by Joel Selvin
Herring delivered plenty of big rock thrills during the three-hour shows, capably bolstered by the two keyboardists, Weir’s unique rhythm guitar, and the thunderous rhythm section. On good nights, the band could generate genuine Grateful Dead–like flight. On the other hand, this tour was all business, no frills. The backstage guest list was slashed. There was no longer any party going on at the shows. The band stayed at mid-priced hotels. Only the Leshes’ accommodations were upscale. In fact, Lesh stayed behind in Boston to hear a symphony matinee, sending his wife and family ahead to New York without him and holding down two big-city luxury hotel suites at once, while Weir didn’t bother to get off the bus that night and slept in a parking lot outside the Holiday Inn in Secaucus, New Jersey. A digital clock on the monitor mixing board on the side of the stage stared out at the musicians during their show. If ever there had been a band that didn’t need to know what time it was onstage, it was the Grateful Dead, but The Dead was proving to be significantly different than the Grateful Dead.
Still, Weir had come around about the name change by the end of the tour. The band seemed to be thriving and, if he didn’t care about taking charge or even greatly influencing the decisions driving the band, he could enjoy playing the music and doing the shows. “I thought we should wait,” Weir told the Los Angeles Times. “But in retrospect, it was a leap of faith. We said we were going to be the Dead, and we actually are.”
Onstage, Lesh acted as bandleader, calling out efficient key changes and melodic transitions through a closed-circuit microphone in the band’s earpieces. Having taken charge of creating set lists, he delivered them by five in the afternoon, invariably sending Osborne and Herring back to school until showtime. The tour included Stevie Winwood, Willie Nelson, and Bob Dylan as opening acts at different times along the way, and they always joined the band for a few numbers during The Dead’s set. The band drew from the full breadth of the Grateful Dead’s catalog, threw in now and again an unexpected Beatles song (“Strawberry Fields Forever,” “She Said She Said”), occasionally Lesh’s “Night of a Thousand Stars,” and Hart’s “Only the Strange Remain” from the post-Dead era. Lesh delivered his “donor rap” at the end of every show. It was clearly his band. He was Captain Trips now.
12
Wave That Flag
IN 2004, before The Dead went out again, the band adjusted the lineup. With Jimmy Herring from The Q already on board, Lesh wanted to bring in the other guitarist from his favored lineup of Phil and Friends, Warren Haynes. With Haynes capable of covering the Garcia vocals, Joan Osborne was out and, to keep the political balance, Rob Barraco of The Q was given walking papers while Jeff Chimenti of RatDog remained.
Haynes was exploding. He was already firmly planted in his role with the Allman Brothers, and Gov’t Mule, his own band, was gaining traction. The forty-four-year-old shaggy Southern hippie, ten years younger than the men of the Dead, brought razor-sharp blues-rooted chops, a sturdy tenor voice, and a handful of songs. He added the unlikely “One” by U2 into the Dead’s repertoire.
“I have a brand-new career ahead of me in the same way that a 25-year-old might,” he told the New York Times. “That’s very odd. But it’s no more odd than the thought of being in the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers at the same time.”
Haynes grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, under the spell of Duane Allman and got his start on the road with country music wild man David Allan Coe. He had already written songs and recorded with Gregg Allman and Dicky Betts when he was invited to join the Allmans for the band’s 1989 reunion. He and bassist Allen Woody left the Allmans to form Gov’t Mule in 1997. Woody died in 2000, and Haynes was invited back into the Allmans fold.
Living in Manhattan’s East Village, he had been married for six years to Stefani Scamardo, who also managed his career. When he accepted the post with The Dead, he committed to playing thirty-six dates and fifty shows with the Allmans in 2004, in addition to other shows with Gov’t Mule and solo performances. His new album came from a solo show he gave the previous year at Bonnaroo (“Live at Bonnaroo”), and he would be appearing as a solo acoustic opening act on The Dead tour.
