by Joel Selvin
GDP counsel Hal Kant had long cautioned the GDP management about the guitars in Garcia’s will. Kant was certain the guitars had been paid for with corporate funds and, consequently, belonged to the company. The band members feared that Irwin was going to turn around and sell the guitars to the highest bidder and that their bandmate’s precious instruments would disappear from public view. They knew he couldn’t resist the money. Of course, Terrapin Station, officially on hold, was still in their minds, but they realized they needed to take action to counter looming public relations problems.
In February, mindful of Irwin’s new legal representative and the gathering storm, GDP contacted the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland and offered to loan them five of Garcia’s guitars (they did not offer Wolf because they were no longer certain the band held title to that guitar and turned it over to the Garcia estate). The Dead made one Dead-like proviso: the guitars must be displayed where people do not have to pay an admission price to see them. In a minute, the guitars were whisked to Cleveland and placed on display in the lobby.
In March 2001, attorney Long filed Irwin’s suit against Grateful Dead Productions in Marin County Superior Court.
On March 27, Weir, Hart, and Kreutzmann—with Lesh notable by his absence—signed a defensive thirteen-hundred-word post on the band’s Web site stating in detail the band’s case and refuting some of the public statements by Irwin and his attorney.
“During the time that GDP was a partnership,” the statement read in part, “and then later when it became a corporation, we as a group always bought and maintained the instruments used by the band on stage and in recording. We did this purposely. Because all of the stage instruments were bought and maintained in the same way, we thought we had avoided any arguments over who owned what. We all owned it all. All for one and one for all.”
The “Letter to the Dead Heads” acknowledged the fans’ stake in the debate. Only the members of the Grateful Dead would feel compelled to make such a detailed public explanation of pending litigation. In conclusion, the band invoked Lesh’s name, at the same time, responding to his comments to the press that the Dead had simply become “just another corporation.” The statement concluded:
Finally, there is a theme in some circles that GDP is becoming just like other corporations, and that it is now run by faceless executives who do not understand the Grateful Dead journey. The corporation is now, and always has been, a democracy made up exclusively of members of the band. At present, the directors and sole owners are Bob, Phil, Billy, and Mickey. No one makes decisions for us and no one is leading us down any garden path. We respect your right to disagree with what we think is best, but understand that the same people who have always made the decisions still make them. Regrettably, this matter will apparently be decided in the courts. We believe we will prevail and we also believe that we have dealt with Doug in good faith and that he and his lawyers have not dealt with us in the same way. No one detests litigation more than we do. We did not start this. But we must finish it.
(Signed) Bobby Weir, Mickey Hart, and Bill Kreutzmann for Grateful Dead Productions
In April, Long took the depositions of both Weir and Lesh. Lesh destroyed the defense case by stating that the collective ownership of instruments was nothing more than a tax dodge. Lesh also gave interviews to the press harshly critical of his bandmates over this issue.
“I don’t agree that justice has been done to Garcia’s wishes,” Lesh told Rolling Stone. “For him to do something that specific in the will means that he wanted that to happen.”
Lesh told the magazine he wanted Irwin to have the guitars, but “since Jerry died, consensus has degenerated into democracy, and I was outvoted.… Now that Jerry’s not here to play them, I don’t care if they go into someone’s vault.”
Reading Lesh’s comments while riding his bus, Bob Weir almost punched out the screen to his laptop. He well remembered Lesh’s express desire to retain the instruments as centerpiece exhibits at the planned Terrapin Station. He also knew Lesh had instructed Steve Parish to stage a midnight raid on the band’s rehearsal hall to grab Lesh’s basses “to be photographed.” They were never returned. Lesh’s presumed moral superiority infuriated Weir, especially knowing his fierce initial resistance to giving up the guitars.
