by Joel Selvin
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the shows in Chicago was that the “seventh member” showed up. In the early days of the Grateful Dead, the band would speak of that intangible extra ingredient that made a show great as “the seventh member.” Sometimes he would be there at the beginning of a show and leave. Sometimes he would show up in the middle and stay. Sometimes he wouldn’t come. He could not be depended on in any way, but when he was there, the gigs were great. The seventh member always brought the party.
At Levi’s Stadium, the seventh member flitted in and out of the shows. At Chicago, he made longer appearances in the first two shows, but never settled into his chair. On the final show, he played several numbers with the band during the first set and decided to stay for the rest of the night. The result was that the last set of the last show was on fire, infused with the secret ingredient that was the primary drug of the Deadheads.
Whatever absolution the Fare Thee Well band needed, they more than earned in the tenth set of the five-concert run. With that final pinnacle, they had done what they came to do. And, as only the Grateful Dead could do, they chose to honor their legacy with this extraordinary panoramic retrospective of their glorious career—ten sets, eighty-eight songs (a mere two repeats), more than seventeen hours onstage. They could have played Wagner’s complete Ring Cycle in that time.
The grand ambition it required is something that goes to the heart of the Grateful Dead—the band that went to Egypt to play the Great Pyramids, the band that built the Wall of Sound, the band whose manager once posted plans for a flying amphitheater on his office wall. Any other rock band would have simply put together one set of greatest hits and played it five times. But the Grateful Dead were always more than just another rock band.
All of this was nothing short of a miracle, a miracle worked in no small part by Peter Shapiro, a true believer innocent enough to think he could make this happen. Shapiro never lost touch with his fan side. He was one of the crowd and ably represented their audience’s point of view to band members. In the entire music business, only Shapiro was positioned to be able to navigate the thorny, twisting, slippery back channels of the Grateful Dead world to bring the fractured group back together just long enough to play these concerts. He also alone knew how successful this reunion would be.
Even more so than the band, Shapiro understood the vast musical and social subculture based on Grateful Dead music that had developed over the years since Garcia’s death. Fare Thee Well certainly qualified as a peak, but Shapiro’s vision extended into the future. Immediately after the concerts, he announced appearances by all four of the Dead men at his Lockn’ Festival in September. Phil and Friends would be joined by guitarist Carlos Santana. Kreutzmann would bring his latest ensemble, Billy and the Kids, and Hart would perform three times, including two late-night concerts in the woods with Steve Kimock. Bob Weir would serve as special guest, sitting in all day with whoever would have him, and many would. Shapiro was in the Grateful Dead business and business was never better.
In August, Weir, Hart, Kreutzmann, and John Mayer announced the Halloween debut performance by Dead & Company in Madison Square Garden (ironically, Lesh would be playing for Shapiro an hour’s drive away at the Capitol Theatre). Oteil Burbridge from the Allman Brothers would play bass and Chimenti would handle keyboards.
Fare Thee Well’s impact on everyone involved—the boys of the band, the community of Deadheads, the culture at large, and even their own music—was multilayered and profound. The event was freighted with so much meaning to so many people for so many reasons, resonating far beyond the parochial world of the Deadheads.
In some ways, Fare Thee Well was an echo of Woodstock forty-six years later, a fresh reminder that the ideals represented there would not disappear, no matter how much they had been marginalized, dissolved, derided, and plain laughed off. The same spirit attended both events. The crowds came together in peace and love for the music and understood that, for however long they would be together, they had become a community.
In the twenty-first century, the Grateful Dead were one of the last remnants, the final rallying points, of sixties idealism, long thought to have vanished. The impressive display of community made clear that whatever it was that people called the movement, the underground, the counterculture, Woodstock Nation, or any other name, those values had not only never vanished, they now permeated all ranks and ages of American society. Yet they still stood outside the mainstream, an alternative to the evanescent pop and r&b conventions of the day. The flame was not extinguished. It had many keepers, a silent tribe whose clarion call to assemble one last time would be met with a gathering of Woodstockian proportions.
