On an inordinately chilly dawn-of-spring night they were back to doing what they’d perfected night after night, year after year, for over three decades. This time they were backstage at a midsized theater in midtown Manhattan. Bent over a coffee table, Lesh, now a lean sixty-nine-year-old, was jotting down a list of songs they’d be attempting that night. The first issue literally on the table was the length of the set; in a very un-Dead-like scenario, they’d only have an hour to play.
“We’ll start out and see where it goes,” Lesh said. “If we have to cut, we cut.”
“Are we gonna be pitch-forked off the stage if we play too long?” Kreutzmann asked.
No one answered, but Hart, looking at the list, interjected, “This is do-able.” Weir remained quiet, soaking it in.
The accommodations at the Gramercy Theatre weren’t as lush as the Dead had long been accustomed to. They were gathering in a blandly decorated room stocked with a refrigerator, a couch, and a fruit-and-cheese display. Gone, for nearly fifteen years at that point, was the larger-than-life, reluctant frontman whose presence still lingered over everything they’d done and would ever do.
In about a month the group, now simply calling itself the Dead, would start its first tour together in five years. They’d been through much in their lives, good and bad, and the accumulated lifestyle mileage and rock ’n’ roll wear and tear was evident on men now in their sixties; skin cancer scars and hearing aids were in evidence. Kreutzmann’s hair, white as a new snowfall, was partly hidden by a backward baseball cap; Weir’s chin of whiskers was also graying. Other than guitarist Warren Haynes—a recurring member of Lesh’s solo band who’d have the unenviable task of filling in for Garcia on the tour, vocally and instrumentally—Weir was still the youngest at sixty-one. Despite the weather outside, he still wore his trademark sandals and short pants.
To help promote the upcoming tour they’d agreed to a promotional stunt: playing three one-set shows at three different venues in one night, with free tickets given away to fans on the Internet. The day had begun with Weir, Lesh, and Haynes appearing on the morning talk show The View (cohost Whoopi Goldberg was a longtime Dead fan), for which a line of Deadheads stretched down the street at the show’s Upper West Side studio. “It’s hard to get used to it without Jerry,” said Don Moore, who scored tickets to all three gigs, “but I know the music must go on.” Hours later the three men started the evening at an acoustic trio show at the five-hundred-seat, churchlike Angel Orensanz Center on the Lower East Side, playing “Cumberland Blues,” “Casey Jones,” “Dire Wolf,” and “Ripple.” On a version of “Bird Song” that extended to almost a half-hour, the three men were caught in a loop-like trance that threatened to derail at any moment but never did.
Now they had arrived at the second venue, the larger Gramercy Theatre, and had to figure out the set list. “Well, so far so good,” said Weir earlier in the evening, settling into a couch as he and Lesh awaited the arrival of Hart and Kreutzmann. “We actually established a dynamic for the acoustic portion. That’s another whole palette. It was fun. And we can go there now, and that’s huge. You know, we haven’t done it for thirty-five years or something like that.”
“We did it at Radio City,” says Lesh, referring to the long-ago 1980 show.
“Right, we did it at Radio City,” Weir repeats, nodding. “The approach we’re taking now is much different, and it’s much easier to hear. And as Phil pointed out, we’ve also learned to listen to each other. So this time around it’s really very different.”
Moments later Kreutzmann and Hart walked in, and hugs and warm greetings were exchanged. “How was The View?” asked Kreutzmann, who sheepishly admitted he’d been napping after a long flight from his home in Hawaii when the show was aired.
“It was good,” said Lesh, adding, with a frown, “[Bill] O’Reilly was there, though.”
“Yeah, it was kind of interesting that he was on the show!” Kreutzmann cracked. “My joke to myself was, I wonder how the green room was.”
“He was civil,” Lesh said. “So were we.”
“Phil put on Keith Olbermann and cranked it,” Weir joined in, and Kreutzmann laughed.
“Well, Ann Coulter is a Deadhead,” added Lesh’s wife and manager, Jill, standing nearby.
“Yeah,” Weir said. “She came to one of my shows. A year or so ago. A Ratdog show.”
The road to this moment had been a tough one for each of them—fourteen often difficult years of shock, depression, health issues, business disputes, and reunions. Five months before, they’d reconvened for a benefit, and it had gone well enough that they were now about to take to the road together again. Old issues remained, yet they were doing their best to make nice publicly. “I’ve got a great-sounding drum set up there,” Kreutzmann enthused, kicking back in a chair. Lesh indicated he was thinking of going onstage early to tune up even though Deadheads were already streaming into the venue.
