by Joel Selvin
With Sears, it was even more complicated. Not only had Sears handled all of Weir’s business since Garcia died, his wife was Cassidy Law, daughter of longtime Grateful Dead staffer Eileen Law. Cassidy happened to be born in Weir’s bed. The same night, he wrote the song “Cassidy.” He was thinking both about the newborn girl Cassidy, whose mother had already decided on the name from the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Neal Cassady, the bull goose looney of the Merry Pranksters, Weir’s onetime roommate and a major figure in Dead circles whose dead body had been found that same day in Mexico. That night was an electric storm of emotion and events in Mill Valley. Weir deeded a portion of the song’s copyright to the baby, who grew up like a stepdaughter to him. This cut was going to sacrifice tissue.
As for Hart, Weir called him and gave him the news regretfully. Lesh had approached Hart about going out without Kreutzmann, but Hart’s refusal had been absolute. He would not betray his brother. Weir extended the possibility that once he and Lesh went out on the road, Weir could work on Lesh, soften his attitude. Hart remained unconvinced. He was mystified that Lesh and Weir had cut him out. “You’re collateral damage,” Weir told him.
Lesh and Weir laid plans and quickly assembled their band. Jay Lane from RatDog joined Joe Russo, another young drummer known in jam-band circles for the Benevento/Russo Duo (Phil and Friends regular Molo was unavailable due to a long-term commitment with Roger McNamee’s new band, Moonalice). Jeff Chimenti from RatDog (and the Other Ones and the Dead) took the keyboard spot. Guitarist John Kadlecik was a telling pick for the Garcia chair. His band, the Dark Star Orchestra, specialized in performing entire Grateful Dead concerts from the band’s history, playing the same songs in the same order. Kadlecik could be scholarly in his efforts at re-creating Garcia’s sound in exact detail. He was known as “fake Jerry” and he would go so far as to adjust his amplifiers and other equipment to the period from the show being played. Formed in Chicago in 1997, Dark Star Orchestra were anointed in a late-night jam at a small Chicago club with Phish members Mike Gordon and Jon Fishman just prior to DSO’s first anniversary.
In the wake of Garcia’s death, the band quickly became known as the leading Dead tribute band, playing as many as two hundred shows a year, polishing their cunning re-creation. In 2008, DSO played a hundred and fifty shows. Given his oft-expressed displeasure with the tribute bands, Lesh’s pick of Kadlecik to join his new band served two purposes: it effectively crippled the top tribute band by taking their guitarist and it signaled Lesh’s intent to tool his new band into the ultimate Grateful Dead tribute band. Playing with a “fake Jerry” would have been the last thing any of the Dead musicians would have considered in the wake of Garcia’s death. Anything but that.
The musicians were assembled at Weir’s San Rafael studios. They were not told anything about a new band; they were simply invited to jam with an eye toward performing a benefit concert together at the end of the month. After the third day, the musicians were informed that they were starting a band. They met for dinner at the Leshes’ home the next night to talk about a name. That was settled early on by Weir. “How about ‘Furthur’?” he said.
On September 18, about a month after the fractious meeting at Jorstad’s office, Furthur made the band’s debut in three nights at the Fox Oakland, a Gilded Age movie palace whose multimillion-dollar restoration was the cornerstone project of a downtown Oakland redevelopment. The ornate twenty-eight-hundred-seat hall had only opened for concerts a few months before, and Furthur’s opening weekend qualified as something of an event in Dead circles, given the band practically dropped out of the sky. The Deadheads knew nothing of backstage infighting. To most of the fans at the Fox Oakland, this was Phil and Bobby with DSO.
The show started with a trifling eight-minute jam between Weir and Lesh, as the rest of the band stood by and watched, effectively isolating the axis on which Furthur would revolve, before the entire band slammed into a hearty “The Other One” for the next fifteen minutes. Kadlecik received a rousing welcome when he stepped to the mike to deliver his first Garcia vocal on “Bird Song.”
In explaining the concept behind the surprise new band, Weir reached beyond the interpersonal issues, which he no doubt cared not to express. “Once you add Mickey and Billy to the mix—and this is more real than one might imagine—you add a layer of expectation,” Weir told Relix magazine. “A lot of folks in the audience are looking for a walk down memory lane and they’re disappointed if they don’t get that. That’s cumbersome. So Phil and I decided to start fresh with the material and with an outfit that didn’t carry those expectations.”
