Fare Thee Well

by Joel Selvin

  He converted the usually suspicious Parish to a strong ally and friend. Weir thought they had made the right choice and Lesh had agreed. But with a fragile power balance among the surviving members and so much at stake, Franks was pretty much on his own. If circumstances had been even slightly different, if Franks had had the chance to learn the catalog without the immense pressure of looming deadlines and pervasive grief, if he had had the luxury of organically incorporating his style into the milieu of the band, the casting of this jazz musician might have been the most inspired decision the band made since Garcia died. They wanted Stan to be Stan and Franks wouldn’t have had it any other way, but he was trying to replace the irreplaceable Jerry Garcia. Perhaps he was bound to fail.

  The next Phil and Friends show in March featured Lesh, Franks, and a completely different lineup. In April, on his third Phil and Friends show, Franks joined Lesh, Weir, Hornsby, and drummer Molo (with saxophonist Branford Marsalis) at the Warfield less than six weeks before they were scheduled to go out on the road as the Other Ones. By then, Franks was struggling with the repertoire and not getting the support from his bandmates that he needed. He was a nervous wreck at rehearsals. He froze, frustrating the band.

  When Franks wasn’t there, Lesh was wondering aloud if they had made the right choice. Every day frustration grew. Everybody knew what was happening, but it wasn’t until Mickey Hart returned to town from the Planet Drum tour and joined the Other Ones rehearsals that Franks’s fate became clear to everyone. Hart, who may have been somewhat distracted by having Molo in the drum chair since the beginning of the Other Ones rehearsals, did not seem to jive with the new guitarist. He tersely suggested to Franks he play more like Garcia.

  “I’m not going to play like no dead guy,” said Franks.

  On May 15, Franks backed up Weir with Wasserman and Hart at Wavy Gravy’s annual SEVA benefit at the Berkeley Community Theater (Lesh joined David Crosby for a few numbers at the same show), but it was clear he wasn’t working out. Stan Franks was a genius local musician and a gentleman who was suddenly drafted into the big leagues, but the band didn’t have the time or inclination to break him in. When he couldn’t duplicate his first night’s performance on cue, the end was near and his downfall abrupt. It wasn’t long after that Weir called Franks with the bad news. Weir was upset, but Lesh no longer supported Franks and Hart was also against him. Franks was disappointed, but not devastated. He had seen it coming in the final days. He went back to work on his apartments the next day.

  With less than a month now before the first concert, the band hurriedly held auditions for the guitar job.

  The last time the Grateful Dead auditioned for a new member was after Brent Mydland’s death in 1990, when they hired Vince Welnick. The position paid big money. The Dead gave the new keyboard player full participation in revenue. They could have scouted the entire world of rock for the highest levels of talent, but that is not how the Dead do things. They checked their phone books and called the five piano players around Marin County they knew (having played in the same band for so long, the members of the Dead didn’t know a lot of other musicians) and tried them out over the course of two days.

  Similarly, when Garcia died, the names of a lot of famous guitarists were floated as possible replacements—Carlos Santana, Neil Young, Jorma Kaukonen, David Hidalgo, Mark Knopfler. When the surviving members finally got around to hiring a new guitarist more than two and a half years later, none of the four guitarists who tried out had anything like a national reputation. Tony Gilkyson was the closest to qualify; he belonged to the highly regarded, modestly successful Los Angeles country-rock group Lone Justice and worked for ten years with a latter-era version of the Los Angeles punk rock band X.

  Oddly, the most obvious choice was Steve Kimock, little known outside Dead circles around Northern California as lead guitarist for Zero, a band that always counted many Deadheads in their crowds. He could play so much like Garcia, without exactly imitating him, it could be spooky. It is not that they sounded alike; they were guitarists who thought alike. Zero was a psychedelic instrumental band Kimock cofounded that worked around the Bay Area during the eighties featuring Quicksilver Messenger Service guitarist John Cippolina, one of Garcia’s peers from the dancehall days of the San Francisco scene.

