dead Productions began entertaining a new round of offers to manage its recordings, merchandise, licensing of likenesses, and any other physical and digital assets (excluding its publishing, which remained with their longtime company, Ice Nine). Several big-name rock managers expressed interest, but in 2006 an agreement was struck with Rhino Entertainment, with the Dead retaining creative control over any decisions. In a move that was very Dead, Rhino executive Mark Pinkus had to pass a test first during a meeting at a hotel in Marin County: To make sure he knew their material well and was the right man for the job, the band asked him to sing the tricky “Victim or the Crime” from Built to Last. Luckily Pinkus, a genial and Dead-loving guy, knew the song.

  Starting in the mid-nineties Deadheads had been uploading fan-taped Dead show tapes to the Live Music Archive, the concert tape section of Archive.org, a San Francisco–based website. But with a new business arrangement in the works, the question became: How to adhere to the group’s free-trade legacy while ensuring its financial future? (A similar issue came up about five years before, when Lesh disagreed with the other band members about giving over their assets—their recorded legacy—to a new venture-capital company, but the dot-com collapse put an end to those plans.) In 2005 the band ordered Archive. org to pull the band’s soundboard recordings, although audience-made tapes would remain available for streaming and downloading.

  The scenario was tricky for all involved. As one source in the Dead world says, “The Dead were caught in a difficult place. The market ethic of the band was always to give performances away. It worked as long as there were infinite shows. When Jerry died, all that music became their financial future. So now it was, ‘Maybe we can’t give this away.’ It was a very complicated position.” Unexpectedly, Lesh issued a statement that read, in part, “I was not part of this decision-making process and was not notified that the shows were to be pulled. I do feel that the music is the Grateful Dead’s legacy and I hope that one way or another all of it is available for those who want it.” Deadheads signed an online petition, after which the Dead allowed audience tapes to be available for download, while the band’s own soundboard tapes would only be streamed. The confusion of the moment embodied the difficult ways in which everyone was adjusting to life after Garcia.

  The reparations eventually arrived. With the Rhino arrangement in place—and someone else taking charge of their business, which always seemed to get between them—tensions within the band began to ease. Lesh and Weir ran into each other in Mill Valley, and before long the two men, along with Hart, played a benefit for Barack Obama at the Warfield early in 2008. Lesh’s son Brian had been an Obama volunteer worker, and when the group was invited to headline an Obama benefit in the fall, all four musicians tabled their differences and agreed to come together again. “It was, ‘This is a man who we think is worthy,’” said Hart to Rolling Stone at the time. “The idea is to put the consciousness in their heads.” Haynes, who had played with Lesh & Friends and the Allman Brothers Band as well as on one of the Dead’s reunion tours (and his own band, Gov’t Mule), was called in, as was keyboardist Jeff Chimenti, a versatile, jazz-influenced Northern California–born keyboardist who’d joined up with Ratdog in 1997 and played on the Dead’s subsequent reunion tours.

  Held at Penn State’s Bryce Jordan Center in October 2008, the concert—the first public performance by all four members in four years—found them playing everything from “Dark Star” and “St. Stephen” to “Touch of Grey,” and afterward Lesh was heard raving about Weir’s singing, an early sign of détente. The drummers again clicked: “Mickey and I are getting along better now,” Kreutzmann told Rolling Stone after. “The egos are out of the way.” Immediately and perhaps inevitably, talk of a reunion tour was ignited, and Live Nation, the touring-business behemoth, came aboard to organize and promote it.

  The sextet reconvened in Mill Valley and rehearsed for two weeks, and the full-on tour began in April. At the start, interband relations were steady; no one wanted to taint the legacy of the Dead, and everything from the standards to more obscure and trickier pieces like “King Solomon’s Marbles” from Blues for Allah were worked up. Haynes and Chimenti were unobtrusive and agreeable, each bringing a new instrumental palette to the band: Hayes was more blues rooted than Garcia and had a throatier, hoarser, more aggressive style of singing and playing, while Chimenti’s piano could sparkle in ways that recalled the work of all the Dead’s previous keyboardists.

  In New York that night in March they were doing their best to carry on the traditions of the band, and so were the fans, who snapped up the free tickets to all three shows. At the Gramercy Theater they played an abbreviated career-spanning set that included “Playing in the Band,” “Franklin’s Tower,” and “Viola Lee Blues.” A roar went up when Lesh sang a verse from “Franklin’s Tower,” recalling the “Let Phil Sing!” signs of Dead shows past. The music
ians then jumped into a van and headed uptown to the Roseland Ballroom, the largest of the venues, with three thousand ticket holders. “It’s like a show split up by cab rides,” cracked Weir.

