Fare Thee Well

by Joel Selvin

  Lesh opened the second set with “Mason’s Children,” a track left off Workingman’s Dead and performed by the band only a dozen or so times in 1969–1970 that had been a piece of archaeology extensively excavated by Phil and Friends, another number that hardly qualified as a lost classic. Anastasio handled “Scarlet Begonias,” his confidence clearly growing set by set, and Hornsby took the reggaefied “Fire on the Mountain,” the band jelling as they went into the evening’s drums/space segment.

  The space jam led to the complex Lesh psychedelic nugget “New Potato Caboose,” which the Dead stopped playing in 1969. The band dissolved into lengthy jamming through a surprisingly tepid “Playing in the Band,” where the musicians lost the plot going out too far in the zone, “Let It Grow,” with Weir overamping the vocals again, and into the eighties vintage beloved medley “Help On the Way/Slipknot/Franklin’s Tower.” Anastasio muttered “sorry” after fluffing some lyrics, but the band built toward a credible climax.

  Hornsby, who had not been well versed in the Dead’s sixties psychedelic catalog since the band largely avoided that material during his stint, felt right at home swimming in this stream. As he looked across the stage and experienced this palpable sense of power growing, watching everyone onstage, feeling himself rocking the house, he knew this was what he came for and took pause to cherish the moment. He turned and took in the vast crowd, swept with spotlights, dancing and weaving like a roiling sea, and was almost overwhelmed by the whole scene. He knew it would not come again anytime soon.

  Lesh returned for his donor rap. “Nobody up here had any idea what response we would get,” he told the crowd. “It is stunning to see and experience the love we have for each other.” The band encored with a supple “Ripple”—Weir allowing himself a satisfied smile as he slowed down the tempo even more heading into the final verse and chorus—and sent the crowd out into the warm Chicago night humming and buzzing. It may not have been the epic Grateful Dead performance, but the show was not without searing high points and rich emotionalism. Weir poured himself into the music and Lesh, at age seventy-five, showed incredible stamina, barreling through a four-hour show and two-hour sound check like a man half his age.

  Roger McNamee missed the first show in Chicago. His band Moonalice had been booked to play after the pay-per-view broadcast on Friday at Mill Valley’s Sweetwater, the club Weir helped create. He pulled together his party including Moonalice guitarist Barry Sless and equipment manager Steve Parish. Parish, whose son attended medical school in Chicago, agreed to go only reluctantly. At least he could visit his kid. They flew into Chicago on Saturday. On the flight, Parish, hardly a shrinking violet, complained loudly about his discomfort. He didn’t want to go. He was unhappy with the whole deal and convinced he would not be welcome.

  Cameron Sears also felt weird about attending. He had managed the Grateful Dead through a procession of stadium tours in the eighties and nineties and had not been part of the scene after getting kicked to the curb by Weir when he and Lesh started Furthur. Sears had taken a job as executive director of the Rex Foundation, the philanthropic concern founded and initially funded by the Dead, but surviving as an independent charity after Garcia’s death.

  Shapiro gave Rex a slot in Participation Row and Sears had manned the table at the two Santa Clara shows, which he had not enjoyed. It was too weird, standing outside the squeaky-clean, soulless stadium, handing out pamphlets, when he was accustomed to working backstage, supervising the crew, arranging a thousand details, and being in the center of the action. He had not been especially inspired by the music he heard, so Sears also went to Chicago without any high expectations.

  But Chicago turned out to be an entirely different experience for Sears. This was a special occasion beyond the scope of the Levi’s Stadium shows. He was thronged at his table by old friends he hadn’t seen in years. The happy crowd refreshed his recollection of how wonderful Deadheads could be and how powerful their sense of community truly was. He was bowled over and, watching the band, found the spirit of the crowd imbued the concert with such joy, the quality of the music no longer mattered. That night, he got on the phone to his wife, Cassidy, who was on vacation with their two teenage children in Massachusetts, and convinced her to book tickets and fly in for the last show on Sunday.

