by Joel Selvin
Hunter stood up to speak. More than anybody except Garcia, Hunter had been responsible for creating the Grateful Dead. While Garcia was the undisputed genius musician and bandleader, Hunter’s job was to articulate the vision, to detail out the Dead world in his songs. He had risen to the occasion many times. A crusty, whimsical professorial sort not given to getting involved in band business, Hunter remained outside the day-to-day turmoil and rarely deigned to express himself. Standing to speak, he had the room’s attention.
Hunter simply quoted a couplet from the end of his song, “Fire on the Mountain.”
“The more that you give, why, the more it will take,” he said, “to the thin line beyond which you really cannot fake.”
Then he walked out.
The meeting moved on. Much business needed to be conducted, decisions that had been set aside for the past four months. The band members had held almost daily telephone conversations with the front office, but spoke with each other very little. Counselor Kant raised an issue about Garcia’s will that concerned him. In the will, Garcia bequeathed the custom-made guitars he played back to the man who made them. Kant was certain that the guitars were purchased with Grateful Dead Productions funds and, consequently, belonged to the band. He wanted to take steps to make sure the guitars did not get away. Some of the musicians didn’t understand that the band owned their instruments, let alone Garcia’s. Garcia himself probably hadn’t known.
Publicist McNally was summoned and he quickly composed a press release. A trained academician who landed his job because Garcia liked his Jack Kerouac biography, Desolate Angel, McNally hardly turned out typical press mill copy. It was a brief statement, tinged with poetry and regret, but it effectively closed the door on the future of the Grateful Dead:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
The wheel is turning and you can’t slow down
You can’t let go and you can’t hold on
You can’t go back and you can’t stand still…
“The Wheel,” Robert Hunter
After four months of heartfelt consideration, the remaining members of the band met yesterday and came to the conclusion that the “long, strange trip” of the uniquely wonderful beast known as the “Grateful Dead” is over. Although individually and in various combinations, they will continue to make music, whatever the future holds will be something different in name and structure.
In making this announcement, band members were especially mindful of their partners in this adventure, the Dead Heads, urging them to remember that the music, the values and the spirit of this marvelous shared journey endure.
Business operations will continue at the band’s long time Marin offices.
The release would go out the next morning. Would that it could be so simple.
2
Terrapin Station
LIKE MANY Deadheads, Rick Abelson was consumed by grief over the death of Jerry Garcia. Unlike most, he was in a position to act on his bereavement. Abelson, who attended his first Dead concert in 1977 while growing up in New Jersey, was a Harvard School of Design–trained landscape architect who specialized in theme parks. He had built attractions and designed exhibits all over Asia and Latin America, remodeled American amusement parks, and consulted on projects around the world. His profession put him far outside the realm of the Grateful Dead, but Abelson was about to converge with the band in ways he could not have predicted.
Garcia’s death shook him and, as he thought about what the other band members were going to do without their leader, Abelson began to develop the germ of an idea. He sketched out his thoughts for a Grateful Dead exhibition that would re-create the atmosphere of the Dead concerts without the band itself. He called it “The Grateful Dead Experience.”
In October 1995, only weeks after Garcia died, Abelson sent his quickly improvised plans, some notes and a few drawings—“eye wash” in the parlance of his trade—unsolicited to the Grateful Dead office in San Rafael. His cover letter outlined a vague proposed idea detailing how the surviving members could move forward into the future without Garcia, a kind of museum/theme park. Abelson held out no special hope for the proposal. It was something he did to make himself feel better, and to offer a small contribution, perhaps, but mostly to work out his own feelings through the design process, something he had learned to do over his years in the field.
What Abelson didn’t know was that the Grateful Dead had fancifully considered such an idea for years. The band, weary of the drudgery of touring, loved to talk about having a home base of sorts, often bringing up the subject among themselves in the middle of the concerts. The musicians would spin fantasies of establishing a headquarters where they could play music without having to travel and let the audience come to them. It was the kind of wishful thinking that nourished their spirit, a joking pastime the band members indulged in over the years.
