by Joel Selvin
The Deadhead world exulted at the news. All four of them—the core four—would play together for the first time since Garcia died as the Other Ones. Having met Lesh’s behind-the-scenes conditions, the band eagerly looked forward to what was planned as a onetime reunion. Also appearing over the weekend would be Phil and Friends, RatDog, Bembe Orisha—Mickey Hart’s new multi-kulti world beat outfit—and the Tri-Chromes, the band Bill Kreutzmann had started since he moved back to the Bay Area. Robert Hunter would also play. Other bands would perform on a second stage. The Other Ones would headline both nights. Bruce Hornsby didn’t come, turning down a million-dollar bonus to join the tour, opting instead to tour on his own in support of a new album and work on the soundtrack to the Spike Lee documentary about basketball star Kobe Bryant. He was tired of the strife in the band anyway.
The band started rehearsals in May at Novato with both Jeff Chimenti of RatDog and Rob Barraco of The Q on keyboards and Jimmy Herring on guitar. The summer would be busy, beginning with the release in May of There and Back Again, the first studio album by Phil and Friends—The Q—under a big-money deal with Sony Music (not Grateful Dead Records). Recorded at The Plant Studios in Sausalito where Fleetwood Mac made Rumours, the Phil and Friends record revolved around a handful of new Lesh-Hunter songs (most notably “Night of a Thousand Stars,” cowritten with Warren Haynes), a Garcia-Hunter leftover from Dead days (“Liberty”), and a few songs from the other guys in the band. Despite the quality of the record and the rising popularity of Phil and Friends, the record would ultimately sell fewer than 50,000 copies, the Internet having already cratered the CD market.
The good vibes were now prevailing and Lesh included all his bandmates’ bands—RatDog, Bembe Orisha, and the Tri-Chromes—as opening acts on dates in his busy summer, which began with a prestige headline appearance by Phil and Friends with guest Bob Weir at the first Bonnaroo Festival on a seven-hundred-acre farm outside Manchester, Tennessee. Lesh also did a series of co-headline shows in July with the Allman Brothers with Warren Haynes playing all night in both bands, who had begun carefully coordinating their bookings around their shared guitarist’s schedule. Lesh wound up what was essentially three straight months on the road, bringing his tour into Alpine Valley to meet up with the Other Ones and “The Grateful Dead Family Reunion.”
They all stitched rehearsals for the Other Ones into busy schedules. RatDog did a European tour before wending their way to Wisconsin. Hart went out with Bembe Orisha, the new band he built around vocalist Bobi Céspedes, blending West African and Cuban music into his own unique brand of world beat. Even Kreutzmann was doing dates with the Tri-Chromes, pretty much a super-charged blues band and an excuse for all involved to consume massive amounts of cannabis. Tri-Chromes was managed by ex-roadie Steve Parish and fronted by lead vocalist Herbie Herbert, the former manager of Journey who now called himself Sy Klopps. A couple of Herbert’s musical associates rounded out the band and guitarist Neal Schon of Journey had played on the original sessions, although he couldn’t keep up with the prodigious pot smoking.
The locals at Alpine had raised so much alarm, the band took steps. Other dates for November in the Midwest and East were announced to relieve some of the pressure and live Webcasts of the Alpine Valley shows were scheduled. Chicago FM rock radio station WXRT broadcast the show live. Advertisements for the event stressed, “Don’t come if you don’t have a ticket.”
Every tow truck in that corner of the state was aligned along the highway leading to the amphitheater entrance. Cops were everywhere, even mounted police. The threat of a $1,000 fine for illegal vending kept the parking lot scene largely free of paraphernalia and other offensive merchandise (at least openly), although computer-generated artwork by Billy Kreutzmann was on sale from $50 for a commemorative poster to $1,100 for a more elaborate piece.
“We are all under a microscope,” read the band’s statement to the Deadheads. “If you want more shows, come only with a ticket in hand. Our reputation and our future is on the line.”
