Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead

by Bill Kreutzmann

  I know the tides are turning, and I know you already know where I stand with this, but it’s time to make cannabis legal once and for all. Federally. Nationally. And if anything can help people shake their addictions, it should be pot. They should be given a joint for every unopened beer can they turn in.

  But enough with the weed rap. It was good for me to get off of Xanax and to stop drinking and to be clearheaded for a change. Reality became sort of like an alternate reality in itself, and I was digging the new, natural high.

  Plus, I was able to get out to Hawaii to go scuba diving—sometimes with Jerry—and, when you’re submerged ninety feet under the sea, there’s no fucking chance for survival if you’re at all fucked up. You’ve got to come to it straight. So I did. So did Jerry. And so it is that, for the most part, as the 1990s rolled in, everyone had found their happy place. Everyone seemed to be in a good spot.

  Brent may have been the one exception to that. The fighting between him and his wife, Lisa, was beginning to remind everyone of Keith and Donna’s domestic warfare. Also, he took the poor reception of Built to Last personally, since he had four songs on there—more than anybody else; the most he ever had on a Grateful Dead album. The album was met with harsh criticism and bad reviews. It went gold fast enough, but not platinum like In the Dark. Somehow, Brent suspected that he might be to blame.

  In December 1989, two months after the album’s release, Brent overdosed on opiates of some sort—either heroin or morphine—and was subsequently arrested for possession. He was released on bail, of course, but the very real threat of significant jail time hovered over him like stormy weather as he entered the New Year. If I recall correctly, he also had at least one DUI to deal with, and he was planning on cleaning up after the summer tour.

  Overall, you could say that Brent was a pretty disturbed guy but, man, was he ever on a roll with us during the first half of 1990. You got the feeling that he was pouring himself into the music in search of some kind of catharsis, that he was letting it all out through the songs, that he was using music for therapy. But, in the end, it wasn’t enough.

  This time, I was at home in Mendocino when I got the call. Brent was dead. He was murdered … from a self-administered speedball—an often lethal mix of cocaine and either heroin or morphine. You shoot them together, in the arm, so each one can balance out the effects of the other. A potent upper and a potent downer, both at once. Never a good idea, kids.

  The overdose was ruled accidental, although some people did whisper that Brent had developed a death wish. I don’t think that’s true. I think he was just naïve and was going for one last rush before cleaning up. It’s a same-old story that you hear far too often. He was thirty-seven years old. That’s four years older than Belushi when he died of the same stupid cocktail.

  Brent’s funeral sucked. All funerals suck. As a band, we tried to make jokes and avoid eye contact as much as possible. And I’m sure more than one person there had the thought that, “Hey, that could’ve been Jerry,” or “Is Jerry next?” For his part, Jerry became noticeably more withdrawn right after this. You could tell it struck a chord in him. I mean, he had his own demons at the time, and when you see similar demons kill one of your friends, it probably should scare the fuck out of you. I’m not sure Jerry was scared, but Brent’s death had a certain effect on him, that’s for sure.

  Brent’s last show with us was on July 23, 1990, at a giant summer shed about a half hour south of Chicago. The World Music Amphitheater in Tinley Park. We encored with a cover of the Band’s “The Weight.” Which means the last line Brent ever sang onstage with us was, “I gotta go, but my friend can stick around.” Talk about a weight, all right.

  Whenever one of our keyboard players died, we felt it in a way that’s usually reserved only for family members and loved ones, because you were a part of something with them. You depended on them but you weren’t just business partners: Your souls became entangled through music, across time and space as the tours rolled past the miles and the miles cut through the years. You felt like you lost a family member because you did lose a family member.

  I’m not sure how many people know this, but I was in another band with Brent, besides the Grateful Dead. In the fall of ’86, when Jerry was recovering from his coma, Brent and I played in a no-frills rock group called Go Ahead.

  We had Alex Ligertwood (vocals) and Dave Margen (bass) from Santana’s band. And we had Jerry on guitar. Not Jerry Garcia, though; Jerry Cortez. He was with the Youngbloods at the time; more recently, he became a late-era addition to Tower of Power. They’re lucky to have him.

