So Many Roads

by David Browne

  On paper Welnick wasn’t the odds-on favorite. He’d grown up immersed in the same genres the Dead loved—jazz, boogie-woogie—but was best known as a member of the Tubes, the campy-decadent seventies San Francisco prog-punkers who were the polar opposite of the Dead. But unlike some of his competition for Mydland’s seat, Welnick could sing the high notes. (As Welnick later told Relix publisher Toni Brown, “[Bob] said, ‘Bruce Hornsby is in the band now, and we want a synth player who can sing high harmony.’”) “I remember the band sitting around going, ‘Wow, he could play the hard parts,’” recalls Bralove, who attended the rehearsals. “He had all of Brent’s high harmonies, which made it possible for them to keep doing what they were doing vocally. The idea of rearranging the vocals to accommodate a new voice would have been very challenging.” Welnick could also hold his own instrumentally: when the band jammed with Welnick on “Estimated Prophet” Kreutzmann was impressed that Welnick didn’t “give up the seven”—referring to the song’s 7/4 time signature. After anxiously waiting a week to hear whether he was in, Welnick got the offer, and he became the Dead’s new keyboard player. As Welnick would later recall in several interviews, the band flashed its dark humor by asking him, “Is your insurance paid up?”

  The decision was relatively quick; the Dead, in typical style, decided to keep working rather than confront its internal issues. As always, it was best to move on without dwelling much, if at all, on what had just occurred. “Band morale was so low,” recalls Justin Kreutzmann. “It was, ‘Oh, God, we gotta do this again?’ I remember Jerry saying, ‘I’m never going to teach all these songs again—this is it. We’re not going to start up all over again with someone new.’ It really sucked to be the new guy after Brent.” When McNally asked the band about releasing a statement on Welnick’s hiring, they decided against it; as Garcia told McNally, “Enough already.” The thought of talking up a new member—and talking about the one who’d just passed away—was beyond dismaying. By way of the San Francisco Chronicle, which had covered the Dead for many years, the news eventually broke. But no official press release about Welnick would ever make it out of the Fifth and Lincoln office, right up to his debut with the band in Ohio in September.

  A few weeks later Hornsby made his official debut as part-time member—and discovered soon enough that the Dead machine, although efficient and militaristically organized, was also eccentric. That first night Hornsby didn’t rehearse and had to wing it. He only knew how to play about thirty Dead songs, which left another hundred-plus that could pop up in the repertoire. (Adhering to a bit of rock concert protocol, they did compile set lists the first few months for Hornsby and Welnick; Welnick especially was far less up to speed on Dead songs than Hornsby was, so the band sent him their back catalog and even a CD player.) When the time came to walk onstage Hornsby would be pumped, but he was surprised by how casual the rest of the band could be. “Eight o’clock would come and go, and they wouldn’t give a shit,” Hornsby says. “At 8:15, I’d say, ‘Hey, you guys wanna go out there?’ They didn’t want to be pushed.” Soundchecks were also rare, and at times he found himself standing onstage with the Dead as everyone adjusted their levels and prepared for the show as a stadium or arena full of fans watched. “Other bands would be freaking,” he says. “That never happened, which was really nice, really refreshing. No pressure.”

  Once the music began, Hornsby at times grappled with the band’s overwhelming sound, now augmented by not one but two keyboard players. It was, he says, “so friggin’ loud,” especially Lesh’s bass, that Hornsby felt the music ripping through his torso. As a result, he would sometimes play the wrong changes and, after the show, be told what chord he should have been playing. Hornsby even stood out physically: recalling one show in the summer of 1991, Hornsby jokes, “I look like a choir boy out there, or like I’d just come from playing with Tony Orlando.” And although Hornsby didn’t mind the smell of pot wafting around him during concerts, he gave the band and crew a strict warning: if he were dosed, he would leave. “I didn’t want to deal with that,” he says. “But they were good with it.”

  Yet Hornsby was a natural fit for the band’s music. His playing was luminous and animated, and his sparkling acoustic piano runs recalled not just Godchaux’s finest work with the Dead but also Chuck Leavell’s vibrant playing with the Allmans in the seventies. With Hornsby on piano and sometimes accordion (and Welnick on synthesizer alongside him, augmented by Bralove’s sonic embellishments), the band felt as reborn as it could after enduring yet another internal tragedy. “Suddenly there was Hornsby, who from a talent point of view was Garcia’s equal,” says Scher, “and Jerry recognized that immediately.” Hornsby’s crystalline piano revitalized everything from “Franklin’s Tower” to “Let It Grow.”

