by David Browne
Unfortunately Mydland’s shaky self-esteem led him to into increasingly difficult behavior backstage. In 1986, at the Berkeley Community Theatre, boards were set up backstage for fans to leave hand-written comments for each band member. Mydland’s comments totaled almost two hundred, of which only two were negative. (“Who asked you to sing?” read one.) Glancing over the list of comments, Lesh asked Steve Marcus of the Dead’s ticket office to transcribe them all and give a copy to Mydland so he could see how popular he was with the fans. When Mydland saw the comments, he ignored all of the encouraging ones and zeroed in on the two negative remarks and began screaming and ripping up the board. For a number of years crew member Kidd Candelario attended to both Mydland and Lesh onstage, but the job was growing even more demanding now that Mydland’s demons were flailing away. When Mydland would demand a drink onstage, Candelario knew after a while to fill it mostly with orange juice and a shot on top; Candelario thought Mydland would take a few sips of the watered-down drink and resume playing. But Mydland instantly knew what he was drinking and would hurl the cup back at Candelario. More than once Mydland would take his pricey synthesizer programming books and throw them into the audience.
Mydland’s wavering sense of self-worth wasn’t helped by reviews of Built to Last, like the Washington Post write-up that claimed “his efforts range from barely tolerable to downright intolerable” and said his songs had “a rinky-dink blandness.” That review also called “I Will Take You Home,” Mydland’s ballad to his daughters, “the most embarrassing thing ever to appear on a Grateful Dead album.” And yet soon after the album’s release one of his contributions, “Just a Little Light,” was chosen as a single—a milestone for Mydland—and in late 1989 the band assembled at a Marin soundstage to make a video for it. As they had with “Touch of Grey,” the Dead again endured hours—five, in this case—of lip-synching. Mydland seemed happy and comfortable as the star of the video, and Gutierrez interpreted the single and video as the band’s way of affirming his vital role in the band. “Doing that song was the band’s way of telling Brent he was an important member of the band,” says Gutierrez. “It was a way of bringing him in.” (To others in the organization it was simply the most radio-friendly song on the album.)
The song itself, its lyrics cowritten by Mydland and Barlow, addressed dreams fulfilled and unfulfilled, the downside of fame, and trampled-underfoot love; the chorus had a heavy-hearted hook. The director interpreted the song as a depiction of the battle between light and dark in Mydland’s own soul. “He told his story in that song,” Gutierrez says. “It was about what was going on with him.” To match the lyric Mydland was surrounded by hundreds of candles. At the end of the video, for dramatic effect, the candles were blown out.
In December 1989, around the same time as the “Just a Little Light” video was shot, Hornsby returned to his home in Virginia to find a message from Garcia on his answering machine: “Hey, man, it’s Garcia—give me a call. I want to talk to you about something.” Hornsby phoned back, but no one answered at Garcia’s home. Months later Garcia flew down to Los Angeles to film a video for a song on Hornsby’s album A Night on the Town, on which Garcia had guested. During a break Hornsby had the chance to ask Parish about the mysterious call and heard the explanation: Mydland hadn’t been doing well, and the band had wanted to hire Hornsby to replace him. Hornsby was stunned, but he was also told the storm had passed, at least for now. “The desire to replace Brent obviously didn’t continue,” Hornsby says. “Parish said something like, ‘Yeah it’s okay—Brent’s doing better.’ I didn’t pursue it at all.” Hornsby never brought up the conversation to Garcia, who didn’t mention it during the video shoot.
The call to Hornsby hadn’t come completely out of the blue. That same month manager Cameron Sears received the news he’d been dreading: Mydland was in jail, having overdosed at home. Hurriedly Sears managed to pull together enough cash for bail and rushed to the jail in San Rafael, where he and publicist McNally found Mydland milling about in the lobby, angry that he’d been arrested. (The paramedic, realizing Mydland had drugs in his system, had alerted the police.) Sears and McNally drove Mydland back home, where they refrained from scolding the keyboardist for his habits; in the Dead world no one told anyone else not to indulge. But they at least wanted him to admit he had a problem, which Mydland resisted. Because he and his wife, Lisa, had separated and she had left their home with their children, Mydland would be alone for the rest of the night; fearing he could ingest more of whatever he’d already taken, Sears and McNally stayed with Mydland until he fell asleep and crashed at the house themselves.
