Fare Thee Well

by Joel Selvin

  Weir was headed for another crash. People around him saw it coming. He had been the subject of interventions many times. He had been in and out of rehab. He had tried experimental programs, but nothing stuck. After Furthur, he went back out too soon. The immense pressure of his relations with Lesh had driven him back to bad habits. He needed a break. He needed to get healthy again. He needed to stop drinking.

  Weir took it all in stride, showing up for rehearsal in a T-shirt that read REHAB IS FOR QUITTERS. He kept himself in shape with rigorous daily workouts, steam baths, and yoga. He ate a healthy diet. When drinking, however, he could grow opaque, less abundantly verbal. Ordinarily generous, supportive, and forgiving, under the influence he could be surly and short. “I don’t want to hear any more better ideas,” he snapped at the band one night.

  A teenager when he joined the band, Weir quickly adopted Jerry Garcia as a surrogate older brother and father figure. Garcia clearly helped shape Weir’s values. He learned music from Garcia, but he also absorbed Garcia’s character and, in his absence, Weir was often the sole remaining conscience of the Dead. Weir echoed Garcia’s passivity. They were both constitutionally incapable of confrontation. As a result, Weir could temporarily get lost in the crossfire, but he always followed his own path. He insisted on it. Weir didn’t admit mistakes or apologize. He only moved forward. Furthur had been traumatizing in the long run, but he emerged more than ever convinced of the enduring impact of the Dead’s work.

  He was now certain that the Grateful Dead’s enduring legacy was in the songs. They were only the messengers, and ultimately it was not about them. He longed for the connection he could only sporadically find in Furthur and, failing that, retreated to his local neighborhood band, RatDog.

  Weir was a musical savant. As the youngest member of the band, he long before gave up expecting to be taken seriously by his bandmates, but he learned how to get his points across. He was also dyslexic, and reading was a labor, but he always found ways to get the information he needed. He developed powerful nonverbal communication skills on the bandstand, part telepathy, part prestidigitation, part speaking in code. And when Weir bears down and puts his considerable skills to use as a vocalist, he can detail out a song with the kind of artistry found in the great country singers like Merle Haggard or Willie Nelson.

  Weir had become a modern-day troubadour—an ancient archetype certain to be recognized by Joseph Campbell, the myth expert and author of Hero with a Thousand Faces, the book on which film director George Lucas partially based his Star Wars trilogy. Campbell was one of dozens of unlikely people to stumble into the Dead camp. At Mickey Hart’s invitation, Campbell attended a Grateful Dead concert. Campbell told Hart he could tell “the band is tied at the heart. You are shaking hands with the ancients.” Campbell was guest of honor at a dinner party Hart threw at his home that Weir also attended.

  In April, Weir attended the premiere of a documentary about his life and career, The Other One, at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. The feel-good movie ended on an upbeat note of Weir the happy husband and father and his rediscovery of his own biological father, Jack Parber, all heartstring stuff for a straight-to-Internet release on Netflix. A younger generation of rock musicians from Sonic Youth, the National, and other groups testified that Weir was as much a legend as Garcia, only he was still alive. Shot more than a year before it was released, the film caught a happier, more carefree Weir than he was by the time the film came out.

  The film was a brief light in a dark time for Weir. His shoulder injury wouldn’t heal. He was back touring with RatDog. TRI was closed. Weir suspended his ambitious schedule of Webcasts, cut down the staff to almost nothing, and cut his losses. His business plan was ahead of its time, but the technological marvel and exquisite audio capabilities of the studio remained, if not entirely abandoned, at least neglected. The studio had drained his finances and RatDog was not going to earn the same kind of money Furthur did. Weir was lost and his only answer was to go back on the road and play music. This time, it wouldn’t work.

  In July, after a month on the road, RatDog pulled into Las Vegas for a show at the Palms Casino Resort. Weir told the band he didn’t feel well at sound check and was going back to his room. That night, a half-hour past showtime, when Weir didn’t show, a hotel official told the crowd that doctors had been checking on Weir, and he would not be able to perform that night. The spokesman offered refunds and added that since everybody was here, RatDog had volunteered to play without Weir. Drummer Jay Lane handled all the lead vocals, singing from lyrics on a music stand.

