No Grateful Dead story is complete without telling of the first encounter. A striking first memory came at the Boston Tea
Party in the late '60s. Organist Ron McKernan, alias Pigpen, sang his climactic tune of the night, "Lovelight." Wobbly
after hours of serious hedonism, he fell off the stage in midsong, splatting on the floor. Helped up by a roadie, he dusted
himself off and finished the song as if nothing had happened.
A fitting sign of the band's spirit?
For sure.
That's life in the Grateful Dead -- the stubbornly determined hippie band that's defied the odds of the fickle pop world,
plus the deaths of three keyboardists (Pigpen, Keith Godchaux and Brent Mydland) and the diabetic coma of guitarist
Jerry Garcia to keep making music based on instinct, not commercial greed. For rock's greatest antitrend band, the
song is still the same.
"What keeps it alive is our approach," says guitarist Bob Weir, whose compatriots -- bolstered since their last visit by
new keyboardists Bruce Hornsby and Vince Welnick -- play Boston Garden for six sellout shows starting Friday. "We try
to walk out each night with our eyes open, as if we were playing together completely anew.
"I like to think we're a bit more articulate than back in the '60s, but there was a certain brutal honesty about what we
were doing then," Weir adds from his home near the band's birthplace of San Francisco, where they often jammed in
Golden Gate Park back when Haight-Ashbury was a melting pot of experimentation, not a tourist trap.
"We're more sophisticated now, but we're still into the moment," Weir says. "We're still into deeply improvisational stuff
where we have no idea where we're going. We do our best to achieve a sort of hallucinogenic realm and just go there
and live a little while."
"Still into the moment" is the key, since juggling continuity and continuous reinvention is what the band's about. But the
Dead are not a completely free-form group, whatever some Deadheads like to believe. While they rarely repeat songs
night to night, there's more structure than meets the eye. For a typical concert of two 90-minute-plus sets, they plan the
first song of the first set and the first four of the second. And they always do their ritualized "space jam" in the second,
sparked by dual drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzman.
A few song arrangements have also become formalized, such as "Touch of Grey" (their only Top 10 hit), their many
covers of Bob Dylan tunes (they backed Dylan on a live album four years ago) and their country covers, such as
"Big River" and Merle Haggard's "Mama Tried."
But improvisation colors most everything else. The one constant through the years, despite personnel changes, is that
the Dead can resemble a genre-splitting jazz troupe more than a rock band. Maybe that's because they never fit any
pop pigeonhole, since they've ransacked the whole closet of musical influences, from Chuck Berry to Bill Monroe and
back again. Certainly that image is enhanced by their latest chemistry with the jazz-trained Hornsby, who studied at
Boston's Berklee College of Music; and former Tubes keyboardist Welnick, who's been known to play John Coltrane
tunes during sound checks.
"There are times when I get goosebumps with this band," says Hornsby, the well-known solo star who has an open
invitation to sit in with the Dead and expects to make 60 of their 80 shows this year, including all the Boston dates.
As a teen-ager, Hornsby joined his brother in a Dead cover band called Bobby Hightest & the Octane Kids in his
hometown of Williamsburg, Va. He first met the Dead in 1986, after they heard he was doing an occasional Dead cover
with his Grammy-winning band, the Range.
"There really is a magic some nights," Hornbsy adds from a tour stop in Cleveland. "One thing the Dead do, which not
many bands dare do, is they're willing to wing stuff and play songs with minimal rehearsal. The Dead are a group willing
to screw up to get to the great stuff -- and I admire that. There's a certain recklessness. They don't play it safe in that sense. And there's a time when it all comes together. It can be a certain thing the drummers do" with bassist Phil Lesh. "It has its own build; and the ebb and flow is unique. It's a collective thing that just happens. I can't explain it. And that's one good thing about it. It hasn't been whittled down to a formula."
"There's an immeasurable amount of freedom," adds Welnick, who studied at the San Francisco Conservatory and
played with the Tubes (anyone remember their hit "White Punks on Dope"?) and Todd Rundgren before auditioning
for the band last year, after Mydland's death.
"The Dead are like a cross between a Dixieland band and a progressive jazz band, blues band, country band and
folk band," says Welnick. "Kind of folkie-country-bluesy-jazzy-progressive-avant-garde."
That ought to do for definitions. Whatever you call it, don't look for it on MTV, or on any of the image-drenched,
computer-programed package tours that have become the rage.
"These days, there's too much importance placed on trends," says Weir. "And music to me is not a matter of fashion or
trend. It's a matter of feeling. All too often these days, if you're concentrating on whether something is appropriate for the
times or the current trend, you're forgetting about the feeling you're putting into it and what it is you're doing. And the
music comes out sounding like that. It may be polished, it may be glamorous, but it's lacking in depth."
The Dead are still led by the R&B-based Weir, whose chunky chords marry a garage-rock feel with a Stax/Volt session;
and Garcia, the congenially inscrutable singer/guitarist who grounds the band in country, blues and bluegrass when
he's not traversing psychedelic realms. The two trade songs during a Dead concert and, through subtle nods and
gestures, urge other members to solo.
"Garcia and I tend to go back and forth and play off of each other a lot," says Hornsby, who moves from piano to
accordion on stage. "That's been happening more and more lately. He likes me to get in his face sometimes and
enter the fray." Adds Hornsby: "I'm not up there to hang out. I'm up there to push it and some nights to jack up the
energy level."
"The nod comes at any time," says Welnick, who grew up in Phoenix and attended Dead shows there. "You never
know. It doesn't happen at the same time in every song, or necessarily ever in the same song again. So you don't
have preconceived notions of what to play and you just do it for better or worse. Maybe they'll be laying back, so you
might play a big synth solo; or maybe play something in half-time, so it doesn't sound so busy."
Sounding busy has reportedly been a problem sometimes for the 1991 Dead. With two drummers, two guitarists and,
on many nights two keyboardists, the potential is there for mayhem. "A lot of my input has been to get people to play
a little less," says Hornsby. "There's so many people on stage now. It's easy to get up there, get excited and overplay.
I'm really aware of it."
"Knowing when not to play is the biggest challenge. . . . And you've got to be careful you don't step on the big fellas,"
says Welnick, meaning Garcia and Weir.
After all, the big fellas and their rhythm sections have been at this a long time; and it's hard to argue with the Dead's
unique brand of success. The group has been the No. 1 concert draw of the last several years in terms of average
grosses per show. They're playing Boston Garden for an unprecedented six nights, following nine nights at New York's
Madison Square Garden. And the recent tribute album "Deadicated," featuring Dead covers by everyone from
Los Lobos and the Indigo Girls to Elvis Costello and Jane's Addiction, only confirms the group's stature among
their peers.
"They're an absolute phenomenon -- and it's not based on any obvious thing," says a recently chatty Robbie Robertson,
formerly of the Band, who played the legendary 1973 Watkins Glen, N.Y., show with the Dead and Allman Brothers in
front of 600,000 people. "They don't have the greatest vocalists or the greatest songs or the greatest musicians.
There's nothing you can really pinpoint, except they give off a kind of love that's unique in music."
That uniqueness is about to invade Boston Garden, which is a long, long way from Golden Gate Park. Or is it?
Stay tuned.
Illustration
PHOTO; CAPTION:Garcia (left) with newcomers Bruce Hornsby and Vince Welnick.