  The Fourth of July on a Saturday and a Grateful Dead concert in the park—all downtown Chicago had been turned into Deadtown, thrumming with the glow from the last night’s show. Some Deadhead picked up David Gans’s breakfast tab at a downtown restaurant because he recognized the broadcaster’s voice from his satellite radio Grateful Dead show. Gans and his business partner Gary Lambert were doing three-hour preview shows from a booth in the lot and color commentary at set break from the Chicago Bears broadcast booth above the fifty-yard line to accompany the live broadcast on Sirius XM, delayed one hour to preserve the video pay-per-view exclusivity. Gans and Lambert had been astonished at how much fun they had with what could have been a bothersome, boring task. Like everybody else, nothing prepared them for the overwhelming good feelings of the weekend.

  Everybody knew the circus was in town by the second show. An airplane circled downtown trailing a sign reading GRATEFUL FOREVER. The Direct TV blimp floated above the stadium, flashing dancing bears on its video display. For the second time, they broke the U2 attendance record at Soldier Field. After the brief sound check, Phil and Jill Lesh, like Kreutzmann at Santa Clara, took a golf cart out to tour the lots. Like visiting royalty, they took their star turn with Jill behind the wheel waving to the Deadheads, the exclusive Fare Thee Well photographer Jay Blakesberg capturing it all on video.

  Band members rarely ventured into the lots before. Someone took Weir on a quick ride through one of the lots during the nineties and the scene was burned into his brain. They largely averted their eyes from the grimy subculture beyond the gates, especially after the crowds outside the concert grew larger than those inside and caused enormous problems with various civic authorities. The band hated these mob scenes, but Shapiro had fashioned a safer, carefully filtered version of the old parking lots for Fare Thee Well, a modest, curated facsimile of the sprawling underground market that sprung up around Grateful Dead concerts.

  Neither Lesh nor any of the Dead would have ventured into those original dens of iniquity. In the intervening years, however, the musicians had grown more respectful of the genuine bond between the Deadheads and the band and come to better understand the nature of the community that grew around their often-insular enterprise. What was happening at Chicago was, for once, the band returning the respect showed them by the Deadheads. These forays by band members into the crowd at Fare Thee Well acknowledged the relationship from this new perspective. The mood in Chicago was just that contagious.

  In a sense, the psychedelic extravaganza of the previous night’s set list came from Lesh, just as the first night at Levi’s had been his. But tonight, as with the second show in Santa Clara, it was all Bobby Weir. Everybody’s fingerprints were on all the set lists, but, switching off as they had in Furthur, Weir and Lesh were the basic architects of the first four shows. The finale was a thoroughly contemplated collaboration, but the penultimate Saturday concert would be on Weir.

  He gave his traditional guitar bow to the audience and counted the band into a deliberate “Shakedown Street,” Weir singing hard over the funky rhythm, Anastasio burnishing the extended final chorus with tasty counterpoint run through an envelope filter, a piece of gear popularized by funk bassist Bootsy Collins but later adapted by Garcia for one of his signature sounds. Lesh came out of the gate thunderous and Weir was shouting over the band by the second verse. Given that it was the Fourth of July, playing “Liberty” next made perfect sense in the context, although the song is not especially patriotic. Taken from an old Robert Hunter solo album and reworked by Garcia, the number found its way into the band’s shows during the nineties and was scheduled for inclusion on the unfinished final album. Weir led the stomping version defiantly,
soul-shouting his way to the end. Anastasio carefully, gamely picked his way through “Standing on the Moon,” a piece that sorely missed the ethereal delicacy of Garcia.

  In relatively short order for this group, the band rattled off “Me and My Uncle,” “Tennessee Jed,” and “Cumberland Blues,” the first song to be repeated from the Santa Clara shows. Weir took out the bottleneck for a deathly slow blues, “Little Red Rooster,” but it was Chimenti on organ who took over the song with a rousing, full-throated solo that drew loud cheers. The crowd could be forgiven for failing to notice the band even had an organ player, considering the absence in the sound mix of both Chimenti and Hornsby on grand piano. They were tucked away onstage in the far corner like two little boys, quietly seeing what they could get away with.

