by Joel Selvin
In the middle of the sonic inventions, Lesh moaned and warbled his way through “What’s Become of the Baby,” a strange, unlikely piece of dissonance from Aoxomoxoa in its live debut. “The Other One” and “Morning Dew,” two Fillmore-era standards, brought the show to a joyous, nostalgic close. Hornsby took the lead vocals on the encore, “Casey Jones,” the third song of the night from the Workingman’s Dead album. The fans poured out of the stadium in dazed delight. The entire night had been devoted exclusively to songs from the sixties—Grateful Dead 101, the introductory course. Bob Weir bounced off the stage, pumped up and psyched. “Boy, I sure missed those stadium crowds,” he said to Matt Busch as they descended the stairs.
But Weir stormed out of backstage almost immediately. Nobody knew where he was, including his wife. It turned out that he was furious over the stage volume. Later that night, Weir reached Lesh on the phone and angrily complained about how loud he had been playing. His voice was hoarse from screaming over the band and the old battle between them was reignited. Weir let him have it and Lesh agreed to turn down. Of course, that would never happen. Day two was hours away.
On Sunday, the next day, Roger McNamee accepted an offer of tickets from former NBA basketball star Bill Walton, possibly the best-known Deadhead, with more than eight hundred and fifty shows under his belt. McNamee, the tech investor who guided the Dead’s aborted foray into the Internet, had made his peace with the post-Garcia bands. As an experienced civilian Deadhead, he loved the music and the culture, but the scene in the audience was not the same as in Garcia’s day. Knowing that the band had not had much time to rehearse, he figured it was better to skip Fare Thee Well than be disappointed. McNamee had been playing a hundred concerts a year with his own band, Moonalice, which entertained Deadheads on a regular basis. He kept a lot of connections to the Dead scene—John Molo was his drummer, Barry Sless his lead guitarist, and Jerry’s friend Pete Sears played bass. Garcia’s equipment manager Steve Parish and several other members of the Dead’s crew worked for Moonalice. He had no plans to attend the Fare Thee Well shows until Walton called and insisted he come.
McNamee had no idea what to expect. He went early to scope the scene and found the parking lot merchants were enthusiastic but out of practice. Walking to the stadium, he started meeting people he knew from old Dead shows. Getting into the giant venue went like a breeze. He smoothly found his way to his seats in the crisp, clean white stadium and texted Walton, who came with passes and took him to the roped-off Friends and Family viewing section on the field in front of the soundboard and lighting console.
In the little compound, he saw most of the guitar players from Phil and Friends and Furthur. He said hello to Garcia’s widow, Mountain Girl, who was down from Oregon with her daughters. He got a high five from Sen. Al Franken, who hosted Dead concerts with his comic partner Tom Davis in the seventies when they were with Saturday Night Live. McNamee’s brother had flown out with his kids. He was having a ball and the music hadn’t even started. It was just like a Grateful Dead show, he thought.
Before the show, Kreutzmann climbed aboard a golf cart driven by his manager with a security guard on the back and tooled through the parking lots handing out packs of cigarette papers promoting his new book. Excited Deadheads waved and shouted at him, gladly accepting his gifts.
Word on the opening show had been good and the second show was markedly better. The band was improving, not just show by show, but almost song by song, the musicians playing together better at the end of the concert than the beginning. From the first note the second night, the band was looser, more confident, more swinging, less uptight. After concentrating the night before on the Dead’s earliest repertoire, opening with “Feel Like a Stranger” planted the band firmly in their eighties peak, reviving a frequent opening number from epic eighties Dead shows. Weir burned his way into the song and Anastasio answered him with a verve and commitment he had been all but entirely lacking the previous night. Weir took a slashing, sterling bottleneck guitar lead on “New Minglewood Blues,” and Hornsby handled vocals on “Brown Eyed Woman.”
Weir howled “Loose Lucy,” serious as a judge, growling over the bar-band riff, driving every line home as hard as he could. In his typical shorts and Birkenstocks, Weir acted like he was carrying the whole show on his back. “Loser” was a Grateful Dead song Hornsby felt enough affinity with to include routinely in his solo performances since his stint with the Dead in the early nineties (although he never performed it with the Dead) and he wrung out the elegance of the lyric with the band at Levi’s.
