Fare Thee Well

by Joel Selvin

  During the Levon Helm Band set, Lesh sat prominently behind Helm’s drum kit and sang along to “Deep Elem Blues,” a song the Grateful Dead also used to play. Donald Fagen of Steely Dan was playing keyboards, as he often did with the Helm Band, and Lesh took up bass for a couple of Dead songs. “Tennessee Jed” was a song Helm recorded for his Grammy-winning 2007 comeback album on his own label, Dirt Farmer, after he got his voice (mostly) back. “Shakedown Street” was sung by Fagen, a great convergence considering the sleek, carefully manicured Steely Dan may have been the polar opposite of the Grateful Dead when both operations were at their peaks. Lesh also joined Campbell, Teresa Williams, and Amy Helm for the Dead’s “Attics of My Life” and the entire Lesh clan chimed in on the finale of “The Weight,” Grahame and Brian each tackling a verse. It was an evening Lesh would not soon forget.

  Furthur finished out the year with a triumphant headline performance at the Outside Lands Festival in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in August, where the Grateful Dead once played for the Human Be-In and where the band and Deadheads gathered after Garcia’s death, as well as tours in September through the West Coast and November through the East, ending with two sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden. By the time Furthur celebrated New Year’s Eve in a two-night run for the second year at the Bill Graham Civic in San Francisco, the band had done a massive seventy-seven shows—not including eighteen public rehearsals—since the previous September.

  With Furthur, Lesh had taken complete charge of the legacy, in short order establishing the new band as the heirs to the throne and doing the roadwork to back up the claim. As the band swept through the markets, every nascent Deadhead in the nation bought a ticket—the old guard was slow to adopt Furthur—and young people barely out of diapers when Garcia died were discovering the music and joining up.

  While Weir relished the road so much he would sometimes ride the bus home at the end of the tour instead of flying to spend a couple of extra days out, Lesh had long hated the touring routine. At age seventy-one, he felt the immense exhaustion of the first year of Furthur settle in mind, body, and spirit. The experience at Levon’s Midnight Ramble had reignited thoughts in his mind lying dormant since he abandoned the Terrapin Station museum project ten years before.

  In March 2010, the Leshes began talking publicly about buying the real estate where the Good Earth Organic & Natural Food Store stood in Fairfax. The popular grocery store was planning to move to a nearby vacant supermarket in the fall and the Leshes eyed the property as a possible location for a barn of their own. Lesh posted a note about his intentions on his Web site: “We’re taking the first steps to make a long time dream—a permanent musical home—come true,” he said. “Our goal is to create a vibrant community gathering place: beautiful, comfortable, welcoming—for members of the community to commingle and enjoy good music.”

  He went on to say they would be purchasing a building that would be remodeled to feel like an old barn and they would begin to present “West Coast Rambles.” He indicated Helm had given his blessing to what Lesh was planning to call Terrapin Landing.

  Although he raised his family in the nearby upscale town of Ross, Lesh lived in Fairfax for many years before he was married, which is a small town with a mind of its own. Several miles up Sir Francis Drake Boulevard from San Rafael, Fairfax is the last town before the woods overtake the road. A longtime hippie outpost, the city only had one rock club through the seventies, the Sleeping Lady, an organic juice bar that served no alcohol and didn’t allow smoking. Van Morrison had lived in town and even bought his parents a small record store in the strip of stores that passed for downtown Fairfax. Lesh knew he would have to ease on in. “There would be a Fairfax-style collaboration between him and the neighborhood in order to work things out,” the town’s mayor told the Marin IJ.

  In August, the Leshes filed a permit application for a different, adjacent piece of property. They changed their minds about the old market, checking out the location after closing one night and realizing the corner location would be a problem for a music club in a residential neighborhood. The new site was on the other side of the market, away from houses. “It’s solidly on Drake, not on a residential corner,” Jill Lesh said to the Marin IJ. “The performance space will be concrete clad in wood, so it will be completely soundproof. You would not be able to hear anything outside. Obviously, we have to deal with parking and traffic and other issues, and that’s what the use permit process is for. We have a lot of work to do to see if we can address all those concerns.”