“Well, there are a few people out there who’d love to see you!” cracked Kreutzmann, who still flashed signs of his untamed, loosey-goosey energy.
“Oh, it’s okay,” Lesh added. “I don’t mind.”
First, the newly reformed Dead would need to get through twenty-two concerts, starting with winnowing down their first set of tonight to sixty minutes. In words that summed up what lay ahead for them, Hart said, with a manic gleam in his eye, “It’s all going to change pretty radically. Stay tuned.”
On that grim day years before—August 9, 1995—everyone who heard the news thought it was just another rumor. At his home in New Jersey longtime Dead promoter and confidant John Scher was awoken by a reporter calling for a comment on Garcia’s death. Scher barked that he didn’t know what he was talking about—Garcia was in Hawaii, just as he’d told many in the Dead organization after the last show in Chicago the previous month. But the reporter was certain, and Scher called Cameron Sears in the Bay Area, who was equally taken aback. Garcia’s former assistant Vince Di Biase phoned publicist McNally, who in turn called the county coroner’s office. The rumor was true: at fifty-three, Garcia had been found dead in a rehab facility not far from his home.
When the Dead returned from Chicago after the “Tour from Hell” in the summer of 1995 a scheduled fall series of shows was still on the agenda, although they could have been canceled at any minute. Management hoped the same crowd-control issues wouldn’t continue at places like the Boston Garden or Madison Square Garden, indoor venues in cities that didn’t attract the same hangers-on outside. Before that run of shows took place, though, Garcia had decided the time had come to clean himself up. Koons has said that she became aware of Garcia’s addiction early in 1995 and that the two agreed he should go into treatment when the summer tour was over. With the help of Koons and his personal manager Steve Parish, Garcia checked into the Betty Ford Clinic outside Los Angeles; as he told his driver, Leon Day, “They tell me Betty Ford’s good for me.” Garcia indicated to Parish he was ready for a change and that he was weary of both his addiction and hiding it from Koons.
Shortly before Garcia left for the clinic Bruce Hornsby had called to check in on him. They’d kept in touch even after Hornsby’s departure from the band in early 1992, and despite his earlier concerns, Hornsby had sat in with the Dead at several shows afterward. “He said, ‘I’m gonna do this and this is what needs to happen and I’ll be okay and I’ll be there for a month or five weeks,’” Hornsby recalls. “He sounded fine.”
Two weeks later Hornsby called back, and to his surprise Garcia himself answered the phone. “Yeah, I left,” he told Hornsby. “I got all I needed in two weeks.” (The plan called for a monthlong stay.) Around this time Garcia ran into Peter Rowan, his former Old and in the Way bandmate, at a record store in Mill Valley; Garcia struck Rowan as upbeat and almost ebullient. But Garcia had slipped back into heroin use and decided to check into Serenity Knolls, a five-year-old rehab facility in Marin County, not far from his home.
Garcia kept his plans fairly private. (When he stopped by the home of close friends John and Linda Kahn before entering Serenity Knolls, he left them with the impression he was going to leave much from his past behind, including, presumably, the Dead.) Just before Garcia arrived at Serenity Knolls, Sears spotted him in his BMW driving out of a local Wendy’s; Garcia smiled and waved at Sears and his wife, Cassidy Law. (Fast-food wrappers were later found in his car.) When Garcia’s daughter Trixie heard where her father was, she called the facility but says she wasn’t allowed to speak with him.
After admitting himself, Garcia called driver Leon Day to wish him a happy wedding anniversary and asked whether he wanted to go with him to Hawaii when he got out. That night Koons visited him, and the two reportedly had dinner at an Italian restaurant in Mill Valley before Koons drove him back to Serenity Knolls. At just after 4:30 the next morning a nurse making the rounds checked in on Garcia’s room; earlier he’d been snoring, but now he was silent. When he was found not to be breathing, a paramedic was called, but it was too late.
According to rumor, word first slipped out when an ambulance driver called his wife and asked her to guess who he’d just picked up there, and the spouse supposedly called a local DJ. Whatever way it leaked, everyone soon heard. Lesh was driving his son Grahame to camp when he received the call; Weir was at a hotel in New Hampshire, where his side band Ratdog would be playing at the Casino Ballroom in Hampton Beach, and his longtime friend and bandmate Matthew Kelly saw Weir react emotionally. CNN crews showed up, and Deadheads held a candlelight vigil all the way down the road to the beach from the club.