  Those three players were all in a local Marin band called City Section, which aspired to be a backline band-for-hire. They hired themselves when they recruited me for an attempted group called the Kreutzmann/Margen Band, which morphed into Kokomo, which morphed into Go Ahead. I hated the name Go Ahead, but it was better than Kokomo.

  We got our kicks and put on some really great shows. Bobby must’ve felt like he was missing out because he sat in with us and even signed on for a short tour. We only played sporadically—from 1986 to 1988—and we never really had a grand plan. It was just for fun. Our one and only video, for a Brent original called “Nobody’s,” was directed by my son Justin with Francis Ford Coppola’s son, Gian-Carlo. It aired on TV, but nothing else came of it. With Brent’s death, there went the possibility of anything more.

  As for the Grateful Dead, we couldn’t stop. Even if we wanted to, we had an empire to protect, a business to run, and a hell of a lot of overhead to finance. Employees had to be paid, headquarters had to be maintained, offices needed a raison d’être, we needed work, and fans needed their band—the beast had to be fed. Our live shows fueled all of this, so we had to get back out there as quickly as possible. Like it or not.

  There was only a month and a half gap between shows after Brent’s death. We had set out to find a new keyboardist immediately, although personally, I was probably back at home in Mendocino during much of that time, resting, recovering, processing.

  For a while, Shelley and I lived in a tract house in Novato, which is at the northern tip of Marin. It was close enough to San Rafael that I could go from my couch at home to my drum stool at Front Street in about fifteen minutes. But we hated living in Novato. It wasn’t my scene. I owned the place in Mendocino—the Comptche ranch—so Shelley and I decided to move back up there. It was a great decision. During the Grateful Dead’s biggest years, I lived on a remote ranch three hours away from it all.

  Granted, because that was—intentionally—too long a daily commute, I ended up getting a place in San Anselmo as well, on the other side of San Rafael’s tracks, where I could stay during rehearsal weeks or when we were in recording sessions or whatever. The band was working a lot, but I would come back from these mega-tours very happy and very wealthy and could then retreat into my own little wilderness.

  At the end of a tour, I’d fly first class to San Francisco and then hop on my friend’s commuter plane, a Twin Cessna Flyer, and he’d take me up to Little River Airport in Mendocino, about thirteen miles from home. Those short flights were just me and my pilot friend.

  Little River Airport was used to support naval flight training during World War II, in conjunction with operations at the Naval Auxiliary Landing Field in Santa Rosa. Sometime thereafter it became a public-use airport but there’s no control tower to speak of. You had to click your radio five times to turn on the runway lights and then pray that there wasn’t any fog. I couldn’t wait to land because Shelley would be there waiting for me, and she’d have the medicine with her—the cocaine—and we’d get back to the house and get wired and stay up all night talking and raving. It felt like I was escaping the insanity of the city and like I was escaping the insanity of the Dead tour. In reality, I was escaping nothing. I was just trading in one insanity for another. I was pulling a geographic.

  Post-rehab, there was a period in Mendocino when I didn’t drink or do any drugs. But from, say, 1985
to 1990, the band was doing really well and I was doing really well and I always seemed to have a reason to celebrate. Life was grand.

  I really loved the community up there, too. That’s where I first started dating Shelley, if you remember. Then we moved away, then we came back. I sometimes played low-key gigs in the bars up there, just for fun. And I helped the homeless there once, when I found out that they were being kicked out from one of the beaches. We brought them food and donations and stuff.

  During the period when Shelley and I were living in Novato, I loaned the Comptche house to my dad. He needed it for a while. His second wife, Gail, had died of cancer and my dad became despondent. It was the hardest thing he had ever gone through and I had never seen him so sad. I was fearful for him, for a while. He didn’t have any money and didn’t have a place to go, so I said, “Dad, I have a house for you…” He took me up on it.

