A Long Strange Trip (79 page)

The next tour was only a month away when they arrived at Front Street to audition new musicians. Because they were emotionally gutted, they had no energy for the process, and after listening to three or four players, including T. Lavitz, Tim Gorman, and Pete Sears, they settled on the first player who seemed able to cover the keyboard parts and high harmonies, Vince Welnick, formerly of the Tubes. The swiftness of his selection did neither him nor the Dead any good at all. Vince was a decent fellow and a more-than-competent player, but he had been a lifetime supporting player, and his fundamental perception of music did not really fit the Dead, where everyone was a lead player. His life had been near the bottom when he joined the band—he’d been sleeping in a barn, about to declare bankruptcy—and the swift turnaround of his financial fortunes complicated his relationship to the band; the enthusiasm with which he grasped prosperity seemed inappropriate to men who were by now used to money.

That September, the band released
Without a Net,
a live album recorded between fall 1989 and spring 1990, which among other things served to document the massive contributions of “Clifton Hanger,” the dedicatee and Brent’s road alias. The fall tour began in Cleveland, and on the first night, Vince got a hint of what it was like to be in the Dead. Just before the show was to begin, Harry Popick went over to check Vince’s microphone and sat down on his bench, which promptly collapsed. By the time Vince got to the stage, the bench was fixed and all he saw was the sticker that Dead Heads had printed up and passed around in welcome: “Yo Vinnie!”

A few nights later, at Madison Square Garden, they were joined by Bruce Hornsby, who would play acoustic piano with the band for most of the next two years. He had a more detailed idea of the structure of Dead songs, as well as the philosophy of playing them, than Welnick. Bruce was at times a little busy in his playing, and the combination with Vince was sometimes too much. At other times, it was brilliant. Vince’s real introduction to the Dead may well have been at the next show after the Garden run, in Stockholm, a truly abysmal night. Despite three days’ rest after the flight from home, the band was jet-lagged. Garcia had eaten a chunk of hashish and was useless. At the drum break, Vince went to visit the facilities and then stood backstage, wretched, when Scrib came up to him and recognized his dismay. “Vince, you don’t understand. It’s not you. This is a band that
really
sucks sometimes, and tonight’s the night. Don’t worry about it.”

The Dead had not been in Europe in nine years, and they were effectively starting over with a promotional tour. Working in halls of between seven thousand and ten thousand, they probably sold 80 percent of their tickets on the continent and 90 percent in England. The press coverage was fabulous. The shows varied in quality, but after the nadir in Stockholm they were at least decent, and Saturday night in Paris was as good as it could get. The tour ended in London, and with a synchronistic tip to the future, they played “(I Ain’t Gonna Work on) Maggie’s Farm” not only for the reigning prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, but also for a future one, Tony Blair, one of a number of members of Parliament who were guests. Yet because the band brought every tour member’s family, putting fifty people into first-class hotels, they lost money on the tour. The thinking had been to establish a viable alternative to U.S. tours, but the band was not in a building mood; it would be the last tour of Europe.

The year 1990 ended with one sweet bonus. In an effort to professionalize the national radio broadcast that now accompanied New Year’s Eve, Healy had suggested that Ken Nordine, creator of Word Jazz, be invited to host the affair. Nordine had been blessed with a silken basso profundo that had given him a great radio voice-over career, but in the 1950s he’d hung out in jazz clubs and begun working up spoken poetry to music, which became the
Word Jazz
album. He was a real hero to Garcia and Healy, and his presence was not only a marvelous opportunity for everyone to connect with their roots but also a chance to meet a truly lovable man. With Branford’s quartet opening, and Branford sitting in with the Dead, 1990 ended well.

The new year began with war, and it sucked Robert Hunter right in. Over the past decade he’d opened up his work life tremendously, first translating Rilke’s
Duino Elegies,
published in 1987 by Hulogosi, Alan Trist’s Eugene, Oregon, company, and then publishing his own poems in
Idiot’s
Delight
(1990) and
Night Cadre
(1991) in New York. He’d even cautiously stepped out onstage to read poetry for the first time, and he’d been warmly received not only by Dead Heads but also by poets and poetry critics. And so as the Gulf War of January–March 1991 began, he responded with two hundred pages of open verse called
A Strange Music.
For two months he sat in front of the television, looking at Baghdad through the green of night-vision cameras. And the result, aside from many dead Iraqi soldiers and lots of American chest-pounding?

