When Jimmy Herring takes the stage Monday at the Allstate Arena as the lead guitarist of the newly reconfigured Grateful Dead — now known as the Other Ones — he’ll likely feel a good deal more relaxed than he did the night of Aug. 3.
That’s when he found himself stepping out for the first time in his new job in front of a sea of bobbing, weaving skeptics at the Alpine Valley Music Theatre in Troy, Wis., primed for a party but dubious that any mere mortal could fill the lead guitar role played by the band’s patriarch, Jerry Garcia. It was Garcia’s death in 1995 that ended the Dead’s reign as the longest-running outdoor party in rock history.
It took nearly seven years before Garcia’s old bandmates — drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, bassist Phil Lesh and guitarist Bob Weir — began to consider the possibility of playing together again. Kreutzmann had retired from the music business, Lesh grew estranged from the others over business matters, and Weir and Hart occupied themselves with side projects. So the weekend of Aug. 3-4 was to be a test to see if the band and its fans could once again co-exist peacefully and profitably. Minutes before that first official reunion gig at Alpine, I ran into Hart backstage.
“Pressure? What pressure?” His relaxed expression said. He knew that just about every one of the 35,000 pairs of eyes in the audience that night would be trained not on him and the other original members or new keyboardists Rob Barraco and Jeff Chimenti, but on Herring.
“He’s the man on the hot seat,” Hart said. “He doesn’t play anything like Jerry, but everyone’s going to be comparing him to Jerry. The beauty of it is, he’s not a Deadhead. He’s got his own style, and that’s what we want.”
Hart finished off a carrot juice and headed toward the stage. “The saddle on this new thing hasn’t been broken in yet. When it is, he’s going to have to be a big part of it.”
A few were fearful
Out in the audience, a few Deadheads feared the worst as the first set got rolling.
“Everybody here wants to hear Jerry play guitar, and this new guy is in a tough spot because he’s going to have to sound like Jerry for people like me to be happy,” said James Ptucha, 36, of Long Island, N.Y., a veteran of 190 Dead shows. By the second set, Ptucha, his wife and everybody else in the pavilion were dancing in their seats. “It’s not Jerry, but he’s good!” Ptucha exulted.
Herring had done the job, copping just enough of Garcia’s flavor and adding a few distinctive touches of his own — notably a pronounced Southern-fried rock feel — to keep the music fresh and the party buoyant.
But stepping into a high-pressure guitar slot was not a new experience for Herring, 40, a Georgia native who has played with everyone from jazz drummer Billy Cobham to psychedelic-boogie jam band Col. Bruce Hampton and the Aquarium Rescue Unit. Before getting Lesh’s call to join the Other Ones, he had already replaced the legendary Dickey Betts in the Allman Brothers in 2000 after Betts was fired.
“Where I come from, the Allman Brothers are the pinnacle,” Herring says from the Buford, Ga., home he shares with his wife and two children. “Being a Southern guy, that music had such an incredible influence on me from the time I started playing. But it was also bittersweet, because Dickey is the reason I started playing guitar in the first place, and he didn’t quit the band, which made it awkward for me. I had all these weird feelings about being between them and Dickey.”
Herring had already done a stint with Lesh’s band, Phil Lesh and Friends, and when the former Dead bassist called again, offering a full-time job, Herring decided to quit the Allmans.
“Playing with Phil pushed me to play differently than I normally play,” he says, “but I got a lot of different tonalities to play in, these really exotic scales that offered more freedom than I had in the Allman Brothers.”
A leg up
The experience of touring with Lesh gave Herring a leg up when he had to take a crash course in the Dead’s back catalog a few months ago. The reunited band rehearsed 10 days, and Herring had to learn 45 songs, in addition to the Dead tunes he had already been playing with Lesh.
“I’d rehearse with the guys seven hours, then spend the next six or seven hours in my hotel room learning what I hoped they would work on the next day,” Herring says with a laugh. “I would ask, `What’s up tomorrow?’ And nobody would tell me!”
It was a typical Deadhead welcome, an introduction to a world where spontaneity rules.
Herring still felt a bit adrift at the pair of sold-out Alpine shows, which drew national media coverage because of rumors that Walworth County, Wis., would be overrun by ticketless Deadheads looking to camp out and party. The fears — both the county’s and Herring’s — were unfounded, thanks to a combination of prep work and goodwill. The reunion went so well that the Other Ones decided to mount a full-scale autumn tour, which has been selling out most shows, including the Chicago date.
“It wasn’t the music that was the hard part so much; it was the mental aspect,” Herring says of his Other Ones debut. “I was nervous before I got on stage, but I felt the crowd was rooting for me. At least nobody threw any beer bottles. But the music allows a musician a lot of freedom. It lends itself to listening to the other guys and reacting. They’re saying to me, `Just be you; don’t worry about filling someone else’s shoes. Just play.'”
That weekend, Herring retained a number of Garcia’s signature licks on certain key tunes, as he must if he wants to play Grateful Dead music. What he can’t recapture is something more intangible. A recent review praised his guitar playing in the Other Ones, but commented that he lacked “the dark side that Jerry had.”
“That’s right on the money,” Herring says. “Garcia had a troubled life, so imagine how it must have been for him. That had to come out in the music.”
A thorough shake-up
But the band is already starting to leave more room for Herring’s personality to emerge. The set list is undergoing a thorough shake-up on the current tour, reintroducing songs such as “Doin’ That Rag” and “Cosmic Charlie” that haven’t been played in decades, and retooling others to fit the new lineup, such as “Only the Strange Remain” and “Casey Jones.”
“We have rehearsed a lot of songs that we have recorded but never performed, or played once or twice and put on the back burner,” Hart writes in the band’s on-line journal at Gratefuldead.com. “Looking back we wondered why we retired songs or not played them at all. We just look blankly at each other and can’t remember why. Maybe someone had a stomachache that day and decided to not play it, or the choruses were too hard to sing live, or whatever. But we are coming to grips with the fact that we have a lot of material that we want to play that never saw the light of day. Over the next two weeks we will be breaking these chestnuts out.”
That openness undoubtedly will speed Herring’s ability to find his own voice within the band, as a fluid improviser steeped in the Southern boogie, funk and soul-jazz traditions. The future of the Other Ones depends on his ability to find his identity without completely overlooking that of his predecessor.
“If you don’t tip your hat enough, you’re not going to fit,” Herring said. “But if you tip it too much, you start copying him, and people aren’t going to dig that either. It’s definitely the hot seat.
“The difference to me is that I’m not a singer like Jerry was. If I were, this would be really impossible, because Jerry was known not just for his guitar playing but his voice. You can’t replace a legend.”
