by Joel Selvin
Plagued with medical issues involving his throat, Mayer disappeared with his next album half-finished. He spent more than two years without singing in public. He relocated to Bozeman, Montana, and apparently underwent considerable self-examination. When he returned in April 2013 to induct the late bluesman Albert King into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Mayer brought his guitar to the podium and gave a short postdoctoral seminar on electric blues guitar styles, underscoring his emergence as a guitar-playing rock musician rather than a sulky pop singer.
Don Was produced Mayer’s comeback 2013 album, Paradise Valley, a sortie into folk rock inspired by the Laurel Canyon scene of the early seventies, CSN&Y, Joni Mitchell, etc. It was another plea to be taken more seriously. During the sessions for Paradise Valley, Mayer became obsessed with the Grateful Dead. He stumbled across “Althea” listening to the Internet music service Pandora and, captivated by Garcia’s guitar lick, followed the song down the entire Grateful Dead rabbit hole. He soon had downloaded every Dick’s Picks to his iPod and was compulsively studying the Dead’s music. Was, producer of Mayer’s album, had no idea the collaboration he was facilitating in his office when he called Mayer upstairs to meet his heroes.
Mayer, an intense and articulate young man, bubbled over. He went into a speech about how much he admired their music. He told them he came to the music fresh, with no cultural association (nobody would ever mistake Mayer for a hippie). He wanted them to understand how he saw their music on its own, free from the tie-dye and psychedelics. He said the songs took him places he never went before and now he visited every day. He might have gotten a little carried away. It sounded a bit like a sermon. “These are songs for people with homes who every so often don’t want those homes,” Mayer told them.
“Hey, you wanna do our PR?” said Weir.
After that meeting, Mayer invited Weir to be his guest during a stint as acting host of television’s The Late, Late Show in February. After the obligatory interview where Mayer explained that he converted to the Dead’s music at the height of his vocal cord problems (“I couldn’t even speak at the time and the music just found me”), the two picked up guitars and played “Althea,” the song that introduced Mayer to the Dead, and “Truckin’.” Mayer’s liquid guitar lines jelled with Weir’s crystalline chording. Weir was taken.
“There’s no way I’m not going to play music with that guy again,” he told Matt Busch as they left the television studio.
In March, Mayer went to TRI at Weir’s invitation for a week of jamming. Dead drummers Hart and Kreutzmann looked at the sessions as an opportunity for a sectional rehearsal in front of Fare Thee Well, since Lesh had decreed there would be only a minimum number of full band rehearsals. With Mike Gordon of Phish on bass and Mayer producer Don Was on keyboards, the band arrived ready to work out on the half-dozen Dead songs that Mayer came prepared to play.
Peter Shapiro was at TRI that morning. The overwhelming demand for the Soldier Field shows had blown everybody away. When tickets for the general public finally went on sale, Fare Thee Well broke the Internet. More than a half-million people were waiting online to buy tickets when Ticketmaster opened for business that morning. Ticketmaster sold out the more than two hundred thousand tickets in less than an hour. It was the biggest single one-day rock concert sale in the company’s history. They figured they could have sold six million tickets. Shapiro’s $2,200 VIP “Enhanced Experience” packages featuring floor seats, private lounge, and food and drink were snapped up instantly. More than 86 percent of the tickets were sold outside Illinois. The secondary market was sizzling. StubHub featured several sets of tickets to all three shows for $11,000 (a private suite was available for $20,000). The average resale price was more than $600. Shapiro was scrambling to meet the extraordinary demand and had convinced the band to consider two additional shows, prior to the Chicago shows as West Coast warmups. Shapiro, Matt Busch, and Aimee Kreutzmann drove down that morning to check out the new football stadium built by the San Francisco 49ers football team in Santa Clara County.