  The property was in escrow pending permit approval and plans called to tear down the old garage and build a 5,400-foot two-story barn with a 2,800-foot performance space to be called the Grate Room, openly modeled on the Helms’ place in Woodstock. Lesh had been converted by his visit to Helm’s Midnight Ramble. “It was like going to church,” he told the Marin IJ. “I knew immediately that was something I wanted to do at home, to have a place like that. It’s small enough and intimate enough that it gives the music more meaning.”

  While Leshes were consulting architects and contractors, Weir was up to his eyeballs into high-tech musical real estate development himself, having bought a huge corner building in a San Rafael industrial park, gutted the insides, and built a space-age recording studio designed to host Webcasts like the world had never seen before. This was his new Tamalpais Research Institute—TRI Studios. Weir had a couple of investor partners, but he poured much of his own money into the project, where costs ran more than $3 million. It was a peculiar corner of an otherwise colorless and anonymous collection of warehouses and offices off the freeway. On the other side of the TRI wall was the chop shop where James Hetfield of Metallica worked on his hot rods. Across the street was a rehearsal hall and studio for Sammy Hagar, where the Red Rocker also parked his collection of Ferraris.

  “Some guys, when they have a little success in life, they go out and buy a yacht or a fancy car,” Weir told the Marin IJ. “What I did was build a flying saucer.”

  The main room of the 11,500-square-foot complex contained a Meyer Sound Constellation, a highly refined audio sound system advancement by the famed Berkeley speaker manufacturer John Meyer. The few Constellations that Meyer had sold at that point had gone to classical music chamber orchestras and the like; Weir was his first customer in the rock/pop field. The room was dotted with as many as eighty small speakers and a couple of dozen microphones to further pick up and disperse sound. The entire system was designed to run through simple computer software that Weir could operate himself from an iPad onstage, bypassing the necessity of mixing engineers. At the touch of a finger, the room could sound like a cathedral or somebody’s living room, a baseball stadium or a bathroom. The Constellation was a modern technological miracle, clean, crisp, resonant audio that enveloped the listener without fatigue or strain, like being dipped in a river of sound.

  In addition to the futuristic audio, Weir and longtime Dead sound man John Cutler stocked the room with all the toys they wanted, including massive amounts of server space to facilitate plans to support the investment in the studio through pay-per-view Webcasts. Weir knew no such business model existed and that recording studios themselves were going out of business on practically a daily basis, but he was intent on testing his hypothesis. As Lesh had done, it was his way of trying to figure out a way to make music without touring. Even for road-loving Bobby Weir, forty years was taking its toll.

  In May 2011, Weir held the first Webcast at TRI the same week he finally appeared with the Marin Symphony Orchestra. Weir had agreed to appear in a fundraiser for the orchestra but insisted they cede creative control. His vision turned into an elaborate and expensive event originally scheduled for 2010. Weir finally made the show in May 2011. He did an opening set backed by ex-RatDog musicians (including both Robin Sylvester on electric bass and Rob Wasserman on acoustic bass) with a quartet of the classical musicians playing some arrangements and—at Weir’s impish insistence—a little ham-fisted i
mprovising. For the second half of the concert, the full orchestra played elegantly realized symphonic arrangements of Grateful Dead songs written by Stanford University composition instructor Giancarlo Aquilanti. To debut his Webcast series few days later, Weir re-created the concert’s opening segment for the benefit of Web viewers live from TRI Studios.

  If he was not busy enough, after a solo appearance at the Sundance Film Festival in February for the release of the dramatic film featuring a Grateful Dead soundtrack, The Music Never Stopped, Weir also announced his first-ever solo tour, a handful of East Coast dates in August.

  In June, Weir brought Furthur into TRI for a two-and-a-half-hour Webcast concert, offered to pay-per-view subscribers for $19.95. Demand was great enough to crash the TRI servers, meaning many people couldn’t sign on the site. The full Webcast was posted as a continuous loop a couple of days later to make up for the technical problems people experienced. As this was a new technology, these kinds of bumps in the road had to be expected. It probably didn’t help that nobody on the TRI staff had ever run a Webcast before.