The time had come for a long-overdue band meeting to confront Mydland’s downward spiral. Band and management gathered around a nineteen-foot-long solid-oak table—complete with wood-carved chairs, one for each band member, skulls carved into the end of each arm—and read him the Dead’s version of the riot act. Mydland wasn’t fired or threatened with such action, but he was firmly told he had to get himself under control. Contrite and embarrassed, Mydland said he’d rein in his excesses and pull his life together, but no one was fully convinced. The crew began monitoring backstage visitors, especially anyone who even remotely resembled a dealer.
At one of the Dead’s first shows after Mydland’s overdose and arrest, at the Oakland Coliseum, Kreutzmann’s limo pulled up right behind Mydland’s. (At this point Mydland had had so many DWIs that he could no longer drive.) The drummer jumped out, grabbed Mydland around the neck, and said, “If you die, I’m gonna kill you!” The two men had bonded many times before on the road, partaking in antics and practical jokes. But this moment felt different. Because neither the Dead nor the generally private Kreutzmann were known for touchy-feely exhibitions, the drummer’s comment to Mydland, as gruff as it was, felt like an expression of genuine concern.
When the Dead inevitably resumed their road work just before the official start of spring in 1990, Mydland’s wrist-slapping appeared to have paid off: his keyboard work—fanciful piano on “High Time,” B3 organ fills on “Estimated Prophet” and “Cold Rain and Snow”—and singing remained robust, even if the huskiness in his voice now had a ravaged edge. (In that regard he really did seem like a true member of the Dead now, no longer the long-haired newbie who’d joined up eleven years before.) In what many would agree was the band’s last first-rate tour, the Dead sounded revitalized, ready to shake off the crowd-control and business hassles that had built up around them over the previous few years. Even Garcia’s voice, heard in renditions of “High Time” and “Crazy Fingers” at various stops on the tour, rediscovered its sweet spot. At a March 1990 show at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, jazz saxophonist Branford Marsalis sat in with the band—at Lesh’s invitation—and pushed the band to new improvisational highs, as he also would during later sit-in jams with them.
Still, Mydland looked as if he were barely holding himself together during most of his time onstage. To Deadhead Dan Ross, who attended every one of those shows and felt a particular kinship with Mydland, the concerts were unsettling. “Brent looked horrible,” he says. “You knew about his separation. You’re looking at this person who was falling apart.” By their last show, in Tinley Park, Illinois, on July 23, Mydland appeared puffy, his trademark stare even more startling than usual. During an encore they played a relatively recent addition to their repertoire, the Band’s “The Weight.” Garcia, Lesh, Weir, and Mydland each sang a verse, and Mydland’s included the line, “I gotta go, but my friends can stick around.” The show was ten years to the day after Keith Godchaux’s death.
On the plane ride home the next day Bralove, sitting next to Mydland, had to stomach Mydland’s alcohol odor for several hours. Bralove was fond of Mydland but was saddened by the state he was in, and like everyone in the organization, he didn’t quite know how to help. “He was in rough shape,” Bralove recalls. “He had his demons, and they didn’t rage all the time, but they were raging during that tour.” Bralove had noticed that during t
hat summer run Mydland had been getting heavily into video games, and that worried him too. “It was isolating him more,” he says. “It felt bad to see him playing a little golf game or whatever he was playing.”
On the morning of July 26 an ambulance was already at the house in Lafayette, a suburb just west of Berkeley, when two police officers responded to a report of a possible fatality. Walking into the bedroom, they found a man dressed in slacks, wearing a long-sleeve blue shirt and sneakers with white shocks. He was lying on the floor in between the TV and the bedroom; the TV was still on and set to a Nintendo game. The controller for the game was lying nearby. Friends at the house admitted to police that Mydland had a heroin habit and had overdosed before and that they hadn’t heard from him since he’d arrived back home from the tour on July 24. Police also spoke to a couple who lived in the house but hadn’t been there in a few days.