  While living at my ranch, my dad met another lady friend, Pat, and she pulled him out of all that darkness. She was his great escape. She also turned him on to a real open style of living, the kind that I was used to but that wasn’t so common among his generation. Pat turned my dad onto psychedelics and they smoked joints and threw incredible parties. So … my dad took acid! You can imagine how thrilled I was about that whole development. When I moved back to Comptche with Shelley, my dad moved into Pat’s ranch, about two miles down the road. The Kreutzmanns were embedded in Mendocino.

  For his sixtieth birthday party, they threw a big bash at the ranch. It was a Victorian croquet party; all the men came in fancy dress coats, slacks, boots, and the ladies all wore long, flowing beautiful Victorian dresses. All dolled up to the nines. My dad invited everyone in town to the party and it felt like half of Mendocino County showed up. Everybody was in the right spirit of things.

  We played croquet in the afternoon and it was really a thrill for me to watch my dad play because he would cheat, but he did it humorously and cartoonish, in a way that almost recalled Neal Cassady. He turned it into a slapstick routine. When it was time to eat, we all sat down at the tables while my dad and some of his friends attended the grill.

  Next to me at my table was Edith, an elderly, local mainstay who came from the Baptist church and ran the store downtown and knew all the gossip for miles around. It surprised me that she showed up, because she knew that all the hippies smoked weed and did crazy things, but she leaned quite the other way. The way we were sitting at the table, Edith’s back was to my dad. I looked over her shoulder and couldn’t believe it—there was my dad, wearing nothing but a blond wig and a jock strap. He started loading all the chicken on a serving plate and I was nervous about what would happen next. He came over and offered Edith the first piece. “How do you like your chicken, Edith?” he asked, smiling, politely, the consummate gentleman. That was my dad in those days. He really had changed since I was under his roof. Pat really helped loosen him up.

  We got sidetracked again, but I did it on purpose: That was what life was like up in Mendocino. It was a totally different universe from that of the Grateful Dead. I’m not sure which one was the escape from the other. They both offered respite and relief—and they both required that, too.

  Back in Grateful Dead land, we needed a new keyboardist and we didn’t have much time to find one, much less make sure they were shipshape before shipping out on tour. We had just a few weeks—Brent died on July 26 and we put an East Coast arena tour on the books, slated to kick off on September 7 in Richfield, Ohio. From there, we were headed to the Spectrum in Philadelphia for three nights, followed by a six-night run at Madison Square Garden. Then it was off to Europe for October. No pressure if you’re the new guy. Not to mention that we didn’t exactly have a new guy.

  Enter, into the Grateful Dead fortress, Vince Welnick. It was Pigpen’s house from the start. Tom Constanten and Ned Lagin were like visitors, stopping by on their way through. Keith Godchaux came a-knocking and we let him in. Poor Brent didn’t have a choice—we grabbed him by the collar in the doorway, rushed him past the foyer, and sat his ass down in the living room. “Take a load off, Mydland.”

  As for Vince, I’m not sure who invited him to the party. We auditioned him, of course, along with a few other guys. I guess one of us, Jerry probably, said “Kick off your shoes and come on in,” but the rest of us were like, “Hey, who’s that guy in the kitchen over there?”

  We had only considered a handful of folks, most of whom came to us by some form of serendipity. They knew at least one of us or we had seen them play somewhere and liked it. Pete Sears was just such a guy. Sears had an impressive résumé that qualified him for the job, including membership in Jefferson Starship (and, later, just Starship). After we passed on him, he joined Hot Tuna. I’ve sat in with him on occasion at David Nelson Band gigs. Bobby’s played with him. Phil’s played with him. He’s still an active touring musician and he’s a great guy and we’re friends. There’s certainly room for the “What if…” question.

  We also auditioned T. Lavitz, a decorated keyboard player from Dixie Dregs who, later, formed a rather notable, all-instrumental Grateful Dead cover band called Jazz is Dead, with Jimmy Herring, Alphonso Johnson, and Billy Cobham. If you know your jazz history, you just raised an eyebrow. It was an original idea for a cover band. (When I hear someone cover us, I want the artist to take ownership over their version of the songs. Keller Williams is great at doing that.)