Back in San Rafael, Hart, Lesh, and Welnick gathered at the Dead office at Fifth and Lincoln, the site of so many rollicking times but now a somber place. TV crews were beginning to appear outside, as were Deadheads. The band members seemed shell-shocked. “It was like they had been whacked by a two-by-four,” says McNally, who was also in the house. “They were just looking at each other and wondering what the future was.” For once there would be no mocking comments about death and caskets. When none of the band offered to go outside to make a statement, McNally did it by himself. The musicians and Koons were driven to a mortuary to view Garcia’s body.
For those who worked with Garcia, regret and second-guessing seeped out. “From my perspective the aura around Jerry was such that clearly we needed to stop touring a couple of times and say to Jerry, ‘We’re not going to tour until you go to rehab or a doctor and get yourself straight,’” says promoter Scher. “But nobody, me included, had the balls to really confront Jerry.” No easy answers existed, and the days and weeks after his death were sometimes fraught. Organized by Koons and held at a church in Belvedere two days after Garcia’s death—the place was called, coincidentally, St. Stephen’s—Garcia’s funeral was attended by many of Garcia’s partners, closest friends, and colleagues, from his fellow Dead players to Hunter, Barlow, Hornsby, Ken Kesey, and even Dylan, who flew up from Los Angeles. Outside—or simply not invited—was another cast of players, including Mountain Girl and Rock Scully. John Kahn managed to sneak in and stand in the back with his wife, Linda. Hunter recited a moving poem. Walking by the open casket to pay their final respects, some stopped to talk to Garcia, others to kiss him on the forehead. Dressed in a flannel shirt, Dylan stood for a few moments and appeared to be talking to Garcia. (As one musician walked out he was overheard saying, “That guy in there, he’s the only one who knows what it’s like to be me.”) When Hornsby and Weir walked up, Weir took a look at Garcia and, recalls Hornsby, said, “Nobody home.”
When the autopsy results were released soon after, Garcia’s death was ruled a heart attack. That he’d used heroin a few days before was less a factor than the two of three largely blocked arteries to his heart. (Two had 85 percent blockage; the third was 30 percent.) As Weir later said, “Jerry had it in mind to clean up. Christ, he died in a rehab place. Right after his first major health issue [in 1986], for a couple of years he was in great shape, and then he slowly slipped back into the dope. But he missed [his good health] and wanted that back and that’s what he was going for when he checked out. His body couldn’t handle it. He was being kind of aggressive about cleaning up and his body just couldn’t handle it.” The fact that Garcia checked himself into a nonmedical facility also indicated that he may not have fully grasped the overall state of his health; the facility was so remote that it would have taken an ambulance a good chunk of time to reach him and rush him to a hospital.
The outpouring for Garcia—TV news broadcasts, tabloid coverage, a public memorial in Golden Gate Park just three days after the private service—was overwhelming and fitting for his iconic stature. Online bulletin boards were overwhelmed with messages of grief from Deadheads: “I just woke up . . . I wish I hadn’t,” “I don’t know what to do with myself,” “I can’t survive . . . I’m devastated.” The WELL (the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link), which hosted online forums for Deadheads back to the mid-eighties, was so deluged it had to shut down for a while.
Reflecting an often messy and chaotic personal and business life, the landscape after Garcia’s death was contentious and litigious. His estate, run by Koons, was hit by millions of dollars of claims from his ex-employees and partners. Although a judge ruled that Carolyn Adams (Mountain Girl) was still entitled to the financial agreement she’d reached with Garcia a few years before, Koons appealed, leading to a televised lawsuit. (In the end Adams agreed to a settlement.) A few weeks after their father’s passing, Trixie and Annabelle Garcia went to visit Koons and asked whether they could grab a few of their father’s belongings. Koons agreed, and Trixie left with a pair of sweatpants with an “NYPD” logo, a jacket, a traveling bag, and a manicure box. In April 1996, about nine months after Garcia’s death, his ashes were dispersed—some in India, some in the waters outside San Francisco. For the surviving members of the Dead the difficult part would be next: what to do with themselves, their future, and their body of work without the man around whom it was all centered.
