Fare Thee Well

by Joel Selvin

  The next month, he was dropped onstage before a capacity crowd at Red Rocks singing his “Tell Me Mama, Tell Me Right” along with the Dead material with Phil and Friends. Greene brought youthful good looks and enthusiasm, a handful of his songs, a few more Dylan tunes, and his own classic rock sensibilities. With Larry Campbell adding judicious touches of mandolin and even fiddle to the band, Greene’s backwoods holler and acoustic guitar made this version of Phil and Friends an entirely more flexible band than the storied Q, even if the latest edition lacked The Q’s firepower.

  This new reunion of The Dead came at a curious juncture in the schedules of the four principals. Even Kreutzmann was working. After The Dead splintered in 2006, he had joined up with Hart to revive the Rhythm Devils with Steve Kimock, Phish bassist Mike Gordon, African talking drummer Sikiru Adepoju, and a few new Robert Hunter songs. He had moved back to Hawaii in 2007 after divorcing his fourth wife. It was bassist Gordon who introduced Kreutzmann to guitarist Scott Murawski of Max Creek when the three performed together at a benefit concert in Costa Rica. When Kreutzmann suggested a more permanent arrangement, Gordon bowed out, but Allman Brothers bassist Oteil Burbridge accepted. Originally called the Bill Kreutzmann Trio but soon shortened to BK3, the band mixed Dead covers with old Max Creek songs, new originals by Murawski, and a couple of new Hunter songs and played a Northeast tour in summer 2008 and a round of West Coast dates in early 2009.

  Kreutzmann was also cooking up music with another associate. He first heard Louisiana native Papa Mali at the Oregon Country Fair in summer 2008 and joined the eccentric guitarist and vocalist for a New Year’s Eve gig with Bonnie Raitt bassist Hutch Hutchinson, who also lives in Hawaii, at the Pauela Cannery in upcountry Maui.

  Hart was also busy, as usual. He had the Mickey Hart Band on tour all summer 2008 whose returning members included Kimock and Adepoju alongside New Orleans r&b bassist George Porter of the Meters, drummer Walfredo Reyes Jr. and keyboardist Kyle Hollingsworth from String Cheese Incident. Hart also picked up his second Grammy Award for his latest world beat percussion album, Global Drum Project.

  With RatDog and Phil and Friends also in action, all four had full dance cards when they paused in spring 2009 to play the short but lucrative tour for Live Nation as The Dead. The originally planned fourteen dates were expanded to twenty-three cities over five weeks in April and May 2009. After the Penn State debacle during the Obama campaign, they managed to squeeze in eleven days’ rehearsal at Weir’s rented studio in San Rafael in February.

  The mission was to return with as much money as possible. The coffers were empty. After four years of working their solo acts, the four men’s revenue stream had thinned out considerably. Their big money deal with Rhino turned out to return about half what the band had been making on Grateful Dead Records. The Leshes suggested that the members’ personal managers sit out the tour and it was agreed. Other options were explored. At first, the band considered hiring mega-manager Irving Azoff, who handled the Eagles and other top rock acts, after Hart was introduced to Azoff by Sammy Hagar (Azoff had managed Van Halen when Hagar rejoined for the 2005 reunion tour), but that unlikely association never happened. Coran Capshaw, manager of the Dave Matthews Band, was dying to handle the tour, but the band members ultimately agreed to work without management to avoid paying commissions, instead hiring Tim Jorstad to work as a consultant paid a $500 hourly fee.

  Caryl Hart took time out from studying for her PhD at UC Berkeley to act as her husband’s surrogate, understanding that she wouldn’t be paid. Taking that role also meant she had to interact regularly with Jill Lesh, who was Phil’s manager. Caryl didn’t see that as a problem as she considered Jill a friend who had even thrown her a baby shower when she was pregnant with her daughter Reya. But the Jill she encountered now was a different woman: harsh, antagonistic, and controlling. She quickly tired of being on the receiving end of screaming phone calls from Jill, who could take issue with the smallest things. This was not the way the Dead handled things. It was the Leshes who had declared themselves keepers of the soul of the Grateful Dead. More importantly, the Leshes were indisputably in charge of The Dead.