  “People are listening to each other more, as opposed to taking the other person for granted,” Hart said at Roseland. “Sometimes you don’t tell people you love ’em after a show or say, ‘That was good!’ We used to get off stage and that was it. But now we’re interacting on a personal level very well and that can only bode well for the music. We try not to be confrontational. We try to work it out in the music.”

  Staring at the set list backstage, though, Hart was initially skeptical of what he saw. “Yeah, that will never happen,” he said, shaking his head. “We could probably play ‘Dark Star’ for an hour. This is nuts. I think Phil did it. Phil probably just had a cup of coffee—that’s what that’s about. Phil’s dreaming if he thinks we can play that set.”

  Weir wandered in. “Bob, look at that!” Hart said, showing the sheet of paper to Weir. “We’ll never get to all that,” Hart said. “If half of it gets played, we’ll be lucky.”

  In the wake of Garcia’s death each of the four men had grappled with the aftermath in varying ways. Kreutzmann stayed largely in Hawaii, away from the music business. “I was lost in every direction,” he told Rolling Stone in 2012. “I didn’t know what to do.” Keyboardist Vince Welnick seemed the most devastated after Garcia died. Initially he’d joined Ratdog but came across as troubled and depressed during a tour with them. On the road, band members had talks with him to “try to bring him out of his funk,” says Kelly. “He was constantly talking about suicide on the tour. We were worried about him.” Before one show they found Welnick unconscious on a tour bus, an empty bottle of Valium nearby. Welnick left the tour soon after. In 2006, feeling excluded from the Dead’s post-Garcia lineups and unhappy with his career, he slit his throat at his Marin home. The curse of the Dead keyboardists didn’t really exist—Hornsby and Constanten were still alive—but here was a particularly grisly reminder of it.

  Dating back to the band’s earliest days, Weir had always kept the most in shape. He’d had lower back problems starting in the seventies, which had led him into running and eventually to try weights, yoga, and bike riding. He now had a regimen—a half-hour of wind sprints on an elliptical trainer, followed by weights—but was also suffering from shoulder pain from throwing around a football all his life and took painkillers “for a number of years,” he has said. A few months after the 2009 Dead tour he told Rolling Stone he was using what he called “an industrial-strength vibrating massager” to work on his shoulder and loosen it up. (“You would not want to use this thing in bed, though,” he cracked.)

  Weir, who had grown a bushy white beard, still had that twinkle in his eye and remained the courtliest of the four. (Few if any rock stars give their cell phone numbers and e-mail addresses to reporters, as Weir often did.) For the ever-pensive Weir, Garcia’s presence always hung in the air. “He shaped the music,” he told Rolling Stone in 2013. “His hand is still there. I can hear him out of the corner of my ear. I can hear his harmonic development. I can hear what he registers he’s going for. It never went away. It just became a little more ethereal. I don’t mean to wax hippie metaphysical, but that’s how it is for me. It always has been.”

  At Roseland that March 2009 the Dead finally were able to play a fairly long set. The younger fans who pushed up against the stage barricades had hair longer than the original members of the band. Haynes and Weir sang the songs Garcia once had, and some of the old trademarks remained, like Weir forgetting a few of the lyrics. (He knew right away and pounded himself on the head as soon as he did, to the loving cheers of the fans who tolerated it.) They jammed on “St. Stephen” and threw themselves into an “Eyes of the World” that was brightened, as always, by Chimenti’s glistening piano.

  The Dead tour would begin the following month and last about four weeks. When it was over, so were the Dead, at least for a few more years. Given their history, clashing personalities, and the directions their post-Garcia music had taken them, it was probably inevitable that a reunion wouldn’t last long. (A completed tour documentary was also shelved.) In a surprise move, Lesh and Weir, who had had their share of ups and downs, decided to carry on together. In the summer 2009 they recruited John Kadlecik and, at Weir’s suggestion, called their new band Furthur. Kadlecik, a guitarist and singer who’d grown up in the Midwest, had been in one early Dead tribute band (“China Cat Sunflower” was the first Garcia-Hunter song he’d learned to play) and, starting in 1997, had fronted Dark Star Orchestra, the country’s leading Dead tribute band. He’d first seen the Dead live in 1989 and had caught his share of shows after. With his gentle demeanor, long, dark hair, and, especially, the way his guitar style recalled Garcia’s, Kadlecik helped Furthur recreate the sound of the Dead more than any previous post-Garcia combination. “Yeah, it’s a little spooky in some ways because he’s internalized the essence of Jerry’s approach,” Lesh told Rolling Stone in 2010. “Not so much the notes, although he’s really good at pulling that out. Also, his voice can be very similar to Jerry’s. Every so often he’ll sing something in a certain way and it’s just like déjà vu. I love that. It’s been a long 15 years.”