“One of the things we discovered is that the last time we took a swing at this, I think we overstocked the pot,” Weir said backstage at the Gramercy Theatre. “The band we put together this time around is smaller and way more agile. This is a shakedown cruise here. There’s less traffic on stage than we had last time around. It’s different.”
“It’s pretty calm right now,” Lesh added. “But we always have the same expectations, which is magic. When we walk out onstage, anything can happen.”
“And we invite it to,” Weir emphasized. When asked about the last time they had come together, five years before, Weir didn’t know quite what to say: “I don’t remember that tour,” he finally shrugged.
In the months after Garcia’s death various tour ideas were floated, from having Carlos Santana or Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo fill in for Garcia or propping up Garcia’s guitar onstage, lit by a spotlight, while the rest of the Dead would play. In the end all were rejected. Finally, in December, four months after Garcia’s death, the surviving members met again, this time in the same conference room where Garcia used to peer over his glasses at certain ideas. Kreutzmann, by then living in Hawaii, called in to say he was finished with touring; Lesh seconded that emotion. The name “Grateful Dead” would be formally retired, and each man would go his separate way.
During that same meeting the band’s business manager, Tim Jorstad, brought up the business of the Dead. “They were kind of tired of being together,” Jorstad says. “But I was looking at them and saying, ‘You have a company here, with merchandise and a record company—that’s a real, live business that will carry on whether you guys release new music or not.’ They were fine with letting the business go along.” In a sense they had no choice. As soon as Garcia had died, the band’s merchandise office was flooded with requests for T-shirts and other memorabilia, so much so that a bank of new computers had to be purchased the following day to keep pace with the orders. (For Sue Swanson, who had returned to the Dead fold to help with computers, the additional work was a mixed blessing: “It was so busy that I couldn’t drown in what was going on. I could only grieve in bits and pieces.”) With no concerts on the horizon, the merchandise wing, once considered the stepchild of the operation, suddenly became the company’s main revenue stream. Still, the income wasn’t enough to support the dozens who worked for the Dead, and a round of layoffs and salary reductions swept through their office. Over fifteen people in Grateful Dead Productions, about a third of the staff, were out, including members of the road crew and Bob Bralove; others were put on retainers.
Starting the following year, 1996, the surviving members began what would become a ritualistic dance of re-forming for a tour, trying to reconnect with an audience and each other, and attempting to rekindle the magic without the man around whom it had been built. First came the Furthur Festival, which featured Weir’s Ratdog—a side band and result of his collaborations with bassist Rob Wasserman that had, ironically, started its first full tour right before Garcia’s death—and Hart’s band Mystery Box. (It was also the name of a fine, rhythm-nation solo album, with lyrics by Hunter and guest appearances by Weir and Hornsby, released in 1996.) According to Hornsby, who was invited to participate, Garcia’s death didn’t come up much backstage. “It wasn’t talked about much,” he says. “It was plow ahead, full steam ahead, and let’s make the best of this situation.” Both that tour and one the following summer had their moments, but ticket sales were shaky, and Lesh’s absence—he was still in retirement mode—made the shows feel less than celebratory.
The dance continued in 1998, when another permutation, cleverly dubbed the Other Ones, toured, this time with Lesh but not Kreutzmann, who decided to stay home in Hawaii. Invited back into the fold, Hornsby, who had remained on good terms with all the Dead, felt an immediate change with Lesh back in the picture. “The Dead never wanted to rehearse,” Hornsby says. “Maybe a few days at Front Street in late summer. But for all practical purposes, we never rehearsed. With Phil back on the scene, we rehearsed a lot for the Other Ones tour. Phil was more determined on a rehearsal level to make it right. He was willing to put in the time. He was asserting himself more.”