One of Mydland’s friends called the Dead’s office to relay the grim news. Nancy Mallonee, now the organization’s chief financial officer, had the unfortunate job of calling some of the musicians. The Dead operation was stunned and saddened—if not completely surprised—by the news. Garcia was at his home in San Anselmo when the call arrived, and he was, in Manasha Matheson’s words, “visibly shaken.” Weir was angry, Lesh saddened, and some office employees cried. That same day John Cutler, Justin Kreutzmann, and engineer Jeffrey Norman were working on the band’s forthcoming live album, Without a Net. They’d just isolated Mydland’s piano track on a terrific, rousing version of “Cassidy” in order to give it a better listen when the news of his passing arrived. With the band’s consent, an immediate decision was made to include a Mydland-sung song on the album, and the Dead signed off on a version of “Dear Mr. Fantasy” that included the keyboardist’s lead vocal.
Starting with the Associated Press, the media reported that Mydland, who was thirty-seven, had died of “undetermined” causes, since nothing was confirmed and the autopsy report had yet to be completed. When the toxicology report came out a few weeks later his passing was attributed to “acute cocaine and narcotic intoxication”; due to “a recent needle puncture mark” and the presence of a mix of cocaine, morphine, and codeine in his blood, it was clear Mydland had injected himself with a speedball. Compared to the initial news, though, the final results didn’t get as much play in the media, and McNally sensed how relieved the band was not to have to talk about a drug overdose in the band. In the Dead organization Mydland’s lack of intellectual curiosity was often cited as a root cause of his ability to find satisfaction beyond fame. As Garcia told Rolling Stone a year later, “He didn’t have much supporting him in terms of an intellectual life. . . . Brent was from the East Bay, which is one of those places that is like nonculture.” But it was also clear that Mydland was still desperately eager to be accepted as more than the “new guy” and that keeping up with the band’s lifestyle may have been his way of earning their respect. And like Godchaux before him, he paid the price for not being as road-hardened as those around him.
As word continued to spread, few were shocked. “We saw it coming,” Hart, his voice a mixture of anger and resignation, told Gutierrez when the director stopped by Hart’s house a few days after Mydland’s death. (Garcia said something similar in his Rolling Stone interview a year after Mydland’s death.) Hart told Gutierrez the band had tried interventions and even made threats about his livelihood, yet there seemed little they could do.
Once again, as they had for Pigpen in 1973, the Dead congregated at a chapel for a funeral service for one of their own—yet another easily rattled keyboard player who couldn’t control his excesses. The Dead squeezed in together in a front row, across from Mydland’s mourning family, as a tape of “I Will Take You Home,” which now felt heartbreaking, played on a small sound system. “They were all quiet,” recalls Mydland’s former girlfriend, Cherie Barsin, who attended. Unable to fully address his death, the Dead joked around with the casket in a back room, almost dropping it. At the cemetery in Lafayette a member of Mydland’s family pointed to his house and told Trixie Garcia that Mydland would sit on his porch with binoculars and zoom in on burials. (“He loved his family, his music and his friends,” read Mydland’s own tombstone.)
Trixie, still a teenager, also grappled with Mydland’s death; she’d come to think of him as her “little buddy.” But a far more sobering thought crossed her mind the day of his funeral. “That was when I realized Jerry was probably going to die early,” she says. “I had to think that Jerry lost hope or was unhappy.”
From the moment he heard the news Garcia clearly took Mydland’s death particularly hard. Onstage the two men had an intriguing dynamic—Mydland’s vigor and musicianship would frequently bolster Garcia’s own, especially coming after Keith Godchaux’s increasingly lethargic concert presence, and he forever seemed to be looking at Garcia to receive a quick nod indicating Garcia was happy with something he’d just played. A few days after Mydland’s death the Dead’s ticket office held its annual barbeque on Garcia’s birthday. Normally Garcia would’ve been on the road, but in view of the tragedy, the Dead had canceled shows, and Garcia was back home. The ticket office’s Steve Marcus invited Garcia, who, to everyone’s surprise, showed up and spent two hours at the party.