  A quote from Garcia during an interview with a guitar magazine calling Kimock one of his favorite unknown guitarists would dog Kimock for years, as if Garcia had somehow anointed him. Yet, although they had many friends and musical associates in common—Martin Fierro, Merl Saunders—Kimock didn’t really know any of the Dead members personally besides Garcia. The audition would be the first time he ever played with them. Kimock came the second day after all the other candidates had come and gone. He thought he blew the audition. He didn’t know the material. He made no attempt to have anything prepared. He thought he sounded like shit and left thinking he couldn’t have been more lame. The Dead don’t like front-runners anyway.

  The least likely candidate was Lauren Ellis. Remembering the version of “Jack Straw” the band had played with Bonnie Raitt at Shoreline, John Molo suggested they try this female blues slide player from an all-girl r&b band, the Scarletts, that he knew from the Los Angeles nightclub scene. Ironically, the forty-two-year-old Ellis grew up in Marin County and dropped acid as a teenager at Grateful Dead concerts only to be certain Jerry was spending the entire evening playing just to her. She had moved to Los Angeles with her boyfriend, ex-Monkee Peter Tork, and was working on her own music when Molo called and told her the band was thinking about going in a different direction. She was astonished by the call, eager to take the shot.

  Ellis didn’t even spend the night. She caught a flight from Burbank to Oakland in the morning, rented a car, and drove across the bay to the Novato headquarters for her four-hour session. They played “Sugar Magnolia.” They did “Friend of the Devil.” She sang a little with them. Ellis found it challenging to make the slide guitar sing in the Dead sound, but she gave it her best.

  When Ellis left, waiting outside for the next session was another little-known player from Los Angeles the band brought up, Mark Karan. Although Karan also grew up in Marin and dropped acid at Dead shows at Winterland, he had been living since 1990 in Los Angeles doing utility guitar work where he could. He was currently playing dates with Dave Mason. While he had been living in the Bay Area, he had bounced around various nowhere bands without brushing up against even the middle time. He had never met any of the guys from the Dead before, let alone played with them.

  They did “Sugar Magnolia,” “The Other One,” “Friend of the Devil,” songs Karan knew from his days following the band. He felt quite comfortable with the music, but couldn’t read the reception. Phil Lesh seemed especially cool, but it was Lesh who sought Karan out after the session when he had gone out into the front office to talk business with Cameron Sears. “I just wanted to thank you,” Lesh told Karan. “We weren’t sure this could still be fun and you just reminded us.”

  After Karan was offered the job, Lesh went home and told his wife Jill, who said that she and her Deadhead girlfriends all wanted Kimock to get the nod. Lesh grew concerned about creating discontent in Deadhead circles and decided Kimock needed to be included, but Weir remained adamant about not using someone who sounded so much like Garcia. The first day Karan arrived for rehearsal, Lesh was not there. He had left word that he would not be coming until Kimock was included. Kimock was summoned.

  The rehearsals were not without tension. The next day, Karan, Kimock, Chimenti, Dave Ellis, and Molo, the hired hands, sat in the studio while the partners quarreled in the control booth. As these band meetings became more frequent, the sidemen took to passing the time by holding little jam sessions, which Hornsby would frequently sneak out and join. Hart intimidated Ellis, telling him about his hatred of the saxophone that went back to his days in marching bands. The two new guitarists eyed each other uneasily. Lesh was tired, his health poor. He didn’t say much and would have
to lie down from time to time. There was a huge amount of material to go through in a short time. Hart could be either a cheerleader or critic with equal intensity. He cut Karan short rehearsing “St. Stephen,” after Karan protested that he had tried to play the part like Garcia.

  “Yeah, well, Jerry isn’t here now, is he?” Hart said.

  Without a designated bandleader to direct traffic, rehearsals tended to revolve around the lead vocalist of the song being practiced. Lesh was a generally encouraging presence, but it was Weir, who could be extraordinarily spacey and unmoored in his personal life, who always seemed to know where he was in the music. He was not a dogmatic conductor or bandleader, but he often knew the territory when those around him were lost. Even then, he didn’t necessarily try to keep his hands on the wheel. The subject of what to do with “Playing in the Band” came up.

  Hart: Hey, Bob, I thought we were starting in the zone.