  Unlike Mydland—or Godchaux or Pigpen, for that matter—Hornsby was extremely self-assured and could give as much as he could take. He quickly keyed into the crew’s snarky, sarcastic tendencies. Whenever Hornsby’s regular-folks friends from Virginia attended a show, the crew would invariably refer to them as “Bruce’s geeks.” That crack amused Hornsby, but he was less than tickled when a crew member barked “Get the fuck out of here!” when one of Hornsby’s friends was standing in the wrong spot. Hornsby admonished the employee and received an apology.

  Beyond the music—including many songs he’d never played before—Hornsby also had to adjust to the fact that by 1991 there seemed to be two Jerry Garcias in the house. Garcia’s drug use and health issues had continued, on and off, since 1989. At one of the ticket office’s Christmas parties he’d walked in and began scoping around the office, clearly searching for something. “Are you looking for nitrous?” an office employee asked him. “Yeah,” Garcia replied. For his part Hornsby had few dealings with addicts, but during some of the band’s shows the summer of 1991 he noticed certain signs: Garcia immobile onstage, hunched over his guitar and staring at the floor, barely playing. When he switched to accordion, Hornsby was able to walk over to Garcia and yell, “Sounds great!” to boost his energy or pump him up.

  What Hornsby didn’t know at the time was that at the end of their summer 1991 tour the band had conducted yet another intervention with Garcia, resulting in a stint at a methadone clinic. (The confrontation, held at Front Street, had finally allowed Lesh to air his grievances toward Garcia, even if his longtime friend and band mate clearly didn’t want to hear them.) One day that fall, over drinks in a bar after a gig, Weir sat down with Hornsby and Welnick and gave them the news: Garcia was using again. To Hornsby, Weir seemed more resigned than angry. “He just told us, ‘This is what’s happening, Jerry’s having a problem again,’ and I went, ‘Okay,’” Hornsby says. “He was matter of fact. He was very even toned.” (Bralove noticed changes too: one time, as the band was preparing for a show, Garcia walked onstage and began intently talking to Bralove, and as Bralove says, “He seemed very lit.”) Although Hornsby also sensed Garcia was doing drugs again, he felt, as a “good friend but a new friend,” that it wasn’t his place to take him to task for it. At another band meeting Garcia retaliated, saying it was no longer fun to play with them and that they’d been “running on inertia,” as he later told Rolling Stone.

  For all those warning signs and offstage debates, Hornsby still admired Garcia’s musicality, and onstage Hornsby and Garcia would exchange runs and, frequently, smiles. Hornsby remained drawn to Garcia’s personal warmth, which he saw firsthand when, during a later stint with the band, he brought along his baby boys, Keith and Russell. Backstage the infants were greeted with an array of musicians who would make most classic-rock fans drool: the Dead, Hornsby’s friend Don Henley, and Sting, who was opening the show. Each time the babies broke out into anguished screams—until they encountered Garcia. For once, the kids quieted down. “He was the only one who they let hold them,” Hornsby says. “Those little babies just had a vibe.”

  One of Hornsby’s most cherished memories would be the time he flew into Marin for a Dead rehearsal and s
tayed at Garcia’s house. Giving Hornsby a tour of the digs, Garcia brought him into a room with the least likely of sights: a treadmill. “Let me show you how to use it, man,” Garcia said. In his black sweat pants, black sneakers, and black T-shirt, Garcia was dressed for a workout, even if he didn’t look especially healthy. Climbing onto the machine, he “walked” a few casual minutes and then stopped: “There you have it—that’s how to do it,” he shrugged to Hornsby. It was, Hornsby would later recall, “a vision you never thought you’d see.” Yet the bigger question—whether the healthy or the unhealthy Garcia would win out—remained unanswered.