  Stepping up for his first vocal, Lesh ambled awkwardly through “Friend of the Devil,” effectively undermining one of the band’s key songs. Weir can sing it like a master, but due to the politics of the Fare Thee Well process, Lesh ended up doing this crucial song in Chicago, despite efforts to limit the number of songs he sang. Lesh and his wife were alone in their appreciation of his vocal skills. The set slowed to a low point.

  Without waiting for Weir to count the band in, Anastasio kicked off “Deal,” at a decidedly jaunty tempo he learned from a Jerry Garcia Band version. Before Weir could do anything about it, he was off to the races. Anastasio made his way through the vocal well enough, but then lit up the instrumental break with a sprightly, dancing, silvery guitar solo. Hornsby took the second verse as the band continued to gallop along the first charging uptempo drive of the day. The stadium came to life.

  For the past three shows, Anastasio stayed in the shadows, following everybody else’s lead, but out of nowhere, without even thinking about it, he took the reins of this band and led them into a blasting, rocking, cathartic close to the first set. Although Weir managed to slow it down on the final chorus, it was too late. As the crowd cheered madly, Anastasio skipped offstage to catch up with Weir, slipped his arm over Weir’s shoulder as they walked backstage for the set break, and asked if everything was all right. “Cool,” said Weir.

  Lesh opened the second set with the slow, rolling groove of “Bird Song,” Hunter and Garcia’s song written after the death of Janis Joplin (“all I know is something like a bird within her sang…”), although Lesh changed the pronoun to the masculine. Anastasio riffed lightly over Weir’s jazzy chord inversions and Hornsby kept a steady stream of piano tinkling through the jam. An organ swirl from Chimenti—shades of Pigpen—announced “Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion),” a jaunty piece of long-lost Grateful Dead garage rock straight from the Summer of Love. The crowd leaped into action. The band charged through the song, Hornsby and Anastasio leading the vocal chorus, and then lost their way in a long, pointless jam.

  Weir slowed down the introduction to “Lost Sailor” while he was playing it and followed with one of his most mesmerizing vocal performances in the concerts so far. Going straight into “Saint of Circumstance,” Weir reprised the pairing of these two songs written by Weir with his lyricist John Perry Barlow common to Dead shows of the early eighties. Hornsby took the plodding “West L.A. Fadeaway.” The band picked up and worked over a riff they came up with during the previous night’s “Playing in the Band,” with Chimenti and Hornsby driving the song to a satisfying close on keyboards.

  Anastasio assayed “Foolish Heart,” a latter-era Hunter-Garcia gem from the Built to Last album, the group’s final studio album. They tucked a stinging, productive jam on the end—the band was now playing tight and confident, really swinging—that led into the space/jam portion of the program. Coming out of the cloud of sound, Weir tried to nudge his compatriots into “Stella Blue” a couple of times before they finally followed his lead. Singing in the original Garcia key, Weir struggled with one of the most poignant songs in the Dead songbook, slowing it down for maximum narrative effect. He put everything he had into each line, like a sculptor chiseling the song lyric by lyric.

  Of course, “One More Saturday Night” brought the set to a frothy, rollicking end. Lesh came back. “Fifty years ago, a good friend of mine made me an offer I couldn’t refuse,” he said, “and he gave me a life I couldn’t have imagined. What a long, strange trip it’s been.”

  Since it was not only Saturday night but the Fourth of July, the band returning to encore with “U.S. Blues” came as no surprise. Weir was game, but his voice was shredded from shouting all night over the powerful machine behind him. As the last great American rock band launched their last song of the night, outside on the Chicago skyline, red, white, and blue lights raced up and down the top of the Tribune Building in tribute. When the band left the stage, fireworks filled the night sky.

  23

  Finale

  CARYL HART was back in the hotel room with her husband after the Saturday night show, high and happy, when Jill Lesh called. They had largely avoided one another over the weekend after a brief, unpleasant encounter on the side of the stage, although Phil had been nothing but congenial with Mickey. Jill was calling Caryl as her husband’s representative to sternly explain that she would be taking an executive producer credit for the DVD of the concerts. Caryl was offended at her tone and presumption. She knew of no reason why Jill Lesh should receive a credit on the production. The conversation didn’t last long, but when Caryl got off the phone, she was no longer floating on the stratospheric experience of the night. She had firmly come back to earth.

