Fare Thee Well

by Joel Selvin

  Anastasio impressed everyone with his attitude; he proved he was a team player even under such grueling conditions. He behaved like a guest, not the alpha bandleader he was in Phish. On breaks, he fussed endlessly with his guitar tone and swapped out gear in consultation with his guitar tech. Relentlessly upbeat, Anastasio was the kind of person who looked people in the eyes when they spoke, quiet, gentle, and serious. But he was left largely to his own devices. Nobody was communicating with him. Keyboardist Chimenti, who had played in every post-Garcia band, made an effort to be especially helpful with Anastasio and, in fact, could often bring the whole band back to focus when they got lost.

  There was considerable debate over the stage plot. Weir wanted to stand beside Anastasio so they could more easily see what each other was doing. But Lesh insisted on holding down center stage. That meant the drummers had to endure the pounding volume of Lesh’s amplifier and a Plexiglas divider was positioned between the drummers to partly dampen the sound. Weir reluctantly agreed to the arrangement to keep things running smoothly. Lesh and Weir also agreed to compromise on their volume-versus-tempo argument.

  The tension was largely lost in the pressure of rehearsing this enormous amount of material in such a short time. Breaks were short and nobody hung around and socialized afterward. There wasn’t a lot of easy camaraderie. The others might make comments about Lesh among themselves, but they would say nothing in front of him. There was a lot of talk about reducing the number of lead vocals Lesh was giving to himself and letting Anastasio sing more, but little came of that. The old animosities may have lingered, but they went unspoken. At this highlight of their careers, they simply would rather let Lesh have his way than possibly ruin everything by tangling with him.

  Even more than Hart, Kreutzmann harbored strong feelings toward Lesh. They circled each other warily the first couple of days, but Lesh broke the ice after getting worked into a froth by the pounding beat Kreutzmann was laying down. At the end of the number, Lesh leaped toward Kreutzmann’s drum set and reached over for a congratulatory handshake over the kit. It was a small gesture and an awkward moment, but a genuine flush of enthusiasm from Lesh.

  At the sight of that exchange, Hart breathed deeply, confident now that they could pull this off.

  21

  Rainbow

  THERE WAS no explaining the rainbow. Some immediately thought it was artificial, created by the wizards of Obscura Digital, the group who designed the magnificent light shows for Fare Thee Well. But it turned out Obscura was not behind it. An artificial rainbow would have to be projected on something and this one was too high in the sky for that. Music industry trade magazine Billboard even reported the next day—incorrectly—that producers had paid $50,000 for the spectacle. But to everyone’s complete amazement, the rainbow proved to be an authentic phenomenon.

  The Grateful Dead had always been a beacon for unexplained phenomena. They all well remembered the Portland, Oregon, concert in June 1980 when nearby Mount St. Helens erupted during the band’s concert while they played—no lie—“Fire on the Mountain.” Concertgoers were showered in volcanic ash leaving the abruptly canceled show. Or the 1987 concert in Telluride, Colorado, during the Harmonic Convergence. The Dead’s cosmic consciousness invoked all kinds of strange and wondrous powers. But if the Deadheads needed a sign of validation to crown this convergence with an omen none could deny, they couldn’t have asked for a more startling and satisfying one than the massive, arching rainbow that encompassed the entire scene, a corona ringing the stadium, stage set, and band, its appearance perfectly timed at the climax of the first Fare Thee Well set as the reunited Dead turned the corner and headed for the barn playing “Viola Lee Blues.”

  The band had arrived at Levi’s Stadium outside Santa Clara on Friday afternoon to hold a two-hour sound check that, in addition to a much-needed technical rehearsal, provided another useful practice session for the band. The production had come together quite quickly and rather chaotically in the final few weeks. Longtime Grateful Dead lighting designer Candace Brightman was brought in somewhat late in the day to confer with Shapiro and his production specialists. She found plans in disarray, the chain of command obscure, and a morass of email communications—more than sixty-five a day—that only spread the confusion.

