Fare Thee Well

1

Board Meeting

CHRIST, NOT Garcia.

Nobody expected that. True, everybody on the plane had heard him wheezing when he fell asleep on the flight home from the band’s last concert at Soldier Field in Chicago, but his death in August 1995 had come as a complete and sudden shock to all his bandmates and their organization.

The Deadheads, especially the canny older guard of the band’s exceptionally knowing, caring fans, were not so surprised. Many had stopped coming to shows after Garcia returned from his diabetic coma in 1987. They were heartbroken as they watched his waistline explode, his health deteriorate, and his once unparalleled skills on guitar disintegrate. As the band’s performances through the nineties continued to devolve with Garcia’s personal problems increasingly apparent—and their audiences almost inexplicably still growing beyond imagination—some simply stopped attending, convinced they were watching him kill himself.

Just as no other band had ever been like the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia had been like no other bandleader. He was the philosophical axis, the virtuoso guitar player, the father figure, the best friend. In fact, each one of the four surviving members thought that he alone had been Garcia’s best friend—they held no such illusions about each other. Garcia was their true north. Since they were young men, they had set their compasses to him. His death hit them like a sledgehammer.

But in the uncertain and bewildering days after Garcia’s death, it wasn’t just the loss of friendship with him that they had to mourn. Their entire foundation had come loose, and they were jolted by the harsh realities that had suddenly intruded into their lives. Distraught and fearful, uncertain of the future, canceling engagements, laying off loyal crew, these men had barely seen each other since the funeral, couldn’t bring themselves to. Each one had largely disappeared into his own world. Four months went by after Garcia’s death before the four surviving members could muster the will to meet and decide what to do about the beast called the Grateful Dead that had ruled their lives for the better part of four decades.

After thirty years of touring, the band ached from a deep weariness that almost no one but their road crew could understand. Over the years, they had realized the Grateful Dead was bigger than all of them, had a life of its own, and created its own momentum. But could it survive without the visionary leadership of its founding father? There had been many lean years in the history of the Dead, but by the time of Garcia’s death, they were playing to stadiums full of paying customers in every city in the country and it was hard not to go out and pick up the money. They had come to enjoy the charter jets, limousines, and five-star hotels. Band members, along with crew and staff, were settling down, getting married, raising families, buying expensive homes. Their employees numbered more than sixty, many of whom had been on the trip for decades.

The band’s so-called career was largely an accident. The Grateful Dead never sought success. They saw themselves as musicians. They played music. The actual business of a rock-and-roll band was a mystery to them, and they couldn’t be bothered with it. They didn’t think in terms of wealth and fame; they hadn’t sought it and didn’t know how to value it. Eventually, they realized if they were going to manage their organization and continue to do what they loved, they had to come to terms with the commerce, and they made a grudging, uneasy peace with it. More than any other rock band, the Grateful Dead had enjoyed freedom from highly structured and rigid business practices. Instead of corporate bylaws, they had lived by a code vigilantly observed, which had served to create the Grateful Dead ethos. They had largely been able to approach life on their own terms, but with the level of success they had stumbled into, that carefree attitude was no longer possible.

The band members and their most trusted associates showed up Thursday morning, December 7, at the band’s old Victorian in downtown San Rafael that had served as their headquarters for more than thirty years—the new Novato headquarters on Bel Marin Keys Road was not quite ready. They were there for a meeting of the board of directors of Grateful Dead Productions, the corporate arm of the famed psychedelic rock band. They were weighed down with grief and the burden of having to decide the fate of not only themselves, but of all the people who depended on the organization for their livelihood. Their long-suffering staff stood by anxiously. Drummer Billy Kreutzmann still couldn’t bring himself to attend and stayed behind in Hawaii.

It would be the last board meeting at the Lincoln Street complex, held in the upstairs room in an auxiliary building across the street from the ramshackle two-story gabled house on the quiet corner. In typical Grateful Dead fashion, the band had rented the building since they first moved to Marin County and had only recently purchased the former Coca-Cola bottling plant in nearby Novato where the band’s thriving merchandise enterprise had already been located under a rental agreement for several years, and where the entire Grateful Dead operation would now be centered. Just before he died, Garcia had visited the new rehearsal hall and offices and given his approval.

For the last ten years, the band had been the leading box-office attraction in rock, pulling down a hard-to-believe $370 million in gate receipts over the decade. Now that roaring river of revenue had come to a sudden and complete halt. The operation was in immediate economic free fall. They had already scrubbed an East Coast tour scheduled to start in September and laid off their thirty-person road crew. Between the office and the band’s merchandise business, there were still another thirty employees.

