The Dead's not dead

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Long live the Dead!


The Dead is still kickin'
Legendary band keeps jamming
Saturday, July 17, 2004 Posted: 7:40 AM EDT (1140 GMT)



The Dead


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MANCHESTER, Tennessee (AP) -- As the Bonnaroo Music Festival began its slow swing into a fever pitch, it was hard not to notice an anticipatory tension in the audience of some 90,000 sweat-soaked fans.

Warren Haynes was delivering a pummeling set with Government Mule, but it almost seemed that the crowd could sense The Dead -- Phil Lesh, Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann and a slumbering Bob Weir -- lurking just yards behind the stage.

Just before kicking off a nationwide tour at last month's Bonnaroo, The Dead -- which carried on after Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia died in 1995 -- spoke to The Associated Press about confounding expectations, jamming in no man's land and surfing their eternal musical current.

Q: A few weeks ago, in an interview with Charlie Rose, Trey Anastasio said that without The Grateful Dead, an event like Bonnaroo would never have happened. Do you find kicking off a new tour here particularly special?

LESH: It's neat that the whole thing hasn't just gone away, like so many things from the '60s. It's a no-brainer for us.

HART: It was a good idea then, and it's a good idea ...

LESH: It's a better idea ...

HART: It's a better idea now, it really is. When you get a lot of people together and a lot of bands together it creates this certain kind of vortex. It's exciting. It used to be like that when we were playing with Quicksilver and the Airplane and Big Brother, it wasn't really a competition but we were just kind of all egging each other on, and it's the same way here. It's just become a great venue for music for music's sake.

Q: Do you feel a more intense kind of familial or collaborative energy at something like this?

LESH: We always hope to have the same level of that whenever or wherever we play, even in rehearsal, and in fact, that's turned out to be very true of our rehearsals for this tour. It becomes, of course as well, a synergy from the audience. The larger the audience, the more the people are into the music. These people are obviously very into the music. They want to go to all those different places that we can take them, and we want them to go with us, we want them, in a way, to show us the way.

Q: When people talk about a "jamband" scene, one of the things that seems to get obscured is the balance between songwriting and jamming, a dichotomy you have always maintained better than anyone else. How do you feel about that balance?

LESH: You've got to have some place to start. You've got to have some place to go to. I mean we could just go out and play, but it might not be as meaningful ... it might not constitute as meaningful a journey if we didn't have some signposts along the way. I'd like to think of it as us surfing the current of that eternal music that's flowing through us, and along the way there are those little islands, (Hart smiles deeply, nodding in agreement) little archipelagos, which are songs, and we surf over to this one, and make a landfall, and live on that island, and then cast off again into the current. Sometimes we know where the next island is going to be and sometimes we don't.

HART: Well, in jamming, speaking metaphorically...

LESH: (Prodding) Oh, duuude!

HART: ... that's so true, we don't know exactly where we're going nor do we care so long as we all go there together, and that's the most important part of that voyage, if you're doing it right. The songs are really important to us, we really love the songs, but we also really like to go out in no man's land and discover new stuff, and even treat the songs differently every night, jamming within the song frame and the going way out of it.

LESH: We can go so far out that we forget where we were.

HART: And then we know we're there! (Laughter, congratulatory high fives.)

Q: Is being able to open yourself to change in that way part of the maturing process as a musician?

KREUTZMANN: You have to be just a vessel for the whole experience.

LESH: Exactly, because the best things happen when we're not there at all. It's such a cliche, but the music plays the band, it's the truest thing anyone's ever said about it.

KREUTZMANN: You have to be there will the skill, of course.

LESH: Chance favors the prepared mind.

HART: And there has to be a willingness, and a certain kind of expectancy, and you have to expect the unexpected ...

LESH: You have to crave it! Pray for it! And go looking for it.

HART: And (the audience) come with the same expectations. They come with expectations, we come with expectations, hopefully a creation will be made collectively, and they go home and do something with that, with the spirit that they get here, and that's really what any great music is about, it's not about the music as much as it is about what it does to you and what you do with that feeling after you leave, not only just being here for a few hours and clapping and having a good time, but going out in the world and doing some good with it. And that's really the experience of the transcendent nature of music. If you can do that, then you're really there.

KREUTZMANN: It's easier to take a journey when you don't have the expectancy, when you're not carrying that baggage. You can cruise easier because you don't have to follow rules out there.

LESH: Or you can just react to what you hear.

KREUTZMANN: That's right, it's in the now.

LESH: Part of the business of art is to confound expectations.

KREUTZMANN: And that's again, about getting out of self. I have an expectation about today, but it's about getting out in front of a lot of people and feeling really good playing music with my brothers.

HART: But there are ground rules, and we've had to define those ground rules over the years, about surrender and the moment. It's mainly about being able to listen really hard to what other people are playing, but not too hard where you don't make your own musical expression, so it's a real delicate chemistry you have to maintain. What makes a band is the specific inner workings of their chemistry, that's what makes the magic, and magic is what we're after. And it's something that only we do the way we do it, other people have their own chemistry, which is not, of course, to say no one else can jam. It's not just playing it right. If it was about playing it right we'd fail miserably. (Communal laughter.)

LESH: Speak for yourself.

HART: That's not the object of this music, to play it right, whatever that is.

KREUTZMANN: And what's right? It's more about having joy.

Q: How do you find that musical communication translates into your everyday interactions with each other?

LESH: Somehow, after a really good set, that communicative afterglow will last a long time into our interactions. I feel toward my brothers, in those moments, the way I feel about myself. We're becoming each other out there as much as we're becoming the music. And it lasts for a long time, it really does. I have feelings of warmth for you guys for days and days.

HART: The horror! The horror! And you can't bottle it, and it makes it so much rarer. It's the type of thing where it just crops up.

LESH: We can't even bottle it, we have to ask for it, we have to ask for it. It's a state of grace.

KREUTZMANN: It's sacred. We take it that seriously, really. It's our form of sacred.

HART: If there is a God, he comes down once in a while and blesses us through music.

KREUTZMANN: (Laughing) You know he speaks through music.

LESH: (In mock pulpit tone) Make a joyous noise unto the Lord!