The life of the Dead

It seems that the Dead's greatest shortcoming may have been that they -- an exceptionally close-knit group of people -- utterly failed to save the central personality in their group, Garcia, whom you've described as the Dead's "emotional center." How could that happen? How did he lose his way so irreversibly?

Well, I can only refer you to the book and say, Look at the personality that develops in the 1950s.

He was a man who harbored a lot of pain that he never dealt with, it seems.

Right, he didn't deal with it. And unfortunately he ended up with self-esteem issues; he did not choose to take care of himself. Saying, "Well, the band should have saved its leading personality": Well, they tried, they did try. He had to save himself. And, as I say in the book, along with his incredible intelligence came an incredible ability to refuse to listen to anybody else if he didn't want to. And you have to want to be accessible to that sort of advice and to be able to change.

In the end, remember, he made the decision to be clean, to step toward the light if I may be a little poetic, and then his body said, "Well, thank you, good decision, we're leaving now." And that's what happened, he died of a heart attack.

The afternoon of his death, I looked at the manager and we said, "You know, he made that commitment [to get clean and sober], so it doesn't feel as awful as it could." Because, you know, we sweated and worried and freaked about him for years, extremely painful. Again, drugs were like a side effect. It was simply neglecting his body.

He had a raft of physical problems.

Right, which he completely refused to deal with, refused to see a doctor, to do all that bourgeois stuff that most of us want to do because most of us want to live to a healthier age. If it hadn't required a lot of effort, he probably would have, too, but he wasn't ready to make that choice. And that comes out of deeply rooted personal issues that no one in the Grateful Dead could reach no matter how hard they tried.

You just saw the Other Ones, a band that includes the remaining original members of the Dead. Do you get the sense the musicians are still able to revisit that place of communal fun or have the rigors of the last few decades made that kind of abandon a thing of the past?

On the Sunday night they played two shows. They played a really brilliant second show. They'd rehearsed for three weeks, then they'd been out with other bands. And, really, the first night was almost a rehearsal in some ways, though brilliantly played.

I sensed a whole other level by the second night. And I can't imagine what it's going to be like on this tour ... When they finished on Sunday night they lined up, put their arms around each other, took a bow. The audience wouldn't let them go. The band went into a little circular huddle and they began pogoing -- 50- and 60-year-old men, along with a couple of younger accomplices, were pogoing. It was pure joy. But no, I think it took seven years, an interestingly mystical number, to recover from the pain that they felt from watching Garcia slip away from them, no matter how hard they tried. But the fun's still there, very much.

Chapter 49 of "A Long Strange Trip" is a list of various band members and others answering the question, "What is the Grateful Dead?" I'd like to put that question to you, "What was the Grateful Dead?"

The Grateful Dead was a mythical beast that made a whole lot of people happy, including its musicians, but also millions of people in the audience. And that gave a lot of people the belief -- and not just the people who lived in tie-dye in the parking lot, but also a whole lot of people ranging from Al Gore and Sen. Pat Leahy to Owen Chamberlain, the Nobel laureate, who used to sit between the two drummers because he said it gave him interesting ideas -- that, to [paraphrase] Dylan, you can live outside the law, be honest and get away with it. Or, to quote Phil Lesh, when the Dead were welcomed into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame, "Sometimes you don't merely have to endure, you can prevail."

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