Haynes added a heavier rock sound to The Dead and a third guitar, which could exponentially increase the spiderweb of crisscrossing guitar lines in any jam. After the customary wintershow at the Warfield Theatre (and a surprise guest set at a Gov’t Mule show at the Fillmore in April), The Dead hunkered down for three weeks of rehearsal at Novato in May. The three-month “Wave That Flag” tour opened in June with a winning performance headlining the second night of the Bonnaroo Festival before ninety thousand people. Even after such a high point, the band and crew quickly realized this summer would not be a repeat of the previous summer’s peace and harmony. Almost immediately, Weir chafed under Lesh’s authoritarian leadership. The volume and tempo war began almost from the start.
By playing music together through the earliest years of their career while under the influence of LSD, the members of the Grateful Dead bonded on a profound nonverbal level. Not only was their music shaped, encouraged, and defined by psychedelics, but the experience imprinted these men with deep, intuitive communication skills, only made deeper over the years. For musicians to come together over rhythm and harmony requires empathy, understanding, and a sense of common purpose. They also needed to listen to each other carefully to create the proper openness for group thinking. When these elements are in place, the experience becomes a sort of musical telepathy, a richly nuanced and diverse language shared by the musicians and audience. With such a dialogue, of course, any emotional undercurrents will come to the surface.
“It’s an organic kind of situation,” Weir told Billboard. “We speak a language that no one else speaks. It comes from all those years on the road; if you piled up the time that we’ve spent just on stage together, playing, it’d be years. Relationships develop. Feelings develop that I don’t think can be found any other ways.”
Despite these bonds, Weir and Lesh were not well suited to accommodate one another. Lesh was always strongly anti-authoritarian. At the Fillmore, he would play over Bill Graham while he introduced the band. At the Monterey Pop Festival, after the band endured the indignity of having Peter Tork of the Monkees interrupt their set to tell the crowd that rumors the Beatles would be attending were not true, it was Lesh who invited the overflow crowd outside the arena gates to crash the show, watching in delight as the cyclone fence came tumbling down.
Weir, too, had a strongly contrarian streak. It is said that if he was told to turn left, he would turn right, even if he might have turned left had he been asked. And when Weir was drinking, he could be as obstreperous as Lesh was naturally supercilious. They had a little brother/big brother dynamic that was not always comfortable for either of them.
Weir had come to believe that his job was not singing songs, but storytelling with music. He felt that each song was an audio playlet that needed to sink into the audience’s mind. After years of small theater performances with RatDog, he wanted to create that intimacy with the larger audience, drawing them into the musical narrative. To that end, he continually insisted on slowing down the tempo of the band and dropping the volume.
Lesh felt the opposite. He thought Weir’s death beat dragged the band down and brisker, more robust tempos were essential in getting the large crowds swept up in the music. With Phil and Friends, he discovered that volume was an important part of the music’s impact and he continually pushed up the volume as well as the tempo. The two drummers were caught in the middle of this constant tug-of-war during the performance. With the two musical philosophies competing onstage, the environment grew hostile. The personalities were now clashing while they played music, which had been unheard of in the Grateful Dead.
The rancor had an effect. Weir was slipping deeper in a fog of booze and pills, burying his resentments. Kreutzmann was spending a lot of time in bathrooms. Sober vegetarian Lesh was openly disgusted with his bandmates and he was not above takin
g his foul moods onstage. Years before, Kreutzmann and Hart had stopped their habit of sharing mushrooms during concerts—“ally” they called it—because Lesh would turn around and scowl at them so furiously, he bummed their trip. During the tempo wars, Lesh could carry his fury into his play, take over the jam, and become the bully of the groove. He made little effort to conceal his anger from the band.