As far back as the seventies, the band struggled with the whole idea of traveling from hockey rink to hockey rink, playing music in the most uncongenial environments imaginable, and enduring extraordinary hardships simply to get to the stage where they could finally play the music. Onetime manager Ron Rakow, one of the shiftiest characters in a Grateful Dead past littered with shifty characters, used to keep plans posted on his office wall above his desk for an inflatable amphitheater that would simply float from concert to concert. In case those drawings didn’t adequately impress visitors, he also posted a letter from acclaimed genius of the day Buckminster Fuller agreeing to consider “certain aspects” of the project, if it ever got going. The floating arena idea never went anywhere, but the Dead always kept their eyes open for innovative alternatives to the conventional system of touring.
Abelson had no way of knowing that his package dovetailed with this long-standing fantasy of the band, more hallucination than vision, but probably only the goofy Grateful Dead would have even explored a crazy idea dropped on their desk over the transom from someone they never met. After some consideration and discussion at the San Rafael office, Cameron Sears picked up the phone and reached Abelson.
Not expecting to hear back at all, Abelson was more than surprised by Sears’s phone call and that he was summoned for a meeting. He showed up at the Lincoln Street offices on December 5, one day prior to the board meeting where the band decided to retire the Grateful Dead. By this time, Abelson had brought aboard Economics Research Associates (ERA), the firm founded in 1958 by Harrison “Buzz” Price, the Stanford MBA graduate who did all the research and planning for Disneyland. After that, the firm was a principal in virtually every major theme park development around the world. Abelson and the two ERA associates, Steve Spickard and Jim McCarthy from the firm’s San Francisco office, knew not to wear their neckties. They parked behind the shady Victorian in downtown San Rafael and were greeted cheerily by Sears’s assistant Jan Simmons. “You’re on time,” she said. “That’s not very rock and roll.”
They walked into the kitchen, where Simmons seated them at a table for the meeting. Office manager Eileen Law met them. The kitchen was the nerve center of the hive. The ladies who ran the Grateful Dead office located their desks in the kitchen, where nobody ever really cooked. A sign above one desk read, “Do you want to talk to the man in charge or the woman who knows what’s going on?”
Hal Kant, the band’s rough-hewn lawyer with the business cards reading LEGALLY DEAD, had flown in from Reno, where he had been playing poker. He was a world-champion poker player and pursued the activity with fierce devotion. Kant, a right-wing, old-fashioned conservative, was an unusual associate for the hippie rock group, but he was unswervingly loyal and vigilant in his representation of the band. He was first hired by the band with the stipulation that they would be his only music business client and he had stayed true to his word. He and Cameron Sears were joined by band member Phil Lesh, who not only enthusiastically greeted the design research team, but immediately informed them that he had a name for what they were planning: Terrapin Station.
Abelson outli
ned his vision. He exuded confidence and energy. He saw nothing but success. He said the Dead museum project was a “slam dunk.”
“You forget who you are talking to,” said Eileen Law. “The Grateful Dead.”
“Yeah,” said Lesh, “if anybody can screw it up, we can.”
The meeting migrated upstairs to the more clubby mood of manager Sears’s office. Abelson explained the concept of “charrette” to the Dead people. Originally drawn from the French word for the carts that collected final papers at the last minute from students at Paris’s École des Beaux Arts in the nineteenth century, in the design community, the term had come to refer to the collaborative process of quickly collecting input from a number of people. He wanted to arrange such a workshop session with the Dead folks as soon as possible. They came to terms and the Dead agreed to underwrite the modest budget.