The guitars were only the latest reversal in Lesh’s positions. He had initially thought Bandwagon was a great idea, but he had since turned on the project with a vengeance. The idea had attracted a $17 million first-round financing offer from Silicon Valley venture capitalists, but that came off the table after the dotcom crash of summer 2000. Roger McNamee was putting together a formidable coalition of rock bands ready to join the Web enterprise. When Bandwagon began, selling merchandise through mail order was the business model, but as technology rapidly expanded other possibilities emerged. With the advent of mp3.com and Napster, the feasibility of sharing audio files across the Internet suddenly became reality and the prospect of being able to put the entire Vault online dramatically altered the potential of Bandwagon.
McNamee envisioned a superstore Web site that would combine advance ticket sales, merchandise, fan clubs, and, now, audio downloads. Bandwagon would put every band directly in touch with their fans. He was holding fruitful talks with many major acts. Meeting with U2 management, McNamee found the Irish rock band was well aware of the unique community of fans that surrounded the Grateful Dead and openly envied the band’s close relationship with their fans. The Dave Matthews Band, one of the first acts to engage on Bandwagon, was managed by Coran Capshaw, who modeled a lot of his business strategy on the Dead. Pearl Jam loved the idea. Dylan’s people were interested.
Meanwhile, as one of the “four amigos” running Silver Lake Partners, he launched the first private equity fund focused on technology. Silver Lake, created to prosper during a bear market, was one of the top tech investment firms in red-hot Silicon Valley, with a $2.3 billion fund that McNamee started about the same time he began working on Bandwagon (while still managing to play occasional gigs with his Flying Other Brothers).
In April, as he was closing the deal with U2 to sign up with Bandwagon, he found himself—in the space of one week—flying from San Francisco to Dublin, back to San Francisco, then New York, Dublin again, back to New York, and home to San Francisco. At the end of his trip, McNamee was struck down by not one, but two strokes at age forty-five. He was forced to retreat into months of painstaking rehabilitation at this crucial stage in the project, and Bandwagon suddenly stalled.
The Sweetwater was a tiny bar a block off the town square in sleepy downtown Mill Valley with live music seven nights a week. A sold-out house was eighty people, jammed together at little tables and arrayed down the bar and along the wall. A postage stamp–size stage stood in the corner. While most nights featured little-known local musicians, the club over the years became a kind of unofficial private club of the Marin County rock scene. Bill Graham would stop by for a drink on his way home. Sammy Hagar would rent it out for his Halloween parties. One night in 1989, Jerry Garcia jammed with Elvis Costello and James Burton, guitarist for the other Elvis. Dan Hicks did an annual Christmas show. You weren’t anybody in Mill Valley until Maria Muldaur had danced in the aisles at your Sweetwater show.
One Sunday night in June 2001, a group called the Crusader Rabbit Stealth Band was the announced attraction. Crusader Rabbit was a black-and-white cartoon character on fifties television that young Phil Lesh knew from growing up in Berkeley. The Crusader Rabbit Stealth Band was a pseudonym for Phil and Friends with one very important addition. For the first time in more than two years, Phil Lesh would be joined onstage by his estranged bandmate Bobby Weir. Not since Lesh, Weir, and Hart joined by Sammy Hagar played Caryl Hart’s save-the-redwoods benefit in Santa Rosa had they appeared together.
The place was packed to the doorway and overflowed onto the sidewalk outside, where gawkers strained for a glimpse through the doors. A light-footed jam started to emerge from the random noi
ses onstage and, after reaching a critical mass on their instruments, Lesh and Weir stepped to the mikes and joined their voices on “Truckin’.” The little room erupted.
Lesh had not played the Sweetwater before. Sneaking his popular band into the beloved cozy bar dropped him into the bosom of the hip Marin music scene, an instant event made all the more so by publicly burying the hatchet with Weir. Nothing was said. Weir, who had stopped by the Sweetwater on his way home and wound up playing all night many, many nights before, was perfectly at ease, singing the Dead songs and playing with the latest edition of Phil and Friends, drummer Molo, keyboardist Barraco, and guitarist Herring. When Warren Haynes joined the band for the encores, it was The Q with Bob Weir as guest. It was Lesh’s world. Weir was only living in it.
