by Joel Selvin
In one of those juxtapositions of events that said far more than could be written off to simple coincidence, the same week they came for the Vault, Ram Rod died. He had been on the bus with Ken Kesey and, in strange but important ways, was as much the heart and soul of the Grateful Dead as anyone. The band recognized his stature among them. Back in the giddy early days, before they became big business, the band found it necessary to first incorporate their business affairs. When they had to name officers, for chairman of the board they selected Ram Rod. Lawrence Shurtliff, his given name, came to the band during the first year and stayed for the entire ride. A lifelong smoker, he developed lung cancer and didn’t hang around long. Typically he kept it quiet, but band members and crew visited him in the hospital daily. His loss was traumatic to the Dead family. “He was our rock,” said Weir.
If that wasn’t enough, two weeks later the harried, depressive Vince Welnick, long estranged from his former Dead colleagues, slashed his own throat, in full view of his horrified wife, who was forced to watch him die. The Dead family turned up for support. Parish was on the scene as soon as he got the call. Weir brought his wife and family over to Welnick’s house later that day. His friends knew how depressed he had been. Many heard him speak of suicide. He was also in the middle of switching antidepressant medicines, which can be a dangerous time. Still his death came as a harsh shock, a sad end to a turbulent life.
Now that Rhino was minding the store, Hart certainly wasn’t sitting around waiting for something to happen. With Kreutzmann living in Marin and the two of them getting along especially well, he returned with a new edition of his all-percussion band Planet Drum with Dead mate and rhythm partner Kreutzmann beside him. Along with bassist Mike Gordon of Phish and guitarist Steve Kimock, Hart brought North Indian tabla master Zakir Hussain, Nigerian hand-drummer Sikiru Adepoju, and Puerto Rican percussionist Giovanni Hidalgo.
With Kreutzmann on board, they called the band the Rhythm Devils, a term that dated back to their drum solos during the seventies, made official by director Francis Ford Coppola when he hired them to produce a combustive percussion piece for the soundtrack to his 1980 film Apocalypse Now. After test-driving the unit at the Jammys in April (right before he went on tour with Particle), Hart booked a full-scale nationwide tour in July and talked again with the Marin IJ before the band’s appearance as the opening act of the annual San Francisco Jazz Festival in September. He didn’t sound especially hopeful when asked about the Dead playing together again. “The healing has begun,” he said.
Once we got rid of the business, we don’t have anything to argue about anymore really. Hopefully, we’ll renew our friendships. We’re starting to get together again socially. Because in order to make Grateful Dead music, you’ve got to really love each other. To do it really successfully and right, it’s not about the music, it’s about the interpersonal relationships between the players. It’s about trust and love and all those crazy things. And that’s coming back. So I look forward to some day when we can all be on the same stage and laugh and smile and feel good about each other and play our music. It’s not over till it’s over, and it ain’t over yet. In the meantime, there’s Planet Drum and the Rhythm Devils.
Hart exaggerated. The band members weren’t speaking. He and Weir talked, but Lesh had nothing to do with them. They all had their own bands. The Vault was gone. Ram Rod was dead. The real estate was sold. The office was closed. The sun had set on the Grateful Dead.
14
Obama
IN AUGUST 2007, Phil Lesh arranged to take his son Brian to New York City for a taping of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. It was Brian’s eighteenth birthday. The featured guest was Sen. Barack Obama, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. Brian, a senior at the exclusive Branson School in Ross, was an avid Obama volunteer who attended meetings run by the national high school campaign director in her Palo Alto bedroom. He went to a three-day “Camp Obama” that summer to train organizers and campaign workers. His rock star father pulled a few strings and scored the tickets to the TV taping.