  As McNally saw, Garcia could still revel in the music, even if they weren’t the ones playing it. On a flight with the band a few months before the Boston Garden run, McNally walked over to Garcia’s seat with a Walkman; he’d just listened to something completely out there that Garcia had to hear. Putting on headphones, Garcia listened, and soon a big grin overtook his face. “That’s a trip!” he said. And it was: a cover of “Ripple” by, of all bands, Jane’s Addiction, the kings of sleazy Los Angeles punk-metal. Nor was it a standard cover: lead singer Perry Farrell sang Hunter’s words while beneath and around him the band played a whirlwind version of “The Other One.” Farrell himself had chosen “Ripple.” “The melody of that song makes you feel better, and the lyrics are beautiful,” Farrell says. “It was a song I zoned in on.”

  Next to Garcia on the plane was Manasha Matheson Garcia. In the summer of 1990 Garcia had nervously asked her, “Honey, would you come with me for a drive?” As she recalls, “At sunset we drove west toward the ocean over Mount Tamalpais. When we reached the Pacific he took my hand and proposed to me.” Garcia suggested Easter 1991 as a wedding date, but Matheson preferred, she says, “to marry free of legal convention. I was a hippie.” Garcia went along with the idea, and on August 17, 1990, the two were wed in what Matheson called “a private spiritual ceremony” at their home in San Anselmo, with Garcia in a black T-shirt.

  On tour with Manasha, Garcia seemed to revel in family life: visiting the Art Institute of Chicago with her, taking a boat ride on Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and going on carriage rides in New York. With their daughter, Keelin, born in December 1987, the family saw the Radio City Rockettes show one Christmas. When the Dead toured Europe in 1990 Matheson referred to it as their “little honeymoon,” and she says she and Garcia discussed opening a “bookstore-theater coffee shop” in San Anselmo. People in the Dead world would often scratch their heads over the relationship, but Garcia seemed, at least for now, happy.

  In April 1991 the Jane’s Addiction version of “Ripple” was unveiled as part of the first-ever Dead tribute album. Overseen by producer Ralph Sall, Deadicated featured covers by an impossibly eclectic lineup, ranging from the expected (Los Lobos, Dwight Yoakam) to the left field (Jane’s Addiction, Elvis Costello). The Dead had little to do with the album but were tickled by it: when Hunter heard Jane’s re-invention of “Ripple,” his jaw dropped and his mind was blown, and it became one of his favorite covers of a Dead song.

  Deadicated wasn’t simply a lark that allowed closet Deadheads like Costello to finally revel in their fandom. (Despite his punky early days, Costello had been a fan as far back as 1972, when he sat in the mud at the Bickershaw Festival show on the 1972 European tour, and he, Garcia, and Weir had shared a stage or two in the previous decade.) The album also had a specific nonmusical purpose: a way to counter the bad press the band had been receiving. “The success had caused everyone to focus on the parking lots and the death at Giants Stadium and all this negativity,” says Arista’s Roy Lott, who approved Deadicated once Sall had pitched the idea. “And I wanted people to remember that it all started with great songwriting and artistry.” As an added public relations bonus, the royalties would be sent to the Rainforest Action Network. (In 1988 the Dead had given a press conference about the foundation at the United Nations, another sign of how legit they’d become in the aftermath of In the Dark.) The album received kind reviews, and for once, the press talked up the band’s music rather than horrid incidents taking place near their shows.

  The album also served to inject some Dead-related product into the market. By the time Deadicated had arrived it had been almost two years since Built to Last had been released, and there were few signs that an all-new Dead album was on the way. An executive at Arista floated the idea of the band playing an acoustic set for MTV’s then in-vogue Unplugged series. But the project, a missed opportunity if there ever was one, never got off the ground.

  The first set in Boston hadn’t gone well—and, to Hornsby’s mind, neither had most of the previous nights at New York’s Madison Square Garden. To him the Dead, especially Garcia, seemed lackluster; the sparkle and interaction evident in his earlier sets with them had dimmed considerably. With a year under his belt, Hornsby had learned it was often best to lay back and wait for space to open up before he played, a particularly crucial point because the band now had two keyboard players for the first time in two decades. But in Boston he was forced to change tactics; to him the band felt so lackadaisical that he pounded forcefully, as many notes as possible, to jack up the faltering energy.

