In an interview last October, one of the leaders of the world`s most popular rock band said the Grateful Dead`s long, strange trip from hippies to millionaires was winding down.
”We`ve been running on inertia for quite a long time,” Jerry Garcia told Rolling Stone magazine. The band members, he added, needed ”to construct new enthusiasm for ourselves, because we`re getting a little burned out.”
Many Deadheads concluded that Garcia wanted out.
But in an interview in Chicago a few days ago, the band`s other principle songwriter and singer, Bob Weir, brushed off the assertion that the Dead is dying.
”Since Garcia`s remarks, we`ve undergone maybe two or three more ebbs and flows in our creative process,” Weir says, relaxing in his hotel suite.
”I think he was speaking out of a temporary angst. You can never push the bounds of your art or your music enough. You can get a good roll going and it feels swell, but there`s always another hill to get over. If they caught him two months later, it would have been the reverse. And two months after that, it would`ve been the same old story. We just have to live with it.”
So Garcia was speaking for the whole band?
”We all feel it, but we get through it. How? We tough it out. How does a writer get through writer`s block? He toughs it out.”
The Dead has been toughing it out to the tune of up to $1.5 million a night-the band`s gross revenue from a recent concert at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J. In a recent survey, the band had the top seven concert grosses of any band in America during May and June. Over two nights at Soldier Field recently, the sextet played to more than 100,000 fans.
Not bad for a band that has had exactly one Top 10 hit in 27 years and releases studio albums about as often as a Democrat gets elected president.
The core of the band-Weir, Garcia, bassist Phil Lesh and drummer Bill Kreutzmann-has been together since early 1965. Drummer Mickey Hart joined in 1967.
”We`ve learned our instruments, we`ve learned each other,” Weir says.
”We`ve reached a level of artistic intimacy that hardly anyone ever gets to enjoy. It`d be stupid to walk away from that.”
The Dead has suffered its share of disappointments, heartache and, to use Garcia`s word, ”inertia.”
The death of keyboardist Brent Mydland in 1990 from drug and alcohol abuse was a major blow, and Garcia barely survived his own eight-year bout with heroin.
”God knows, we tried to help them,” Weir says. ”We went and hammered on Garcia, but he didn`t do anything until he was ready. We went and hammered on Brent. He didn`t do anything, and he died.”
In hiring Vince Welnick to replace Mydland, the band recognized that it would take more than just an accomplished musician and singer to fill the void.
”One thing we didn`t want to do is get someone a lot younger than us, who hadn`t had a chance to work out some of the problems that go with being in a band,” says Weir, who at 45 is the second youngest member of the group next to the 41-year-old Welnick. ”Otherwise it would land right in his lap-the sudden fame, the money. It`s perilous. It happened to all of us so slowly that many of us hadn`t had a chance to go all that astray.”
Weir is a fitness buff who spent his free time in Chicago jogging along the lakefront-not exactly embodying the image some people have of the Dead as LSD-munching space cadets still living in the `60s.
”You`ll find, on a given day, four or five of us in the gym,” he says.
”Most everybody in the band works out. Times change. . . . You kind of burn out on drugs after awhile, even if you`re not heavy into them. I was done with LSD a year after I started taking it, and I took LSD willingly the last time in 1966. Then there was experimentation with other stuff, but I`ve always liked to be self-contained, to enjoy myself without being tied to anyone`s or anything`s coattails.”
The Dead`s performances consist of three hours of largely improvised music, which requires each band member to listen and react with split-second precision.
”We have complicated arrangements and you have to have your wits about you to catch a theme as it`s introduced, so you can play off it,” Weir says. ”If we were all buzzed out, we couldn`t do what we do. I don`t think a lot of kids understand that. I don`t think a lot of people in American society understand that. I think most people think that we`re in a raging drugged-out stupor all the time.”
Weir says he`s aware that many of the band`s newer fans-the ones who have turned the Dead from a long-running cult combo into a stadium act-seem intent on re-creating a drugs-and-tie-dye era they have only read or heard about.
”I don`t know what to say to them,” he says. ”I`ve always been into enjoying the here and now if I possibly could. I lived through the `60s and I had all the fun I needed to. Then I moved on. I`m trying to get all I can out of the `90s. I am not a nostalgic sort.”
To stay out of ruts, he stays busy. He frequently collaborates with outside musicians, including virtuoso bassist Rob Wasserman, with whom he`ll perform July 16 at the World Music Theatre. He`s also heavily involved in the environmental movement. His current project is fighting legislation that threatens one of America`s largest remaining stretches of forest, in Montana. ”The land and forest management policy of our goverment is really pathetic,” he says. ”If we`re going to have any forest left in this country, we have to do something now. We can`t be telling Brazil and Malaysia to stop clear-cutting their forests when we`re clear-cutting the last forests we have. And we`re taking it down just as fast they are. The results are just as bad, to the climate, the atmosphere. How can we be that two-faced?”
Weir is wary of using his celebrity to advance the cause, but ”the sad fact is that people won`t listen to qualified experts. They want famous people. I`ve done my best to get up to speed on the issues, but I don`t for a moment pretend to be a qualified expert. All I can do is try to bring as many facts to light, defer as much attention as I can to qualified experts and get as much relevant commentary as possible into the records.”
His commitment is as much personal as patriotic: ”I expect to live a long time, and I would love to have children someday. But I`m not real eager to bring them into a world that I don`t think is trying to mend its ways. Part of working for a living is working for a world to live in.”
In talking to other musicians about his ecology work, ”I try to explain to them that it`s going to take serious commitment. I did a benefit concert for the rainforests in New York a few years back, and there was a major star involved. She made a little address about the subject and the next week she dropped it. She had bigger fish to fry. All of her fans said, `Oh, come on, we did rainforests last week.` That ticked me off good and proper. That kind of commitment we don`t need.”
Weir is most animated when talking about his political involvements, but it`s the music-the Dead`s music in particular-that continues to bring him the greatest pleasure.
”I`ve been promising myself as soon as I get done with this specific political issue, I`m gonna hack out a whole lot more time for writing,” in preparation for a Dead studio album, which Weir hopes will be recorded next winter.
”I`m starting to feel pretty stale, and suffer behind it. I really need to get some songs out. I`ve got all kinds of stuff clamoring for attention in terms of songs, musical ideas. And I`ve got to get back to it. That`s what grounds me.”
And it`s the music that allows him to put up with the big tours and the circus atmosphere they frequently create.
”There`s a major band out right now that`s doing a note-for-note show and they`re doing a two-year tour,” Weir says. ”Their amount of leeway every night is less than 1 percent. If I was doing that, I`d get about halfway through the tour and then you`d find me in a belltower with a sniper`s rifle.”