  Weir: No. Here’s the plan. I’ve had this straight all along, but I haven’t been able to get it across to anyone.

  Lesh: We were doing it the other way the other day.

  Weir: No, no, Phil. We started at the end because we figured let’s do “Playing in the Band” because we haven’t done that yet, but the fact is, in actuality, we will have done it, you see?

  Hart: I see. But I don’t see.

  Weir: Here’s the deal. For maximum impact, to give all those screaming hippies out there something to love, what we’re going to do is we’re going to do “Playing in the Band” and in the minor part of the jam, we’re going to go into “Baba Jingo.”

  Hart: Bob, may I? The first time we started this, we started it there… in an atmosphere, what Bruce calls “world music.” Then we went into some things and then you brought “Playing in the Band” out. Then we went from “Playing in the Band” into the solo section and then into the minor section.

  Weir: OK, fine.

  Hart: That’s the way we did it the other day and it seemed to work.

  Weir: OK, fine.

  Hart: You mind doing it that way, Bob?

  Weir: No, that’s actually a better way to do it.

  Two nights later, June 4, ready or not, the Other Ones took it out of the rehearsal hall to a high-priced benefit for rain forest relief before a capacity crowd of excited but wary Deadheads at the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco. A little more than three hours later, the verdict was in: the good times were back. The Other Ones were attempting to emerge from the Grateful Dead with some identity of their own. They brought new material, Rob Wasserman’s “Easy Answers” and “Banyan Tree,” from Weir and Hart with lyrics by Hunter. They did Hornsby’s songs. Hornsby ably handled Garcia’s vocals. They resurrected “Mountains of the Moon” after a forty-year absence from the repertoire. For the first time in Dead history, there was a jazz component in the band, although Ellis and Hornsby could quote Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” and nobody else on the bandstand would know what was going on. Instead of opening shows as the Dead did with regulation-length songs, the Other Ones stretched everything they played out to the ten-minute mark and beyond. The “St. Stephen/The Other One/Lovelight” suite lasted almost thirty minutes by itself.

  The third official Furthur Festival tour opened three weeks later in front of a half-capacity crowd at Lakewood Amphitheater in Atlanta with Rusted Root and Hot Tuna on the bill. The band sounded great and the next night they played the hell out of “St. Stephen,” a fan favorite seldom featured in the Dead’s concert repertoire. Word went out on the Deadhead grapevine. The next show at Nissan Pavilion in Bristow, Virginia, was sold out with ecstatic Deadheads. For the first time since Garcia died, shows went clean throughout the tour and, with expenses down and ticket prices up, the band members made some serious money, which they all needed.

  The band was enthusiastically received by the Deadheads, even if the three-guitar lineup often made for traffic jams onstage and a lot of the fans shared Mickey Hart’s distaste for saxophone. Karan, perhaps understandably nervous on the bandstand, may have been somewhat less inspirational on lead guitar by Grateful Dead standards, but he was a diligent craftsman. Kimock was a crew nut who liked to hang out with the roadies. He rode on their bus with them, went to the shows early to watch them build the stage, and always set up his own gear. During the shows, he sat on a stool, often barefoot, and largely ignored the audience, but his playing could spark imaginative turns in the jams. With the in-ear monitor system allowing for individual mixes, Kimock thought most of the musicians were turning themselves up in the headsets and not listening to each other. There may have been some truth in that; Hart said he always heard Garcia in his deaf left ear when they played. Although Lesh’s ill health dogged him, ashen-faced and looking cadaverous at thirty pounds underweight, he played great. The tour proved more taxing than he imagined, and he and Jill Lesh kept largely to themselves.

  The Other Ones rolled into Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View July 24–25 for the final two dates of the triumphant tour. A drunken Billy Kreutzmann showed up for the first night. Hart handed him an African hand drum and he tottered onstage during the first few numbers of the opening set, returning in the middle of the show to take over Molo’s drum kit for “Iko Iko.” He was surly and disheveled, fresh off the islands. It wasn’t some joyful, jolly reunion. Kreutzmann sulked around backstage feeling like a stranger who didn’t belong. They didn’t even put his hand drumming in the mix.