In December 1998 Lesh, who was living with Hepatitis C, had liver transplant surgery that took him out of commission for several months. In 2000 Weir, Hart, and Kreutzmann partook in another Furthur Festival, and by then Lesh had returned to performing, but this time with his own outfit. First launched in 1999, Phil Lesh & Friends presented an ever-evolving lineup—with notable players like Haynes, Phish’s Trey Anastasio, drummer John Molo, guitarists Derek Trucks and Jimmy Herring, keyboardist Rob Barraco, and many others—offering up faithful, well-played, extended-jam versions of the Dead repertoire. In that regard Lesh became the keeper of the flame, as Herring learned when he was invited to rehearse with and then join Lesh’s band in 2000. “Phil thought of it like a flock of birds or a school of fish—he’d use those analogies,” Herring says. “In Phil’s world a solo was a group conversation, not a single person going off and doing their thing while the others played a backing track behind him. Sometimes you might be in front and sometimes in the back or middle or side. He never wanted you to find yourself in your own space, and that was hard. Most of us come from a place where you play the song and back up the vocals.” Herring soon realized the fans wanted that too: on this first tour with the band that spring, the audience would largely stay in their seats and not head out for a beer. Not surprisingly, Lesh & Friends became the shows that attracted increasing numbers of Deadheads, and in 2002 the group recorded a credible studio album, There and Back Again. The ascendance of Lesh and Friends, compared to Ratdog, initially confused some promoters: Why were so many people buying tickets to their shows? The business types didn’t realize—but the fans did—that Lesh’s bass was as integral to the Dead’s legend as Garcia’s voice. Even after all those decades Lesh’s jumpy rumble remained distinctive and embodied the sound of the band as much as any other player in the group.
With Ratdog, especially in its first half-dozen years, Weir took the opposite approach: internalizing his grief, he threw himself into touring and decided not to turn Ratdog into what amounted to a Dead tribute band. A few Weir-penned Dead songs would enter the set—“Victim or the Crime,” “Throwing Stones”—but he rarely played his best-known Dead songs, instead relying on covers of blues, R&B, and Dylan songs. To those who worked with him, that decision was baffling. “There was this void, and we had a choice of which way to react,” says Kelly, who played with Ratdog for a period after Garcia’s death. “Everybody felt, ‘Well, we’ll never take the place of the Dead, but let’s do something to fill that void.’ Bobby took a strong stand on not doing any Dead songs. People in the audience were devastated. The audience needed so badly to be healed, and they were looking to us—you could see it in their faces. It broke my heart. It was almost unbearable. The rest of the guys were pleading, ‘Bobby, you have to do this for no other reason—they’re dying out there.’ He wouldn’t go there.” (In 1998, Weir told Rolling Stone, “I carry his [Garcia’s] memory with me.”) Early on, Ratdog didn’t even have a lead guitarist, another way of avoiding Dead comparisons.
In 2001 Weir and Lesh played together at Sweetwater in Mill Valley under a fake name, playing rarities like the Workingman’s Dead outtake “Mason’s Children.” “It was awesome to look onstage and be standing there with Bobby and Phil but not having it called the Dead or the Other Ones,” says Herring, who joined them that night. “It made it less pressure. No one had any expectations other than friends playing together, and it was fun.” In 2001 Ratdog coheadlined a few shows with Lesh & Friends, and the following year Lesh joined up with the Other Ones for a tour that featured some of his players.
In 2003 and 2004 the four surviving members united once again for two summer tours but now billed as the Dead. During the 2003 tour, in a quaint sign that some things hadn’t especially changed with the fans, Tampa, Florida, police seized a small quantity of chocolate lollipops that were blended with mushrooms. Musically the tours had plenty of high points, but the four founding members were still trying to adjust to life without Garcia and determine who would lead the charge. Garcia had been their bond, and without him they weren’t simply missing the musical center of the band; they were sometimes lacking the principal connection they had with each other. By the time the tour wrapped up in May 2004 at one of the Dead’s longtime favorite venues, the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California, the Dead had grossed $17.9 million, but were weary of each other. But as Hart would later recall to Rolling Stone, “We had to let this thing rest. These things take a lot of time, the ability to see beyond the struggle of being the Grateful Dead and who we are. This isn’t an easy thing. This is really hard.”
“Everybody remembers things really well,” says Lesh as he and his wife, Jill, were driven to the next venue, the six-hundred-seat Gramercy Theatre in midtown. “It’s in our bones now.”
As they always would, reparations between the musicians after the 2004 tour eventually arrived, with one more bump along the road. Around 2005 Grateful Dead Productions began entertaining a new round of offers to manage its recordings, merchandise, licensing of likenesses, and any other physical and digital assets (excluding its publishing, which remained with their longtime company, Ice Nine). Several big-name rock managers expressed interest, but in 2006 an agreement was struck with Rhino Entertainment, with the Dead retaining creative control over any decisions. In a move that was very Dead, Rhino executive Mark Pinkus had to pass a test first during a meeting at a hotel in Marin County: To make sure he knew their material well and was the right man for the job, the band asked him to sing the tricky “Victim or the Crime” from Built to Last. Luckily Pinkus, a genial and Dead-loving guy, knew the song.
