Naturally, Brent’s death was a tremendous shock, even to those familiar with his substance-abuse problems (and most Deadheads knew him only as a drinker). The Dead office was flooded with phone calls, letters and telegrams mourning his passing. Deadheads laid flowers on the doorstep of Brent’s home. In Philadelphia, more than five hundred people showed up in Rittenhouse Square for an impromptu memorial, and there were other smaller gatherings in cities coast to coast.
“I remember the evening after Brent died Jerry and I were up at Echo Court just sitting out on the deck and gazing at the stars,” says Vince DiBiase. “Jerry was deeply affected by Brent’s death.”
Garcia made no public statement about Brent’s death at the time, but a year later he reflected on it in an interview with James Henke in Rolling Stone: “Brent had this thing he was never able to shake, which was that thing of being the new guy. And he wasn’t the new guy; I mean, he was with us for ten years! That’s longer than most bands even last. And we didn’t treat him like the new guy. We never did that to him. It’s something he did to himself. But it’s true that the Grateful Dead is tough to . . . I mean, we’ve been together so long, and we’ve been through so much, that it’s hard to be a new person around us.
“But Brent had a deeply self-destructive streak,” he continued. “And he didn’t have much supporting him in terms of an intellectual life. I owe a lot of who I am and what I’ve been and what I’ve done to the beatniks from the ’50s and to the poetry and art and music I’ve come in contact with. I feel like I’m part of a certain thing in American culture, of a root. But Brent was from the East Bay, which is one of those places that is like nonculture. There’s nothing there. There’s no substance, no background. And Brent wasn’t a reader, and he hadn’t really been introduced to the world of ideas on any level. So a certain part of him was like a guy in a rat cage, running as fast as he could and not getting anywhere. He didn’t have any deeper resources. . . .
“It was heartbreaking when Brent died, because it seemed like such a waste. Here’s this incredibly talented guy—he had a great natural melodic sense, and he was a great singer. And he could’ve gotten better, but he just didn’t see it. He couldn’t see what was good about what he was doing and he couldn’t see himself fitting in. And no amount of effort on our part could make him more comfortable.”
Almost immediately after Brent’s death was announced, Deadheads began to speculate about his possible successor. Many wondered if the band would carry on with their planned September and October tour of the East Coast and Europe; some suggested they would call it quits altogether. However, the day after Brent’s death, the band announced they would try to keep their fall commitments. Was it a money decision? Was it a hasty move by a band in denial? Was it “what Brent would have wanted; the show must go on,” or some such justification?
It was probably a little of all three. And with twenty-twenty hindsight, it was also probably a mistake.
CHAPTER 21
So Many Roads to Ease My Soul
ithin a week of Brent’s funeral the Dead got their first bit of encouraging news in a while: Bruce Hornsby agreed to play with the group, if only temporarily, while they broke in a true successor, who would be chosen from several auditioning candidates. Hornsby’s solo career was so successful at that point that it was unreasonable to expect him to abandon his own music completely. But he was familiar with many of the Dead’s songs already, he’d played with the band on several occasions and his dynamic musicianship and effervescent stage presence were certain to make the transition into the post-Brent age a little easier.
Hornsby had deep roots in Grateful Dead music long before he shared a stage with them. As a teenager in the early ’70s the Williamsburg, Virginia, native was introduced to their music by his older brother Bobby, who lived in a Deadhead-dominated fraternity at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Bruce was already developing into a fine pianist with diverse musical interests—his influences included Leon Russell, Professor Longhair, Bill Evans, Otis Spann, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett and Herbie Hancock. But for kicks, he and his brother formed a band—Bobby Hi-Test and the Octane Kids—that played a slew of Dead tunes (mostly material from “Skull and Roses” and Europe ’72) and other cover songs by the Band and the Allman Brothers at fraternity parties and dances.
“I was way into them from ’71 to ’76,” he says. “About ’76, I got really into jazz music and ended up going to school and becoming sort of a bohemian jazz musician in college. I was more into ’Trane and Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea and McCoy Tyner. I kept track of the Dead a little bit, but not nearly as much as I had.”