  Never one of the most sensitive of men, Kreutzmann had come largely unwound in the wake of Garcia’s death. In his case, his father died only a few weeks after Garcia. They had become close and his father had moved to Mendocino to be near Billy. In the next few months, Kreutzmann would divorce his wife, enter rehab, and move to Kauai without so much as a drum kit, all before the first Grateful Dead Productions board meeting after Garcia’s death. Kreutzmann smothered his pain surfing, scuba diving, fishing, and growing pineapples on the north shore on Hawaii’s most tropical island. He consciously avoided contact with his old bandmates.

  Before the end of the year, however, he was playing small gigs around the island with a couple of local musicians, jamming on Dead songs and calling themselves Backbone, enjoying his local celebrity in dive bars around the islands. But Kreutzmann was still a mess. In December 1997, he had been arrested and jailed in Kauai on a domestic violence beef. He was not going through a happy period. Hanging out backstage at Shoreline didn’t make him sentimental.

  The next night, a couple of hours before the final show, tour coproducer John Scher was summoned to the Leshes’ trailer backstage. He listened in utter disbelief as Lesh and his wife laid down a set of demands that must be met if the other members ever wanted Phil to play with them again. They had been furious about Cameron Sears participating as both a tour producer and band manager of the first Furthur tour—accused him of essentially double-dipping the band—even though Lesh was not even playing on that tour and presumably they didn’t have a dog in that race. At Shoreline, they told Scher that they wanted to renegotiate the division of tour proceeds, which, of course, had been agreed to before the tour began. The Leshes insisted that Bruce Hornsby be paid as a sideman not a partner. They wanted Cameron paid wages like a Grateful Dead Productions employee, not a partnership in tour revenues he was due as coproducer. They further demanded that Scher tell the others of their demands before they went onstage that night.

  Scher was astonished. He did not see this coming. Lesh had been largely isolated with his wife during the tour, but they had been an uncomplaining, agreeable presence. Having worked with the Dead for thirty years, Scher had known Lesh since they were both young men. He could see that the tour was wearing Lesh down. He figured Lesh and his wife were largely keeping to themselves because of Lesh’s health issues and didn’t realize there was any quarrel between them and the rest of the band. This came as an unwelcome surprise.

  With a sour feeling in his stomach, Scher assembled the rest of the band in another nearby trailer and laid out the Leshes’
demands. Their reactions were predictable. Hornsby dismissed it as bullshit. Hart was more forceful. He called it crazy and said so bluntly. Weir was incredulous. There had been no preamble, no hint of dissatisfaction, no discussion between the long-standing bandmates. With only one show left, the tour had been a huge success from every viewpoint—musically, financially, consumer satisfaction—which may have caught the Leshes by surprise. They may have anticipated a more tepid response and modest earnings along the lines of the previous two summer tours. But the Other Ones had worked out much better than anyone expected. It had likely begun to occur to Phil and Jill Lesh that the only difference was Lesh himself. Phil Lesh, who had always felt underappreciated in the Grateful Dead, now had proof of his value. Without him, the amphitheaters had been half-full. He could now claim his due.

  But, much like a baseball team that argues in the locker room and hits the field united against their opponent, the four men took the stage with their band that night and, for two hours, put aside their feelings and played music. Hot Tuna guitarist Jorma Kaukonen joined the band on the set-closing “Lovelight” for a little Fillmore homecoming and Weir brought everything to a close in a rare encore: “Playing in the Band” into “Touch of Gray,” the exclamatory chorus “I will survive” ringing almost dolefully in the chilly night air at Shoreline as the concert—and the tour—came to an end.

  The phone lines buzzed continually the next week. Lesh called Sears repeatedly, who could clearly hear Jill Lesh piping up in the background. Nobody saw any reason to concede to any of the Leshes’ demands and didn’t particularly take his threats seriously. All appeared well enough when Lesh resumed his monthly Phil and Friends shows August 7–8, two weeks after the tour ended, in two sold-out shows at the Fillmore with a band that was essentially a streamlined version of the Other Ones—Weir, Kimock, Chimenti, and Ellis with drummer Prairie Prince from Todd Rundgren’s band.