So Many Roads (66 page)

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.