Located in the heart of Silicon Valley near the city of Mountain View, the billion-dollar Levi’s Stadium had only opened the previous season. No concerts had yet been held in the facility, but country star Kenny Chesney was booked into the stadium the coming May. Only a few miles from Palo Alto where the Grateful Dead first came together, the area had changed dramatically since those sleepy days. The tech industry that flowered in little cubbyholes around that part of the peninsula about the same time the Dead did had blossomed into America’s great new industry and radically transformed the surrounding area, partially fueled by the same psychedelic soup as the Grateful Dead. It was a long way from Magoo’s Pizza Parlor on El Camino Real in Menlo Park now. Shapiro and the party toured the spanking new stadium and decided they could do the shows there. When Busch phoned back to TRI to tell Weir they had cut the deal for the additional concerts, the band was already playing and he left word with Weir’s wife Natascha.
None of the musicians at TRI knew why they were there, but the music they were making together was convincing. Weir’s sonic marvel of a studio allowed them to explore the subtleties of their music at comfortable volumes and exquisite fidelity. By the end of the week, they had decided to form a band. On one hand, whatever plans they would make would have to wait until after the Fare Thee Well shows in July. On the other hand, if somehow the plans for the reunion faltered, a possible backup was now in place. While the band members had all agreed to Shapiro’s proposals, they had still not come together in person.
Drummer Kreutzmann and his wife Aimee had temporarily relocated to San Francisco early in the year. They took an apartment in the former industrial neighborhood turning hip, Dogpatch, a far cry from the north shore of Kauai. Kreutzmann’s book was coming out in May and the Fare Thee Well event would be in July. He wanted to play music. He had been locked up in Hawaii since 2012 working on the book with journalist Benjy Eisen, who was now serving as Kreutzmann’s manager. He had vowed not to play music until the book was done. Outside of one existing obligation in Belize and Costa Rica in January 2013 called “Jungle Jam,” for which he fielded a version of BK3, his Bill Kreutzmann Trio, he had been good to his word.
His days in Kauai could be bucolic. He lived with his wife in his rambling former bachelor pad, a pool house set on lush grounds, a couple of miles from where his wife maintained the organic farm she operated before they met. They were building a new home on a lot next to the farm. Kreutzmann liked to get up early and perform light chores around the place. They hired farmworkers for the hard work, but Kreutzmann enjoyed pitching in. When wild pigs became a problem, they set traps and ate boar for weeks. The farm ran a fruit stand and he took a particular interest in its operation. He also liked to go fishing or scuba diving off his boat, typical daily pursuits of life in the Hawaiian paradise, not to mention the occasional psychedelic camping trip. Although he wasn’t playing music while he worked on the book, he and Eisen would eat mushrooms and listen to old Dead tapes.
When RatDog had cancelled their tour after Weir’s crash the previous summer, an opportunity suddenly arose for Kreutzmann to play the Lockn’ Festival. Eisen put him together with keyboardist Aron Manger of the Disco Biscuits, an old friend of Eisen’s, and guitarist Tom Hamilton. Kreutzmann brought guitarist Steve Kimock, bassist Oteil Burbridge, and other guests, including Taj Mahal and Col. Bruce Hampton, for what they called the Lockn’ Step Allstars. The well-received set was lauded by reviewers as one of the highlights of the festival. Fresh from that triumph, with Manger and Hamilton on board and bassist Reed Mathis of jam band Tea Leaf Green, Kreutzmann started Billy and the Kids early the next year after landing in San Francisco and took the band on the road in April. He also paused for a weekend at New Orleans Jazz Fest in May with a couple of the Little Feat musicians in an impromptu outing they called Dead Feat. On top of all that, he spent two weeks on a book tour in May doing signings and media interviews for his freshly published memoir, Deal: My
Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams and Drugs with the Grateful Dead. Experienced touring musicians who meet the book tour are often flabbergasted by how much more exhausting it is than rock tours because, on the road with a rock band, you don’t have to get up early to do the morning TV talk shows. After more than two years of quiet isolation on the islands, Kreutzmann was busting out of his rock fever.
Kreutzmann was a primal man. His life in Hawaii was quasi-retirement, a blend of leisure and boredom only available to someone who could afford it. As much as he liked drumming, music was not his lifeblood and, outside of playing drums, there was not much he was driven to do. Life on Kauai could be idyllic, but he had no support system to rival what he left in Marin. Living on the most remote islands on the planet can be confining and depressing, but every day is paradise. Kreutzmann always liked to blur the line between play and work. After Garcia’s death, he had gone full tropo and outside of occasional patches of loneliness and isolation, the island lifestyle largely suited him. Only now was he itching for activity.