Like many families protecting an addict in their midst, the Dead had lived in denial over Garcia’s health issues. They had survived one near-death episode years before, but carried on while Garcia continued to sink deeper into the abyss. He had struggled for ten years with his heroin addiction. Only band management knew that he had secretly made plans to enter rehab at the Betty Ford Clinic after Soldier Field that July. The management team had questioned among themselves whether the September tour would happen. Garcia, chafing against the detailed routine, bolted Betty Ford after a few days, but had checked into another treatment facility in Marin County when he was found dead in the middle of the night.

With such a large organization, it would make sense that a financial plan would have been in place to cover unexpected catastrophic events such as the death of the leader. Yet nothing like a plan had ever been developed. The Grateful Dead operated like a minimum-wage worker living paycheck to paycheck, without preparation for the future, acting like things would never change. They had worked for years, but had little to show for it other than expansive lifestyles and large debts. With a number of Dead employees already gone and more layoffs looming, Garcia’s death forced instant hardships on those he left behind. These were mostly people who had labored beside the band for thirty years or more. The egalitarian Dead treated them like family. They paid salaries well above the industry norm and extended all kinds of financial assistance to their people. When a fallen redwood tree crushed manager Cameron Sears’s home (during a New Year’s Eve show while the house was vacant), the band loaned him the money for repairs. The band routinely extended cash advances to crew and employees and then carried the debt on the books for years. Such generosity was typical of the Dead. The type of loyalty the band members showed the people who worked for them was rare in the music industry, and these layoffs cut them to the core.

Guitarist Bob Weir and bassist Phil Lesh had attended the first company meeting within two weeks of Garcia’s death conducted by band attorney Hal Kant, the first round of layoffs, where anybody who had worked for the band less than ten years was let go. They hung around after the meeting to commiserate.

“This place has been a haven for the chronically unemployed,” Weir told the band’s computer specialist, Bob Bralove, whose relatively recent hiring meant he did not make the first cut. “You’ll be all right.”

The layoffs only heightened the emotional toll on this traumatized group. There was no consensus on what to do. Weir, along with drummer Mickey Hart, eager to return to performing, had committed to a summer tour to be called the Furthur Festival, which would feature a repertory-style program that included Hot Tuna (featuring Jefferson Airplane alumni Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady); the East Los Angeles Chicano rockers Los Lobos, who were a favorite of Garcia’s; former Dead sideman Bruce Hornsby; and others. It was a hurried and unorganized effort to find employment for at least some of the crew and help cover lost income for some of the Dead’s concert promoters across the country. Phil Lesh, sick of strenuous touring and father to two young sons, wanted to stay home, raise his kids, and have nothing to do with any future performances. Kreutzmann, one of two drummers in the band, who initially had dived into a bottle, went through rehab, divorced his wife, and vanished to Kauai, where he was surfing and scuba diving. He didn’t even take a drum kit with him.

When Garcia died, Weir was in New Hampshire touring with his solo band RatDog. He played the show that night and returned to California the next day for the funeral, leaving his band and crew waiting in an East Coast hotel for the tour to resume the next week. The band had evolved out of a collaboration with bassist Rob Wasserman (originally called Scaring the Children) and had only recently added drummer Jay Lane. Garcia’s death was announced the morning of Lane’s third date with the band. After the funeral, Weir went right back on the road and stayed. He was only in town for the fateful board meeting, flying to Las Vegas for a gig that night.

Mickey Hart had been sequestered in the recording studio in his Sonoma County ranch with an ambitious solo album, a monstrously complex project that Garcia had known about and encouraged. The drummer brought in British record producer Robin Millar, best known for his ultra-sleek production with soul singer Sade, to finish the record. Millar smoothed Hart’s massive percussion overdubs into silken Europop sonics highlighted by a British female vocal group, the Mint Juleps, along with some powerful songs from Dead lyricist Robert Hunter. The album brimmed with exquisite instrumental tracks and sublime vocal textures. Titled Mystery Box, the record became a far more polished and fully realized piece of work than any previous solo album from members of the Dead and, astonishingly enough, sounded like a record that could be a hit. Hart said later that making the album saved his life.

Such was the emotional landscape when the band members dully crowded their cars into the tiny, cramped parking spaces behind the back of the house. Grateful Dead Productions CEO and band manager Cameron Sears was to chair the meeting. The band’s chief financial officer, the straitlaced former banker Nancy Mallonee, was there. Hal Kant attended, as did the head of Grateful Dead Merchandise, the band’s direct mail operation, Peter McQuaid. The two remaining members of the road crew, Steve Parish and Ram Rod, came. They had already announced they would be pooling their salary and sharing it equally with their crewmate Kidd Candelario to keep him on the payroll. Keyboardist Vince Welnick, who just joined the band five years before and was given a full share from day one, was the only one wearing tie-dye. Sears’s assistant Jan Simmons would take the minutes of the meeting. Even lyricist Hunter, hardly an organization man, came. Publicist Dennis McNally hovered around, in case they needed to draft a press release. The atmosphere was grim and hardly chatty.