  The story would have held water if Deadheads hadn’t seen Weir drinking all afternoon at the hotel bar and posted photos of him on the Internet. His wife and manager flew in the next day. He finished the few dates remaining on the tour, went home, cancelled all his dates for the rest of the year—a huge financial loss—and, once again, disappeared from public view.

  At the bottom of all his problems was his bad back. The damage to his muscles and tendons had been years in the making. Spending his entire adult life standing up for hours in front of microphones and strumming heavy guitars, his rhomboid muscle was one long, gnarled strip of gristle. Playing music had become almost too painful to bear. By the end of the first set of the night, he would be in such pain that the entire second set would feel like playing with a knife in his back. Pain medication just sent him back to rehab. He needed to solve the problem or he could not continue.

  Weir delved seriously into his medical issues looking for a cure. For Weir to go six months without playing music in public—not dropping by the Sweetwater on the way home a single time—is evidence of how seriously he followed that path. After endless rounds of doctors, physical therapists, and trainers, he finally found an exercise regimen involving swinging heavy objects that proved effective therapy. He underwent surgery on his neck and had to train himself not to look down at his guitar while he played. For a while, he practiced blindfolded. He devoted himself to healing with a missionary zeal. With the next year’s fiftieth anniversary looming, he wanted to be ready for whatever was going to happen.

  In the meantime, wheels were turning in the music industry to capitalize on the coming anniversary of the Grateful Dead. In the twenty years since Garcia died, the myth of the Dead had only spread. Prep school students in the band’s eighties prime, heavy tape traders, were now running Wall Street firms. And a whole new generation of hippie spawn had embraced the ethos and adopted the mythology. A tidal wave of consumer demand could be envisioned. Every major player in the concert business caught the scent.

  In July, Dick Clark Productions, the Hollywood television production company run by the old host of American Bandstand, stepped forward with an offer to produce an all-star celebration of the Grateful Dead’s fiftieth anniversary in a concert to be held in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and filmed for a television special. The producers wanted to bring in special guests and create a network television–style extravaganza. Lady Gaga was mentioned as a possible guest star. The offer caught the band members by surprise and jarred management into starting to take the prospects seriously. Having gotten wind about the Dick Clark people looking into renting the park, San Francisco concert producer Gregg Perloff, a veteran of Bill Graham Presents—the firm that threw more Grateful Dead shows than anyone—also whipped up an offer to present the reunited band in Golden Gate Park. Perloff’s company, Another Planet Productions, presented the annual Outside Lands festival for as many as sixty thousand paying customers every year in the park.

  Coran Capshaw wanted to pay the band $3 million to reunite at his Bonnaroo Festival. Live Nation pitched a nationwide tour. The producers of the annual Coachella Festival envisioned a weekend event at their polo fields in the California desert. Without any business entity or any representatives for the Dead, nobody could even tell where to submit offers. Some were accepted by the band’s attorney at a law office in Culver City. Others were received by Jonathan Levine in Nashville, no longer offi
cially representing Lesh, but still the last Dead agent standing. There was a lot of interest, but, at this point, the band members weren’t even all speaking. All involved, however, could feel the will of the Deadheads.

  The fans knew nothing. These confidential maneuvers were happening behind the scenes. In November, an announcement posted on the Internet brought an end to Furthur, which Lesh had put on “hiatus” since 2013. With this post, he put the band out of its misery with certain finality. “We’ll all be keeping very busy over the foreseeable future, and it’s time to let Furthur take a bow,” the statement read. “We enjoyed the ride more than we can possibly express.” The death notice came while Lesh was in the middle of a ten-show run at the Capitol. With Weir still missing in action, the grim post sent a shiver through the Deadhead community, who were beginning to wonder about the pending anniversary and hoping for word of some celebration in the works.

  Around the same time, Hart and Kreutzmann went to dinner at Weir’s Mill Valley home specifically to talk about the fiftieth anniversary. They each came with their managers. Matt Busch had already held talks with Shapiro, who called wanting to know what Weir was thinking. The three bandmates and their associates brainstormed for several hours about the coming anniversary. They all wanted to do something. The question mark was Lesh.

