Fare Thee Well

by Joel Selvin

  If Lesh and Weir were building themselves clubhouses, they were also experimenting with building community, which had been the great lesson of the post-Garcia years. While the Sweetwater represented the return of a cherished Mill Valley institution and appealed to a broader cross-section of the community—which fit egalitarian Weir—the club certainly created a wide berth for the Deadheads. Lesh’s place was more Deadcentric—or, more specifically, Lesh-centric—and may have actually extended and promoted Dead culture. Most importantly, they both created spaces where community could develop.

  At his TRI Studios, Weir was also dealing with community, trying to harness the power of the Internet to support—or, at least, partly support—the space-age studio through regular pay-per-view concerts on the Web. He had remodeled the large building to his exact specifications. Longtime Dead engineer John Cutler and mad audio scientist John Meyer went to town building the most advanced studio in the world, capable of broadcasting heretofore impossible levels of video and audio quality on the Internet. The million-dollar recording console was obtained at a substantial accommodation price after Weir traded a private performance with the company. In addition to two other smaller studios, the main room was two thousand square feet and contained the miraculous Constellation sound system. This kind of technological experiment was in keeping with long-held Grateful Dead tradition. Almost alone among their peers, the Dead devoted large amounts of time and money to research and development. The band put their money where their sound equipment was. Grateful Dead audio innovations over the years have benefitted many people besides the Dead—from the design of large public address systems to tiny hearing aids. The band’s first resident audio wizard, Owsley Stanley, invented modern concert sound and monitor speakers for bands to hear themselves sing. The so-called Wall of Sound system the band developed in the early seventies was probably their most well-known experiment—a massive and complex network of speakers that took hundreds of man-hours to erect and take down. The Wall proved to be impractical to the extreme, cost a ton of money, and only was in operation a short time, but the Dead learned lessons from the experience that informed all their future thinking. The Dead never earned a penny from their efforts, only better sound. In the grand Grateful Dead audio research style, Weir knew TRI was a gamble on the future and he ran through all his own money before taking on partners. He never once penciled out the investment.

  In March, a free broadcast with the National, the Brooklyn-based alt-Americana band who brought along other musicians, introduced the TRI Webcasts. The resulting performance was exactly what Weir had in mind—a meeting of like-minded musicians, drawing on each other’s repertoires and styles to create something fresh in the moment. The National had requested “My Brother Esau,” a song Weir hadn’t played since 1987. He and lyricist John Barlow fiddled with the lyrics in the days before the show. Weir also sang a National song, “Daughter of the SoHo Riots.” The show ended with the entire studio audience standing around the musicians in the center of the room—there is no stage at TRI—while they sang around one microphone “Ripple,” “Uncle John’s Band,” and “Brokedown Palace.”

  Weir was again throwing himself into work. With Furthur increasingly dominated by the Leshes and tension between them growing louder every show, he sought other outlets. The week after the TRI Webcast with the National, he was back at Sweetwater sitting in with Lukas Nelson, son of Willie, and his band Promise of the Real. That weekend, he played two shows at the Fox Oakland with Bruce Hornsby, two solo sets capped by a duo appearance. Two days later, he left for the Furthur tour and stayed out after Furthur came home to do a round of solo dates on the East Coast. Three weeks later, he was back out doing nine dates in a trio with Chris Robinson and Jackie Greene.

  While Weir was doing all this work and Lesh spending most of his time in between Furthur tours at his Terrapin Crossroads, Mickey Hart was touring with his new Mickey Hart Band behind the release in April of a new album, Mysterium Tremendum, sizzling, smoldering slow, fat grooves of electrofunk that featured exquisite new Robert Hunter songs such as “Slow Joe Rain.” The carefully layered instrumental tracks contained large helpings of Hart’s sonifications from the astrophysicists—sound waves he converted using sophisticated algorithms from data collected from planets, stars, entire galaxies.