In the boardroom, sitting in one of the dozen custom chairs, one arm draped over the signature armrests hand-carved with the stealie—the skull-and-lightning bolts trademark of the Dead—was Phil Lesh. His sock-clad feet rested on the massive twenty-foot antique oak table the band brought back from Germany on their 1972 European tour. He rolled an unlit cigar in his mouth.

The band members knew each other well. They had, quite literally, grown up together. Weir had joined the band at age sixteen; Lesh, the oldest, was almost ten years older. After almost a decade of chaos and touring in 1974, the band took a yearlong hiatus. They came back together having come to accept the role the Dead played in their lives and settled into a remarkably steady, harmonious collaboration with Garcia at the helm. There had been the typical miscellaneous arguments and shifting alliances, but no major political disputes inside the Grateful Dead.

The entire world seemed to be aware of the band’s predicament. Hart and Lesh had attended a fundraising lunch for President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore, and the president asked about their plans. Since shortly after Garcia’s death, rumors had been flying about his replacement. David Hidalgo of Los Lobos, Neil Young, Carlos Santana, Jorma Kaukonen, and Mark Knopfler were all mentioned. The band members heard the rumors and so did the guitarists named, but there was no basis in fact. There were no plans. Nothing had been seriously discussed. The four musicians had only seen each other once since the funeral and the Golden Gate Park memorial two days later. They held a brief meeting a couple of days after, sitting around one of the front offices at the new place in Novato, vaguely tossing around some thoughts, but mostly staring at their shoes and enduring the awkward silences. Nobody thought the idea of continuing as the Grateful Dead sounded right, especially Kreutzmann, but nobody had the belly to deal with anything but the most fundamental business, certainly not facing any difficult issues at that early stage.

Four months later, this board meeting would have to address the question. It seemed almost sacrilegious to consider replacing Garcia, but there was a need among the band to come to some decision. These men were tired, bereaved, frustrated, and scared, with the enormous weight of the massive Grateful Dead organization on their shoulders and, without Garcia, no idea how they were going to hold it up. The meeting was called to order before a standing-room-only crowd.

There were many items on the agenda, but staring everybody in the face was the most basic decision that needed to be made about the band’s future—how they would continue.

Discussion was relatively brief. Cameron Sears, who never met a decision he would not rather postpone, argued that no decision need be made yet. Welnick, who had been flat broke when he was hired by the band and had become greatly enamored of the Dead lifestyle, enthusiastically supported getting the band back on the road as soon as possible.

Talking from a speakerphone, Kreutzmann put the matter to rest. “I’m not going to tour anymore,” he said.

With Kreutzmann’s simple declarative statement, Lesh no doubt felt a sense of relief flood through him. He, too, must have been tired of the Grateful Dead hamster wheel. Maybe they weren’t ready to pull the plug on their carers, but Kreutzmann’s words were liberating. The overwhelming sense that they couldn’t continue without Garcia took over the meeting. Nobody had the drive or interest in remodeling the band. It seemed to them that their long, strange trip had finally come to an end.

Hunter stood up to speak. More than anybody except Garcia, Hunter had been responsible for creating the Grateful Dead. While Garcia was the undisputed genius musician and bandleader, Hunter’s job was to articulate the vision, to detail out the Dead world in his songs. He had risen to the occasion many times. A crusty, whimsical professorial sort not given to getting involved in band business, Hunter remained outside the day-to-day turmoil and rarely deigned to express himself. Standing to speak, he had the room’s attention.

Hunter simply quoted a couplet from the end of his song, “Fire on the Mountain.”

“The more that you give, why, the more it will take,” he said, “to the thin line beyond which you really cannot fake.”

Then he walked out.

The meeting moved on. Much business needed to be conducted, decisions that had been set aside for the past four months. The band members had held almost daily telephone conversations with the front office, but spoke with each other very little. Counselor Kant raised an issue about Garcia’s will that concerned him. In the will, Garcia bequeathed the custom-made guitars he played back to the man who made them. Kant was certain that the guitars were purchased with Grateful Dead Productions funds and, consequently, belonged to the band. He wanted to take steps to make sure the guitars did not get away. Some of the musicians didn’t understand that the band owned their instruments, let alone Garcia’s. Garcia himself probably hadn’t known.

Publicist McNally was summoned and he quickly composed a press release. A trained academician who landed his job because Garcia liked his Jack Kerouac biography, Desolate Angel, McNally hardly turned out typical press mill copy. It was a brief statement, tinged with poetry and regret, but it effectively closed the door on the future of the Grateful Dead:

The release would go out the next morning. Would that it could be so simple.