  Weir was still in touch with Lesh—they had sung the National Anthem together at the Giants game in October and watched the game with each other in the stands as the Giants won—but he sagely declined to put himself in the middle. Hart and Kreutzmann, on the other hand, hadn’t spoken to Lesh in years and weren’t about to start now.

  They talked about what they thought it would take to convince Lesh to join them. They talked about what to do if he refused. They agreed that they only wanted one additional guitarist and talked about possible guitar players. Trey Anastasio of Phish was everybody’s first choice. The idea of using a rotating cast of guitarists came up and the names Kimock, Kadlecik, and Haynes were mentioned. Even with all the talk, they were so distant from their lifelong colleague Lesh, they had no idea whether he would join them or not. They parted ways that night having agreed they would do something, just not knowing exactly what.

  Peter Shapiro had the inside track. Lesh was going to be the key and the other offers were coming largely from people the Leshes didn’t know personally. Since his days at Wetlands, Shapiro had been working with all four members. He came from the parking lots, not the corporate music business. He understood the audience and he knew the band members. Shapiro had developed an especially good rapport with the Leshes. He had worked closely with them on the Capitol Theatre deal and, as they came east in October and November to play Phil and Friends shows for Shapiro at the Brooklyn Bowl and the Capitol, he worked on them. Initially, Jill Lesh was adamantly opposed to any reunion, but Shapiro was able to bring her around. With plentiful private time and comfortable surroundings to hold discussions, Shapiro could feel out the Leshes and craft a proposal he could feel confident would be accepted. His first plan involved multiple dates at Madison Square Garden in New York and Oakland Arena in Oakland.

  There were many issues facing Shapiro. Lesh would not tour, so the concert would have to take place in a single city. The economics worked against a festival setting like Golden Gate Park, where the expenses of setting up the concert site would eat into the revenue. Also, the Leshes did not want to play on the West Coast. They liked Chicago. Although no reasons were ever given, they refused to entertain other options.

  Among other demands, Lesh insisted on reading a manuscript copy of Kreutzmann’s upcoming autobiography before agreeing. Putting together the right backing ensemble—especially the guitar player—was crucial. The Grateful Dead had a long history of selling tickets independently, and that tradition would have to be preserved to some degree. At no time did the other band members speak directly to their estranged bandmate. Kreutzmann was urged to take up the issue of his book directly with Lesh, but he didn’t have Lesh’s email address. All the negotiations with the Leshes went on between them and Shapiro or Matt Busch. Weir’s affable and capable young manager had forged a smooth working relationship with Jill during their years with Furthur and all the communication between the two camps now went through those back channels.

  Shapiro was gradually able to expand the number of shows from one to two and, finally, three. The offer kept growing. There was considerable resistance from the rest of the band to the idea of Soldier Field in Chicago. The Grateful Dead had played the band’s final concert before Garcia died there twenty years earlier and that was not a good memory. Chicago had never been a special city for the Dead, but the location did allow people to travel from either coast with equal ease. After some discussion, the band members decided to go back and do it right this time.

  All matters were settled except one and arrangements were made for Lesh to read the manuscript of Kreutzmann’s book at an attorney’s office in Marin County. He was not allowed to bring his cell phone or any writing instruments. Lesh spent a couple of hours reviewing the book and the deal was on.

  On January 5, 2015, Trey Anastasio was in Miami recuperating from Phish’s annual New Year’s run when he received an email from Phil Lesh, officially inviting him to play with the band. Coran Capshaw was instrumental in convincing Anastasio to join the band. Even though he had been a fan since he was a teenager, Anastasio and Phish had always been scrupulous in avoiding comparisons with the Dead. Phish never covered any songs from the Dead’s repertoire. Anastasio recognized the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that had been dropped in his lap. He was not difficult to persuade. Jeff Chimenti and Bruce Hornsby were also added on keyboards.

