Fare Thee Well

by Joel Selvin

  “The Jammy Awards ceremony exists to celebrate the world that was mainly created by the Grateful Dead,” said the New York Times, “a world of rock-based improvisers, eager to extend their digressive songs by incorporating bits of country and jazz and the blues. The Grateful Dead’s leader, Jerry Garcia, died a decade ago, but the group is still at the center of the jam-band universe: the Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh served as the evening’s host, and Grateful Dead–related projects took home a handful of awards.”

  In the eight months since the last Dead concert, Lesh had been largely holed up, writing his autobiography, which was published the week before he appeared as host at the sold-out event in New York City. He had been signed to a lucrative book deal the year before by Michael Pietsch, a publishing industry heavyweight running the Little, Brown house at the time. Working without a ghostwriter, Lesh had cranked out Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead and had been quiet, save for a couple of one-off Phil and Friends dates around town. The Jammys was kind of a coming-out party for him. None of his bandmates would be around to share the spotlight.

  Even if the future of The Dead was in limbo, the band nevertheless won the award for Best Download for the live recording from the 2004 Bonnaroo Festival, and Lesh acted like nothing was wrong, the real first rule of show business. “This proves it is possible not only to survive but prevail,” said Lesh, accepting the award.

  Lesh presided over an extraordinary evening of music, beginning with his fellow Marin County rock star Huey Lewis, about to make his Broadway debut in the musical Chicago, who joined South Bend, Indiana, jam rockers Umphrey’s McGee to sing “I’ll Take You There” along with Mavis Staples and a subdued Sinead O’Connor, who returned later to join reggae pioneer Burning Spear. Bruce Hornsby sang one of his songs with Yonder Mountain String Band. Peter Frampton reprised his “Do You Feel Like We Do” with alternative rockers Guster. The Disco Biscuits backed country star Travis Tritt in a lengthy exploration of his hit “Honky Tonk History.” Lesh anchored the walloping blues jam with drummer ?uestlove and guitarists Buddy Guy and John Mayer. But the single most mind-boggling moment of the momentous night belonged to Ryan Adams, alt-rock brat with a classic rock swagger, hardly a beloved figure with the jam-band crowd.

  Lesh joined Adams and his country-rock-oriented band the Cardinals as the thirty-year-old singer-guitarist, glasses sliding down his nose, hair hanging in his face, took possession of Garcia’s “Wharf Rat,” pulling it apart and putting it back together in front of Lesh’s eyes—bawling, mewling, grating his way through a twelve-minute odyssey before a house full of skeptical Deadheads won over halfway through the first chorus. Lesh struggled to keep up, but stood there, a grin plastered across his face, amazed at what he saw like any other fan, only with a better seat. If he was casting around for a lead vocalist for Phil and Friends that coming summer, he could not have found a better candidate.

  Lesh also reacquainted himself backstage with guitarist Larry Campbell, whom he knew from touring with Bob Dylan. After seven years, Campbell had left his post in Dylan’s band only four months before. He had been working as the informal musical director of the Midnight Rambles, weekly Saturday concerts held at the barn owned by Levon Helm in Woodstock, New York, as a means of helping cover some of Helm’s medical expenses and helping him ease back into playing music after a severe bout with cancer.

  He had never been a Deadhead, although Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty had caught the country music–loving Campbell’s attention, and he had watched with interest during that first 1999 tour with Dylan when Lesh had Robben Ford and the two guys from Little Feat in his band. When Lesh mentioned backstage at the Jammys that they should play together sometime, Campbell had no idea how few guitar players Lesh knew.

  Lesh used guitarist Jimmy Herring for the Phil and Friends show in December 2004 and the February 2005 Mardi Gras shows, Lesh’s only public performances since The Dead tour. On both those shows, the band was fronted by the charismatic Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes. Robinson was on the loose, having suddenly scrubbed his fall 2004 tour and fired his band, disappearing except for his two Phil and Friends shows until a showcase with his brother Rich Robinson in February at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas paved the way for a Black Crowes reunion later in the year. Robinson was not likely to be available again for Lesh anytime soon. With his book hitting the streets, Lesh showed up in New York for the Jammys, ready to consider further musical plans.