At the show, Obama shook hands briefly with Lesh and his family as he left, but later that evening the Leshes attended an Obama rally before an overflow audience at the New York Marriott Hotel at the Brooklyn Bridge. The forty-six-year-old junior senator from Illinois, lean, poised, and relaxed, electrified the crowd. He warmed up with folksy recollections of his student days living in an apartment in the recently gentrified Park Slope neighborhood (“I couldn’t afford it now”) before turning to rallying cries for health care, against the Iraq war (“It’s not going well”), seeking Osama Bin Laden, and emptying Guantánamo (“I want to restore habeas corpus”). He was firm, fair, measured, but the speech was shot through with his unique understated charisma. He led the crowd to a rousing finale, getting them to scream and holler with him like a Baptist preacher: “Fired up… ready to go… fired up… ready to go… fired up… ready to go… Thank you, Brooklyn. Let’s go change the world.”
Lesh was swept up by the performance, the hairs on his neck standing on end. Since Brian was an official in the Obama youth organization, he was invited backstage to meet Obama, who then came back out with Brian to meet his parents. They engaged in small talk and Obama asked about Lesh’s profession.
“I played bass in the Grateful Dead for thirty years,” Lesh said.
Obama brightened. “I enjoy your music very much,” he said.
Lesh asked if he had ever attended any Dead concerts and Obama told Lesh he had not seen the band, but he had their music on his iPod. The Leshes glowed at this moment. Jill Lesh, as taken by the experience as her son and husband, spoke up.
“We can get the hippie vote for you,” she said.
Obama smiled and her husband echoed his wife and offered to help any way he could. Within days, Obama’s staff reached out to speak with Lesh. He started to make plans to hold a Phil and Friends benefit for the Obama campaign, but Brian wouldn’t hear of it. “No,” he told his father, “you’ve got to get the Dead together because it will be much more meaningful and important.”
Nobody had been thinking about playing music together again. Everybody was actively pursuing projects on their own, freed from the Grateful Dead and not even really in touch with one another. Another reunion wasn’t something anybody had even considered. The other three might have thought about it if they were speaking with Lesh. Things did not end well between them. Lesh had recently run into Weir shopping at the Apple store in Marin, so they were talking again, to a degree, but Hart was a different matter. Lesh, who spent a weekend in January canvassing Obama voters (and going unrecognized) in Nevada, bravely put in a call.
“I was about to call you for the same reason,” said Hart, whose intense political enthusiasms had already led him to Obama.
On Monday, February 4, 2008, the eve of the California primary, a key state in the Super Tuesday delegate sweepstakes where Obama trailed rival Hillary Clinton in the polls by as much as ten points, “Deadheads for Obama” drew a raving full house to the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco where Bobby Weir, Mickey Hart, and Phil Lesh were going to perform together on behalf of the Obama campaign. Kreutzmann, who had moved back to Hawaii the previous year, was not available. Obama wanted to bring America together and he was going to start with the Grateful Dead.
Outside on the sidewalk, people were offering as much as $300 for a ticket. Inside, the tie-dyed Deadheads were waving Obama signs. Because this was the big event of the night for the campaign in town, every political reporter and television crew assigned to the Obama beat in Northern California crowded into the tiny basement area outside the dressing rooms for a press conference before the show. Lesh extolled the virtues of their candidate and talked about how the Dead men were bonded as brothers. He told about calling and soliciting Hart, as if they spoke every day. As the political reporters, unfamiliar with the personalities involved, dutifully scribbled down Lesh’s proclamations of unity, one of the town’s music writers s
tepped out from behind a camera and asked Hart how long it had actually been since the three of them had even seen each other.
“I see Bobby every week,” Hart said. “Phil… it’s been years and years.”
The evening opened with a video message from the candidate himself on a screen in the middle of the stage as the band members milled around and watched. “Hi everybody—this is Barack Obama,” he said. “and I just want to thank Phil and Bob and Mickey for helping pull this together. You know, Phil’s son Brian cut his summer short to join this campaign for change. It’s young people like that all across the country who are rediscovering a sense of idealism and possibility. For all of you to come together and help put on this concert to encourage people to vote is extraordinary. So I want to say thank you to all of you. I want everybody to sit down and enjoy the music”—Deadheads smothered the instructions to “sit down” with jeers—“and make sure you vote tomorrow, because if we vote, we not only got a chance to win the election, but we got a chance to change the country and change the world.”