  Caryl came to dread interactions with the Leshes. She began to pop Valiums before taking business meetings to help cope with Jill’s nonstop talking. Relations were also strained—to say the least—by the Leshes’ constant complaints and demands for more money. Their past threats the previous couple of years to sue the other partners over business issues didn’t help. If Lesh envisioned himself as a leader who would take over after Garcia and direct the band’s fortunes, nobody was following him. Not voluntarily, at least.

  On the eve of the reunion announcement planned for New Year’s Eve 2008, Jorstad received a 3 a.m. email from Kreutzmann in Hawaii. “I want nothing more to do with the Grateful Dead,” he wrote. “Leave me out of it.” Jorstad, who never knew who was authoring recent emails from Hawaii, Kreutzmann or his new girlfriend, Aimee Morehead, called the Leshes to ask if the email sounded like Kreutzmann. They assured him it did indeed sound like Kreutzmann, so Jorstad now had to quickly contemplate the announcement he and Live Nation were planning to make the next day. There would be a giant difference between a reunion of the surviving original members—the so-called core four—and three out of four.

  In a panic, Jorstad dispatched Kreutzmann’s grown filmmaker son, Justin Kreutzmann, to Hawaii to get his father to call Jorstad. When he finally spoke to him, Kreutzmann claimed the email was nothing more than a joke. Kreutzmann may have relented, but he maintained a dark, sulky mood for the duration of the tour. He showed up in poor physical condition and struggled to keep up with the much more physically fit Hart for the whole tour.

  The band hoped to unveil the new edition at a free concert in New York City on March 30, but weather and city permits scotched that plan in favor of three shows in one night at small Manhattan venues. The four thousand tickets were distributed to fans through an online lottery. The morning began with Weir, Lesh, and touring guitarist Warren Haynes playing “Friend of the Devil” on morning TV talk show The View (host Whoopi Goldberg was a longtime Dead fan). At five in the afternoon, the same three gave a rare acoustic performance at a former Lower East Side synagogue called Angel Orensanz that focused on Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty material, although the highlight of the hour-long set was a near-twenty-minute, largely instrumental version of “Bird Song.”

  At eight o’clock that night, drummers Hart and Kreutzmann with keyboardist Jeff Chimenti joined the three guitarists at Gramercy Theater on East 23rd Street for a full electric band romp that began with a half-hour jam and “Playing in the Band.” The evening ended with a two-hour session uptown at the Roseland Ballroom, where three thousand fans were treated to a rocking set of fan favorites such as “Eyes of the World,” “Cassidy,” “St. Stephen,” a twisting, turning “Dark Star,” and a celebratory “Sugar Magnolia” finale, Haynes topping the mix with Chuck Berry riffs. “It’s just like playing a three-hour show,” Weir told Rolling Stone, “but it’s broken up by cab rides.”

  The tour began two weeks later in Greensboro, North Carolina, and almost immediately tempo wars broke out onstage. Weir and Kreutzmann would engage in duels—Weir fighting to slow the rhythm, Kreutzmann trying to drive the beat back up. The next day was a day off before appearing at the Verizon Center in Washington, DC, and the band accepted an invitation to meet with President Obama in the Oval Office of the White House. Band members and wives talked history with the down-to-earth president. Jill Lesh spotted a vase of scarlet begonias on the way out of the Oval Office, to everyone’s delight. After all, it was Obama’s campaign that had fostered this current reunion and the place was lousy with Deadheads. They were ushered into Chief of Staff David Axelrod’s office to meet with the senior Deadheads on the staff, all of whom intended to attend the concert the following night, where Tipper Gore sat in on drums.

  After the first week, Jorstad went home, but a week later he received an aggrieved p
hone call from Lesh, who demanded that he return immediately to the tour and straighten out the situation. Lesh was unhappy with the musical performances and wanted Jorstad to settle the problems. Jorstad flew from California straight to backstage at Madison Square Garden in New York. He feared the tour would be canceled and the money would have to be returned to Live Nation. With tickets costing as much as $100, sales had not been as brisk as Live Nation had hoped. Although the last tour in 2004 had earned $18 million, the current tour could wind up losing money for the company and they were getting nervous. Jorstad did not want to give them an excuse to cancel. The next night, he brought all four together in a backstage room before the show and explained the financial realities and possible consequences of their disputes.