“Row Jimmy,” with its tricky extra two-beat phrase, fooled Anastasio every time, but Weir again poured himself into the song. The set hit critical mass with “Alabama Getaway,” a house-rocking rendition led by Anastasio on vocals. Weir slowed down the forlorn “Black Peter” to a death march and burrowed into the song with ferocity, picking a perfectly understated guitar solo into the first verse. He and Anastasio fired each other up in heated exchanges on the end of “Hell in a Bucket” to close the first set.
Opening the second set with “Mississippi Half-Step,” another frequent opening number during the eighties, plopped the band back into that rich era, Anastasio loose and agile on lead guitar, Lesh halting and uncertain on vocals. Weir’s “Wharf Rat” led to an extended jam—Hornsby thought the Ravelesque quality of his piano solo had been lost in the cavernous stadium—out of which the band emerged with “Eyes of the World,” which faltered only under Lesh’s vocals.
The band was cooking and dropped into a low groove for another Weir dirge beat on “He’s Gone,” Weir punching every syllable, a song originally written about one of the band’s managers (“steal your face right off your head”), a joyful celebration of his departure, but now inevitably seen as a mournful paean to Garcia. This emotional high point swiveled into the nightly drums feature. The previous night, Hart and Kreutzmann had experimented with manufactured sounds and beats they drew from both their interests in electronic dance music—Deadtronica—but tonight Hart brought his Planet Drum associate Sikiru Adepoju on the African hand drums and the percussion symphony went world beat.
The band broke out of the drums with “I Need a Miracle” into “Death Don’t Have No Mercy,” another relic from the psychedelic era that even longtime Deadheads like McNamee had never heard in concert before, and, finally, a jubilant “Sugar Magnolia.” To cap this Deadhead’s dream second set, the band returned to encore with “Brokedown Palace.”
McNamee wandered out of the stadium, buzzed, bedazzled, and ecstatic. He ran into Howard Cohen, Mickey Hart’s manager, and asked if there were any tickets available for Chicago. “Fuck, yeah,” said Cohen. McNamee got on his smart phone and quickly found hotel rooms in walking distance of Soldier Field. From what he just saw, he knew he needed to be there. And he knew Steve Parish also had to come.
The next stop was Fourth of July weekend in Chicago.
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Chicago
SIGNS HUNG from practically every bar, “Welcome Deadheads.” Next to Soldier Field, the Field Museum of Natural History got into the act, draping the entrance with three giant banners of dancing tyrannosaurs wearing crowns of roses by psychedelic poster artist Stanley Mouse, who co-created the original skull and roses for the Dead. Old concert tapes blared from portable players. Deadheads in costume were everywhere. A truck selling Grateful Dead merchandise rolled through the Loop, attracting crowds wherever it stopped. Hotel staffs dressed in Dead T-shirts. A local brewery produced an American Beauty Ale. Even the staid old Palmer House offered a special cocktail, the Deadhead, that mixed tequila, vodka, rum, and gin. Fare Thee Well hit town and Chicago rolled over and played Dead.
The chief attraction at “Everything Is Dead,” the Field Museum exhibit mounted for the occasion, was Tiger, one of the guitars made for Jerry Garcia by Doug Irwin. The guitar was bought anonymously at auction by Hyatt Hotels heir Dan Pritzker of Chicago, leader of the rock band Sonia Dada. In addition to other Dead me
morabilia, the Field featured a large display of decorated ticket envelopes from GDTS TOO in Stinson Beach. Jazz bands played Dead tunes in the museum atrium.
Nightclubs were packed with after-shows featuring acts with known Deadhead appeal like Railroad Earth, Karl Denson’s Tiny Universe, Afrobeat rockers Antibalas from Brooklyn, a New Orleans r&b jam band featuring Papa Mali and Ivan Neville. Jackie Greene and Steve Kimock did a Garcia tribute. Garcia’s mandolinist buddy David Grisman played a bluegrass brunch. Joan Osborne gave a matinee. Bars and restaurants all over town hosted pay-per-view screenings of the video feed from the sold-out concerts.