Starting in the mid-nineties Deadheads had been uploading fan-taped Dead show tapes to the Live Music Archive, the concert tape section of Archive.org, a San Francisco–based website. But with a new business arrangement in the works, the question became: How to adhere to the group’s free-trade legacy while ensuring its financial future? (A similar issue came up about five years before, when Lesh disagreed with the other band members about giving over their assets—their recorded legacy—to a new venture-capital company, but the dot-com collapse put an end to those plans.) In 2005 the band ordered Archive. org to pull the band’s soundboard recordings, although audience-made tapes would remain available for streaming and downloading.
The scenario was tricky for all involved. As one source in the Dead world says, “The Dead were caught in a difficult place. The market ethic of the band was always to give performances away. It worked as long as there were infinite shows. When Jerry died, all that music became their financial future. So now it was, ‘Maybe we can’t give this away.’ It was a very complicated position.” Unexpectedly, Lesh issued a statement that read, in part, “I was not part of this decision-making process and was not notified that the shows were to be pulled. I do feel that the music is the Grateful Dead’s legacy and I hope that one way or another all of it is available for those who want it.” Deadheads signed an online petition, after which the Dead allowed audience tapes to be available for download, while the band’s own soundboard tapes would only be streamed. The confusion of the moment embodied the difficult ways in which everyone was adjusting to life after Garcia.
The reparations eventually arrived. With the Rhino arrangement in place—and someone else taking charge of their business, which always seemed to get between them—tensions within the band began to ease. Lesh and Weir ran into each other in Mill Valley, and before long the two men, along with Hart, played a benefit for Barack Obama at the Warfield early in 2008. Lesh’s son Brian had been an Obama volunteer worker, and when the group was invited to headline an Obama benefit in the fall, all four musicians tabled their differences and agreed to come together again. “It was, ‘This is a man who we think is worthy,’” said Hart to Rolling Stone at the time. “The idea is to put the consciousness in their heads.” Haynes, who had played with Lesh & Friends and the Allman Brothers Band as well as on one of the Dead’s reunion tours (and his own band, Gov’t Mule), was called in, as was keyboardist Jeff Chimenti, a versatile, jazz-influenced Northern California–born keyboardist who’d joined up with Ratdog in 1997 and played on the Dead’s subsequent reunion tours.
Held at Penn State’s Bryce Jordan Center in October 2008, the concert—the first public performance by all four members in four years—found them playing everything from “Dark Star” and “St. Stephen” to “Touch of Grey,” and afterward Lesh was heard raving about Weir’s singing, an early sign of détente. The drummers again clicked: “Mickey and I are getting along better now,” Kreutzmann told Rolling Stone after. “The egos are out of the way.” Immediately and perhaps inevitably, talk of a reunion tour was ignited, and Live Nation, the touring-business behemoth, came aboard to organize and promote it.
The sextet reconvened in Mill Valley and rehearsed for two weeks, and the full-on tour began in April. At the start, interband relations were steady; no one wanted to taint the legacy of the Dead, and everything from the standards to more obscure and trickier pieces like “King Solomon’s Marbles” from Blues for Allah were worked up. Haynes and Chimenti were unobtrusive and agreeable, each bringing a new instrumental palette to the band: Hayes was more blues rooted than Garcia and had a throatier, hoarser, more aggressive style of singing and playing, while Chimenti’s piano could sparkle in ways that recalled the work of all the Dead’s previous keyboardists.
In New York that night in March they were doing their best to carry on the traditions of the band, and so were the fans, who snapped up the free tickets to all three shows. At the Gramercy Theater they played an abbreviated career-spanning set that included “Playing in the Band,” “Franklin’s Tower,” and “Viola Lee Blues.” A roar went up when Lesh sang a verse from “Franklin’s Tower,” recalling the “Let Phil Sing!” signs of Dead shows past. The musicians then jumped into a van and headed uptown to the Roseland Ballroom, the largest of the venues, with three thousand ticket holders. “It’s like a show split up by cab rides,” cracked Weir.
“People are listening to each other more, as opposed to taking the other person for granted,” Hart said at Roseland. “Sometimes you don’t tell people you love ’em after a show or say, ‘That was good!’ We used to get off stage and that was it. But now we’re interacting on a personal level very well and that can only bode well for the music. We try not to be confrontational. We try to work it out in the music.”