A month later, RatDog was opening shows on a handful of Phil and Friends amphitheater dates in the Midwest and East Coast. Weir would join Phil and Friends for a couple of the early numbers in the first set, but Weir had accepted his secondary role in the kingdom. As furious as he had been with Lesh, he never lost touch with the brotherly love he felt in his heart for the man. Weir had been absorbed in the battle and lost perspective. Angered and aggravated, Weir had responded like an enraged animal without considering the bigger picture. Like all of them, he had no expectations of life after the Dead and had been basically bouncing along from one seemingly good idea to another without any apparent strategy or overview. Battling Lesh had been nothing but destructive. He had also come to understand that more things would be possible through unity than adversity. And he could read the writing on the wall. He knew how intractable Lesh could be. He surrendered. Weir was not the full extent of Lesh’s rapprochement. In July at Jones Beach Amphitheater on Long Island, a couple of nights after the run of seven dates with RatDog, Lesh welcomed Mickey Hart onstage to join Phil and Friends. Hart had never been to any Phil and Friends shows. He sat in for the first several numbers of the opening set. As eighteen thousand fans showered them with applause, Lesh planted a kiss on Hart’s forehead. “The good times are back,” he said.
Lesh let Weir know he would consider playing together again, but only under certain conditions. He wanted things his way now. With sales finally dwindling at Grateful Dead Merchandise, money was thinning out. McQuaid managed to keep appealing material in the pipeline like the twelve-disc boxed set of the Dead’s albums for Warner Brothers that he arranged with reissue specialists Rhino Records. But since Garcia died, they had released twenty multidisc Dick’s Picks sets and, as they flooded the market with three or four new releases a year, demand slowed predictably. Only Lesh was making any money on the road on his own. The prospect of a lucrative onetime reunion looked attractive.
Lesh was in a position to dictate. Newly sensitive to the hue and cry among Deadheads, he wanted the Irwin suit settled. Although he originally strongly backed their case in private, now he turned on the band in public. As much as the others felt that their legal case was sound and that they had been abandoned by Lesh, they also knew the entire episode had been a public relations nightmare. There was no way they could effectively communicate their position to their fans. The Deadheads couldn’t get past the idea that the band was not acting in accordance with Jerry’s wishes. The fine-point detail of collective ownership was lost on the fans. The Terrapin Station project was growing colder and more remote all the time, so the guitars’ significance had shifted. Work had almost entirely ceased on the museum since the acquisition of the downtown San Francisco real estate intended for the site in June 1998. Lesh was pushing to settle.
Easier said than done. With his volatile moods and often deranged thinking, Irwin could reverse himself in midsentence during negotiations. Long interrupted one session to lead Irwin out of the room, returning to continue without him. “He’s staying in the car,” Long said. The Dead team at one point offered Irwin an annuity of fifty thousand dollars a year to settle the suit and let them keep the guitars. They thought an annual stipend was the most humane, reasonable way of dealing with the mentally handicapped Irwin, but he remained convinced the guitars were worth millions of dollars.
In October, attorneys hashed out a deal. The Dead agreed to give Irwin the two key guitars—Wolf (retrieved from the Garcia estate) and Tiger—on condition that the band be allowed to match any possible sale price when the guitars went on the market and that Irwin agree to a mutual press release and promise to keep his mouth closed about the matter henceforth. Irwin went ballistic, sent out his own press release saying he was being deprived of his free speech rights. The agreement went south, but the Dead had capitulated. Lesh had his veto power back.
In October, Roger McNamee, weak and still recovering from his strokes, met with the GDP board to discuss Bandwagon. Lesh did not attend, but all three of the others were there. The project would require an initial $2 million investment, which McNamee said could be raised either by the band themselves or taking on one or two outside investors who would certainly be glad to invest in GDP. Kreutzmann, who did not want to take on outside investors or reduce his own revenue by investing the band’s money, asked if there was any way to borrow the money. McNamee pointed out that would require putting up the Vault as collateral, one of the conditions he made on accepting his role as consultant. With Lesh counting himself out and Kreutzmann unwilling to accept either of the two options that McNamee laid out, Bandwagon was dead. Coran Capshaw, who started his own mega-band Web site, Musictoday, picked up for a song what remained of Grateful Dead Merchandise, and whatever program the band had once envisioned about building back employment for their former associates was officially abandoned.