With un-Dead-like surgical timing, as applause died for Obama’s video, the band rolled into “Playing in the Band” and the place exploded. It was a makeshift Dead—the current edition of Phil and Friends plus Weir, Hart, and RatDog guitarist Karan, but the band was on fire, everybody clearly pumped by the three-quarters reunion and the excitement of the occasion. Lesh’s latest band not only included drummer Molo and guitarist Larry Campbell, but singer-songwriter-guitarist Jackie Greene, keyboardist Steve Molitz of Particle, and steel guitarist Barry Sless.
The band brought the brief opening set to a close with the Beatles’ “Come Together,” a most appropriate selection that RatDog had been performing, but Lesh’s band took pains to learn that evening during sound check. At the end of the forty-minute set, Lesh read a campaign speech clearly crafted by the campaign for him full of “Yes we can” and “fired up… ready to go.” Hart echoed the endorsement and Weir took a poll from the crowd to find out when were they going to vote the next day—in the morning, lunchtime, or after work.
The seven-piece band returned for two more dazzling sets. Greene mowed down “Sugaree,” a song he had been performing not only with Phil and Friends but in his own shows as well. At the close of the thrilling evening, Lesh appended his customary donor rap with an appeal for fans to volunteer the next day to help get out the vote. The final song was—what else?—“U.S. Blues.” While the band played, some crazy hippie dashed back and forth at the back of the stage waving a giant American flag. By the time he reached the front of the stage and the band charged into the song’s final choruses, the hippie had changed his flag to one with the peace sign where the stars usually are. The Deadheads burst into cheers.
The next day, Obama punched his way to an eight-point loss to Clinton. The Deadhead vote Jill Lesh promised to deliver did not swing the day, but The Dead’s drawing power on the East Coast was not lost on the Obama campaign who, in the fall election, smelling victory in the perennial swing state of Pennsylvania and looking to load up resources in the state, asked Lesh if the band might be able to hold a fundraiser. By this time, plans were already quietly under way to mount a full-scale Dead reunion the following year, although the official word from the Dead camp was that this would be a one-time-only event and any future reunions would wait until after Pennsylvania. Behind the scenes, Live Nation had made an attractive offer for a modest number of dates with a guarantee of $1 million per show. Only the details remained to be ironed out.
On October 13 at the Bryce Jordan Center at Pennsylvania State University, with Billy Kreutzmann on board, the fully reformed Dead played a concert called “Change Rocks” with the Allman Brothers opening that raised $500,000 for the campaign. Guitarist Warren Haynes played in both bands and stayed on the stage all night. “It’s a beautiful night,” he told the crowd during the Allmans’ opening set. “It’s an historic night. Don’t forget to vote.”
This would be the sixth new edition of the Grateful Dead since Garcia died. It had been almost four years since the four had last performed together. They had all followed different individual paths in the intervening years, but nobody had found the same kind of connection—with the crowd or other musicians—as they did when they played together.
“We’re all deeply into this,” Hart said to Rolling Stone backstage, “into Barack Obama and the thought of taking this country back in some shape or form, what’s left of it. It’s probably one thing we can all agree on. It’s funny that an Obama event would do that, but that’s how important and critical this election is. It’s our call to arms, or call to music, which is the way we arm ourselves.”
After another Obama video speech during the break—“For twenty months, I’ve been traveling this country from town to town—even developing a ‘Touch of Grey’ of my own,” Obama said. “On November 5th, I hope to announce that we ‘Ain’t Wasting Time No More.’”—the band swung into immediate action with “Truckin’” stretched into a delirious ten-minute romp, which led to a rollicking “U.S. Blues,” an almost ridiculously upbeat opening segment that soon veered into less productive areas. The band lost its footing and never regained the altitude. There had been no real rehearsals. Lesh squeezed in the show between Phil and Friends dates on an East Coast tour; RatDog had been out all summer with more dates starting later in October; both Hart and Kreutzmann had been touring with their own bands that summer. Coming together between all their own tours and projects, the Pennsylvania show by the revived Dead might have suffered as a consequence.