  The book was a brilliant move that galvanized Lesh’s standing as the leading living member of the Grateful Dead. The publishers trumpeted the New York Times best-seller as the first inside account, although roadie Steve Parish (of all people) beat Lesh to the market the year before with his memoir of life in the Dead, Home Before Daylight. In Searching for the Sound, Lesh took charge of the narrative in subtle, telling ways, using a kind of self-serving, faux honesty that impressed reviewers, but not his intimates who had lived these stories with him. It worked. In an article headlined NOW THE DEAD WILL ALWAYS BE WITH US, the New York Times credited Lesh, following the death of Garcia, with “reshaping both the band and the public’s understanding of its legacy.”

  Still, Lesh was either playing it cool or keeping his options open regarding the current status of The Dead in his musical life. In the same article, he confirmed there were plans for celebrating the band’s fortieth anniversary later in the year, even though he knew that would never happen. “In typical fashion, we don’t know what we’re going to do yet,” he told The Times.

  Nobody was sitting at home waiting for Lesh. Weir, back on his feet, hit the road with RatDog in March and stayed out for months, rolling into an appearance on the main stage at Bonnaroo in June. Before the massive crowd, Weir played his managers’ wet dream of a “greatest hits” set list—starting with “Truckin’,” into “Playing in the Band,” “Cassidy,” “Jack Straw,” “St. Stephen,” “Sugar Magnolia”—if only to show them he could, but never would again.

  In April, Mickey Hart went out with jamtronica specialists Particle, who dubbed the collaboration Hydra. “Hydra is extreme music,” Hart said. “Extreme music for extreme people. I need it.”

  Almost alone among his colleagues, Hart kept his antenna tuned to the contemporary music world, not the pop charts necessarily, but a phenomenon like Particle—live musicians fusing jam-band instrumentals with modern electronic dance music, customarily the product of recording studios—would reach Hart’s ears. He had attended raves and kept his eyes on the growth of DJ culture. Formed in Los Angeles in 2000, Particle blew up two years later. In 2002, one of the band’s two sets at Bonnaroo started after midnight and was still going strong five hours later at sunrise. A few months later, the band laid waste to the Jammys backing Fred Schneider and Kate Pierson of the B-52s on a romping extended remake of “Love Shack.”

  Particle brought together strains of funk, jazz, and rock into the world of electronica, also subverting the form by performing primarily in public up to a hundred and fifty concerts a year. This was usually a producer/DJ’s game, not a live band’s, and was unusual in dance music circles. The jam-band scene embraced the group. Fans of the band dubbed themselves Particle People, attracted to the genre-busting group whose 2004 debut album, Launchpad, was a critical and popular success. Particle keyboardist Steve Molitz had joined Phil and Friends in December 2004 at the Warfield, but that had nothing to do with the band’s collaboration with Hart, who challenged the group with his polyrhythms and space. Molitz credited Hart with showing the band how to play with more space and patience.

  “I have everything all in one place,” Hart told the Santa Cruz Metro, “all my favorite processors are onstage. I can do things in this band that I couldn’t do in the Grateful Dead. These kids were born digital.”

  While the band members busied themselves with their various projects, Grateful Dead Productions CEO Cameron Sears worked at reducing the overhead and streamlining the operation. Only about twelve
employees remained. He kept a skeletal office staff at a small suite on Lucas Valley Road down the highway from Novato. Only the Vault, the studio, and the funky production trailer Ram Rod and Parish kept in the parking lot were still at the old Coca-Cola plant. Sears struggled with the mission, but he plodded on, under the impression he was consolidating operations for sustainability, not closing everything down. Every few months, he would lay off another person or two. With Lesh still refusing to attend board meetings, Sears could call a quorum with the other three, but he had to deal with Lesh through fraught phone calls to Jill, often hearing Lesh in the background offering direction or shouting “No, no, no!”