They came to Chicago to celebrate the music of the Grateful Dead. But they also came for a ceremony, both jubilant and solemn, presided over by the living members of the band. They knew they were all called together to lay the Grateful Dead to rest. Whatever that was onstage playing the music at Fare Thee Well, it was not the Grateful Dead, only an earnest facsimile. To the audience, however, it was enough, symbolic as it was of all they had shared for fifty years, and they combined with the musicians to perform their tribal rites that both acknowledged and reaffirmed the meaning of their community. Perhaps they understood innately that this was also a symbolic gesture of passing the torch.
Yet it was anything but the end of an era—the era had ended twenty years before. It was more specifically the end of the Grateful Dead as imagined by Jerry Garcia. Whatever these musicians would go on to do with their work, they had loosened themselves from the grip of the Grateful Dead and its legacy. They had finished what they started fifty years before.
With this final punctuation, the legacy was securely defined, illuminated, and, now, handed off to the future. This often brilliant, always evocative reinterpretation of the Dead songbook by the four original members, with the potent symbolism provided by Trey Anastasio from Phish, the leading second-generation Dead acolytes, clearly showed that they left the inheritance in capable hands. They had made their point. The word had been spread. The music would live on.
Early in his post-Garcia education, Lesh figured out that the band’s music could have a separate life as repertoire, musical pieces open to reinterpretation, but he missed the importance of the texts. Weir, who saw the songs as the band’s body of work, emphasized the texts, which detail the spiritual and philosophic ideas that truly linked the community. In the end, both approaches served to expand and extend the Dead’s music into life after Garcia, even if they were bound to conflict.
The Fourth of July was the perfect date for this celebration. In Hunter’s lyrics, he paints a history of a different America. He tells stories—gothic, weird, and whimsical—that evoke the dark underbelly of Mark Twain’s America, a grotesque cartoon riddled with piercing truth, a prayer for the wicked and the ridiculous, a call for unity, combined always with themes of freedom and adventure. The blend of Hunter’s unique and detailed tales of sin and redemption with Garcia’s ability to harness the vast abundance of twentieth-century American music—gospel, hillbilly, rhythm and blues, jazz, bluegrass—into one compelling musical landscape is what made the Grateful Dead, alongside the Beach Boys, the greatest of American rock bands.
All four heroes—Weir, Lesh, Kreutzmann, and Hart—found themselves on the long road to Chicago before they knew they were going there. Without Garcia, they all spent too many lost years trying to find their way. The triumph was that, in the end, they did. Fare Thee Well freed them. They found closure to their personal and creative lives. They could now put the Grateful Dead away. They lived up to their pact with the Deadheads. They could live for the first time without the Grateful Dead beast hanging over their heads, only trailing behind them.
So much had changed in fifty years, starting with the scale on which the band operated. They went from a constituency drawn from a small San Francisco neighborhood to a global audience. From the $3 tickets at the Fillmore and Avalon, the band had graduated to lux
ury boxes and VIP suites costing thousands of dollars in Chicago. The men themselves had grown from young, intrepid innocents to wise tribal elders. The earth had cooled considerably.
Mickey Hart likes to think of the Grateful Dead as a hierophany, a revelation of the sacred, a manifestation of the divine, something that looked like a rock band but was actually something wholly different. Joseph Campbell had called the Dead “an electric gamelan orchestra.” The members of the band used to refer to what they did as “diving for pearls.” Born of the rich imagination and clear mission of Jerry Garcia, an artist determined to work in a collaborative mode, the other members had followed his lead so completely that after his death they were left scrambling to figure out what it really was.
Each led his own hero’s journey on wildly divergent paths to, finally, arrive at the same place at the same time. It was a journey of self-knowledge; they not only had to learn who they were, they had to learn who the Grateful Dead was.