  The first proposed stage design came from Mike Tait of Tait Towers, the stage construction and design firm that built massive stage sets for Madonna, the Rolling Stones, and Michael Jackson. Tait envisioned a gigantic, elaborate stage that would have cost more than $1 million. Brightman didn’t like the stage design. She thought it was overdone, clumsy, and un–Grateful Dead–like. In spite of that, erroneous emails circulated saying that Brightman endorsed the design.

  She was bewildered by the lack of communication. There was no central organization and Brightman could never figure out who was in charge of what. She had been told by management she could not speak to any of the band members unless they were all present, which made knowing their wishes difficult. Word eventually was handed down from the band that they wanted an “industrial look” and Brightman went about a more rudimentary design that incorporated a simple proscenium decorated with roses and a large video screen. Obscura Digital, the high-tech outfit from San Francisco, created luminous, imaginative light projections for the proscenium. A computer model was used to build the stage, sound, and lights and nobody knew how it would work or what it would look like until it was constructed and plugged in at Levi’s the day before the first show.

  On their drive from Sebastopol where they lived to Levi’s Stadium for the Friday afternoon sound check, Mickey Hart and his wife and daughter stopped at the water’s edge in the Presidio in San Francisco to draw a deep breath and take a moment’s respite before heading into battle. His wife Caryl had to negotiate the time off from her job as park director of Sonoma County. The sun sparkled on the bay and the ocean breeze cooled the air, as the Harts took a break from the three-hour drive for a brief family interlude. Where they were going, such private exchanges were going to be scarce. They were leaving serenity behind.

  At sound check, Bob Weir stepped out of the late-afternoon shadows onto the giant stage at the end of the stadium and looked out at the empty field and grandstands yawning before him. It had been many years since the Dead commanded stadiums. He could not escape the feeling that what was about to occur was truly momentous. In many ways, his entire life had led to this place and this hour. More than the culmination of twenty years of struggle, a victory over immense adversity, an exultant triumph of spirit over flesh, this was the peak of a lifetime’s path.

  Preparing to oversee the storied songbook he so intimately helped to create with his lifelong colleagues for one final remarkable occasion, Weir knew their hard-won rapprochement had brokered this tenuous peace and paved the way for a once-in-a-lifetime experience. In that moment, he stood on top of all that had been accomplished, and he determined to feel it in every cell of his body.

  The stadium was eerily quiet. With the perimeter of stadium and parking lots surrounded by cyclone fencing and gates closed until the afternoon of the concert, the only people on the scene were worker bees buzzing around the hive. There were few hangers-on waiting in the wings, as stagehands busily finished preparing the production. No crowds of Deadheads, partying and partaking, camped out in the empty, quiet parking lots.

  As the sky turned orange and purple from the tie-dyed sunset, when the band finally assembled onstage and the first belches of electric guitar and eruptions of drums echoed from the stage, barely a soul paused to watch. The band cruised through “Althea” and “Brown Eyed Woman.” They practiced the next night’s opening selection, a one-two punch of “Truckin’” and “Uncle John’s Band.” They tried out “Cumberland Blues” and ran “St. Stephen” with the “William Tell” bridge into “The Eleven.” They went over the bridge a few times. The Lesh experimental piece “What’s Become of the Baby,” a studio track the Dead never performed live, was rehearsed and “Cream P
uff War,” a song from the band’s earliest days, was worked out several times.

  These songs all came straight from the Fillmore era and, for good measure, they trotted out the traditional set-closer of the day, “Turn on Your Lovelight,” the blues romp that was a specialty of the band’s first blues singer and keyboardist, the beloved Pigpen, who died at age twenty-seven in 1973. Weir had handled the song more than capably since 1981, when he reintroduced it to the band’s repertoire. They even tried “Alligator,” another number from the band’s early days the Dead dropped from their songbook in 1971. Clearly, the legacy would be deeply plumbed.