With the two drummers obstinate and impenetrable, caught in a crossfire not of their creation, and Weir dazed and confused, the Leshes struck out, as they saw their power erode and their control slipping. Sternly protective of what she perceived as her husband’s interests, the often mercurial Jill Lesh could be calm, efficient, even thoughtful one minute, then turn on a dime into a fit of rage. Stefani Scamardo had to rescue a cowering teenaged Reya Hart, Mickey’s daughter, from a Jill Lesh lecture backstage during a concert at the Gorge in Washington. Among other things, she told Reya that she had a horrible childhood and had been raised badly. Young Reya was visibly upset when Scamardo intervened. The two powerful women managers fell into a screaming match before Scamardo took Reya by her arm and led her out of the dressing room. Her father responded by automatically text-messaging photos of his daughter to Jill every hour for the next day. Backstage was a powder keg on the verge of blowing, as Jill reflected Lesh’s frustrations among the crew. She had become a problem all her own. And the stage had turned into a battlefield.
Haynes brought a toughness to the sound, but couldn’t match the delicacy of some of the music and could get lost in the zone. He stayed rooted in the blues, which was one thing the Dead always did, but only one. Chimenti, the Bill Evans of rock, tended to roll unchecked into strongly bebop-flavored solos. Haynes, Herring, and Weir were constantly butting guitars against each other. Lesh sprinkled gratuitous oldies from other sixties acts in the set lists—the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High,” the Band’s “The Weight,” even Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman.” The band attacked the performances with a crisp efficiency without reaching the critical mass they had managed remarkably often the previous summer, when they were all still getting along. This band never jelled.
Not only was the band not having as much fun, they weren’t selling as many tickets. Only three of the five shows in Red Rocks Amphitheatre outside Denver sold out. The band played to half-full houses in Salt Lake City and Phoenix. The band also, for the first time, brought politics into the shows, encouraging voter registration, openly supporting Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, even playing the occasional “Johnny B. Goode” in his honor. Lesh plastered a KERRY sticker on his bass.
The tour ended in August at HiFi Buys Amphitheatre in Atlanta, on a double bill with the Allman Brothers, who were starting their tour that night. Warren Haynes played three hours with the Dead, did his solo acoustic intermission act, and finished the night with the Allman Brothers. The next morning, he left on the Allmans tour.
A month later, Weir went into rehab. It wasn’t his first attempt at sobriety and it wouldn’t be his last. He had been the target of an intervention as early as 1986 when he was strung out on white wine and Valium. The entire fall tour by RatDog was cancelled at considerable cost to Weir.
In March 2003, Weir had replaced bassist Rob Wasserman, his original partner in RatDog and close friend, with Robin Sylvester, a low-key, easygoing British expatriate who won the job over former Bobby and the Midnites bassist Bobby Vega. Wasserman’s ouster signaled a seriousness of purpose, turning RatDog into more of a rock-and-roll band. The highly accomplished Wasserman always saw his bass playing a much larger role in the ensemble than simple rhythm section work, a vision he shared with Phil Lesh. He was a virtuoso bass player with a grand vision for his instrument and, as a result, often left something to be desired as a timekeeper and rhythm maker.
They broke in Sylvester on a two-month spring run before Weir went out with The Dead for the summer. RatDog managed only a couple of dates in September after Weir’s return before it became apparent he could not continue.
Weir’s anti-authoritarian proclivities never served him well in the recovery process. He could not even fully process the first of the twelve steps in Alcoholics Anonymous (“admitted we were powerless over alcohol”), let alone the part where you give everything up to a Higher Power. Weir could only absorb so much of the didactic AA orthodoxy and he never attended meetings. He continued a lifelong cycle of going in and out of sobriety. His clean and sober periods could last a long time, but they always ended.
He was living through a more than two-year remodel of the Mill Valley bachelor home he bought thirty years before with inheritance from his parents. He and Natascha were raising two small daughters, and the intense conflict flaring up again on The Dead tour only exacerbated the stress. He could summon Buddha-like acceptance of life-and-death matters and yet would struggle against some of the most basic precepts of reality. He had been on the road so many miles, known so many women, sung so many songs, Weir had become a grizzled veteran, at the height of his significant powers in the prime of his life, but hobbled by his steely insistence on doing things his way for his reasons, whatever they may be. Alcoholics in the recovery community refer to characters like Weir as “terminally special.”