We must change
& we can’t
We never could
Individuals alone
can change
I can change
You can change
They cannot
You & I will
never be them.
They may be us
but never can
they be you or me.

So long as Americans separated themselves from the fortunes of the rest of the world’s inhabitants, there would be trouble.

Hunter was not the only published member of the band. The previous fall Mickey Hart had published his memoir,
Drumming at the Edge of
Magic.
The book and accompanying CD did well, setting the stage for a second volume,
Planet Drum,
in 1991. It also led to a percussion summit: Hart and his cohorts in the band Planet Drum, Zakir Hussain— Babatunde Olatunji, Airto Moreira, Giovanni Hidalgo, Sikiru Adepoju, and Flora Purim, among others—played at the American Booksellers Association’s convention at the Marriott Marquis in the heart of Times Square. A drum and stick were placed at each table setting in the vast ballroom, and at the end of the performance, the band led the entire audience in a thunderous samba line down a number of escalator flights, through the lobby, and out onto Broadway—where Hart leaped into a limo and vanished. Around this time he also engaged in an even more profound adventure. His ethnomusicological studies had led him to produce a series of field recording albums. He was working on one release, a compilation from New Guinea called
Voices of the Rainforest,
which had environmental angles, so a liaison from the environmental movement came to have a talk with him. The liaison was a member of the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office named Caryl Orbach, and when Mickey turned from the mixing board in his home studio to greet her, he was instantly and completely smitten. They married in 1991, and their partnership was enlarged by the arrival of a daughter, Reya, in 1993. Hart was a fulfilled man.

In April Arista brought out
Deadicated,
an album of Dead songs performed by other musicians; the company had wanted to direct some attention to the Dead as musicians rather than the band’s crowd control problems, and had supported the efforts of an independent producer named Ralph Sall. The resulting album did an excellent job of serving that purpose. Elvis Costello’s “Ship of Fools” delighted both Garcia and Hunter, who called it “exquisite . . . he’s inside the song so much, he’s telling it to me.” Many other songs were superb, but the clear winner for many was the most outré take, Jane’s Addiction’s version of “Ripple,” with the lyrics sung over the rhythm of “The Other One.”

The summer tour season began in late April with the first outdoor Las Vegas shows, and the local newspapers estimated that the weekend brought $23 million to the local economy. The touring rock business was down that summer, and the Dead had the only stadium tour in America. Money talks. The Dead talked their way across the country, and mostly the responding sound was accommodation. One of the favorite new venues of the nineties was Deer Creek, an amphitheater in the countryside outside Indianapolis. At first, the nearest small town, Noblesville, had been terrified of the Dead Heads. After the first year, though, the town began to charge for camping in the local park. Soon it was basing its yearly park-and-rec budget on the profits from four days of Dead Heads. Money talks, especially through Dead tickets: on June 13, three days before two shows at Giants Stadium, FBI agents burst into Nino’s Printing in Queens to arrest Jaime Nino and Joseph “Joe Fish” Dire, who had two thousand counterfeit tickets to the shows, ready for sale, stacked next to the press.

The summer tour ended in Denver, where the band sat down with Garcia in a major intervention, and he responded positively. He spent August driving himself to a methadone clinic every morning, standing in line with everyone else to receive his allocation, seemingly committed to getting healthy. He made other changes in his private life. For the first time since Stinson Beach, he purchased a home, on Palm Court in San Rafael. It featured an Olympic-size swimming pool, which cost $1,200 a month to heat, and, oddly, rental units. For some time, Alice Giblin, once part of the Dead’s office staff, had taken care of Garcia’s personal business. But she had roused deep suspicions in Garcia’s increasingly possessive mate, Manasha, and was let go, replaced by Vince Di Biase, a New York Dead Head who’d been involved in making holographic art. In the early eighties he’d met Garcia and eventually done business with G.D. Merchandising. Despite being burned by the Dead when they’d signed with the merchandising company Brockum in the early nineties—his poster rights were taken away in violation of his contract with the comment “Sorry, we owe you one”—Vince had stuck around. His wife, Gloria, had become Garcia’s daughter Keelin’s full-time nanny in 1989, and early in 1991, Garcia called in Vince to ask him to manage the property, and ultimately take over his art business from Nora Sage, who annoyed Garcia with her aggressive commercial instincts.