Lesh sought to systematically strip his business involvements with his old bandmates, almost as if he wanted to financially cripple his former partners by disrupting GDP. He wanted all the real estate sold (Lesh had already declined to join the partners in purchasing a second tract of land on Bel Marin Keys). Instead of preserving employment, he demanded the businesses close, the office shut down, the staff be laid off, all long-term obligations be ended. His final condition was that Peter McQuaid be fired and Cameron Sears be brought back to oversee Grateful Dead Productions. Lesh was taking the opportunity to use his advantage to put himself in charge and get free of any future entanglements with the Dead, a coup of sorts.
Sears had left the company in May 2000 after having been reduced to strictly manager of RatDog to join Jerry Harrison of the Talking Heads in a Silicon Valley start-up called garageband.com. He was surprised when Phil and Jill Lesh phoned him in September 2001 to discuss the possibility of his returning to work with the Dead. Weir and Kreutzmann took McQuaid to lunch.
McQuaid had just delivered the most profitable year yet in his time at GDP, six years after Garcia’s death. He had managed to make the merchandise sales grow significantly, made some smart licensing deals, and did what he could to advance the brand amidst the past two years of intense infighting between the partners. For his reward, he would walk the plank. “We hate to say this,” they told McQuaid, “but Phil wants to let you go.”
With McQuaid gone and Sears on his way back, Lesh’s coup was complete by the time Phil and Friends took the stage New Year’s Eve at Oakland’s Henry J. Kaiser Auditorium. After The Q delivered a sterling opening set and the hall darkened in anticipation of midnight, strains of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” boomed out of the sound system as a float carrying four Harry Potter–style magicians made its way slowly through the crowd. At the stroke of midnight, as the four sorcerers doffed their caps and took their places onstage, the audience exploded in cheers, applause, whistles, foot stomping. Standing onstage together were Phil Lesh, Bobby Weir, Mickey Hart, and Billy Kreutzmann—the Crusader Rabbit Stealth Band. With the crowd still screaming and cheering madly, the band slammed into a propulsive “Not Fade Away” and carried everybody into the new year.
After a rollicking ride through a half-dozen Dead standards, played end to end Phil and Friends style, the four departed the stage to make way for the f
inal Phil and Friends set. Lesh returned for the encore without his Dead associates to deliver the obligatory “donor rap.”
“If the harmony and love manifested in the room tonight continues throughout the year and even further, I think we’re going to have a damn good year. Bless you all.… I want to thank everybody in our crew for making a great New Year’s Eve celebration tonight. I especially want to thank Bob Weir, Mickey Hart, and Billy Kreutzmann for joining us. Unity is possible.”
11
Alpine Valley
THEY WELL remembered the Grateful Dead in Walworth County, Wisconsin. The last time the band passed through town in 1989, more than seventy-five thousand fans overwhelmed the tiny East Troy hamlet—almost half of the crowd outside the venue without tickets—and the band was permanently barred from returning to the nearby Alpine Valley Music Theater. Built in 1977, the thirty-seven-thousand-capacity open-air amphitheater with the wood roof has hosted summertime music events ever since. The Dead played there twenty times before the final, cataclysmic appearance. In June 2002, one month after the instantly sold-out two-day return to Alpine Valley by what was being called “Terrapin Station: The Grateful Dead Family Reunion” was announced, the Walworth County Highway Commission denied permission for the band to hold their concerts there.
The corporate concert promoters, Clear Channel, who had failed to take out adequate permits prior to announcing the show, were required to guarantee as much as $200,000 for police overtime, forty tow trucks to enforce parking violations, and a $100,000 bond against property damage claims that might arise. Clear Channel had originally hoped to stage the event in Chicago’s Grant Park, but city fathers there turned them down cold. In July, after Clear Channel had taken the suggested precautions and satisfied the Highway Commission, the Walworth County board unanimously reversed the previous month’s ruling and the show was back on for August 3 and 4 at Alpine Valley.