Charlie Rose of CBS-TV’s 60 Minutes had shown up at rehearsals in May to grab some footage of the men at work. He filmed Weir, Lesh, Hart, and Kreutzmann busking outside 710 Ashbury, the band’s communal headquarters during the Haight-Ashbury days. He caught up with the band in Indianapolis on tour. The resulting piece didn’t air until November, by which time the band was off the road with no dates on the calendar. Still, Lesh managed to stir more controversy than he intended among the Deadheads, always a touchy bunch. His anger-tinged comments about Garcia’s heroin addiction set off a firestorm on Deadhead bulletin boards across the Internet.
“It’s one of the biggest tragedies or the biggest bring-downs of my whole life, to know that he loved the drug more than he loved us,” Lesh told 60 Minutes. “I felt like I had mourned him already when I got the call, and I had been mourning him for years. He was gone for years.”
Lesh was giving voice to resentments commonly held by those close to addicts and anger is a frequent response from confused and bereaved family members. On the other hand, among Deadheads, leveling any criticism at Jerry Garcia was touching the third rail. After the broadcast aired in November, Deadheads chattered endlessly among themselves about what they saw as Lesh’s gaffe.
At home, the Leshes took note. They had scrupulously studied the Deadhead community to build their own following. From insisting Kimock be included in the first iteration of the Other Ones to reviving old Grateful Dead songs from the sixties in Phil and Friends, the Leshes tested their ideas for Deadhead approval. Feeling that now they alone were proprietors of the soul of the Grateful Dead and held control, the Leshes courted the Deadheads, and it paid off for them. They knew Deadhead loyalty was a valuable commodity and that they owed their status and power to Deadhead approval. They treated the messages they heard on the grapevine seriously. With Lesh’s misstep about Jerry, their strategy for domination was immediately weakened, at a time when Lesh was, once again, tired and disgusted with his bandmates.
There had been talk of a New Year’s Eve show. Sidemen like Haynes and Herring kept their calendars open. Weir spoke optimistically after the tour about the band’s plans for making new music to Rolling Stone. “I don’t know if albums are the way it’s going to be done anymore,” he said. “With downloading, the album may be an obsolete concept. If there’s some reason to put out a group of songs together, we may do that. We’ll be recording all along. We’ve written a few new songs already.”
But any future hinged on Phil Lesh, who again wasn’t as interested and couldn’t be reached as easily. After his equal share of The Dead tour amounted to substantially less net revenue to Lesh than his Phil and Friends shows, he began to rethink his collaboration with the others. He decided he wanted future income pro-rated with him to receive a larger p
ortion. He reasoned that he was clearly the main attraction in the band, a measurably larger draw than any of the others, and, as such, should be rewarded appropriately. Without him, the others would not make as much money, even with the reduced shares called for in his new plan.
Naturally this did not go over well in the all-for-one/one-for-all world of the Grateful Dead and, as the Leshes grew even more remote, the others slowly began to realize that Lesh had once again taken his ball and gone home, and that the incarnation of the band called The Dead was finished.
13
Jammys
PHIL LESH didn’t get out much when he wasn’t playing, so the invitation to host the fifth annual Jammy Awards at the Theater at Madison Square Garden in April 2005 was also a welcome opportunity for him to cross paths with a broad cross-section of like-minded musicians. The event, which had graduated the previous year from the much more intimate Roseland Ballroom to the bigger room, was the brainchild of executive producer Peter Shapiro, a rising young impresario who ran a rock club and Deadhead community center in Tribeca called the Wetlands, along with Relix editor Dean Budnick. While the bands appearing at Shapiro’s club were diverse in style—from Afrobeat to British blues—the common bond between the bands and the audience was a devotion to jamming.
At his club and his Jammy Awards, Shapiro represented this subculture of the pop music mainstream, a thriving scene not reflected on the radio or Billboard album charts, a genuine underground phenomenon that had been growing quietly over the ten years since Garcia’s death in the NSYNC/Backstreet Boys/Britney era of pop. It was a movement that owed its entire existence to the model of the Grateful Dead.