The Other Ones opened their first set with an instrumental evocation of “He’s Gone”—which had usually been sung by Garcia—with the repeated refrain “he’s gone, you know he’s gone.” Striking that sentimental note at the opening released a torrent of pent-up emotions from the Deadheads, who responded with overwhelming fervor that drove the band to even greater heights as they cruised through a crowd-pleasing program of old favorites—“Dark Star,” “I Know You Rider,” and “Morning Dew” among others. The next night repeated only one number (“Playing in the Band”) and came to a serene, satisfying close with Lesh’s elegiac “Box of Rain.”
All the advance efforts at crowd control proved effective. Few stragglers without tickets showed up at the site. Some of the extra deputies assigned to work all weekend were sent home early. The additional concert dates, which had been announced as provisional depending on the outcome of the Alpine Valley weekend, were on. Mountain Girl and Augustus Owsley Stanley III—the beloved Bear—were on hand backstage to flesh out the family reunion. Mickey Hart told Billboard the concert represented nothing less than “victory over adversity.”
“We had our own family feud going,” Hart said. “See, the music mediates everything in our lives, but once the music stopped, we didn’t have that mediation process; we couldn’t meet on the stage, look at each other, and renew our vows, as it were. And, so, the business side started overtaking us. We didn’t have agreement. There was, like, hard feelings between people. In the back of my mind, I wished we would [reunite]. But I didn’t think there would be enough forgiveness and kindness that would rise to the surface.”
“We had been disagreeing on a lot of lower level stuff,” Lesh told Billboard. “And my feeling was that last year, I started really feeling that we needed to reaffirm our relationship on the high level that it started at, and that level was intimately involved with making music, that relationship.” “When that’s not happening,” he continued,
and everybody’s just part of the board of directors that’s just doing business, it makes it harder for individuals and passionately committed people like the Grateful Dead guys to work together. So Bobby and I started communicating, and Bobby sat in with my band, and then RatDog and my band played together on the summer tour. And Bobby sat in with us again. And on New Year’s I invited everybody—all the surviving original members—to join my band for our set. I guess that sort of broke the ice, and put it back on the level that it really needs to be at, the high level of making music.
The well-behaved Alpine Valley crowd had given the return of the core four a giant, loving liftoff and the good vibes echoed backstage among the crew and band members. It almost felt like old times. Everybody had a marvelous time. All except one.
Wandering around in the dark, playing an impromptu gig at a local Thai restaurant the night before and a campfire show in the festival campgrounds the night of the show, was onetime band member Vince Welnick, desperately distressed to have been excluded from “The Grateful Dead Family Reunion.” He focused on the phrase—along with publicity touting “the surviving members of the Grateful Dead”—and was tearing himself apart at having been left out. Wasn’t he a surviving member? Wasn’t membership in the Grateful Dead a lifetime thing bestowed on him by Jerry that couldn’t be revoked? He came to Wisconsin under the delusion that this terrible mistake would be rectified before it was too late.
Life had not been good to Welnick since he left the RatDog bus. His own band, Missing Man Formation, made a sold-out debut in July 1996 at the Fillmore, but within months, depressive Welnick had alienated his lifelong friend, drummer Prairie Prince from the Tubes, who had put the band together for Welnick, and the group shortly thereafter dissolved in acrimony and incompetence.
By the time Alpine Valley was announced, Welnick had been reduced to playing humiliating shows in small college towns with Dead tribute bands with names like Gent Treadly or Jack Straw in front of sometimes fewer than a dozen patrons. He had su
ccessfully battled throat cancer but continued to suffer from emphysema (although that didn’t keep him from smoking cigarettes) and sucked on an inhaler all day long.
The Dead had bought out his interest in the band and would not allow him to use the facilities to rehearse his bands or borrow equipment for his recording sessions. He peppered management with phone calls and emails with plans to reunite the band and go out on the road, always with him at the keyboards. He became something of an embarrassing pariah. Not fully understanding, Welnick sat in his motel room at Alpine Valley and waited for a last-minute phone call that never came inviting him to join the band again.
The core four did not give Welnick a second thought—he was only the last of six keyboardists to play in the Grateful Dead—and went along their merry way, riding a wave of bonhomie out of Alpine Valley into a frolicsome performance at Neil Young’s annual all-acoustic Bridge School benefit at Shoreline Amphitheatre. In November, the Other Ones headed out on their swing of East Coast basketball arenas and civic centers. Robert Hunter went along and played acoustic between the band’s two sets. Vocalist Susan Tedeschi was added to the band on many dates in the second half of the tour.
