So Many Roads (67 page)

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.