  Jorstad counseled the band to resolve their differences. He knew Weir thought Lesh played so loud, he had to scream to sing. He knew Lesh thought Kreutzmann was rushing the beat. Jorstad advised the band to keep in mind they had not been playing together for more than five years. “I don’t know what your expectations were,” he told them, “but perfection is not on the menu.”

  Jorstad reiterated the complaints band members had expressed to him—but not each other—about one another. These feelings needed to be aired, he said, but he also reminded the band that their fans, in the middle of a severe economic recession, had paid big money to attend these shows and the band owed these people a good show. Jorstad resolved to stay with the band for the duration of the tour, even though it would increase his fee.

  Thinking it would be shrewd to keep her busy, Jorstad gave various minor duties to Jill Lesh. She was smart and capable enough and took care of some of the details for him, although he knew it could cause huge trouble if other band members found out. She had been working the Phil and Friends tours for ten years, which made her far more experienced than Jorstad. She also had a close working relationship with Matt Busch, the young RatDog road manager who came to Phil and Friends with Warren Haynes in 1999 at age twenty-five. He went to work for Weir in 2005 with the blessing of the Leshes and remained one of the few insiders who stayed on good terms with everybody. Jorstad had to rely on Busch and Jill Lesh. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but he knew better than to tell Kreutzmann.

  Jill took her responsibilities seriously. As the tour neared the end, she became enraged at Stefani Scamardo, Warren Haynes’s wife and manager, onstage at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View during sound check. Her beef was the amount of attention Haynes was getting onstage. She attacked Scamardo, criticizing her husband for taking too much prominence. She then dismissed Haynes as hired help. Scamardo, not a timid woman herself, refused to back down as the two women got into it in full view of band and crew.

  Backstage, Jill wouldn’t stop. She had decided that her contributions to the tour should be compensated, even though the band had decided not to pay managers. She confronted Jorstad over money, demanding a commission for the management work she had done on the tour. “The drummers don’t bring anything to the table,” she said. “They have to pay.”

  Fearful of Kreutzmann’s reaction if he ever discovered Jill Lesh had assumed anything resembling official duties on his watch, Jorstad counseled her to drop the matter. She would not hear of it. Jorstad even pointed out that she and her husband would be paying a quarter of the fee to her out of their own take and that wouldn’t be worth the trouble it would cause. Still, Jill Lesh was determined to extract a fee from the band.

  The Shoreline show was highlighted by a troupe of fire dancers from Kauai, friends of Kreutzmann, who lit up the traditional drums/space interlude with fiery acrobatics that linked the Dead’s underground roots to the modern-day Burning Man culture. Weir squirmed in the wings. “Is this what we’ve become?” he muttered to Jorstad. Lesh also hated the display, but Hart thought it was sensational and Kreutzmann was only sorry his friends didn’t play every show on the tour.

  Of course, the ongoing musical tension between Lesh and the two drummers carried into their relationship offstage. Band members were not speaking and the Leshes had turned against the drummers, especially Kreutzmann. Many years before, in a drunken moment, Kreutzmann had squeezed Jill Lesh’s breasts backstage. The incident had never been forgotten or forgiven. Lesh was not happy with Kreutzmann’s playing. He even secretly kept Molo on call throughout the tour in case there was an opportunity to use him. Lesh approached a startled and appalled Mickey Hart before the tour’s final show at the Gorge Amphitheatre outside Seattle about substituting Molo for Kreutzmann. The answer was a firm, resolute no, but Lesh was not someone to take no for an answer.

  One big money date remained on the calendar, the Fourth of July at the Rothbury Music Festival in western Michigan. The band was scheduled to received $2.5 million for a headline performance with a bonus based on ticket sales. When Jill Lesh discovered the promoters had opened a third gate for tickets not shown on the manifest, she held back the band from taking the stage until the promoters agreed to pay the full amount they owed. With Jorstad not on the trip, she acted as manager. The show started a half-hour late. Instead of that making her a hero with Kreutzmann, he was furious that she would get involved and thought taking the stage late was disrespectful to the fans. Kreutzmann simmered with anger and frustration.