  Lesh did not mount a full-scale Phil and Friends tour that summer, but he did book a July weekend in Denver—one night at the new Denver Fillmore and the next at Red Rocks—and brought along Ryan Adams, his Jammys discovery, as the band’s lead vocalist. The Fillmore Auditorium in Denver was an old hall where the Dead played in 1967 when the place was operated in a short-lived, ill-fated venture by Chet Helms of San Francisco’s Avalon Ballroom called the Denver Dog. Red Rocks, of course, had been the scene of some of the greatest latter-era Dead concerts.

  At Red Rocks, Adams was game, but he never found the intensity of “Wharf Rat” at the Jammys. He flubbed lyrics in virtually every song, even reading from a teleprompter. Adams had not done his homework tackling the massive songbook and his performance teetered on catastrophe. He threw off sparks at points and tried to dig in, but spent most of the three-hour show flailing at the songs. Lesh, in an experimental mood, laughed it off. “Ryan brings the crazy,” he said.

  If the Deadheads remained unaware of the latest break in the band, the tribute concert, “Comes a Time,” to mark the tenth anniversary of Jerry Garcia’s death in September at the Greek Theater in Berkeley, should have given them cause to ponder. A five-hour extravaganza and Rex Foundation fundraiser, the concert covered the full expanse of Garcia’s career—from his beginnings in the Palo Alto bluegrass scene to his solo bands. A largely disabled Merl Saunders, Garcia’s old partner around Bay Area clubs and recent victim of a stroke, hobbled out and sat at the keyboard for a few minutes to receive some applause. RatDog did a short set. The evening built up to a massive Grateful Dead jam session featuring guitarists Warren Haynes and Trey Anastasio of Phish, pianist Bruce Hornsby, and the rest of the Dead guys. Only one was missing.

  Nobody knows why Lesh skipped the party. It is not like he wouldn’t be missed. He and his wife now had their own nonprofit and it was conceivable that he didn’t want to participate in a competing foundation’s fundraiser. He never said. What he did say, in a post on his Web site, ever conscious of Deadhead sentiment, was that he could not attend because he would be helping his son move into the dormitory at Stanford University, an hour away, where he was going to be an entering freshman.

  Lesh should have known the enterprise of the Deadheads better. In a short time, they had discovered that Stanford ordered parents to leave by 6 p.m. Saturday so their children could start their college careers unimpeded by parental supervision.

  On his fall Phil and Friends tour of the East Coast and South, Lesh brought Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes. With Jimmy Herring unavailable, he called Larry Campbell, Dylan’s old guitarist he ran into at the Jammys. Campbell fit with the band like a puzzle piece. He was in the guitar chair for Lesh’s big New Year’s Eve concert at the seven-thousand-seat Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco with Ryan Adams back on vocals, Red Rocks all forgiven.

  Lesh was still the outlier critic sticking up for the Deadheads in November when Grateful Dead Productions clamped down on the tape traders. It may not have been the smartest move the Dead ever made, but Lesh wasted no time in abandoning any kind of united front. With sales of CDs down dramatically—not just Dick’s Picks, but the entire industry—the Internet loomed as the new avenue of distribution for recordings. After the introduction of iTunes by Apple in 2001, the music business started to see downloads as the next format, although there were issues around digital rights management that needed to be solved. The Dead began posting concert recordings on the band’s Web site and offering downloads for a pricey $18, although the files could be copied. Sometime around Thanksgiving, it occurred to GDP CEO Sears that the band was competing with massive numbers of Dead concerts already posted on the Web and available for free. He contacted the Internet Music Archive (www.archive.net), home to thousands of Dead concert recordings, and asked the site to bar any future downloads.

  He might as well have set off a bomb in Deadland. The outrage from Deadheads was instantaneous. Thousands of fans signed an online petition overnight. It wasn’t only that the Dead had pulled down the soundboard recordings that were the official property of the band, but they also banned the tapes fans made and traded under the full approval (and even auspices) of the band.

  At the heart of the band’s complex relationship with their following were the tape traders. For years, the tapers operated with impunity at the shows from a special section set aside exactly for that purpose, a tiny forest of microphones clustered over the crowd. The Dead have always had a loose relationship with their intellectual rights. Garcia’s proclamation that whatever the fans wanted to do with the music was OK—“after we’re through with it”—was more than authorization; it was the crucial piece in the band’s compact with the Deadheads. The tapes fostered new generations of fans and served to create a worldwide community that shared the music and saw these tapes as a product of hippie ideals.