Hornsby’s own career didn’t take off until the mid-’80s, when he scored a smash single with the socially conscious “The Way It Is,” followed by a succession of popular AM and FM radio hits, including “Mandolin Rain,” “The Western Skyline” and “Valley Road.” Hornsby was the first pop pianist since Elton John to attract a large following. But he was more than some lightweight pop confectionaire. His love of jazz came through in his playing and, like the Dead, he loved to improvise and connect songs. His singing showed more folk and country influences—it’s not surprising to learn that he grew up listening to Bill Monroe and George Jones. The Dead influence in his music was subtle, more evident in his approach to soloing than in what he actually played, though he performed the Dead’s arrangement of “I Know You Rider” in his own sets.
“The Dead heard that there was this band riding around the country playing Dead songs, and Garcia and Phil became fans of the record,” Hornsby said. “So we got a call saying they wanted us to open a couple of shows. I was just mad for this. So in May of ’87 it was Ry Cooder, us and the Dead at Laguna Seca [in Monterey, California] for two days. It was a great time for me, because I had been a fan.”
The next summer, at Buckeye Lake in Ohio, Hornsby’s band opened again, and this time Bruce played accordion on “Sugaree” and “Stuck Inside of Mobile,” to Garcia’s obvious delight—he and Bruce beamed at each other practically the entire time Hornsby was sitting in. The Range appeared on several other bills with the Dead in 1989 and ’90, and Bruce and Jerry’s offstage relationship also deepened during this period. In 1989 Garcia played on Hornsby’s A Night on the Town album and appeared in a live concert video based on the record.
“My band opened for the Dead in Louisville and Raleigh a couple of weeks before before Brent passed away, and I sat in with them a bunch and had a great time,” Hornsby remembers. “So when Brent passed, I was in Seattle and I got a call from my production manager, a guy named Chopper who’s friends with a lot of Grateful Dead–related people. He called me at about six in the morning and told me about it. Of course I was really shocked. Three hours later I was walking down the street in Seattle and some guy comes up to me and says, ‘Hey Bruce, you going to join the Dead?’ It was that quick. To be honest, I was a little fazed by it, and then the rumor mill really started runnin’ rampant. I was on a tour with my band and all of a sudden I was hearing that everywhere I went: ‘You gonna join? You gonna join?’ At that point I hadn’t heard from the guys in the band yet.
“A few days later I got a call from Phil—he wanted to talk about it a little. A week later we were playing the Concord Pavilion and Phil, Garcia and Cameron [Sears, Grateful Dead road manager] came out and they basically gave me the pitch. It was pretty low-key—‘Hey, you want to come play with us? We’d like to start something new here, see what happens.’ I think they wanted me to actually join the band. And if they’d caught me in 1984, before I got my own career going, I probably would have lived happily ever after as a Grateful Dead piano player—I think that would have been great. But they caught me in 1990. I had three records out, I’d sold a couple of million records and I didn’t feel I could give that up completely.
“So I sort of mulled it over a little while, and then I called ’em up and said, ‘What the hell—let’s give it a go.’ So we made plans for me to start at Madison Square G
arden, a few shows into the tour, because I already had shows booked all the way up through that Friday night, which was the second Garden show.”
Meanwhile, the Dead were auditioning keyboardists for the permanent slot in the group. Dozens of names were kicked around at Club Front, at the Dead office and among Deadheads. These ranged from sentimental “family” favorites like Tom Constanten and Merl Saunders to hot players like Little Feat’s Bill Payne and Santana’s Chester Thompson. In the end, only a few serious candidates were considered: onetime Dixie Dregs ace T. Lavitz; ex– Jefferson Starship members Tim Gorman and Pete Sears; and veteran Tubes and Todd Rundgren keysman Vince Welnick. Each was sent tapes of a half-dozen recent shows and then asked to come down to Club Front to see how they fit in musically with the Dead. This process took longer than anticipated, so the band had to cancel some scheduled shows at Shoreline Amphitheater—as they explained on the group’s telephone hotline, Brent’s shoes were big ones to fill, “and we haven’t found the right foot.”
Near the end of August the band unanimously agreed that Vince Welnick was the strongest candidate. He was a fast learner with a good feel for the range of the Dead’s material, and he was easily the best harmony singer of those who auditioned. About a week after his tryout, Vince says, “I got a call from Bobby and the first thing he said was, ‘Is your insurance paid up?’” evidently a macabre joke about the fate of his predecessors in the keyboard chair.