In May, all four men almost crossed paths at “Dear Jerry,” a Garcia commemorative concert held at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland. Early on it was decided that they would save any joint appearances for Fare Thee Well so Lesh opened the show as Phil Lesh & Communion (with his sons in the band) and left to catch an early flight. The four-and-a-half-hour all-star concert also featured New Orleans songwriter Allen Toussaint, Garcia bluegrass associate David Grisman, Jamaican reggae star Jimmy Cliff, country singer Eric Church, alt-rock princess Grace Potter, Garcia’s favorite East L.A. Mex-rockers Los Lobos, seventies rock hero Peter Frampton, and others. Without Lesh at the end of the show, the other three—Weir, Hart, and Kreutzmann—came together for “Touch of Grey” and the ensemble finale of “Ripple.” Early flight or not, Lesh still managed to extend his opening set to the point where the entire day’s schedule needed to be adjusted.
Hart had never slowed down, and Fare Thee Well only interrupted his steady stream of activities. He was immersed in consuming, passionate projects at all times. He had begun recording another album, continued to create his artwork, and done “Music and the Brain” work with neurophysicist Dr. Adam Gazzaley. He served on the boards of the National Recording Registry and the Exploratorium, a beloved San Francisco science museum. He was part drummer, part mystic, part swashbuckling Gandalf bravely forging ahead, a force of nature unto himself. He and Kreutzmann were the yin and yang of the beat; Kreutzmann the steady, powerful beat; and Hart the imaginative, irresistible color. They were drum brothers under the hood of the rhythm together, a symphony of percussion at the heart of the Grateful Dead.
Lesh didn’t appear to see it that way. In Furthur, he never replaced Jay Lane, indicating he didn’t feel the second drummer was necessary to interpret Grateful Dead material. He treated Hart and Kreutzmann with a certain disdain. He seemingly saw the drummers as disposable and made no attempt to disguise his contempt. They returned the disrespect. To the drummers, being left out of Furthur remained a wound that had not entirely healed. But that was hardly the beginning of the clash. This battle extended back through the years, but had only broken into the open when Hart made that “liver of a jerk” comment after Lesh’s transplant. After that, relations between the Leshes and the drummers had been at best tenuous, wary, and terse; at worst suspicious, combative, and hostile. A lot of bad blood had been spilled. Coming back together, even for this limited amount of time, was fraught with possible danger.
That morning in June, driving to the first day of rehearsals at the sound stage the band rented in San Rafael, Hart felt undeniable excitement, but he also experienced considerable anxiety. He had not been in the same room with Lesh for a number of years now. They could both still feel the animosity, even at a distance. So much of Lesh’s actions and statements had been hurtful, they cut Hart to the bone and he had struck back. The conflict was a deep heartache for Hart because Lesh had been Hart’s first friend in the band after Kreutzmann brought him in. He had lived in the Belvedere Street house in the Haight with Lesh, sleeping in a closet. Lesh turned him on to the album The Music of North India, a recording that changed Hart’s life and, subsequently, the music of the Grateful Dead. Hart scarred the album cover dripping wax from candles as he struggled to read the liner notes in his dark closet. He and Lesh had shared the rhythm and the great adventure that was the Grateful Dead all their adult lives. Underneath the anger and recriminations were broken hearts. Hart wondered what was waiting for him as he pulled his black Porsche into the studio parking lot.
32TEN Studio in San Rafael was a massive facility built by George Lucas’s production company, Industrial Light and Magic. They shot pieces of Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies there. TRI was too small for the full-scale production they were planning to mount. Their equipment had been loaded in and set up. Vocal rehearsals with Weir, Lesh, Anastasio, and Bruce Hornsby had been taking place the previous four days. The quartet worked out the harmonies using only acoustic guitars and Hornsby on piano, who could feel his keyboards in the intimate, low-key music they were making, helping shape the songs.