  A couple of intrepid Deadheads had sneaked into the stadium yard. In a twenty-first-century touch, they recorded the rehearsal from outside the stadium and posted it on the Internet. Shapiro quickly brought in the Phish security team, and they went nuts racing around the stadium trying to find the source of the broadcast and shut it down, but gave up when they realized it was coming from the parking structure across the street.

  On Saturday, the day of the show, with the perimeter fenced off and the lots not open until three in the afternoon, the customary “Shakedown Street” scene moved to a hotel parking lot a mile away. Still, when the fans began to trickle into the empty stadium from the official parking lots in the late afternoon, the crew couldn’t help but be struck by what they saw. As these hippies of all ages filed through the turnstiles and onto the field, all hands recognized immediately that this was no ordinary rock concert crowd. It was not simply that they came in colorful raiment, festive moods, and buzzing with anticipation—they did all that—but this crowd was instantly special. Nobody had seen anything like it before. Unlike other concertgoers, they were quiet, peaceful, happy. They radiated joy. Shapiro had colored roses handed out to the first forty-five thousand and that helped set the tone, but it was the Deadheads who brought the party, and that was clear before the band ever set foot onstage.

  In fact, it was the Deadheads who willed this concert into existence. Their collective, conscious expectation of a giant celebration in honor of the fiftieth anniversary created the event. The musicians themselves were hardly in a sentimental mood about the good ole Grateful Dead at the time, although they could not fail to notice the looming milestone. The mere fact that they were still alive was amazing enough. It was possible that the four living members had never been further apart in all their adult lives, but the will of the Deadheads pulled them together like an irresistible force. Between the power of the Deadheads and the allure of the music, the band encountered a complex siren song that even the most recalcitrant among them could not resist.

  Truth be told, the Deadheads also cast Trey Anastasio in the Garcia chair. All the other guitarists that the Dead had tried after Garcia, to one degree or another, had failed. Nobody could replace Garcia. Anastasio had barely played ten minutes with any of the Dead musicians and didn’t know the repertoire, but his status as the lead guitarist/vocalist/Garcia-like figure of the second generation’s leading jam band made him the only obvious, noncontroversial choice. In the history of a singular rock band who resolutely followed their own path and kept their own counsel, Fare Thee Well was the first time the Dead made decisions based on focus-group studies, even if they were collected through the ether.

  At Levi’s Stadium, the sheer size of the seventy-thousand-capacity crowd was staggering enough, but the unified identity of the people attending lent the proceedings the uncanny intimate, familial air of a high school graduation or church social more than a rock concert. Old friends came together. People ran into people they knew from past shows. For this one day, all these people would be friends who never met before, happily sharing this signal event that brought them together and gave them all common purpose. Stockbrokers who came in their Mercedes, street people who picked up a miracle ticket in the lots—everybody was a hippie for the day.

  Backstage was swarming with well-wishers, friends, and celebrities such as television’s Andy Cohen, Deadhead ex–Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Apple widow Lauren Jobs, rock star John Mayer, whose presence was a mystery to many, although the pending formation of a band between him and three of the core four qualified as one of the worst-kept secrets in Deadland. Mayer, who had hoped to sit in at the shows, had to be told that there would be no special guests on this engagement.

  The two camps—the Leshes and the other ones—remained sharply divided. The dressing rooms were a metaphor for how fractured the band had become. In the stadium, signs pointed to dressing rooms for Weir, Hart, and Kreutzmann in one direction and to the Lesh dressing room in the opposite direction.

  Walking the short stairs to the huge stage, flanked by VIP viewing areas, the men from the Dead were finally ascending a hill they had spent many long years trudging up. Epiphanies of self-discovery, tests and trials, long days adrift at sea—each man had both lost and found his true self, fought his own dragons, lashed himself to the mast, and ultimately proved his worth. This coming together had been written long before it happened, although it had been far from inevitable. These lost sailors would combine their tempest-tossed crafts for one more voyage. As they gazed out on a sea of tie-dye in the warm California afternoon sunlight, a wave of emotion rippled through the band.