By the fall of 1991 the Dead had hit a certain peak. Coverage of the tour phenomenon verged on the overwhelming, and even their side projects now received respectful, well-deserved notice. That summer the
Independent,
a reputable English publication, had taken note of the Rex Foundation’s Lesh-guided grants to avant-garde English composers like Havergal Brian and Robert Simpson, gleefully reporting that the Rex gave as much in some years as the British Arts Council. A few weeks later Mickey Hart appeared before a U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging to recommend drum circles as a form of music therapy, particularly for the elderly. But
the
media frenzy of the year centered on the band’s return to downtown Boston. Ten years before, the Garden’s management had decided that basketball, hockey, and the circus were enough. Now the new boss, Larry Moulter, stuck his neck out and invited the band. Their six nights in September came accompanied by days of front-page coverage in both the liberal and traditionally friendly
Globe
and the tabloid
Herald.
When the
Herald
announced on the front page that “Hub Grateful for Dead invasion,” predicting the visit would pump $10 million into the Hub’s depressed tourist economy, the deal was done. Moulter had anticipated everything, even setting up a merchant’s hot line for complaints about Dead Head behavior. The line was used once in the six-night run, when someone wanted to buy some tickets.

The least satisfactory aspect of the visit was the shows, which were generally mediocre. They followed a Madison Square Garden run in which Garcia’s playing was so uninspired—in Bruce Hornsby’s word, “languorous”—that Hornsby actually protested to Garcia. “I resent you coming to the gig and being there but not being there. You’re not bringing what you can to the show every night.” Not used to being challenged, Garcia replied, “Well, you don’t understand twenty-five years of burnout, man.” Though the conversation was cathartic, and Garcia responded with a little more energy in his playing, he was clearly still subpar.

In Boston the
Globe
’s Steve Morse visited Garcia onstage and got a tired, cranky interview that lacked Jerry’s usual generosity. “Yeah. I can’t stand it backstage. Too many geeks.” Self-deprecating as ever, he remarked, “I don’t go onstage with some kind of messianic vision or anything. I’m basically going out there hoping my guitar is in tune.” When the talk turned to Brent, he grew serious. “It’s always a blow to lose a friend and I find myself losing them more and more frequently now . . . It’s just pain . . . We’re now talking about taking some serious time off . . . So it looks like a hiatus is going to happen.” In fact, though Garcia had long grumbled about being overworked, the interview was more of a warning shot to the band than a report on a decision made, since 1992 was as fully booked as ever.

More pain. On October 25, Bill Graham and his lover, Melissa Gold, attended a Huey Lewis and the News show at Concord Pavilion, arriving in a helicopter piloted by his longtime employee Steve “Killer” Kahn. It was a stormy night, and on their way home, the chopper was caught in a sudden downdraft and crashed into an enormous electricity tower near the town of Sonoma, killing all three instantly. It was an insane night to fly, and Graham’s hubris in insisting on doing so was absurd. “But what a way to go,” said Weir. “Like something out of Wagner.”

The Dead’s four-show Halloween run began just two days later, and the press was there. The band talked about Bill, going for the laughs, as they always did in a group setting.

GARCIA:
“We miss the personal thing—the guy who understands us. That’s what hurts. As far as the other stuff, the way of going about things, Bill and us differed a lot of times, but . . .”

WEIR:
“That’s ’cause we were right and he was wrong.”

GARCIA:
“Right! We also knew how to get the best out of each other . . . The big loss is this guy who was like our uncle . . .”

WEIR:
“Our thieving, conniving uncle . . .”