Staring at the set list backstage, though, Hart was initially skeptical of what he saw. “Yeah, that will never happen,” he said, shaking his head. “We could probably play ‘Dark Star’ for an hour. This is nuts. I think Phil did it. Phil probably just had a cup of coffee—that’s what that’s about. Phil’s dreaming if he thinks we can play that set.”
Weir wandered in. “Bob, look at that!” Hart said, showing the sheet of paper to Weir. “We’ll never get to all that,” Hart said. “If half of it gets played, we’ll be lucky.”
In the wake of Garcia’s death each of the four men had grappled with the aftermath in varying ways. Kreutzmann stayed largely in Hawaii, away from the music business. “I was lost in every direction,” he told Rolling Stone in 2012. “I didn’t know what to do.” Keyboardist Vince Welnick seemed the most devastated after Garcia died. Initially he’d joined Ratdog but came across as troubled and depressed during a tour with them. On the road, band members had talks with him to “try to bring him out of his funk,” says Kelly. “He was constantly talking about suicide on the tour. We were worried about him.” Before one show they found Welnick unconscious on a tour bus, an empty bottle of Valium nearby. Welnick left the tour soon after. In 2006, feeling excluded from the Dead’s post-Garcia lineups and unhappy with his career, he slit his throat at his Marin home. The curse of the Dead keyboardists didn’t really exist—Hornsby and Constanten were still alive—but here was a particularly grisly reminder of it.
Dating back to the band’s earliest days, Weir had always kept the most in shape. He’d had lower back problems starting in the seventies, which had led him into running and eventually to try weights, yoga, and bike riding. He now had a regimen—a half-hour of wind sprints on an elliptical trainer, followed by weights—but was also suffering from shoulder pain from throwing around a football all his life and took painkillers “for a number of years,” he has said. A few months after the 2009 Dead tour he told Rolling Stone he was using what he called “an industrial-strength vibrating massager” to work on his shoulder and loosen it up. (“You would not want to use this thing in bed, though,” he cracked.)
Weir, who had grown a bushy white beard, still had that twinkle in his eye and remained the courtliest of the four. (Few if any rock stars give their cell phone numbers and e-mail addresses to reporters, as Weir often did.) For the ever-pensive Weir, Garcia’s presence always hung in the air. “He shaped the music,” he told Rolling Stone in 2013. “His hand is still there. I can hear him out of the corner of my ear. I can hear his harmonic development. I can hear what he registers he’s going for. It never went away. It just became a little more ethereal. I don’t mean to wax hippie metaphysical, but that’s how it is for me. It always has been.”
At Roseland that March 2009 the Dead finally were able to play a fairly long set. The younger fans who pushed up against the stage barricades had hair longer than the original members of the band. Haynes and Weir sang the songs Garcia once had, and some of the old trademarks remained, like Weir forgetting a few of the lyrics. (He knew right away and pounded himself on the head as soon as he did, to the loving cheers of the fans who tolerated it.) They jammed on “St. Stephen” and threw themselves into an “Eyes of the World” that was brightened, as always, by Chimenti’s glistening piano.
The Dead tour would begin the following month and last about four weeks. When it was over, so were the Dead, at least for a few more years. Given their history, clashing personalities, and the directions their post-Garcia music had taken them, it was probably inevitable that a reunion wouldn’t last long. (A completed tour documentary was also shelved.) In a surprise move, Lesh and Weir, who had had their share of ups and downs, decided to carry on together. In the summer 2009 they recruited John Kadlecik and, at Weir’s suggestion, called their new band Furthur. Kadlecik, a guitarist and singer who’d grown up in the Midwest, had been in one early Dead tribute band (“China Cat Sunflower” was the first Garcia-Hunter song he’d learned to play) and, starting in 1997, had fronted Dark Star Orchestra, the country’s leading Dead tribute band. He’d first seen the Dead live in 1989 and had caught his share of shows after. With his gentle demeanor, long, dark hair, and, especially, the way his guitar style recalled Garcia’s, Kadlecik helped Furthur recreate the sound of the Dead more than any previous post-Garcia combination. “Yeah, it’s a little spooky in some ways because he’s internalized the essence of Jerry’s approach,” Lesh told Rolling Stone in 2010. “Not so much the notes, although he’s really good at pulling that out. Also, his voice can be very similar to Jerry’s. Every so often he’ll sing something in a certain way and it’s just like déjà vu. I love that. It’s been a long 15 years.”