At the MCI Center in Washington, DC, the band dedicated “New Speedway Boogie” to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who was watching from the wings. The San Francisco congresswoman and her husband had become almost regular visitors backstage at Dead concerts. Weir and Hart had taken their pal Steve Miller that past February to play a swanky celebration of her elevation to Speaker at the Capitol. The band had come a long way from the ragtag hippie crew that used to crawl the country.
The Other Ones returned home, played a couple of high-spirited nights at Oakland’s Henry J. Kaiser Auditorium and, three weeks later, a sold-out concert at the sixteen-thousand-capacity Arena in Oakland on New Year’s Eve. As Lesh promised Hart, the good times were back.
Carried along by the glad tidings and good graces they found themselves enjoying, members of the band took yet another step in reclaiming their identity in February 2003. At a board meeting while Weir was out of town—and over his objections—the band voted to officially change their name. “With the greatest possible respect for our collective history,” read the announcement posted on the band’s Web site, “we have decided to keep the name ‘Grateful Dead’ retired in honor of Jerry’s memory and call ourselves ‘The Dead.’”
The announcement went on to explain that the decision came as a direct result of the “magical” experience at Alpine Valley. “To us, that was the Grateful Dead—without Jerry. We had stopped being the ‘Other Ones’ and were on our way to becoming something new but at the same time very familiar.”
The Dead celebrated the new name with a Valentine’s Day concert at the Warfield Theatre where Sammy Hagar joined the band to sing “Loose Lucy” and Joan Osborne, who shared booking agent Jonathan Levine with Phil and Friends, sat in for a few numbers. Warren Haynes finished the night on guitar.
As the band continued to meet the conditions Lesh stipulated for his return to the fold, Cameron Sears came back to work to downsize the operation. The band settled the Irwin suit in January 2003, simply by dropping their conditions and giving up the two guitars, Wolf and Tiger. As expected, Irwin put them immediately up for auction and the two guitars did indeed yield more than $1 million for the destitute guitar maker.
Grateful Dead Merchandise, the goose that laid the golden egg, had been sold to Musictoday, the e-commerce firm founded by Coran Capshaw, manager of the Dave Matthews Band, which already handled the Phil Lesh merchandise account. The remaining dozen employees in Novato were laid off. In August, the old Coca-Cola plant was sold to Marin Mountain Bikes, although the band continued to lease the rehearsal hall/recording studio. The downtown San Francisco property bought with the Terrapin Station museum project in mind was likewise sold (at a tidy profit).
With the band’s long-term record contract with Arista Records due to expire, a new deal was being negotiated with Rhino Records, the reissue specialists who had been handling the Dead’s Warner Brothers catalog. The agreement with Rhino’s corporate owners, Warner Brothers, would include the entire Grateful Dead catalog (the rights to the Arista recording having reverted to the band) and would lavish on the band a multimillion-dollar long-term license. Band members made the head of Rhino audition by singing an obscure Grateful Dead song (he passed). Under the harmonious spirit of the day, they all were on board with the plan.
That would spell the end of Grateful Dead Records, the wholly owned company the band started thirty years before. Lesh had effectively demolished the shared business enterprises between band members. “We want to simplify and play music,” Hart told the San Francisco Chronicle, “and get rid of all this mumbo-jumbo. That was what got us into trouble.”
The band was rehearsing for the 2003 “Summer Getaway” tour when Bob Weir found the magic guitar, a long story that goes back to the circumstances of his birth. Weir was an adopted son. His birth mother sent him a letter many years later in his adult life, and he learned her story. She had gotten pregnant with her college boyfriend in Arizona, gone to San Francisco to have the baby, and given it up for adoption without telling him. She returned to find he had given up on her and moved on with another woman. Their lives never crossed again, she said. She told him the man’s name.