Three nights later, two days after laying the Grateful Dead to rest, Phil Lesh appeared on an early Internet broadcast called Grateful Web with Dead tape archivist Dick Latvala. Such Internet events were in such a fledgling state that the press release felt compelled to advise anybody who wanted to participate that “you need a computer with an Internet hookup and a graphic browser to read the World Wide Web.” They were celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the Dead’s first appearance at the Fillmore Auditorium. Latvala’s archival CD series, Dick’s Picks, had already proved a surprisingly strong source of unexpected revenue, with orders arriving at the band’s headquarters in the mail daily and experiencing a strong boost in sales following Garcia’s death. Lesh and Latvala were sampling tracks from Latvala’s two most recent releases, Hundred Year Hall and Dick’s Picks Vol. 3. Three days after first meeting with designers, an enthusiastic Lesh was already talking about celebrating the band’s legacy and culture through some kind of institution, “some kind of gathering place,” Lesh said, “perhaps to be called Terrapin Station.”
He envisioned a meeting place for people to continue the Grateful Dead experience without the band actually having to perform. He mentioned a performing space and virtual reality rooms, a combination of computer technology and audio science, with Grateful Dead music and videos playing continually. “San Francisco is the most logical place for it,” he said, “but we are entertaining offers from elsewhere.”
Lesh had no plans for the band to play. “We want to have a place where Deadheads can come and recapture as much of that experience as they can without actually having a live performance,” Lesh said.
In March 1996, Rick Abelson showed up for his charrette over two days at the Wyndham Hotel near San Rafael. He immediately saw Dead roadies Ram Rod and Steve Parish wandering around like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern looking lost in the lobby. The conference room had been reserved under a fake name, so there was no sign directing guests to “Grateful Dead Museum Meeting.” Instead the board in the lobby listed a family reunion under a phony name that Ram Rod and Parish didn’t recognize. Abelson introduced himself and led the two rock-and-roll cowboys to the meeting.
The Grateful Dead Productions office had pulled together more than a dozen guests that included not only Phil Lesh and all the band’s senior business advisors, but other key players such as lighting director Candace Brightman and audio engineer John Cutler. Long-standing office manager Eileen Law and her daughter Cassidy, who was married to band manager Cameron Sears, also attended, as did fan newsletter editor Gary Lambert and broadcaster David Gans of the widely syndicated Grateful Dead Hour. Also attending was a golfing buddy of Hal Kant’s, a former Silicon Valley attorney named Neil Cumsky who had helped a client of Kant’s acquire some oil fields in Costa Rica. Cumsky flew in from New Jersey for the meet and had everybody thinking he was some sort of gangster showing up dressed all in black. Kant had him in mind as a kind of project manager.
They sat around a table and, beginning with Abelson, introduced themselves to the group. Lesh was third. “I’m Phil Lesh,” he said, “and I’m an out-of-work musician.”
Abelson spent the day collecting ideas from the group. He and Spickard and McCarthy from ERA were there to hear from these people, plumb their thoughts on what this project could be, how the band’s legacy could be reflected and contained inside four walls. They made notes on whiteboards. They listened as the panel considered many aspects of the idea. How big would it be? Where would it be? What components would it need to connect with the Grateful Dead experience? Abelson encouraged free-flowing dialogue, looking to get at the essence of why people would go to Grateful Dead concerts. He madly scribbled notes and recorded everything.
After the exhaustive session led into the evening and dispersed, Abelson, McCarthy, and Spickard huddled in the hotel bar. Abelson had brought a renderer from his office in Los Angeles and had dispatched the sketch artist to his room to work up some drawings based on the day’s discussions. Spickard finally retreated to his room around midnight, leaving Abelson and McCarthy to close the bar.
Abelson finally made his way back to his room to supervise the final touches of the drawings his renderer was making. They cut pictures out of books. They stayed up all night putting their presentation together. At six in the morning, they took the sketches to a nearby Kinko’s and made giant color enlargements of the original drawings. The man working behind the counter had read in the local paper about a secret meeting by the Grateful Dead and figured out the connection between the news report and his early morning customers, but he played it cool.