  Stepping offstage, Hornsby was steamed, and the time to vent had come. He knew Garcia could have an occasional off night, like every other musician, but this was one time too many. “I thought, ‘Okay, well, fuck it—I need to do something here, for my own sanity,’” Hornsby recalls. By the time he stepped into Garcia’s backstage tent he had worked himself up into righteous anger. “Hornsby’s a perfectionist,” says Scher. “He wanted to be great every time he was out there. And you can’t do that by yourself.”

  Many times Hornsby had witnessed a version of Garcia in his tent, including the time Owsley Stanley—who remained in touch with some of them, especially Lesh—had stopped by. For reasons Hornsby didn’t understand, Garcia snapped at their old friend. Tonight, though, Garcia was good-natured and effusive, telling Hornsby how much he loved the more forceful, aggressive style the keyboardist had adopted in the first set. “Man, I love the way you’re playing tonight,” he told Hornsby. “It’s the best.”

  Rather than softening Hornsby up, though, the remarks set him off. Hornsby retorted in a way he’d never done before to Garcia, and others rarely did. “Motherfucker, I hate the way I’m playing,” Hornsby snapped. “I’m playing too much.”

  Garcia seemed puzzled: “What do you mean?”

  Hornsby didn’t let up, telling Garcia he was only playing that way—“triple forte at all times”—to inject some life into the set. “You’re just phoning it in,” he said to Garcia. “You’re not there. You’re not really delivering.”

  With that Garcia’s friendly façade faded, and he muttered the phrase that would haunt Hornsby for decades afterward: “You don’t understand twenty-five years of burnout, man.”

  Even so, Hornsby didn’t let up. He told Garcia how busy he was, with only six days off that year, and that he was “fried half the time” from shuttling between studios and road work. Despite that pace, Hornsby said he still tried to play at a high level, and Garcia didn’t seem like he was even trying—and that Garcia was letting the fans down. Steve Parish, who popped in and out of the tent during the exchange and caught moments of it, was a bit surprised someone would challenge Garcia like that. Everyone knew Garcia struggled at times, but, Parish says, “It’s something that was never said but was under the surface.” The conversation settled down, and the topic didn’t come up again, at least not with Hornsby.

  Outside the dressing room Manasha Garcia was prepping a soothing honey-ginger drink for her partner. After Hornsby left, Garcia told her about the conversation. According to her, Garcia had a flu-related respiratory issue that night. “He wasn’t feeling well at all,” she says. “He was also a bit exhausted from playing the nine-night run of concerts at [Madison Square] Garden.” Yet, she says, “I can understand how Bruce may have missed that Jerry was not feeling well that evening. Jerry rarely compl
ained publicly about his health and always preferred to continue on with the show.”

  Hornsby knew Garcia didn’t like to be confronted about his lifestyle and its impact on his playing. In the short term, at least, the exchange may have helped. During the second set at the Boston Garden “Fire on the Mountain” in particular felt spunkier, and on subsequent nights at the venue the Dead and Hornsby played ferocious versions of “Hell in a Bucket” and “New Minglewood Blues.” Later some Deadheads would refer to the six nights in Boston (which alone grossed just over $2 million) as the band’s last first-rate string of shows anywhere. A day that had promised so little wound up delivering more than intended.

  Yet the night would signify the beginning of the end for a potentially promising new era for the Dead. “Jerry didn’t think, ‘This is gonna change my life that Bruce Hornsby is giving me this lecture,’” says Parish. “But Jerry felt bad about it, and he knew Bruce felt that way. After a year of playing with them, Bruce realized there were some days when people were having problems. After that time he tried to distance himself from the Dead.” Within a few months Hornsby would no longer have the same role in the band.

  The gathering darkness: Fans overtaking the fence at the last show at Deer Creek.

  © JEREMY HOGAN

  CHAPTER 15

  NOBLESVILLE, INDIANA, JULY 2, 1995

  Three songs into the show, the house lights still on, the time had come for “Dire Wolf,” but with a perverse twist no one had anticipated. Twenty-five years had passed since the Dead had recorded that song at Pacific High studio. They’d played it innumerable times since, occasionally slowing it down a half step. But tonight, in the middle of Indiana, they again injected it with the crisp, merry gait of the recorded version, and even the song’s refrain harked back to its original impending-death inspiration. “Please, don’t murder me,” Garcia sang again, now in a voice weathered by age and abuse, as cops pivoted their heads, hoping to catch sight of the man who’d vowed to kill Garcia before the night was over.