  Ten days later, on January 16, a video of Jerry’s daughter Trixie Garcia was posted on the Internet announcing the three shows for July 2–4 at Soldier Field in Chicago. No band name was billed. The concerts were titled “Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years of the Grateful Dead.”

  “The great thing about this show happening at Soldier Field on the Fourth of July,” she said, “is because this is an amazing American rock band being celebrated on America’s birthday. The great things about these shows happening in Chicago, not only is it the central location for all Deadheads to come gather, but it’s also the last place the Grateful Dead played together in 1995. Being able to get everyone back together—the fans and the band members—for this special weekend is really a big deal.”

  Big deal indeed. It had been a big deal to pull together the disparate forces inside the band, and a bigger deal to overcome all the obstacles presented. But nobody had yet quite foreseen how big a deal it would become.

  20

  Rehearsal

  STINSON BEACH is a tiny beach town at the end of a harrowing drive down the cliffs above the Pacific Ocean in western Marin County. The town boasts a full-time population of 632, but is mostly home to vacation houses for well-heeled San Francisco residents a half-hour drive away. Jerry Garcia moved to this remote outpost with Mountain Girl and their girls in 1972. When the Dead set up the band’s original mail-order box office, management chose the post office in the oceanside hamlet. Since the eighties, Deadheads had been buying tickets from the Dead’s box office, GDTS TOO, at Box 456 in Stinson Beach. The small but experienced staff braced for an onslaught of orders after the announcement of Fare Thee Well and the decision to allow a portion of the tickets to be sold via the traditional Grateful Dead mail-order system. The band had insisted that the Deadheads be allowed to write in for tickets before releasing tickets to the general public, as they always had.

  This was no simple matter to negotiate. The stadium had an exclusive agreement with Ticketmaster, the corporate advance ticket agency, and also a deal with season ticket holders for the Chicago Bears football team to offer exclusive access to tickets to other events at the park. For the Dead, maintaining this long-standing direct connection with the fans was important and Shapiro had to jump through hoops to make it happen. Nobody was prepared for what occurred.<
br />
  An avalanche of mail buried the tiny post office. Inside a few days of the announcement on January 16, 2015, more than seventy thousand letters fell out of the sky onto their heads. As many as one-third were decorated with lavish artwork—it had always been the Deadheads’ theory that drawing pictures on the face of the envelope improved the chances of getting tickets and, in fact, it did. Each envelope contained a money order. More than $90 million was received, enough orders to pay for more than three hundred thousand tickets. The Chicago stadium held fifty-five thousand seats and the advance order was already about twice the number of tickets available.

  The explosion took everybody’s breath away. No concert in history had been the subject of this kind of advance sale. Nothing in the Grateful Dead’s experience remotely prepared their staff for the tsunami of orders. To give the ticket office time to deal with this unexpected torrent, Shapiro postponed the official sale date on Ticketmaster to late February. He rejiggered his seating map to make more $199 tickets available for the Dead ticket office. He expanded the stadium capacity to seventy thousand seats by opening seats all the way around, including behind the band. The inexperienced promoter, producing a show on a scale he had never previously attempted, was caught flat-footed with the hottest concert in rock history. Not that he was surprised.

  A week after the announcement, Weir and Hart were in Los Angeles for the music industry trade show NAMM, and Weir tagged along when Hart went to meet with Don Was, record producer and Capitol Records executive, about a possible deal for Hart’s thirty years of solo recordings at the Capitol Tower in Hollywood. Was had been working on a record with pop star John Mayer and knew of Mayer’s fascination with the Dead. Mayer happened to be downstairs in the basement recording studio and Was called him up to meet Weir and Hart.

  Mayer was a misunderstood pop star. He vaulted up the pop charts at age nineteen in 2002 with his first album, Room for Squares, a smooth, frankly commercial pop album that threw off several hit singles, including “Your Body Is a Wonderland,” which won a Grammy. Although success came easily to him, he remained, obviously, someone with something left to prove. His 2006 album, Continuum, was an acclaimed, popular bid to be taken more seriously as a musician, an aspiration Mayer managed to swiftly undermine with a series of gaffes, public romances turned ugly, and awkward interviews.