In the end, everybody won. Everybody got what they wanted. Lesh could go home, weary from battle but satisfied with the final encore, and rest easy doing occasional Capitol Theatre gigs and staying busy at Terrapin Crossroads. At age seventy-five, surrounded by family more than friends, he could now hang up his sword and suit of armor and put his adversaries behind him, while enjoying one of the most active retirements a musician could imagine. He earned his respite. Terrapin remains his great gift to the community. In its short time, thousands of shows have been presented, dozens of bands have blossomed, nurturing a wellspring of Dead music for years to come.
Hart went back to both active touring with Dead & Company and his various projects in his typical whirlwind way of creating mania and magic: recording imaginative, complex percussion pieces at his home studio on his Sonoma ranch, studying neuroscience, and serving on nonprofit boards. The mystical drummer does yoga every morning in his Japanese garden and drives everybody who works for him crazy with his unflagging energy.
Kreutzmann returned to Hawaii. Dead & Company tours provided him enough drum time. He needed to restore himself with the long, lazy tropical days in Hawaii, snorkeling, surfing, fishing. His book brought Kreutzmann out of the shadows, and his pride in the Grateful Dead is unquestioned, even if he remains the most aloof of all four from the legacy. His primal needs are less complex, and the once-brutish, angry young man has mellowed into an acerbic but avuncular white-bearded grandfather.
Weir the troubadour dove into Dead & Company and picked up his schedule of guest appearances, dusting off his solo act, appearing regularly at benefits at the Sweetwater and elsewhere. With Fare Thee Well in his rearview mirror, he was free to take the repertoire and be himself. He will stay on the road the rest of his life, spinning tales with his guitar. He found his destiny long before the final Fare Thee Well—merely another adventure in an adventure-filled life—and as always, he will be on his way to the next project.
And, for all the sweat, goofs, blown cues, and impossible tasks, Trey Anastasio got what he came for as much as anybody. He lived out the fantasy of a lifetime. He belonged to the Grateful Dead. The night after the first concert at Levi’s Stadium, the most tense and intimidating moment of his career, Anastasio sent his wife a text message: “That was the most fun I’ve ever had playing music in my whole life.”
Certainly, Peter Shapiro got what he wanted. His concert and all the ancillaries couldn’t have been more successful. But for Shapiro, the victory was much larger than box-office grosses. He became a made man, the single most important concert producer of his day, “Bill Graham without the yelling,” said one Dead associate. He picked his way through a minefield to reach his goals and, in the end, after a series of historic concerts, he could rest gratified that he had done what he set out to do as well as he could have. Shapiro may not have been there when the Dead started, but he was there to help put them away and they couldn’t have done it in grander, more extravagant style.
But it was the Deadheads who won the biggest prizes. In a stunning statement of joyful unity, the Deadheads proclaimed their independence over the Fourth of July weekend in Chicago. They celebrated an entire nation of Deadheads and saluted the core four and their associates as the spiritual leaders of a movement they clearly had no intention of abandoning.
In fact, over the twenty years since Garcia died, the band’s impact and influence—and their audience—may have grown to an even greater magnitude than when the Dead existed. It is an astonishing phenomenon and this would never happen to, say, the J. Geils Band, or even the Rolling Stones without Jagger. But the Grateful Dead, in spite of everything, continued to have momentum with the combination of a staggering number of great songs the band added to the catalog over the years and the extraordinary revolutionary concepts about the possibilities of a rock band.
The Deadheads won, not only because they summoned forth these concerts and willed them into existence, but because now they were the band. They brought the spirit; the musicians only played the songs. It was the Deadheads who filled the stadiums with the kind of joy they so well remembered and turned the shows into the harmonic convergence they were. Whatever had been lost had been recovered. The truth was what Mickey Hart said in an interview way back at the beginning of this journey, fresh after Garcia’s death: the Deadheads are the Grateful Dead now.
These people wanted to go to one more Grateful Dead concert. And they did. It did not matter who was on the bandstand or what they played, Fare Thee Well was a genuine Grateful Dead concert. The last one.