  About to embark on a series of five concerts that would recapitulate and summarize a career shared with millions, the seven members of this band arrayed themselves behind their instruments and bobbled, tumbled, and stumbled their way into a soft, rolling groove that picked up steam as it clattered to its feet. Lesh bounced lightly on his heels with a face wreathed in grins, while Weir’s expression was set in a gaze of steely determination. Hart and Kreutzmann started out softly, Hart using brushes instead of sticks, slowly powering into the groove. Hornsby and Chimenti, on piano and organ, respectively, could barely be heard in the cacophonous sound mix. When the three vocalists stepped forward to sing the opening lines of Hunter’s autobiographical calling card for the band, “Truckin’,” the stadium erupted. When they hit the line “what a long, strange trip it’s been,” the place went nuts all over again.

  Following with “Uncle John’s Band” sent a warm, comforting signal to the Deadheads that Fare Thee Well would be a feast for the fans. When the band finally chugged to a stop, the song stretched out into a long, largely uneventful jam, the show had been running for a half-hour. With the next selection, “Alligator,” a psychedelic-era Pigpen specialty, the band began serious archaeology as Lesh stepped forward with a wobbly, froggy lead vocal.

  “Cumberland Blues” gave the band a brisk but supple groove to explore. Weir sunk into the song like a knife. Lesh grinned as they smeared the harmonies out of pitch. The next two songs were authentic antiques. “Born Cross-Eyed” was a track from the band’s second album, Anthem of the Sun, that the Dead played only a handful of times in 1968, and “Cream Puff War,” a song that Garcia always hated off the first album, hadn’t been performed since 1967.

  The first productive jam of the concert led to “Viola Lee Blues,” another staple from the ballroom days that had been abundantly reprised by Phil and Friends. Weir leaned hard into the song and the band burbled along a driving rhythm they took through various detours. Gray clouds now covered the sky and the stadium floor was dark, swept by spotlights. As the band neared the end of the lengthy jam, slowing into some quieter dynamics, the crowd inexplicably burst into cheers. The clouds had parted briefly, and, as a sign of the miracle that these concerts were, the storybook-perfect rainbow appeared in the sky above the eastern end of the stadium like a halo.

  The rainbow blazed its arc in the sky as all eyes in the stadium turned up. Unaware of the celestial event transpiring out of sight over their shoulders, the band played on. As the rainbow gradually melted back into the gray clouds, the jam slowly, deliberately disintegrated into a squall of squeaks and squawks and rolling tympani as the first set of Fare Thee Well came to its perfect ending.

  The lack of rehearsal showed. They had played plenty of bad notes a
nd missed more than a few vocal cues. Harmonies could be iffy. Anastasio was timid, almost uncertain, not bold and assertive, and his solos never caught fire. At times, he quickly handed off the lead. They might stay on the same riff over and over. Hornsby and Chimenti were tucked over on the side of the stage and almost entirely absent from the house sound mix. People probably forgot they were there and the few solos Hornsby took were lost in the din.

  But Weir stoked the fire, continually lighting up the inside of the sound with propulsive strokes on his guitar that found the right spaces. He was singing like a man determined to elevate the stadium single-handedly, sometimes obviously straining his voice. Lesh, cheery and upbeat, braided his thumping bass lines around the beat. It was the two drummers, however, who made it sound like the Grateful Dead. Like prizefighters who fought a busy, tough, but uncertain first round, the musicians retired to backstage for the set break.

  The second set dug even deeper into the psychedelic electro-blues Dead catalog, a revisit to the band’s sixties heyday when the Dead held forth at Winterland or Fillmore West until the morning sun was in the sky. “Cryptical Envelopment” led to “Dark Star,” long one of the Dead’s signature pieces they would go years without playing (although it was standard fare for Phil and Friends). A crushing “St. Stephen” and “The Eleven” gave way to Weir leading “Turn on Your Lovelight”—a sequence immortalized on the Live Dead album. Hart and Kreutzmann took over for a twenty-minute “Drums/Space” that featured a lot of Hart’s prerecorded sonifications triggered from the bandstand.