  At the same time Hart was working out with Deadhead astrophysicists, he came together with Dr. Adam Gazzaley of UCSF, a pioneer in bridging neuroscience and technology. The neuroscientist wired him with electrodes and used him as a guinea pig/research associate on serious explorations of the relationship between cognition and rhythm. With signals coming from wires attached to a cap Hart wore while he played drums, x-rays of his brain lit up with different colors as he drummed his way through the rhythms. He was the perfect lab rat. He had long understood the significance of the vibratory universe and had spent considerable time studying the chemical and physical ramifications of sound and music.

  “It’s the most exciting frontier in music in this century,” Hart told an interviewer.

  This is what music was meant to do, to be. It was medicinal at first with the shamanic traditions. Then it became entertainment, people paid money to see it performed. Then it became religion again with the church, different kinds of religious prayer. And now it’s becoming medicinal again, people are understanding its powers. Now science is going to understand it. The practitioners, we knew it. That was easy. You always come off a stage, if you play halfway decently, elated, with elevated consciousness. It’s elevating the consciousness, that’s what music does.

  If that wasn’t enough, Hart also commissioned a twenty-three-foot replica of the Golden Gate Bridge to be used in a performance on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the bridge in May. Twenty-five years before, when there had been big plans for celebrating the bridge’s fiftieth anniversary, Hart developed an idea to play the actual bridge like a giant wind harp and percussion instrument. He was going to plant tiny microphones on each of the span’s cables and amplify the signals. Those grand plans fell through at the last minute, but twenty-five years later, he adapted that vision—recording vibrations from the bridge and running the sound files through his computers to create “sonifications” of the bridge. Outside the Palace of Fine Arts, in the shadow of the bridge, backed by his band, Hart used those sonifications plucking and pounding on his mini–Golden Gate Bridge.

  As busy as he was, Hart was all but completely estranged from his erstwhile bandmates and business partners. “I had dinner with Bob a few weeks ago,” he told Rolling Stone in April. “We correspond.”

  Hart’s drumming brother Kreutzmann was also on the road that spring with his swampadelic band 7 Walkers. Playing a sturdy hybrid of Louisiana funk and Dead looseness, the group worked small clubs in the cities and hippie halls in the outlying areas. Guitarist Papa Mali brought an agreeable, laconic vocal style to Hunter’s evocative lyrics on songs such as “King Cotton Blues” or “Evangeline.” In concert, the band mixed Dead staples such as “Bertha” or “Deal” that were given a Gulf Coast rinse, a little New Orleans, a little Jamaica. The band was something of a gem, an authentic blend of Dead and Mardi Gras, but the small audience was not going to pay for Kreutzmann’s hillside home in Kauai.

  Kreutzmann didn’t disguise his contempt for the Lesh and Weir collaboration in interviews. “I haven’t really got much interest in them,” he told one reporter. “They sound just like the other bands out there doing it. What do you call those bands that copy other bands.… Anyways, I don’t feel they’re doing anything really new with their music.”

  Furthur had achieved world domination in Deadland. Lesh had marginalized the drummers, co-opted Weir, and crushed the other tribute bands. For all the band’s instant success, Furthur also came with the built-in conflicts that extended back to the Summer of Love and beyond. In some ways, the musical battle over tempo and volume was a simple extension of personal conflicts. On the other hand, the fight over creative issues went to the heart of
the personal relationships among these men. With improvisational music, the emotions between musicians will play out on a nonverbal level. They take their battles into the jams.

  For Weir and Lesh, there was a dichotomy that could never be solved because they viewed their work in such basically different ways. Weir was painting sound pictures in his audience’s mind and he was in no hurry for the images to evaporate. He wanted his parables to unspool like movies in the mind.

  Lesh, on the other hand, wanted to explore the possibilities of the repertoire, expand on the material, thrust it into new shapes by pushing, prodding, and pulling at the sonics. He sought visceral impact, which required driving tempos and loud volume, especially bass volume. He liked to feel the rumble. Lesh saw himself as a conductor leading an orchestra through repertoire. Interpretation was everything.

  These two approaches were bound to conflict, but they also represented a deep divide between the personalities involved that could not be reconciled any easier than the creative issues. The titans of the band did not want the same thing; friction was inevitable.