  * * *

  We looked at just a few other keyboardists—at most—but out of all of them, Vince Welnick was easily my least favorite. No question. There was no denying that he had a respectable history: He played in the Tubes, a theatrical rock band that had its own share of commercial success, including a Top Ten single and hit video on MTV in 1983 (“She’s a Beauty”). Much like the Grateful Dead, the Tubes built their career on the strength of their live shows. But unlike the Grateful Dead, their live shows seemed to be more about performance art than about the music itself. They were making some kind of ironic anti-showbiz statement, but it was lost on me.

  That’s not the reason why I thought Vince was the wrong man for the job, though. I just thought he was lackluster. Perhaps a more diplomatic way to put it is that his playing style was understated. Surprisingly, that’s what Jerry seemed to like the most about him. That is, until a few years into it when Vince picked up the habit of mimicking Jerry’s lines. Jerry hated that with any player, be it Vince or Keith or Brent or Phil.

  At the time of Vince’s audition, the band was attracted to his abilities to hit the high harmonies, and he was certainly an adequate keyboard player, so he got the job. It was the path of least resistance. Vince got voted in by default.

  In addition to the Tubes, Vince had done some road work with Todd Rundgren, who now lives down the road from me in Hawaii. So he had a name for himself. But by the time he came to audition for us—in August 1990—he was flat broke and desperate for work. Perhaps that played into the decision to hire him, too. He told us that if he didn’t get the gig, he was going to have to go down to Mexico and smuggle bricks across the border for dough.

  As for Vince’s personality, I didn’t have any issues with him. We got along. I’m sure we partied some. He was a true gentleman and he was easygoing and he was friendly. Of course, he wouldn’t have been a proper Grateful Dead keyboardist if he didn’t have problems with his marriage. Before marrying Vince, Lori rode the bareback pony in the circus or the carnival or something. She had a pistol-packing cowgirl image, like a modern day carney Annie Oakley. She was one of those real out-there characters that we seemed to attract. But that’s neither here nor there.

  Another prop I must give to Vince is that he was dedicated. He put the time in and rubbed it with elbow grease. Like Brent, I’m sure he felt the backlash of so-called “purist” Deadheads—stubborn fans who would’ve resisted any new keyboardist, no matter what. Fools. But instead of taking it as personally as Brent did, it just drove him to work even harder. And he did work hard. He would practice for an hour or
more before every gig, just going over the material. He had to struggle to get it right, and I’m not sure that he ever did. But not for lack of trying.

  Remember: Vince had but a couple weeks to learn an entire twenty-five-year canon. And he had just days to learn how to read our minds when we veered from the script. Which was often. We had a quarter century of experience on our side. He had a lot of catching up to do. So we asked our friend Bruce Hornsby to lend some assistance.

  Actually, the truth is, Bruce Hornsby was our first choice. Before we held auditions, we asked him to join the band. Bruce didn’t need an audition. We wanted him. He turned us down. He was already committed to his own vision, but I think he also realized the benefits of being affiliated with us, so we came up with a compromise: He would play with us part-time, as often as his schedule allowed, until the new guy got settled.

  Maybe that says something about Vince—neither Keith nor Brent needed training wheels. They were able to hit the ground running.

  Bruce Hornsby was such a big player, with such a big personality, that he was almost too much of his own force for our little ensemble. We all loved him, and I still do to this day. But I think he recognized before we did that his talent demanded his own thing. He never would’ve been happy just being “another band’s keyboardist.” Even if that other band was the Grateful Dead. Although, he did like it enough to play more than 100 shows with us.

  Even after March 1992, when he handed in his badge and went back to concentrating on his own career, he continued to sit in with us, a few times a year, until the very end. He may have only been there part-time, during an eighteen-month stretch, but Bruce Hornsby will always be an honorary member of the Grateful Dead, as far as I or anyone else is concerned.