  In the meantime, Lesh was having his own problems getting his project green-lighted by the Fairfax city council. The day before it was to be considered, Lesh pulled his permit approval from the agenda after being unnerved by signs posted strategically along the route of his morning walk reading “No Terrapin, Please.” “They must have done it in the middle of the night after watching where he walks,” Jill Lesh told the Marin IJ. “It felt a little weird and creepy.”

  Jill Lesh also told the paper that she and her husband were disturbed by anonymous opponents who put negative fliers on cars that were parked at St. Rita’s Church in Fairfax during a child’s funeral. The Leshes had proposed paying St. Rita’s to use some of its parking during performances at their planned club. “We didn’t want to start off this way,” she said. “There are lots of other places we could go. We just really like Fairfax. We thought we could really do some things that would benefit the town.”

  Weeks before the Leshes announced in November they were scrubbing the Fairfax project, they had already been meeting with city officials of San Rafael to check the lay of the land. Lesh had been reading the Bob Dylan memoir, Chronicles, and reminiscing with his wife. He took her on a drive past the band’s old San Rafael rehearsal hall, Club Front, by the waterfront. “We were having lunch in the area one afternoon and decided to take a drive by the old studio,” Lesh recalled on his Web site.

  While we were driving around we went by the Seafood Peddler, where Furthur did some rehearsal shows a couple years ago in their Palm Ballroom. We pulled into the rear parking lot and we saw a large painted Grateful Dead/Steal Your Face logo with the words “Buckle Up Kidz” above it. We looked at each other and both had the same flash—that the Seafood Peddler had the foundation for us to realize our long-held dream of finding a place in Marin County to make music. It was one of those wonderful moments in life when it all converges and you can see the path that lies ahead.

  In January 2012, the Leshes announced they had purchased the Seafood Peddler, a landmark wharfside eaterie with a trademark sign of a ship atop a flagpole visible from the freeway. The longtime owner simply stepped aside and relocated his business when he heard the Leshes wanted to buy the spot. It was all too perfect. Lesh changed his plan for the name, having decided it was not a landing, but a new beginning. He called it Terrapin Crossroads.

  At almost the exact same time Lesh was announcing his new club in San Rafael, oddly enough, a few exits down the freeway Weir was ballyhooing the reopening of a Mill Valley club in which he was an investor, the Sweetwater Music Hall. The miniscule eighty-seat original club was the jewel of Marin County nightlife, a community center to the local rock crowd where Lesh and Weir staged the Crusader Rabbit Stealth Band comeback. After changing hands, a dispute with the landlords, and several years of not being open, a new set of investors acquired the name and pumped a cool $3 million into remodeling the 107-year-old Masonic Hall just off the town square. Weir supervised the installation of a pristine audio system from Meyer Sound Laboratories. If Lesh was going to build himself a playhouse, Weir had staked out some territory for himself at another playground down the way.

  “For years, Sweetwater was the place many of us local and visiting musicians headed to when we were looking to play for fun,” Weir told the Marin IJ. “Well, our clubhouse is back—and it belongs to all of us. Woo-hoo—Mill Valley finally has its playpen back!”

  While the soft opening of Sweetwater in January 2012 featured the Southern rock band the Outlaws, the initial calendar leaned heavily toward the Deadhead clientele that Lesh would also hope to attract with bands featuring Mark Karan, Steve Kimock, and other Dead acolytes. Weir played the opening with Sammy Hagar and Jerry Harrison of the Talking Heads, came back a couple of nights later to sit in with Steve Kimock, and then disappeared from public view for the next six weeks.

  17

  Capitol

  “AFTER FORTY-FIVE years, I’m done touring,” Phil Lesh told the Marin IJ. Eating a “Phil’s Scramble” of egg whites, avocado, scallions, cheddar cheese, and tomatoes off the brunch menu on the porch of his new San Rafael club Terrapin Crossroads, a few weeks after the official March 2012 opening, Lesh surveyed his new domain and professed his satisfaction. “This all came together in six weeks,” he told the reporter, as Bob Dylan records played on the house sound system. “It’s astonishing after the debacle in Fairfax.”