The Chicago Tribune embraced the event in its editorial pages. “Yes, it’s a big deal,” they said. On Friday morning before the first show, Peter Shapiro met with Mayor Rahm Emanuel and thanked His Honor for letting him bring the circus to town.
Hotels were bursting. Occupancy was up 120 percent from the Fourth of July the previous year and rates jumped 77 percent. Tickets were selling for astronomical prices on the secondary market, $1,500 for obstructed-view seats. VIP packages ran into the thousands. The New York Times noted the upscale nature of the event in an article headlined GRATEFUL DEAD FANS REPLACE VW VANS WITH JETS AND THE RITZ-CARLTON.
Among the most opinionated and entitled fans in rock music, some of the Deadheads raised objections to the massive commercial juggernaut. Stewart Sallo, publisher of the Boulder Weekly, wrote a passionate article for Huffington Post that received a lot of attention, denouncing the ticket sale system, complaining about choosing Chicago as the location and using Trey Anastasio on guitar. Wrote Sallo: “It’s worse than a pity—it’s an outright tragedy—that perhaps the most beloved band in history has put itself in a position to be remembered for participating in what may go down as the biggest money grab in music history.”
In characteristic openness, Shapiro reacted by locating Sallo’s cell phone number. They talked and emailed several times and, after consulting with Sallo and others, Shapiro used a different system to sell tickets to the Santa Clara shows. He literally bought out the Ticketmaster allotment and sold every ticket by lottery through GDTS. Sallo changed his tune. “I am convinced Peter Shapiro’s heart is in the right place,” he told the Washington Post, “and I don’t think you can expect these guys to work for free.”
The band had cancelled their original plans to fly out immediately following the last Santa Clara show. Instead the musicians and their parties travelled separately to Chicago and assembled for tech rehearsal and sound check on Thursday at Soldier Field. Although the band had agreed on a press blackout before the show, Kreutzmann did a few interviews for his book on the condition that he didn’t answer questions about Fare Thee Well, but of course he did. The bright green grassy field would not be covered for the show until the following morning and the band worked out for two hours in the fading afternoon light before an empty stadium. That night, the musicians kept to themselves, although if you looked quickly you could have caught Phil Lesh and his party having drinks in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton, band headquarters for the weekend.
On Friday, the stadium opened the lots at one o’clock in the afternoon, four hours earlier than they would for tailgating before a Bears game, after rejecting a petition signed by eleven thousand Deadheads asking to allow overnight camping. Shapiro installed tables for select nonprofits in what he called Participation Row, and other authorized vendors found key spots. Kreutzmann was furious to learn the artwork his associates planned to sell had been soaked by late-night automatic sprinklers inside their tent.
Next door, Jerry Garcia’s art dealers had erected a small wood building and readied to do land office business. As at Levi’s, the parking lot scene was hardly the robust carnival from days of yore, but people were meeting who hadn’t seen each other in years. Police averted their gaze as vendors doled out various cannabis edibles. One gentleman openly sold balloons filled with nitrous oxide from a tank.
All afternoon, Deadheads moved like a herd through the park to the stadium. At every downtown traffic light, a cluster waited to cross. Hippies stood all along the way holding up one finger for a “miracle” ticket. The fragrance of burning marijuana was everywhere. The tribe was gathering, coming together in the lakeshore park as they walked to the stadium past Mouse’s banners hanging on the front of the Field Museum. As joyful and loving as Santa Clara had been, the Chicago tribe went far beyond that. They had come from all over the country, taken over Chicago as an invading force for the weekend, and transformed the city for their own purposes.
At Soldier Field, security barely checked the crowd while they flooded into the refurbished old football stadium. Shapiro dressed personnel in tie-dye and, once again, handed out fifty-five thousand roses along with printed programs. More than three-quarters of the audience had traveled from out of state. While there were plenty of gray ponytails in the house, more than half the crowd wasn’t old enough to have seen Garcia play. The festive audience of more than seventy thousand broke the attendance record set by U2 in 2009.