  Weir took action. He shifted his gear from the center of the stage plot to the far side, as far away from Lesh as he could get. He hated screaming over the bass when he was singing. Ostensibly the move was to lessen the roar and thunder of Lesh’s powerful bass amps, but the effect was also to isolate the two principals and keep all the hired hands between them as a buffer zone. It was a metaphor that signaled the state of the band.

  Weir’s friends openly worried about his health. Out of rehab again, he picked up where he left off. He could be uncharacteristically short-tempered, annoyed, and disgusted. Even so, he remained the most unpretentious rock star. He still played football every Saturday he could in the town’s public park with his long-standing team, the Tamalpais Chiefs. He was tiring of Furthur and he was squirming under Lesh’s thumb. He was growing even more disconnected and alienated from Lesh in the band, which only increased in the imbalance of power. But Weir was nonconfrontational to the extreme and his discontent only fueled more intoxication and resentment. Lesh was also growing tired of Furthur, Weir’s drinking and spacey intransigence, not to mention all the travel. Plus he was captivated by the tiny realm he and his wife had created at Terrapin Crossroads. On the heels of the summer Furthur tour in July, Lesh took a Phil and Friends that not only included Jackie Greene and Larry Campbell but his two sons, Grahame and Brian, to play two big music festivals and a Midnight Ramble in Woodstock. He was clearly losing interest in any kind of collaboration with his old bandmates.

  Furthur had taken off the runway so smoothly, from the uplifting Fox Oakland opening weekend through the low-key rehearsal shows at small halls around the Bay Area into full launch on East Coast tours. The Furthur Festival at Mountain Aire in that first year seemed like a glowing coronation. Furthur made deliberate efforts to connect to the Dead’s legacy like the Valentine’s Day 2010 concert at Barton Hall at Cornell University, returning to the scene of a 1977 Grateful Dead concert immortalized on one of the most highly traded tapes from the band’s history.

  The band was capable of toying playfully with the audience, for instance performing the Beatles album Abbey Road one song at a time over the first few shows of the spring 2011 East Coast tour to the delight of the Deadheads, who got the joke immediately. Or arranging a set list where the first letters of the songs would spell out a code—a trick they borrowed from Phish, who had spelled out the Phish song “Fuck Your Face” in a set list a couple of weeks before at Red Rocks. Two weeks later at Red Rocks, the Furthur set list spelled out “Steal Your Face.” For the concert on November 11, 2011—11-11-11—background vocalist Sunshine Becker wore a dress festooned with eleven lightning bolts made by a seamstress she knew from the lots (although she knew it would be considered out of bounds, as Jill strongly encouraged background singers to dress in all black). Over the course of four years, hundreds of shows on nineteen tours, the band had brought tens of thousands of people together to hear their music. Every concert was like a celebration. But the happy early days were long past.

  Lesh had enjoyed playing with Weir without the distraction of the Dead drummers, but now Weir was wearing on him, too. Weir likewise had retreated from the warm, brotherly feelings toward Lesh that informed the first several months of the enterprise and had now settled into a sullen acceptance of the Lesh regime, occasionally flashing rebellious rebukes. And drinking. “I’ve rarely known an interesting man who didn’t drink,” Weir liked to say. Lesh didn’t drink.

  It all came crashing down April 25, 2013, at the end of a nine-show run at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York, a near-hundred-year-old vaudeville house where, as a run-down movie theater, the Dead played eighteen memorable shows in 1970 and 1971. The band loved the sound of the room. With Furthur that night, Weir wobbled his way unsteadily onstage the first set, but his road crew swapped the set list for the second half, eliminating any Weir lead vocals. Early in the second set, it became apparent something was wrong. He blew the vocals to “Eyes of the World” and stumbled toward the amplifiers. He looked dazed and uncertain. Toward the end of the set, as the band was deep in “Unbroken Chain,” Weir looked so woozy, his road crew brought out a red plastic chair for him. He kicked the chair out of his way and staggered, continuing to play. He took a few uncertain steps, leaning precariously to his left, then suddenly fell over on his right side. He crashed to the stage like a bag of sand at the feet of guitarist Kadlecik, who had to step back out of the way.