  A sign outside with the dancing turtles from the Terrapin Station album cover could be seen from the freeway. The interior had been paneled in vintage barn wood and the walls were covered with photographs and memorabilia from the Dead. Upstairs was a quiet room full of overstuffed easy chairs and homey couches and downstairs was another lounge across from the bar. Bands played free shows on a small stage in the bar. The big shows took place in the Grate Room, the former ballroom adjacent to the main dining room, where the Lesh family could often be seen eating dinner together before a show.

  Lesh would make his way out of the dining room, shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries with his patrons. Jill Lesh was around the club nightly, overseeing details and running the staff. She could be capricious, once pulling Deadhead journalist Blair Jackson—who was more fan than critic—into her office at set break to berate him for not being more supportive of their efforts in the community. Although stung, Jackson, true to Deadhead form, returned to the hall to enjoy the second set. Club staff wore work shirts emblazoned with the stealie and slogan “Buckle Up, Kidz” from the graffiti the Leshes had first spied as an omen of the location’s suitability.

  Before the official opening, Lesh tried out both the club and a new rendition of Phil and Friends for one night in February before taking the band on weekend dates in Colorado. It was the first appearance of Phil and Friends since the formation of Furthur, a sign of Lesh’s growing discontent with Furthur. Soon after, Terrapin Crossroads announced a twelve-show run in March by Phil and Friends with tickets at $150 apiece ($300 VIP tickets were also available), setting off the inevitable protest squealing in Deadhead circles. The club’s own Web site agreed the ticket prices were “quite high.” However, the site continued, “the reality of bringing a major rock show to an intimate venue is that tickets will cost a few bucks more than usual. It costs a lot to put on a big show in a small space! Rest assured, though, as we get rolling there will be shows and ticket prices for all budgets. We don’t want to exclude anyone from what we’re building here.”

  Prices notwithstanding, demand for VIP tickets crashed the club’s computers as soon as tickets went on sale. The additional fee included food, drink, an exclusive tent, and a private after-show performance. All twelve shows sold out.

  Lesh used a revolving crew for the opening shows that included Phil and Friends veterans Jackie Greene and Jimmy Herring, mixed with Furthur players like Jeff Chimenti, John Kadlecik, Joe Russo, and others. Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes showed up. Larry Campbell and his wife,
Teresa Williams, came in for the second weekend. Lesh’s son Grahame played on every show. Bob Weir joined one night early in the run.

  In April, after a walloping fourteen-show East Coast tour by Furthur that included an eight-night run at New York’s Beacon Theatre, the band’s longest residency to date, and co-headlining the Wanee Festival in Florida with the Allman Brothers, Lesh presided over the reunion of The Q in four nights at Terrapin Crossroads. He was drawing from a pool of jam-minded younger musicians such as Jackie Greene’s pal Tim Bluhm of Mother Hips and his wife, Nicki Bluhm, or members of Ryan Adams’s band the Cardinals, or Railroad Earth. Lesh had discovered an array of willing participants in his experiments closer to the age of his son Grahame. Lesh himself played practically every night at the club during May and June, either in the four-hundred-seat Grate Room or in a free show at the smaller lounge.

  In May, he officially introduced what he called the “West Coast Ramble” and dedicated not merely the series of performances but his entire nightclub/restaurant operation to Levon Helm, who had died from cancer the previous month. In New York with Furthur in April, Lesh had phoned the hospital and spoke to Helm’s daughter Amy. At Terrapin, prior to performing a song-by-song rendition of the second album by the Band, Lesh recalled visiting and performing at Helm’s Midnight Ramble.

  “So much of our vision comes from there,” Lesh said, “an intimate setting, collaboration with different musicians, multi-generationally friendly. It’s safe to say that this place would not exist if not for Levon’s example and encouragement. I’d like to dedicate not just the show, or the next show, or everything we do here, but the whole place, to Levon Helm.”