At one point, Weir learned that his biological father was a colonel in the Air Force, running the Hamilton Air Force Base in Marin County. A confirmed anti-authoritarian, Weir did nothing with that modestly alarming information. Years later, after the birth of his children, his wife Natascha finally egged him into looking up the man’s name in the phone book. When he reached the gentleman and identified himself as Robert Weir of Mill Valley, the man immediately recognized the name. “The only Robert Weir I know plays guitar for the Grateful Dead,” he said.
Jack Parber and his wife, Madeline, had raised four sons and they all played music. The eldest took a shot at a career and got as far as playing around Bay Area clubs with a couple of bands before he was struck down with spinal cancer. He moved back in with his parents and spent twelve years in a slow, agonizing death that finally came in 1991. After he died, his brothers all divided his guitars except for one beat-up, broken-down electric. The Weirs became quite close with the Parbers, who were doting grandparents to Weir’s two daughters, and they used to spend nights at the Parbers’ home, where the guitar was parked in his way in the spare bedroom. After having to practically step over the case, Weir asked the Parbers if they wanted him to take it and they responded enthusiastically.
He brought the old guitar to rehearsal the next day, where one of his equipment people remounted the pickup and put new strings on it, polished it up, and brought it to Weir, who strapped it on and turned back to the rehearsal. As soon as Weir struck the first chord, he knew this was the guitar he had been waiting for. It instantly pulled together the sound of the entire band, the thin, reedy tone slicing through the clutter. After an exhilarating rehearsal with the guitar, they sat around admiring the piece when the guitar tech noticed the five-figure serial number on the back. He called the factory, where he was told that the guitar was a first-run production model Fender Telecaster from 1956 and probably worth more than $75,000. The guitar immediately became Weir’s number-one guitar on the tour. James Parber, Jack and Madeline’s deceased son, never made the big time, but, in the hands of the brother he never knew, his guitar did.
For the summer tour, the band invited Joan Osborne to join on vocals, putting her sunny alto in the vocal blend, singing a few select lead vocals and lending a touch of unexpected sex appeal to the Dead’s stage show with her bare midriff and sensuous dancing. Osborne, who was never a Deadhead and only slightly familiar with the band’s music, loaded one of those newfangled Apple iPods with the Dead’s catalog and studied. She started out working on a songbook of fifty songs, but every night she found herself having to sing three or four songs she didn’t know. By the end of the tour, she w
as dealing with two hundred songs. The forty-year-old musician had a solid background in folk and blues long before her 1995 number one hit “One of Us,” which provided common ground with the other musicians. Her playful personality helped her fit into the boys’ club atmosphere backstage. Onstage she liked to kid around with Weir and would even dare to invade the space Lesh held sacred.
Guitarist Jimmy Herring had to walk a thin line between evoking Jerry Garcia and copying him, but he had practice at that by replacing Dicky Betts in the Allman Brothers. The soft-spoken Southern hippie in the lumberjack shirt and the orange-turning-white ponytail first came to attention as lead guitar from the H.O.R.D.E. tour jam band Col. Bruce Hampton and the Aquarium Rescue Unit.
He substituted for Betts one night in Saratoga Springs, New York, in 1993, after Betts had been arrested, and had been offered the job for the rest of the tour, but declined. Seven years later, he did accept their offer to replace Betts for the Allman Brothers 2000 summer tour, where he looked out in the audience at every show and saw WHERE’S DICKY? T-shirts.
In October 2000, he went straight from the Allmans into the first fixed lineup of Phil and Friends—The Q. The forty-one-year-old Berklee-trained guitarist had been studying Garcia since 1998, when he joined the instrumental Dead cover band, Jazz Is Dead, but he, too, had to learn a massive amount of new material in The Dead. Since Lesh concentrated on the Garcia songs, Herring knew nothing from his Phil and Friends work of the Bob Weir side of the equation. Like Osborne, he found himself facing songs he didn’t know almost nightly, sometimes vamping the chords and other times decorating the edges to fake his way through.
“I’m not trying to copy,” Herring told the New York Times. “I just want my playing to sound fairly authentic, as far as the Grateful Dead goes. I don’t have to harmonically play what he played. I don’t have to copy his riffs and lines. But I’d like for the overall picture to be somewhere within the kingdom.”