Lesh had insisted that he would only play one day of full band rehearsal for each show, a total of five days with the drummers. Considering Anastasio had to learn around one hundred songs, it seemed unnecessarily difficult and more rehearsals might have been indicated, but his bandmates had learned that Lesh would not negotiate. There had always been arguments about how much rehearsal was good for the band. Of course, only the Dead would worry about overrehearsing in the first place. But Weir, Hart, and Kreutzmann were under no illusions that that was Lesh’s reasoning on the Fare Thee Well rehearsals. They figured that he simply wanted to avoid spending that much time with them.
When Hart walked into the cavernous studio, his greatest fear materialized. Lesh was the only one who had arrived ahead of him and they were alone. The awkward moment passed quickly. Lesh was immediately cordial and open. They gave each other a hug and exchanged witticisms. Hart felt his doubts ease and sat down behind his drums.
For months, the musicians had been passing around a shared text of a list of songs they wanted to play. There was a second list of songs people didn’t want to play, but nothing was ever added to that list. At rehearsal, with limited time to process a massive songbook, many numbers were discarded simply because they were too complex and would eat up too much rehearsal time.
With more than one hundred songs to consider, Lesh had proposed arranging the concerts in a chronological retrospective. Set lists for all the shows were written, although the band would tinker with the selections up to the last minute. Lesh had been experimenting at Terrapin Crossroads with themed presentations concentrating on individual years from the Dead’s history, studying the repertoire, using his club as a laboratory for Fare Thee Well. Only the week before, John Mayer had sat in at Terrapin, re-creating two individual 1977 shows. Lesh knew he wanted to open the Soldier Field shows with “Box of Rain,” because that was the last song the Dead played at Soldier Field in 1995, and end the entire series of shows with “Attics of My Life.”
At the rehearsals, he took charge, strutting around like a rooster, ruling on other people’s ideas, snapping off terse orders to his equipment handlers. Lesh was clearly nervous—everyone was. He threw off tense vibes, which were intimidating and uncomfortable to both crew and musicians. The air was fraught with electricity. Hart grew frustrated tinkering with his drum sound and exploded, throwing a stick at his equipment guy. The atmosphere between Weir and Lesh could become charged. Weir balked at Lesh’s bullying, clearly still a sore spot from Furthur, but the touch-and-go moments came and went. There was too much work to be done for much disagreement and, for the most part, the musicians concentrated on the daunting enough tasks at hand.
Guitarist Anastasio had been thrown in the briar patch. He started learning the songs on his own almost immediately after accepting the assignment in January, but before long, he hired Broadway pianist Jef
f Tanski, who wrote charts for seventy songs and rehearsed daily with Anastasio in a Midtown Manhattan studio they locked out for the duration. He spent three days in March with Weir at his Stinson Beach place, jogging the beach together in the mornings and strumming arch-top guitars long into the night. Weir spent another few days with him in Marin in April and again Manhattan after the “Dear Jerry” concert in May. After that, Anastasio came to Marin County in May for a couple of days playing with Lesh, even sitting in one night at Terrapin Crossroads. Attending a barbecue given by Lesh was Anastasio’s first opportunity to witness the little brother/big brother dynamic between Lesh and Weir, even before he played with the two together. In between jams, the three of them sat around a table at Lesh’s and worked on the set lists for the shows.
The guitar parts were hard enough, but Anastasio had to practice his vocals without knowing which songs he would be assigned to sing lead or which harmony part he would be singing. Weir sang a lot of the old Garcia songs and Lesh used to cover the high notes on the harmonies, but now he sang lower. Some parts were in different registers. There was no way for him to know until they all came together for rehearsal.
Anastasio could not win. He had been given an impossible task, a job with failure built in. Not only did he have to learn and master a massive number of complicated songs that his bandmates all knew better than he did, he was standing in the place of Jerry Garcia, one of the most distinctive stylists to ever play an electric guitar, before some of the most critical and discriminating fans in rock. He would be faulted either way—if he sounded too much like Garcia or didn’t sound enough like Garcia. And as much homework as he had done, it was pure fantasy to think he could ever be adequately prepared with such an extensive and complicated songbook. He was one courageous musician.