Lesh also explained the decision to break off from the drummers as a creative choice. “One of the reasons that Bob and I wanted to go ahead with this band was to bring fresh approaches to the tunes, like he was doing with RatDog and I did with Phil and Friends,” he told Relix. “We treat it as repertoire. In Grateful Dead terms, that means every performance can be different. All versions of the songs are true, just like a fairy tale.”
In October, Lesh and Weir previewed the East Coast tour with a brief appearance at a VIP reception for an exhibit about the Grateful Dead in, of all places, the stately New-York Historical Society across the street from Central Park. About three hundred donors and patrons milled in the upstairs hall hung with giant antique paintings. “Who knew we would ever be historic,” Lesh told the crowd, as he introduced his “best friend and brother” Bob Weir, who arrived on the small stage guitar in hand. The pair played a short set, beginning with a Dylan song undoubtedly selected for the surroundings, “When I Paint My Masterpiece.”
Back home in Marin County in November, Furthur played a secret show at the tiny 19 Broadway in Fairfax, deep in the bowels of the county, announced only the day of the show. The live rehearsals continued in December with a quick swing through five East Coast small theaters and two nights at Mill Valley’s three-hundred-capacity Masonic Hall before ramping up to a full-scale two-night New Year’s Eve run at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco.
In January 2010, Furthur announced the band would do a series of ten consecutive shows at both the Masonic Hall and the 142 Throckmorton Theatre. Deadheads swamped the elite enclave of Mill Valley, filling the quaint town square with panhandlers and camp followers, vans and campers, thoroughly disrupting the upscale community after the shows in December had caught the little town by surprise, but the invasion that accompanied the January run was something the burghers were entirely unprepared for. The redwood-covered town center was overrun with hippies and not the bucolic, easygoing California brand, but the more seedy and contentious Deadheads from the East Coast. Ticket sales were limited to one ticket per customer and the press was barred from what was being advertised as live rehearsal sessions. Dozens of people waited in line all day on the sidewalks outside the halls. There were complaints of public urination. People were astonished to hear of a knife fight in the Throckmorton lobby.
When the band announced the first extensive national tour for February, the two background vocalists—Zoe Ellis, younger sister of RatDog’s Dave Ellis, and Sunshine Garcia Becker, no relation to the guitarist—who were both young mothers with infant children, begged off. Stellar road mother Jill Lesh swung into action, ordered a separate bus and a pair of nannies, and the girls signed back up.
With all this youthful energy behind the grand old men of the Dead, Furthur brought a new vitality to the music. Kadlecik slowly eased his way into his own personal style and away from a more exact re-creation of Garcia solos. Chimenti, always among the most solid musicians on any bandstand, came into his own in this ensemble. Russo was a powerful, supple drummer, and Lane had become thoroughly schooled in the songbook through his years in RatDog. Lesh and Weir even introduced new material. Weir brought “Ashes and Glass” from RatDog. Lesh dusted off an old song Garcia started with David Crosby more than thirty years before called “The Mountain Song,” messed around with it himself before giving it to his younger s
on Brian to finish the lyrics. The Princeton undergrad also worked on lyrics with Robert Hunter for a piece of music by his dad called “Welcome to the Dance” that Furthur introduced as early as the initial Fox Oakland run. Furthur was fresh and confident right from the start. Lesh had taken all the lessons he learned from Phil and Friends and put them to work. Plus he had Weir with him. The Deadheads embraced Furthur immediately.
Matt Busch, Weir’s tour manager, and Jill Lesh shared duties comfortably backstage. Busch was calm, capable, and fair. The two camps—Lesh and Weir—did not mingle much. Weir and the Leshes alternated writing the set lists and the loose duties of the bandleader went with whoever wrote the sets that day. They set up backstage tents on opposite sides of the stage and while Weir’s was always party central, the Lesh tent was often empty and quiet. The brotherly dynamic between the two principals could shift suddenly from loving and harmonious to chilly and antagonistic without the other band members knowing what happened. At first, Weir was doing fine, enjoying himself, singing and playing great, holding court backstage endlessly. Lesh was bubbly, chipper, surprisingly energetic, although the crew whispered rumors attributing his stamina to anti-rejection steroids he took for his transplant. They also wondered if Jill didn’t sometimes take the same drugs.