  The Leshes didn’t suddenly become compliant and cooperative once they agreed to do these shows. Even after all their demands had been met, down to and including reading Kreutzmann’s manuscript, they continued to find issues that needed to be settled. They went over the budget carefully, trimming expenses wherever they could, maximizing revenue. There would be no complimentary tickets, eliminating the guest list that could run into the hundreds at certain Grateful Dead shows. Mountain Girl ordered a batch of tickets to make sure family members who couldn’t afford them would be covered. Jill was not satisfied with her husband’s Jumbotron time at the Levi’s shows, especially that there were not enough close-ups, and complained to the video director, demanding more camera time for Lesh.

  After Caryl Hart told her outraged husband what Jill said in her Saturday night call, word spread rapidly through the rest of the band. By the morning of the final concert, everybody was pissed off at the Leshes all over again.

  On Sunday morning, Steve Parish awoke and realized there was no way he could get out of going to the show. He had skipped the concert the day before, spending time with his son instead. He didn’t feel good about any of this, but he had accepted McNamee’s generous offer and felt obligated to his good friend. Since getting fired from Phil and Friends on the first tour, he had kept his distance from all the foolishness, although he was still lodged deeply in the heart of the Dead world. Parish was a true believer and has been since the day they picked him up off the sidewalk. Now he was dubious, conflicted, and unhappy—with himself and his circumstances.

  Parish had never been to a Grateful Dead concert—or any concert, for that matter—through the front door. He had never seen a box office or used a ticket. He had never sat in a seat in the audience. He had no idea what to expect or even what he would have to do and it only added to his discomfort.

  He left for the show early with McNamee and Sless, stepping out in the warm Chicago summer to walk through the park to the stadium. Instantly Deadheads recognized the big lummox. They approached him with respect, almost reverence, and talked with him like a cherished old friend. He wasn’t two blocks away from the hotel and every few steps another Deadhead would stop and greet him. Parish felt the love and it melted his defenses. By the time he reached the stadium, he was developing a new attitude when he ran into Cameron Sears, who was heading for the Rex Foundation booth. Sears immediately recognized Parish’s confusion and shepherded him through the box office to pick up his passes. As soon as they got inside, they encount
ered Mountain Girl and Caryl Hart, who took over from Sears and escorted an anxious Parish and his party backstage.

  Parish was still distressed when Robbie Taylor, Lesh’s stage manager, rushed to him as soon as he saw him backstage and embraced his old colleague. Parish was suddenly surrounded by the crew, who were all ecstatic to see him. Ram Rod was dead; Parish was their last link to the glory days of the Grateful Dead road crew when they were grizzled cowboys riding the range. His presence was a touchstone to the crew that brought the spirit of the crowd backstage. Taylor took him to a special chair, placed it in Parish’s customary spot in the wings, a few feet offstage, and there he sat like the honored dignitary he was. The tough old bastard, really a softie, was humbled by the reception.

  This would be the final show. Whatever these four men would go on to do after this, Fare Thee Well would stand. Lesh may have thought of these shows as one giant encore and the others may have seen the concerts as more of a portal to pass through, but in any case, this was the finale, the last fanfare, the closure that had been sought and denied for twenty years. For both the musicians and the fans.

  This was the greatest farewell in rock history since the Band said goodbye at The Last Waltz, and that concert took place before a mere five thousand people, not hundreds of thousands, not only in Chicago, but watching the pay-per-view video feed across the country. The entire nation took note of the final concert by the Grateful Dead, from the highest offices in the land on down. President Obama paid tribute in a statement released by the White House, which Shapiro reprinted in the program for the day’s concert.

  “Here’s to fifty years of the Grateful Dead, an iconic American band that embodies the creativity, passion and ability to bring people together that makes American music so great,” Obama wrote. “Enjoy this weekend’s celebration of your fans and legacy. And as Jerry would say, ‘Let there be songs to fill the air.’”