Weir followed Lesh’s donor rap with remarks of his own. He quoted gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson: “If every Deadhead who lived in Florida had voted in 2000, it would be a very different world today.” The band then launched into “Touch of Grey” followed by a thunderous “Not Fade Away” to bring the two-hour concert to a close. In the end, the band weathered the rough spots to rediscover their primal connection. Lesh raved about Weir’s vocal prowess and Kreutzmann boasted he and Hart were clicking again. “Mickey and I are getting along better now,” he told Rolling Stone. “The egos are out of the way.”
Since closing the office and parting ways in 2006, both Lesh and Weir had been keeping busy schedules with their individual bands. Over the past several years, RatDog had grown in popularity and Phil and Friends, at the least, had leveled off. Since Robin Sylvester replaced Rob Wasserman in the band and RatDog took a sharp turn into serious jamming and hard rocking, the crowds had been building. At the same time, the revolving cast of Phil and Friends—plus the band’s decreasing novelty—was losing ground with the Deadheads. Guitarist Larry Campbell, who replaced Herring as his main guitarist, was not as beloved by the audience, and the addition of guests like the arcane jazz guitarist John Scofield, however entertaining he may have been for Lesh, left the fans somewhat less enthusiastic. RatDog had developed a serious following after years of dogged touring and evolving the band. In April 2008, for the third year in a row, RatDog sold out three nights at the Beacon Theatre in New York.
Although Weir worked out daily and had a health regime that extended to esoteric ginseng extracts that cost hundreds of dollars a bottle he took before shows, he was a mess. He was drinking heavily, often to a near-comatose state, made all the more dangerous by his fondness for pharmaceuticals. He often complained of shoulder pain from throwing a football—he played with the same bunch of local guys at public parks around Mill Valley every weekend he was in town—or hanging a guitar from his shoulder, and he took painkillers. Booze and downers. In July, after he played a local benefit, a friend found him collapsed, trembling, and unable to speak on the front bench outside the 2 AM Club, a well-known Mill Valley watering hole. The bar owner called an ambulance.
Weir toured almost compulsively. He went out for three six-week tours a year and, in between, played festivals and weekend gigs. During his infrequent stays at home, he could be found sitting in with other bands around town or playing benefit concerts for environmental
or political causes. RatDog played the band’s 850th show New Year’s Eve 2008 at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco (headlined by Phil and Friends) with the band’s roster undisturbed since bassist Sylvester joined five years before.
Lesh also had learned the benefits of having, at least, a longer-term band. Guitarist Larry Campbell continued to serve as his musical consiglieri and Particle’s Steve Molitz was holding down the keyboard chair with Molo at the drum kit. In July 2007, Lesh added twenty-six-year-old Jackie Greene to his Phil and Friends repertory company. Greene was a promising Dylanesque singer-songwriter and a musical throwback to his parents’ generation, who released his major label debut, American Myth, on Verve/Forecast in 2006. Raised in the gold rush town of Placerville in the Sierra Nevada foothills, young Greene absorbed his parents’ record collection at an early age and recorded his own debut CD in a home studio while still in high school. His 2002 Gone Wanderin’ album on a Sacramento-based independent label won widespread acclaim and some airplay across Northern California. His major label outing featured Elvis Costello’s rhythm section and was produced by Steve Berlin of Los Lobos, but failed to launch.
Lesh first heard Greene’s title song from Gone Wanderin’ on KFOG, the San Francisco rock radio station, and checked out his set at Bonnaroo in 2007. A month or so later, Lesh phoned Greene and asked if he would be interested in helping him make some music. Greene, who knew nothing of the Grateful Dead’s music, leaped at the opportunity.
His major label release was a stiff. Greene, who had moved to San Francisco, was sleeping in the equipment locker of the Mission District recording studio he shared with Tim Bluhm of Mother Hips and Dave Brogan of Animal Liberation Orchestra. His ’94 Jetta was falling apart. When he landed the job with Phil and Friends, he was finally able to afford his own small apartment.