Furthur Festival—Bruce Hornsby, Bobby Weir, Jorma Kaukonen, and friends, June 1996 (Photo by Susana Millman)
David Gans and Phil Lesh with the Broken Angels, December 1997 (Photo by Susana Millman)
RatDog: Jay Lane, Rob Wasserman, Johnnie Johnson, Matt Kelly, Bob Weir, 1997 (Photo by Susana Millman)
Stan Franks, Phil Lesh—Phil and Friends at Warfield Theatre, February 1998 (Photo by Susana Millman)
The Other Ones—Dave Ellis, John Molo, Bruce Hornsby, Phil Lesh, Bob Weir; seated, Mickey Hart, Mark Karan, Steve Kimock, 1998 (Photo by Susana Millman)
Artist’s rendering of Terrapin Station exterior and lobby (Environmental Design Archive, UC Berkeley)
Bob Weir wedding; Bob Weir, Natascha Muenter, Phil and Jill Lesh, Mickey and Caryl Hart, July 1999 (Photo by Susana Millman)
The Other Ones—Mark Karan, Steve Kimock, Bob Weir, Mickey Hart; seated, Alphonso Johnson, Billy Kreutzmann, Bruce Hornsby, 2000 (Photo by Susana Millman)
Phil Lesh, 60th birthday party, Henry J. Kaiser Auditorium, Oakland, March 2000 (Photo by Susana Millman)
Harry Potter float (“Unity is possible”), New Year’s Eve, Henry J. Kaiser Auditorium, Oakland, 2001 (Photo by Susana Millman)
Alpine Valley, the core four back together—Billy Kreutzmann, Phil Lesh, Bobby Weir, Mickey Hart, August 2002 (Photo by Susana Millman)
The Dead again—Jeff Chimenti, Rob Barraco (keyboards), Phil Lesh (bass), Joan Osborne (vocals), Billy Kreutzmann (drums), Bob Weir (guitar), Mickey Hart (drums), Jimmy Herring (guitar), Warren Haynes (guitar), September 2003. Sitting in was violinist Michael Kang of String Cheese Incident. (Photo by Susana Millman)
Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Mickey Hart, press conference backstage Warfield Theatre night of the California primary, February 2008 (Photo by Susana Millman)
The final show by The Dead at Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View, May 2009; Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Billy Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart, Warren Haynes (Photo by Bob Minkin)
Mickey Hart’s brain on rhythm, 2014 (Photo by Susana Millman)
7 Walkers: Papa Mali, George Porter, Matt Hubbard, Billy Kreutzmann, 2012 (Photo by Michael Weintrob)
Furthur: Phil Lesh, Bob Weir at Coney Island, Brooklyn, 2010 (Photo by Bob Minkin)
Phil Lesh in the Grate Room of Terrapin Crossroads, San Rafael, 2016 (Photo by Bob Minkin)
Bob Weir and the National at TRI Studios, Terre Linda, May 2012 (Photo by Bob Minkin)
“Fare Thee Well” producer Peter
Shapiro before the first show at Levi’s Stadium, Santa Clara (Photo by Michael Weintrob)
“Viola Lee Blues” ending the first set at Levi’s Stadium with a rainbow (Photo by Michael Weintrob)
Trey Anastasio, Billy Kreutzmann, Phil Lesh, Mickey Hart, Bob Weir, Soldier Field, Chicago (Photo by Michael Weintrob)
The stage lit up for the second set at Soldier Field (Photo by Jeff Kravitz)
Trey Anastasio, Phil Lesh, Bob Weir at Soldier Field (Photo by Jeff Kravitz)
“Fare Thee Well,” July 5, 2015 (Photo by Jeff Kravitz)
Acknowledgments
I AM NO Deadhead. I have never attended consecutive performances by the band, never traded tapes, never twirled in the hallway, and didn’t spend much time in the parking lots. On the other hand, there is no other rock band I have seen on as many occasions, and the Grateful Dead have been responsible for some of the finest moments of my music-listening career.