For the next four years Furthur became a juggernaut, touring regularly and playing songs from the Dead canon and even entire album sides. Dark Star Orchestra continued without Kadlecik, still brilliantly recreating specific Dead shows, but Furthur became, in their way, the leading Dead homage—and, in doing so, unintentionally rode a business wave in rock ’n’ roll. More and more, classic rock bands—Journey, Foreigner, Styx—were touring without their key front men but with younger vocal ringers. Yet when Furthur was on—at intimate shows at Sweetwater in Mill Valley in early 2013 or a headlining triumph at Madison Square Garden in late 2011, to a sold-out crowd that spanned generations and stayed on its feet the entire time—it transcended nostalgia and brought the old songs back to life. By the time Furthur had run its course in 2014, the four surviving members had returned to their separate corners. Hart, who had two Grammys under his belt (for his Planet Drum and Global Drum Project albums), had his own pop-worldbeat band, the Mickey Hart band, and was working on projects that included turning light waves into sound. Still based in Hawaii, Kreutzmann applied his drum skills to a series of jam bands starting in the early 2000s, including 7 Walkers (fronted by New Orleans–based singer-guitarist Papa Mali) and, in 2014, Billy and the Kids. In 2011 Weir opened the Tamalpais Research Institute (TRI), a recording and broadcast facility based in San Rafael; he would also return to Ratdog, with whom he’d cut the sturdy 2001 album Evening Moods. Lesh had his own venue, Terrapin Crossroads, in San Rafael, an intimate venue inspired by Levon Helm’s Midnight Ramble barn shows in Woodstock.
What remained, more than anything, was the Dead’s broad legacy. For a bunch of outcasts and outliers who’d come together from widely varying economic and musical backgrounds, playing music that rubbed against conventions (and the industry) from the start, the Dead had left a startlingly huge footprint on the culture. The world of improvisational jam bands had become a genre unto itself, complete with annual festivals and extended improvising that used the Dead as its blueprint. One could easily trace a line from the Acid Tests to the flourishing electronic dance music world that had become mainstream by the second decade of the new century. As with the Tests, electronic dance music (EDM) events were less about the performers (DJs, in this case) and more about communal (and actual) ecstasy. Both focused on waves of sound and delirium. Their impact could be even more day-to-day. In Japan during a later tour with Ratdog, Weir was confronted with the band’s reach when he visited an ancient temple. “We stopped into this little Japanese restaurant that had been in the family for hundreds of years,” Weir told Rolling Stone in 2013, “and the head chef was a huge fan. He recognized me right away, and he was acutely knowledgeable of many aspects of our lives. He served us a lot of sake.”
For a band that never quite knew how to deal with the business until later in their career, the Dead’s influence on the music industry was also profound. With the virtual collapse of the old-school music business in the new century, bands like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails began releasing new work on their own labels, much like the Dead had thirty years before (but with not as much success). The Dead had a connection to the formation of social networking: first with its direct band-to-fan communications in the seventies and then by way of the online Deadhead forum in the WELL (cofounded by Stewart Brand). Thanks to devoted Dead archivist David Lemieux, the music kept coming in the form of elaborate boxed sets of particular tours and the Dave’s Picks series of vintage concerts that picked up where the late Dick Latvala’s Dick’s Picks series had left off. There were now Grateful Dead conferences, snowboards, and video games. The industry of the Dead, considered in such peril after Garcia’s death, carried on—but, luckily, so did the band’s music, preserved better than ever for future generations to dissect and analyze. As for future reunions, Weir wouldn’t rule anything out. As he told Rolling Stone, “Unfinished business, and there always will be with us, until enough of us are gone that it’s off the table. But until then, it’s always going to be on the table. The Dead is going to do what the Dead is going to do, and that’s always there.”
The Roseland set of the evening finally ended, and the four surviving members, along with Chimenti and Haynes, gathered in a backstage area to finally rest after a relentless day. “Interesting band,” Hart said with a smile. “It’s like a box of chocolates—you never know what you’re going to get.” Behind him, the musicians shared a collective end-of-the-night joint. Garcia was gone, but some of the rituals—along with the songs, the melodies, and the flashes of group harmony—remained. The vans soon arrived to transport them to one more hotel room and return them, once more, to the twisty road that had changed music and their lives.