The job offer couldn’t have come at a better time for Vince. A journeyman rock ’n’ roller who had played in every imaginable situation during his years with the ultra-theatrical Tubes (best remembered for their mid-’70s anthem “White Punks on Dope”) and then with Todd Rundgren, Vince by 1990 was finding it harder and harder to make ends meet playing music, and he and his wife, Laurie, were seriously thinking of leaving the Bay Area to live more cheaply in Mexico. Then Mimi Mills, former secretary for the Tubes who was working for Bob Weir in 1990, suggested to Laurie Welnick that Vince should try for the Dead’s vacant slot.
Once the band settled on Vince, the real work began for him—a serious crash course on the Grateful Dead’s repertoire, in preparation for the band’s Eastern tour, set to begin outside of Cleveland on September 7. “Bob Bralove made a series of ten tapes, and each tape had ten songs on it and they were from recent live gigs, ’89 and ’90,” Vince says. “First they sent me a case of CDs, but I didn’t have the heart to tell them I didn’t own a CD player. Then Jerry thought it would be a better idea to send the live tapes. So I’d be at home and I’d get my list of ten songs and I’d get the tape, and I might just write the title and what key it was in; others I had to completely chart out, like ‘Help on the Way,’ for instance, just to learn them. For a song like ‘Terrapin’ I had sheets that contained the chords for the three main movements, and some of the time changes. I had to work everything out myself, playing the tapes over and over again. So I’d do that for the ten songs and then hopefully the next day we’d go over those ten songs and then Bralove would give me another tape.”
Since the Dead had an active repertoire of somewhere between 120 and 150 songs, Vince had his work cut out for him—ten days to catch up on twenty-five years of history. But he was a diligent student and he loved every second of it. “Every song I’d learn was like opening a new Christmas present,” he says. “I’d go home and listen to tapes and sometimes I’d be so elated that I’d have tears running down my face. I’d be raving about how great this tune or this jam was and making copious notes on it.”
The bandmembers gave Vince very little specific musical direction, though “sometimes Jerry would give me a little history of the song. He’d say, ‘This one is a cousin of that other song,’ meaning it was closely related structurally. He was like old Granddad sitting Sonny Boy down and telling how the feel of it should go. But mainly he’d say, ‘Play anything. Have fun.’”
The mood inside the Richfield Coliseum (near Cleveland) the first night of the September tour was hopeful, even jubilant. Someone in the crowd passed out little stickers that said YO VINNIE! and a big banner hanging opposite the stage proclaimed, WELCOME VINCE! Vince was understandably quite nervous before his first show, but once Garcia hit the downbeat for “Cold Rain and Snow” to open the concert, it was immediately clear that the Dead had made a good choice. For the entire first tour Vince used chord charts to help him remember some of the more complex tunes, and the Dead also took the unprecedented step of playing from predetermined set lists, “though of course we didn’t stick to them exactly,” Vince says. In contrast to Brent’s setup, which included the Hammond B-3 organ so prominently, Vince had just a single electronic keyboard—one of Brent’s synthesizers—and a library of sounds that had been developed primarily by Bob Bralove. If there was a common complaint about Vince’s early tenure with the group, it was that some of the sounds he and Bralove chose were unappealing or somehow inappropriate, whether too garish a texture for a delicate song like “Stella Blue” or an organ sound on another tune that was thin and reedy.
That first show at Richfield, Vince dived headlong into jamming tunes like “Bird Song,” “Truckin’” and “Playing in the Band,” and most agreed that he acquitted himself quite well. The second night, the band fell into a smoldering jam after “Terrapin” that sounded as if it could have come from the Carousel Ballroom, circa 1969, and that was an encouraging sign. Vince’s harmonies caught some people off guard because on a few tunes he adopted Donna Godchaux’s old part rather than Brent’s, but his voice blended well with Garcia’s and Weir’s and he wasn’t shy about using it. His only real deficiency was that he was not a very effective soloist at first—not too surprising in light of the fact that he hadn’t had much opportunity to solo in the Tubes or Todd Rundgren’s band. But he was a sympathetic ensemble player who found his place in the group’s sound fairly quickly. And just as important, he was an instantly likable presence who brought a tangible lightness to the band, especially in contrast to his sometimes dark and brooding predecessor.