  For the next four years Furthur became a juggernaut, touring regularly and playing songs from the Dead canon and even entire album sides. Dark Star Orchestra continued without Kadlecik, still brilliantly recreating specific Dead shows, but Furthur became, in their way, the leading Dead homage—and, in doing so, unintentionally rode a business wave in rock ’n’ roll. More and more, classic rock bands—Journey, Foreigner, Styx—were touring without their key front men but with younger vocal ringers. Yet when Furthur was on—at intimate shows at Sweetwater in Mill Valley in early 2013 or a headlining triumph at Madison Square Garden in late 2011, to a sold-out crowd that spanned generations and stayed on its feet the entire time—it transcended nostalgia and brought the old songs back to life. By the time Furthur had run its course in 2014, the four surviving members had returned to their separate corners. Hart, who had two Grammys under his belt (for his Planet Drum and Global Drum Project albums), had his own pop-worldbeat band, the Mickey Hart band, and was working on projects that included turning light waves into sound. Still based in Hawaii, Kreutzmann applied his drum skills to a series of jam bands starting in the early 2000s, including 7 Walkers (fronted by New Orleans–based singer-guitarist Papa Mali) and, in 2014, Billy and the Kids. In 2011 Weir opened the Tamalpais Research Institute (TRI), a recording and broadcast facility based in San Rafael; he would also return to Ratdog, with whom he’d cut the sturdy 2001 album Evening Moods. Lesh had his own venue, Terrapin Crossroads, in San Rafael, an intimate venue inspired by Levon Helm’s Midnight Ramble barn shows in Woodstock.

  What remained, more than anything, was the Dead’s broad legacy. For a bunch of outcasts and outliers who’d come together from widely varying economic and musical backgrounds, playing music that rubbed against conventions (and the industry) from the start, the Dead had left a startlingly huge footprint on the culture. The world of improvisational jam bands had become a genre unto itself, complete with annual festivals and extended improvising that used the Dead as its blueprint. One could easily trace a line from the Acid Tests to the flourishing electronic dance music world that had become mainstream by the second decade of the new century. As with the Tests, electronic dance music (EDM) events were less about the performers (DJs, in this case) and more about communal (and actual) ecstasy. Both focused on waves of sound and delirium. Their impact could be even more day-to-day. In Japan during a later tour with Ratdog, Weir was confronted with the band’s reach when he visited an ancient temple. “We stopped into this little Japanese restaurant that had been in the family for hundreds of years,” Weir told Rolling Stone in 2013, “and the head chef was a huge fan. He recognized me right away, and he was acutely knowledgeable of many aspects of our lives. He served us a lot of sake.”<
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  For a band that never quite knew how to deal with the business until later in their career, the Dead’s influence on the music industry was also profound. With the virtual collapse of the old-school music business in the new century, bands like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails began releasing new work on their own labels, much like the Dead had thirty years before (but with not as much success). The Dead had a connection to the formation of social networking: first with its direct band-to-fan communications in the seventies and then by way of the online Deadhead forum in the WELL (cofounded by Stewart Brand). Thanks to devoted Dead archivist David Lemieux, the music kept coming in the form of elaborate boxed sets of particular tours and the Dave’s Picks series of vintage concerts that picked up where the late Dick Latvala’s Dick’s Picks series had left off. There were now Grateful Dead conferences, snowboards, and video games. The industry of the Dead, considered in such peril after Garcia’s death, carried on—but, luckily, so did the band’s music, preserved better than ever for future generations to dissect and analyze. As for future reunions, Weir wouldn’t rule anything out. As he told Rolling Stone, “Unfinished business, and there always will be with us, until enough of us are gone that it’s off the table. But until then, it’s always going to be on the table. The Dead is going to do what the Dead is going to do, and that’s always there.”