When the panel of experts returned for the second day, most of them anyway, they were greeted with the huge color sketches laid out on the conference table. The facade of the building had been drawn to look like San Francisco’s Warfield Theatre, surrounded by the scaffolding fashioned to hold the Dead’s historic experimental sound system called the Wall of Sound, Garcia’s face at the center of a giant video screen. There was a drawing of the Dancing Bear Café, the rooftop restaurant envisioned the day before. As the meeting came to order, Abelson taped the blow-ups to the wall, but Ram Rod was so fascinated, he squatted down, inspecting the details. The sketches drew from the previous day’s discussion, but now that the ideas were gloriously visualized and embellished, the project seemed even more plausible. The drawings offered a glimpse at the reality of a Grateful Dead museum, no longer just a joke for Dead insiders, but something tangible. Abelson had smashed a home run with his audience, who buzzed excitedly for the rest of the day about the prospects and possibilities. Yet they gave Abelson no direct instructions on what to do next. They figured he knew.
After a complete stop, the museum plans came as part of an unexpectedly hectic schedule, as the band sought to come out into the sunlight after agreeing to call an end to the Grateful Dead. The merchandise wing was experiencing brisk sales on the Dick’s Picks CDs and plans to roll out a more robust release schedule were under way. Weir’s RatDog and Hart’s Mystery Box, the band that played on the album of the same name, had been announced even before the board meeting in December as headline attractions on the Furthur Festival summer tour. It was also announced that Lesh, Weir, Hart, and Vince Welnick would be joining the San Francisco Symphony for a new music festival in June. Lesh and Hart appeared in January at the ceremonies at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria to induct their colleagues Jefferson Airplane into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Lesh was ideally suited to lead the band’s exploration of the museum project. A conscientious parent of two young sons, Lesh also struggled with serious health issues. He had been dealing with the ravages of hepatitis C for years, but it wasn’t getting better. He was frankly relieved to be off the road and have the Grateful Dead touring regimen off his back. He could drive his kids to school in the morning—he was taking one of the boys to summer camp when he first received word of Garcia’s death—and preside over the evening family meal, prepared by his wife, Jill, and even lead the family sing-alongs after dinner. Lesh had no stomach to return to the stage. He told the band he was retiring. He intended to concentrate on projects like Terrapin St
ation that would keep him home.
In another project waiting for him at home in those desperate days following Garcia’s death, Lesh undertook the investigation of the Dead’s unfinished album project. The band had been recording a new album in starts and stops beginning with sessions November 1994 at The Site, a remote, high-end Marin County recording studio in the woods down the road from George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch. Many of the songs had been thoroughly road-tested in concert (“So Many Roads,” “Days Between,” “Samba in the Rain,” “Liberty”), but Garcia had only laid down rudimentary guitar parts—no solos—and his indifferent vocals were little more than placeholders for the real performances that would now never come. Lesh went in the studio in January to see if there was anything that could be done with the tapes, but quickly concluded there was not enough to salvage any kind of serious album release. He was not surprised. But any disappointment he felt was ameliorated by being able to go home and sleep in his own bed every night.
His bandmate Bob Weir, on the other hand, did everything he could to stay away from home. Garcia’s death came at the start of an East Coast tour by RatDog, and Weir had simply stashed his band and crew in a hotel while he returned to California for the funeral and memorial, going back to the scheduled dates the following week, almost as if nothing had happened. RatDog started as an attempt for Weir to define himself outside the Grateful Dead—the band featured no lead guitar, he was not performing Dead material and instead concentrated on blues and even occasional fifties pop standards such as “Fever” or “Twilight Time”—but it quickly became his lifeboat. In many ways, of all the Dead musicians, Weir was the one most shaken by Garcia’s death, the little brother suddenly abandoned by his protector and benefactor, but he would work out his grief on the road, tirelessly grinding out a series of shows with his band for the entire month after Garcia died in August 1995 and, again, with another several weeks on tour in November and December—performances that were as much therapy sessions as concerts, for the audience as well as Weir.