  The two roadies rushed to their fallen boss, took off his guitar, and helped him to his feet. They planted him in the plastic chair and handed him back his guitar with the steely patience of two long-suffering loyal squires who had seen their knight toe the abyss many times in the past and attended this latest calamity without a shred of alarm. Lesh never dropped a beat, and hardly looked in Weir’s direction. He led the band through to the end of the song, Weir gamely strumming to some rhythm only he heard until his roadies pulled the plug to his amplifier. At the end of the song, the house lights went up and the band trudged off. Weir remained seated until his guys emerged and helped him off. Backstage, at his request, he was given a beer.

  Lesh and the band returned to the stage without Weir. Lesh told the crowd Weir had been to the doctor earlier in the day for a shoulder injury. His shoulder had been aggravated on the tour and he had been playing a special lightweight guitar already for the past few nights. The shoulder pain was chronic. So were the painkillers. Vicodin was a favorite. What felled Weir so dramatically was he accidently mistook a sleeping pill, the potent Ambien, for more painkillers. It knocked him crossways.

  “You could see Bob is having some problems,” Lesh told the crowd. “He hurt his shoulder and had to see the doctor. We’re going to finish the set for you.” Without Weir, the band did another few songs and returned for an encore of “Built to Last.”

  Trixie Garcia was at the Capitol that night to dedicate the bar, Garcia’s, to her father’s memory, but in the end her appearance was vastly overshadowed by the Weir debacle.

  Furthur immediately cancelled a big money headline appearance at the Bottlerock Festival in the Napa Valley over Memorial Day weekend (“Grateful Dead and Furthur co-founder Bob Weir is unable to perform in any capacity for the next several weeks,” said the band’s Web site). Weir typically treated the incident lightly. He wrote an email the next day to his friend Tim Flannery, third-base coach of the San Francisco Giants and amateur songwriter. “I’m doing fine,” Weir wrote, “just a bit too much work and especially travel. I put in more miles in the first six months than I normally do in a year. Taking some time off, which I haven’t done in 50 years.” He managed one last, fairly feeble performance with Furthur in Atlantic City two days after his embarrassing collapse had been broadcast on video clips across the Internet. After that, Weir, once again, disappeared from public view, and Lesh returned to performances at Terrapin Crossroads.

  18

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  PETER SHAPIRO spent two years negotiating a twenty-year lease on the historic Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York, which had lain essentially empty for a quarter-century. He poured more than $3 million into refurbishing the old movie palace and opened the hall for concerts in September 2012 for the first time since its glory years in the early seventies. Bob Dylan was his opening attraction. He had wanted to hold the opening on his fortieth birthday, but Dylan wasn’t available on that date and he had to move the launch to three days earlier. For Shapiro, the Capitol would be the new, palatial home court to his growing enterprise.

  Shapiro was the leading entrepreneur of jam-band nation. From the beginning of his career, his enthusiasm and ever-present optimism allowed him to plunge ahead fearlessly in enterprises he knew nothing about. Having never operated any kind of bar or nightclub in his young life, twenty-four-year-old Shapiro started out by taking over the operation in 1996 of the Wetlands Preserve, a Deadcentric rock club in lower Manhattan. Shapiro convinced the original owner, a hippie visionary who ran the club with an environmental and social justice angle, that he knew enough about the scene to keep the club’s unique program running. Ignoring other big money offers, the hippie sold him the lease for “basically nothing,” according to Shapiro.

  After closing the club in 2001, unable to afford the rising Tribeca rents, Shapiro concentrated on his work as an independent concert producer who presented everything from the Green Apple Music Festival on Earth Day to concerts for President Obama’s first inauguration to his annual jam-band award show, the Jammys. In 2009, he opened the Brooklyn Bowl, which quickly became the nerve center of the entire jam-band movement. As it grew to be phenomenally successful, Shapiro opened subsequent branches in London and Las Vegas. He also bought Relix magazine, the mouthpiece of the scene. Shapiro was building a jam empire.