  15

  Furthur

  THE BAND members arrived at Tim Jorstad’s office in downtown San Rafael for the final settlement conference after the tour. It had been successful and as much as a million dollars in residual funds needed to be distributed. Jorstad, who managed the tour, something he had never done before, had also represented some of the members as accountant and financial advisor for years, acting as Kreutzmann’s proxy for the GDP board when Kreutzmann was in Hawaii. Although he was financial consultant to other Marin County rock stars such as Carlos Santana and Grace Slick, Jorstad was no hippie. He was a small-town boy who graduated from the University of Northern Colorado and had owned his own bank, a straitlaced financial consultant. He was not accustomed to the rough-and-ready rock-and-roll world of the Dead or the complicated personal relationships that extended back more than forty years.

  He had attended many performances by his clients over the years and enjoyed concerts as much as anyone, but Jorstad had never gone out on the road with his acts before. The experience on this tour had been revelatory, to say the least. No longer were the sales and revenues simply figures on a page; now he was conducting nightly settlements and paying out crew expenses. In addition, he was constantly negotiating among band members who could no longer communicate among themselves. Even with his hourly fees soaring, he felt compelled to stay on the road, for fear that without him the tour would fall apart. When the tour ended, he was relieved. Jorstad had witnessed many dire scenes in client meetings over divorces and other financial hardships over the years, but nothing had prepared him for dealing with the Dead.

  In August 2009, after playing the final, one-off Fourth of July date at the Rothbury Music Festival, all four members of the band presented themselves in Jorstad’s office. Jorstad knew that the Leshes were still pissed off at the drummers and planning to extract their pound of flesh via a commission for Jill. Phil and Jill had taken him to lunch and ranted the entire meal over their perceived injustices. Jorstad was clear they were not going to let the matter drop. Finally, before the meeting, he told Hart and Kreutzmann about the Leshes’ demands. Kreutzmann exploded at Jorstad for keeping him in the dark about Jill’s work on the road and raged that the Leshes thought they could hold up the band for a commission at the end of the tour.

  In Jorstad’s office with the four members, all the frustration, all the veiled resentments, all the years of being lashed together erupted, and Kreutzmann went off like a geyser. The furious drummer leveled his accusations at Jorstad before turning his attention to Lesh, whose haughty response caused Kreutzmann to explode out of his chair and go for Lesh with his hands. Lesh was no match for the enraged bull, but Kreutzmann was quickly pulled off. He sputtered in anger at
Lesh.

  “I never want to see you again,” he said. “I never want to play with you again. I don’t want to have anything to do with you.”

  Then Kreutzmann stormed out and, once again, closed the door on the Dead.

  Lesh, on the other hand, was fine with that. He saw a future without the drummers. He moved quickly behind the scenes with Weir, taking a cutthroat approach to relations in the band, harsh by even his standards. For Lesh, this day had been a long time coming.

  Weir sounded sheepish on the telephone talking to John Scher, who had comanaged Weir with Cameron Sears since Garcia died. “I did something last night you’re not going to like,” he told Scher.

  Weir explained that he and Natascha had spent the evening before dining with Phil and Jill and got “knee-crawling drunk.” Vegetarian Lesh had stopped drinking many years before and only sneaked occasional puffs of pot out of the purview of his vigilant wife, so this was quite the occasion. Lesh made Weir a proposal. He suggested they combine forces in a new band. He explained to Weir the financial reality: it would take a whole bunch of RatDog shows to earn the same amount he would in a single show if they played together. Without the pesky drummers/partners, they could have a better band, play before bigger audiences, and keep a larger share of the greater spoils.

  Weir, who was certainly attracted by the money and the crowds, was also still angry with the drummers from the tour. He could remember specific moments like car crashes during ballads he thought the drummers ruined with their overplaying. In a weak moment, without considering the full ramifications of his decision, he said yes to Lesh. There would, however, be conditions.

  Weir would have to dissolve RatDog and jettison his current management. Jill and RatDog road manager Matt Busch would handle the new band and Lesh’s booking agent, Jonathan Levine, would represent the act. While it might be possible to save some of his people’s jobs under the new conditions, Weir was going to have to fire Scher and Sears, two longtime, close personal associates. Scher began producing Grateful Dead concerts on the East Coast more than thirty years before. Garcia called him their “Jewish cousin” in New York.