Fare Thee Well had struck a chord. The concert attracted interest far beyond the commercial appeal of the surviving Dead members in any previous incarnation. Whatever convergence of synchronicity and thinking had transpired to create this enormous cultural moment, it had worked. If there is such a thing as a collective unconscious, it was certainly operating here. The air at Soldier Field was heavy with emotion, rich with consumer satisfaction, before one note of music had been played. These people had come to a historic occasion and they knew it. It was the passing of an era and they were not going to let it pass without them.
The VIP guests included Deadhead Sen. Al Franken, who had also attended Levi’s, and Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin. John Mayer knew he wouldn’t be invited to play, so he brought his girlfriend Katy Perry. The pop star couple attracted a lot of attention as unlikely backstagers since word about the new band they were going to call Dead & Company hadn’t really filtered out. Chicago homeboy Bill Murray was on hand, hanging out with the Los Angeles alt-rock singer-songwriter Jenny Lewis. The rock world was well represented with Perry Farrell of Jane’s Addiction, Jon Popper of Blues Traveler, Liz Phair, members of Phish, Disco Biscuits, Wilco, the National, moe. Actor Woody Harrelson and actress Chloe Sevigny attended, as did Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay, who owned Wolf, one of Garcia’s Doug Irwin guitars.
The Friends and Family section was crowded with old Dead family members. Mountain Girl was there with all three of her daughters, dropping a little acid for that old-time feeling. Second-generation Dead children were everywhere, not just the Garcia girls, but a passel of young adults who had grown up together backstage, many of them with children of their own. Somebody brought a jar containing Owsley Stanley’s ashes and placed it on the soundboard.
Backstage, once again, the dressing rooms were divided with Lesh on one side and the others in the opposite direction. Lesh’s accommodations were not only larger than the pipe- and drape-covered locker rooms the others used, but came with a private bathroom. A lengthy afternoon sound check also provided another undercover rehearsal, but sapped the musicians before the show. The mood backstage, while not grim, was businesslike. Weir toyed with his guitar quietly in the corner wearing his serious man-at-work face. Kreutzmann took a few minutes to pose for family photos and cut a birthday cake for his grandson, but otherwise stayed alone and solemn in his private sanctum.
The men from the Dead couldn’t escape the weight of the great expectations that awaited them. As the band mounted the stage, the four men knew this was where it all ends. All the struggles, all the heartbreak, all the broken alliances and mended fences no longer mattered. They did what they needed to do to get them to this point. The music would take them the rest of the way now.
They would start where they left off—singing “Box of Rain,” Lesh’s best-known song for the Dead, which ended the last Soldier Field concert exactly six days short of twenty years before. Whatever powerful emotional weight
that might have carried was destroyed almost as soon as Lesh opened his mouth to sing. All the Phil and Friends shows had not turned Lesh into a lead vocalist. The band charged into the song, but Lesh’s feeble, strained vocal couldn’t match the power of the band. In the record industry, they would say he couldn’t sing up to the tracks. He worked his way weakly through the song, hardly the striking, penetrating moment needed to open the show.
On “Jack Straw,” Weir took control and slowed the drive into the song down to a syrupy crawl. After some less successful passages, they brought the piece to a substantial finish. Anastasio’s first lead vocal, the surefire “Bertha,” got better almost line by line. Not only was this the first time he had ever sung it in public, he was doing it in front of a jam-packed football stadium. His guitar solo was more confident. By the end, he was winning everybody over, on the bandstand and off.
Up next, “Passenger” from the Terrapin Station album was never more than modest repertoire, even when the band played the song occasionally during the late seventies and early eighties, not some neglected gem, but the band found a nice groove to work. “The Wheel,” ostensibly an opportunity for Anastasio to stretch out and shine, would have foundered entirely except for Weir’s prodding but elastic rhythm guitar.
Weir led the band directly into a painfully slow, almost unsteady “Crazy Fingers.” Even though Anastasio delivered the scrupulous lead vocal, Weir was driving the train. Halfway through the first set at Chicago, the limitations of the band’s ability to re-create the authentic Grateful Dead experience without Garcia were already obvious, but that was also beside the point to everybody who was there.
Weir dug into “The Music Never Stopped” with the conviction of someone who was under a spell. He was possessed. Weir and Anastasio tangled their guitars to the close, driving the band to a fierce end of the first set.