After Richfield, the tour headed to the Philadelphia Spectrum for three shows, then to Madison Square Garden. Deadheads generally gave high marks to the band’s first few concerts. There were some detractors and a few, mainly younger fans, who believed that Brent was irreplaceable. (This was the ’90s version of the mid-’70s sentiment “There is no Grateful Dead without Pigpen.”) But nearly everyone agreed that when the band—including, for the first time, Bruce Hornsby as second keyboardist—hit the stage at Madison Square Garden on September 15 and opened the concert with an ebullient “Touch of Grey,” the Grateful Dead had turned “it” up a notch.
Sitting animatedly at a concert grand piano directly to Garcia’s left, Hornsby instantly became Garcia’s main foil. Here was a really top-drawer pianist, with a style as distinctive as Garcia’s, ready and eager to jump into the musical fray with ten fingers blazing. He says he knew about a quarter of the Dead’s songs when he hooked up with the band, yet he went out onstage the first night with no rehearsal. Like Vince, he used some charts at the beginning. But it was apparent from the first minute that he understood the Dead’s music and had internalized their approach to playing. He seemed to be overflowing with confidence yet not at all arrogant. He and Garcia traded grins and musical licks all night. With Bruce occupying an imposing pianistic midrange in the group’s sound, Vince was forced into the upper register more often, and to synth sounds that could cut through the band’s suddenly dense forest of textures. Bruce was definitely a star in the best sense of the word—charismatic and talented. And that took getting used to for some Deadheads who were not accustomed to having such a commanding pianist onstage, taking nearly as many solos as Garcia—at Garcia’s urging. Hornsby’s presence allowed Garcia to lay back a little—which he undoubtedly appreciated, but which disappointed some fans—but he also pushed Garcia and the other bandmembers musically in ways no keyboardist ever had. In so doing, he fundamentally changed the group’s sound.
As the six
-show series at the Garden progressed, the concerts got better each night. The jams were longer and more powerful with Bruce thickening the stew, and as the week went on the music became increasingly experimental. Before “drums” the band would split into little subgroupings—“We’d break the group down to Phil and me and Garcia,” Hornsby said, “or just Bobby and me and Garcia; different little side trips they weren’t doing before.” And the last two nights of the run were two of the best Grateful Dead concerts of the modern era—played with breathtaking abandon and conviction, and featuring great musical surprises at every turn. The music was dense but majestic, and unarguably new. The last night, when the band played a transcendent “Dark Star” in the post-“drums” segment for the first time ever, and closed the show with “Touch of Grey” followed by a “Lovelight” encore, the Dead hit a musical peak that had every Deadhead in Madison Square Garden believing that the band was beginning a new golden age.
That warm, sunny feeling lasted all the way until . . . the very next Dead show, at the Ice Stadium in Stockholm, Sweden, in mid-October. This was just about as bad as a Dead show could be—low-energy, sloppy and completely lacking in inspiration. Bob Weir later joked that the Dead had been replaced that night by the famous Swedish band “Jetlag.” It didn’t help that right before the show Garcia had gobbled a potent pot cookie, so by midpoint of the first set he could barely stand up, let alone play well. Hornsby was lucky enough to miss the show because of a prior commitment in America, “but when I got to Europe I heard how awful it was from everybody,” he says. “I guess it was almost funny.”
The Dead’s fall 1990 Europe trek was their first trip across the Atlantic since 1981. The band did have an album to promote—the live double CD Without a Net—but they seemed to view the tour more as a paid vacation than an important promotional jaunt. In a sense this trip was a reward for the band’s hard work between 1987 and 1989. Spouses, lovers and children were welcome, and the accommodations were deluxe every step of the way. The band traveled mostly by bus, but there was none of the zaniness that had marked their European adventure in 1972. There were more peaceful outings and expensive meals this time around. In Paris, Garcia, Manasha and Keelin, along with helpers Vince and Gloria DiBiase and their son, Chris, went on what Jerry called “the Top 40 Tour,” visiting the Louvre, Notre Dame, the carousel at the foot of the Eiffel Tower and other classic tourist destinations.
Garcia: An American Life Page 62