The good vibes didn’t last. Lesh’s mercurial wife exploded all over the background vocalists after the next-to-last show on the tour in Colorado. The band had just finished one of the hottest shows they had ever played. Zoe Ellis’s father had attended and watched from a strategic seat on the stage. Jill had taken a special interest in the two women vocalists from the start and, with her official duties largely handled by her competent partner, she focused extra attention on them. Then following this exhausting and satisfying show, after weeks together on the road, Ellis found herself facing a livid Jill Lesh, who was furious over some minor misuse of a van and errand runner backstage. Jill further shocked Zoe by lashing into both her and Sunshine personally.
“You are nobodies,” she screamed at them. “Less than nobodies. All the years these guys have put in paying their dues—”
“You have no right to speak to me like that,” Ellis interrupted. “You don’t know anything about what dues I’ve paid.”
Ellis quickly turned and left the room. She was hurt and deeply embarrassed to be spoken to that way in front of her daughter, even if she was an infant. She had to learn twenty-three songs in two days for the first show. While she had come to appreciate the music—especially Hunter’s lyrics—she was no Deadhead like her singing partner Sunshine Becker. Furthur had been a fun, fairly well-paying job. She went home after the next concert and sent the Leshes the most polite, kindly letter of resignation she could write.
As it happened, that first tour was also the end of the Furthur road for drummer Jay Lane. After fifteen years of following Weir’s leadership, he found himself relegated to a secondary role in a band where Weir also seemed relegated to a secondary role. Where he had been the sole driving force of RatDog, in Furthur, Lane was accenting and decorating Joe Russo’s playing. He was the Mickey Hart of Furthur. Lane had no real complaints—he was playing a job any drummer in the world would want—but then Les Claypool called and said he wanted to put Primus back together. Now Lane faced a dilemma. He held long talks on the bus with Weir and came to the decision to leave Furthur, only informing Lesh the day before his final gig. Lesh posted a magnanimous adieu to Lane on his Web site. “Over the past year, Jill and I have come to know and love Jay for the great guy he is,” Lesh wrote. He would not be replaced. Russo would remain the sole drummer of the band.
Jeff Pehrson was drafted to replace Zoe Ellis. He was one-half of an acoustic folk-pop duo called Box Set and he auditioned by singing a few Dead songs with Sunshine Becker at a local studio for Lesh and a few others. He got the nod but was told there would be no rehearsals before the Memorial Day weekend date. “Trial by fire,” he was told. His future with the band would depend on his performance at that gig. Pehrson passed the test.
The Furthur Festival was an ambitious three-day event that May staged in Calaveras County Fairgrounds in sleepy Angels Camp in the Sierra Nevada foothills. This was not the touring Furthur Festival that Scher and Sears had produced in the late nineties. Angels Camp had been the scene of an annual rock show in the seventies and eighties called Mountain Aire Festival and subsequent performances by both the Grateful Dead in 1987 and Phil and Friends in 1999. Not only did Furthur play note-for-note recitations of six full-length Grateful Dead albums over the three nights, but Larry Campbell and his wife, Teresa Williams, both Phil and Friends veterans, wrangled a second, largely acoustic stage where Campbell, Jackie Greene, and others combined for a middle-of-the-night Phil and Friends mini-reunion. Campbell and his wife augmented Furthur prominently during acoustic-flavored Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty segments of the program. Band members held question-and-answer sessions during the day in a room displaying old photos and memorabilia, including a giant blowup photo of the Dead playing there. Other groups appearing over the weekend included Brian Lesh’s band, Blue Light River, and Mark Karan’s band, Jemimah Puddleduck.
While Weir and Lesh were launching Furthur, the drummers were not staying home crying in their bongs. Kreutzmann was involved in the most serious non-Dead musical project of his life, a New Orleans–oriented jam band called 7 Walkers featuring guitarist-songwriter Papa Mali. As bassist for the New Orleans r&b instrumental group the Meters, 7 Walkers bassist George Porter was one of the most influential players in his field. Mississippi-born Malcolm Welbourne—who goes by the name Papa Mali—wrote the band’s original material with lyrics from Robert Hunter, mixed at shows with old New Orleans r&b, Papa Mali originals, and, of course, a few Dead covers.