Before Garcia arrived, Marcus warned his coworkers not to mention Mydland; no one wanted to accidentally depress Garcia. But once he showed up and took a seat at a picnic table, Garcia brought up the topic before anyone else could. “What should we do?” he asked the employees. He told them he dreaded the idea of going onstage and not having Mydland there, but the Dead had shows lined up at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View. Perhaps boldly, Marcus suggested that the band should take a six-month break and examine its scene, which would involve shutting down the ticket operation. Garcia took it in but didn’t decide one way or another.
A little over a week after Mydland’s death Hornsby and the Range were playing the Concord Pavilion—by eerie coincidence the same town where Mydland and Keith Godchaux had both grown up. Before the show Hornsby had received a call from Lesh that he and Garcia were going to drive down to see the show and talk with him. Along with Sears, they all huddled in Hornsby’s dressing room and offered Hornsby a job with the Dead.
Almost immediately Hornsby had mixed feelings. A part of him relished the thought: as a young music head, he’d been a fan of jazz and Leon Russell and had seen his first Dead show in 1973. But it wasn’t until the following year, when he saw them at the William and Mary Hall at the University of Richmond, that he became truly entranced. Between the Wall of Sound and the band’s music, Hornsby was swept up in the Dead. “What really got me on board,” he says, “is that at the end of the night, Bob walks up—I’ve never seen this before or since—and says, ‘Hey, we had such a good time playing tonight, we’re gonna come back tomorrow and take out the seats and party.’” Hornsby was one of many who returned the next day and heard the band play a completely different multihour set. With that, he says, “I was totally on board. I wasn’t a Deadhead, because I was immersed in other music too, but I loved it.”
Thirteen years later Hornsby found himself playing an opening set at a Dead show—the same Laguna Seca performances where the “Touch of Grey” video was filmed. (Because he left after his set, Hornsby didn’t witness any of the backstage tumult involving the Dead’s crew.) The Dead’s East Coast promoter, John Scher, a fan of Hornsby’s music, had sent a copy of his debut album to the Dead, who signed off on the idea of Hornsby and his band as an opening act; it might have helped that Hornsby was covering “I Know You Rider” in his set. Over the next few years the bond between the group and Hornsby gradually strengthened. Having played in a Dead cover band in Virginia, Hornsby was fairly well versed on the band’s repertoire, so it felt natural when he was asked to sit in on piano or accordion. “They said, ‘Come on and play!’” Hornsby recalls. “And suddenly I’m standing next to these guys. Garcia said, ‘We don’t let just anyone play accordion wit
h us.’ They were a bunch of smiley faces. It was surreal.” Early on, Hornsby also learned how demanding the band’s fan base could be: at the Laguna Seca shows he played the identical songs both nights, and Deadheads responded by yelling out, “Same set!”
For all his interest in hooking up with the Dead, Hornsby’s own career was thriving. The previous year “The End of the Innocence” had hit the Top Ten, and his schedule was starting to fill up; he’d already been in the studio with Dylan and Crosby, Stills & Nash, and Raitt was next. As flattered as Hornsby was about Garcia and Lesh’s offer at the Concord Pavilion, the timing wasn’t right. “If they had gotten to me four or five years before, I would’ve said yes,” he says. “And I would’ve been their keyboard player for good, and it would’ve been great. But I had my own thing going pretty well.” A few days later Hornsby called back to say he wouldn’t be able to become a full-time member but offered to help with their transition to another keyboardist; he would be, in Garcia’s term, a “floating member.”
Now the band had to scramble; a fall tour was set to start in early September. The last thing anyone in the Dead wanted to do was break in a new member, but they dutifully called in a range of keyboard players, including T. Lavitz of the Dixie Dregs and former Jefferson Starship member Pete Sears, and jammed with them, all in a single grueling day. When word leaked that the band was auditioning players, Weir, through a mutual friend, was approached by Vince Welnick, a thirty-eight-year-old Arizona-born journeyman player and singer.