  Lesh jumped to the Deadheads’ defense. He immediately posted a statement condemning the action on his Web site. “I was not part of this decision-making process and I was not notified that the shows were going to be pulled. I do feel that the music is the Grateful Dead’s legacy and I hope that one way or another all of it is available for those who want it,” he wrote.

  The next day, the band capitulated. They agreed to allow audience-recorded tapes to be freely traded on the site, but reserved the sound board tapes as streaming only. It was not so surprising a teapot tempest in the volatile world of the often-entitled Deadheads, but the attention paid this minor matter was indicative of how mainstream the Dead’s following had become in the years since Garcia’s death. The august New York Times not only devoted two daily news stories to the controversy, but a third think piece by lead pop music critic Jon Pareles explained why it all mattered.

  On their own, the band had been meeting with an accountant and financial advisor named Tim Jorstad, who worked with other Marin County rock musicians like the members of Santana, the Doobie Brothers, and Journey. Jorstad had long worked with some of the band and had served as Kreutzmann’s proxy at many GDP board meetings. Jorstad counseled the band to cut overhead severely. While Sears was on the East Coast at his family’s old summer home dealing with his father’s diagnosis of lymphoma, the band met over Italian food in Mill Valley and decided to follow Jorstad’s advice. Weir and his wife called Sears in tears to tell him about the meeting. “We’re shutting it down,” they told him.

  While Sears did not understand the urgency, he agreed to Jill Lesh’s demand that he take a call with Jorstad to discuss the situation before he returned home two days later. Sears dutifully made the call from a bench at the Boston Science Museum with his kids in tow and reached Jorstad on his phone, driving his Porsche to a dental appointment, seemingly unaware of any urgency, breezy and unconcerned. Sears returned home depressed and discouraged. He had thought he was streamlining the business, not folding it. He felt betrayed.

  The band’s new record deal neared completion. Rhino Entertainment was changing their business model and targeted the Grateful Dead as a pilot project, putting Sears, John Scher, and Hal Kant in the enviable position of negotiating a beneficial deal. As the revenues from CD sales plummeted, labels were seeking different approaches to dealing with bands. Rhino wanted to assume control of the Dead’s entire business, especially the Vault, and demonstrate to other successful classic rock ban
ds how well this kind of an operation could be run. As record sales evaporated, these so-called 360 deals were a new wrinkle in the music business. Rhino was owned by Time Warner Inc., so the label had full access to the Dead’s Warner Brothers catalog and had already released two doorstop boxed sets of the band’s Warner Brothers releases. Despite Lesh’s previous statement about never leasing the Vault, Rhino negotiated a ten-year license to the entire business of the Grateful Dead—all their recordings, merchandise, logos, emblems, intellectual properties, their Web site, the works—for a sum said to approach an astronomical $30 million, $3 million a year.

  One morning in May 2006, temperature-controlled moving trucks pulled up in the parking lot at Bel Marin Keys and the Vault was loaded up and shipped off to some Fort Knox–like tape facility Warner Brothers operated in Burbank. The split was leaking into public view.

  “I think it was a common thought that if we got rid of the business, we might become friends again,” Hart told the Marin Independent Journal. “We might actually play again. We really love each other, and, deep down, we’re tied at the heart. Our friendship needs to be renewed, but we could never do it around a boardroom table. Now we have nothing to fight over.… This is a great load off of me and all of us in general, which is one of the reasons we thought it was a great deal. It had become unmanageable between the four of us. Board meetings were never our thing, even in the best of times.”

  Rhino hired Grateful Dead merchandising manager Peter McQuaid as a consultant, thinking the company needed someone on their end with intimate knowledge of the Dead. This move did not make the Leshes happy as they had fallen out with McQuaid and no longer wanted him involved in anything Grateful Dead. This time, however, they could not pressure someone to fire him.