Drummer Hart has never slowed down—from ancillary projects like an art exhibit of slices of bark from redwood trees he found on his morning walks around his Sonoma ranch to a deep plunge into astrophysics with Nobel laureate George Smoot, manipulating sounds recorded from deep in space. Using UC Berkeley’s supercomputer, Smoot and his team showed Hart waveforms millions of years old and he turned them into sound files—sonifications—to use in recordings. Hart was literally playing with the Big Bang.
Hart took time to write the score for a ballet by the Alonzo King Company. He was also putting together another edition of the Rhythm Devils, his percussion orchestra, this time featuring the young blues-rock phenom from England, guitarist Davy Knowles of Back Door Slam, and guitarist Keller Williams, headed out on tour in the spring. He and Kreutzmann were still drum brothers, a celebrated percussion team, and Kreutzmann rejoined the band for a handful of dates in the summer, including the Gathering of the Vibes hippie fest in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the night after Further played. Like ships passing in the night.
16
Crossroads
LEVON HELM was a leathery survivor. In 1991, on his Woodstock, New York farm, his beloved barn and recording studio along with all of his gear burned to the ground in an electrical fire. He promptly rebuilt it. In 1998, he was diagnosed with throat cancer and advised to get a laryngectomy. He opted for twenty-seven radiation treatments at Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York City, which killed the tumor but also destroyed his voice. After several years of writing notes and hoarse whispers, Helm regained his voice, but now he faced foreclosure on his rebuilt barn and home. In 2003, Helm decided to throw a rent party. He tabbed Larry Campbell and guitarist Jimmy Vivino of The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien to put together a hot house band and began holding informal weekly gatherings called Midnight Rambles at his barn. Helm likened the affairs to the late-night sessions held by minstrel shows he attended as a youth in Arkansas.
As drummer and vocalist with the Band, Helm knew something about disputes over control of a storied rock band’s legacy. He alone was the holdout when Band guitarist Robbie Robertson purchased the other members’ interests in their partnership. Helm and Robertson didn’t speak for years. Long after The Last Wal
tz, the concert extravaganza film by Martin Scorsese that marked the group’s retirement from touring, Helm continued to plow that field, leading various versions of the supposedly defunct group as long as he could. When keyboardist Richard Manuel hanged himself in a sleazy motel room after one more shitty gig in Florida in 1986 and bassist Rick Danko died in his sleep in 1999, Helm retreated to Woodstock, where his credit was always good at Vince’s Meat Market.
These Rambles were distinctly low-key affairs. Campbell switched off between fiddle, mandolin, pedal steel, and guitar. His wife, Teresa Williams, sang in the band and Helm’s daughter, Amy Helm, played. The barn held two hundred spectators and tickets cost a whopping hundred dollars apiece, but once Helms’ friends like Elvis Costello, Emmylou Harris, and Dr. John started turning up, there was a line of cars from his place to the highway every Saturday night.
In July 2010, the night after finishing a sold-out run at Nokia Theater in Times Square to culminate a successful six-week tour by Furthur, Phil Lesh and his family headed up to Woodstock to be guests at the Midnight Ramble. The Levon Helm Studio sat atop a breathtaking vista of mountain greenery. The refurbished barn had the clean, wholesome air of a cabin in the woods. The intimate audience included actresses Jane Fonda and Catherine Keener and Phish bassist Mike Gordon. Lesh was greeted with thunderous applause.
“This is so cool,” he said. “Thank you, Levon, for getting this together—absolutely.”
With Phil and Friends veterans Campbell and his wife in the band, Lesh brought out his two sons, Grahame and Brian, and dug into a set of Dead tunes like “Deal,” “Dire Wolf,” “I Know You Rider,” and “Friend of the Devil,” Lesh’s seismic bass notes shaking the barn floor. Lesh and his sons’ harmonies lit up the songs. The boys showed off their guitar chops. Lesh glowed. He choked up introducing his sons to the crowd. “I have to say,” he said, “this is the proudest moment of my life.”
