Bobby

From the Monterey Herald:

STILL PLAYING IN THE BAND
For Bob Weir, the music never stops
By RAY HOGAN
The Stamford Advocate

It has been 10 years since Jerry Garcia's death put an end to the Grateful Dead.

For Bob Weir, Garcia's fellow guitarist for more than 30 years, it's hard to think of the past decade in terms of time.
''One moment it seems like yesterday and in another it seems like eons ago,'' he says.

The remaining members of the Grateful Dead have stayed musically active and occasionally team up together (they did last summer as The Dead), but none has shown Weir's dogged determination.

When Garcia died in August 1995, Weir's band Ratdog was starting to take form as a side project that, like the Jerry Garcia Band, would tour when the Dead wasn't on the road. Soon after, it became his focus and took several years and lineup changes to find its shape. In putting together a band, Weir wasn't looking for musicians who knew the Dead's repertoire inside out. Instead, he wanted players who would bring a new approach to his own and the Grateful Dead repertoires, in addition to the songs they would write as Ratdog. Ultimately, he found them.

''I tapped into a well of good musicians who were fun to play with, a lot of whom came from the jazz vein, there's a healthy one in San Francisco,'' he says. ''That made sense to me. I knew I was going to get players with wings. I kept going to that well.''

Ratdog's lineup is Weir, guitarist Mark Karan, saxophonist Kenny Brooks, keyboardist Jeff Chimenti, bassist Robin Sylvester and drummer Jay Lane, an original member.

Bruce Hornsby and the Noisemakers play with Ratdog, and aren't strangers to Deadheads. When Grateful Dead keyboardist Brent Mydland died in 1990, Hornsby joined the band to help the transition for new keyboardist Vince Welnick. He stayed until the summer of 1992 and would continue to sit in with the band and its various offshoots.
When asked if he plans to collaborate with his old friend, Weir is emphatic.

''Hell, yeah,'' he says. ''I was going to give him a buzz today and see if he has any notions,'' Weir says. ''I had the notion of just seamlessly flowing from his set to ours, removing one of his guys and putting one of our guys on stage.... the band changes slightly over every few minutes. But that wouldn't give the audience the break it needs, but we might try it once or twice. The situation is rife for borrowing musicians.''

The Grateful Dead redefined the idea of touring for the rock era. Its road warrior mentality spawned an American phenomenon that was the seed for the current boom of jam bands. A common misconception is that the Dead's albums were always afterthoughts to the concerts. With decades to rethink them, several of the studio albums -- particularly ''American Beauty'' and ''Workingman's Dead,'' both from the early 1970s -- are considered classics.

Ratdog has toured consistently for a decade with only 2000's ''Evening Moods'' as its recorded output. Weir realizes the band is overdue for a new disc -- and batch of songs -- but admits a two-year renovation of his Northern California home has kept him out of his home studio, where he normally writes. Unlike the songs on ''Evening Moods,'' many of which were written democratically out of jams and rehearsals, the next batch should bare more of his own ideas. ''My writing facility is such that I might get a fair bit done on my own,'' Weir says.

In concert Ratdog encompasses the span of Weir's career. Set lists include songs from the Grateful Dead, Weir's solo career (''Ace,'' ''Heaven Help the Fool'' and ''Bobby & the Midnites'') and Ratdog originals.

Weir was born Oct. 16, 1947. He began playing with Garcia and Ron ''Pigpen'' McKernan as Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions in 1963. As the jug band switched toward a more psychedelic sound that would incorporate many forms of American music, the group became the Warlocks and eventually the Grateful Dead.

Just as the band was forming its own sound by mixing elements of rock, rhythm and blues, bluegrass and country, Weir took a distinct approach to rhythm guitar. He drew his inspiration from classical composers including Stockhausen and Debussy and jazz pianist McCoy Tyner.

''I wanted to play music and I'm sort of an iconoclast by nature,'' he says. ''I want to squeeze all the music out of that instrument as I can. All that stuff that's been done as rock 'n' roll guitar has been done. It's not my job. I just want to try to expand the horizons a little bit for my own satisfaction.''

Weir's approach made sense in a band that had enough conviction and musical knowledge to mix so many kinds of music into a unique sound.

Popular opinion has marked this year as the 40th anniversary of the Grateful Dead, but to the surprise of Deadheads, the living members of the band are doing nothing to commemorate it. According to Weir, he will play with his former bandmates again sometime down the line.

''The 40th birthday is kind of arbitrary,'' he says. ''It will be my 42nd very shortly, at least playing with Jerry and Pigpen.'' Despite its absence from the stage this summer, the Grateful Dead organization seems omnipresent. Live recordings regularly are released through the ''Dick's Picks'' series and other ventures. The estate of Jerry Garcia also is catching up for lost time by releasing recordings and DVDs of his musical ventures outside of the Dead with the ''Pure Jerry'' series. Festivals including the upcoming Vegoose in Las Vegas are filled with bands presenting the Dead's sense of adventure, community and musical exploration to a generation too young to have witnessed the originators.
For the ''Dick's Picks'' series (which recently released its 35th volume) and archival material released on Rhino records, the band allows others to decide what is put out -- not surprising since the band allowed fans to record their concerts for years, letting people hear performances with peaks and flaws.

''I have veto power but I don't ever expect to use it,'' Weir says. ''I don't have time to do it nor the interest. The benign neglect approach to that is the best one. We'd get too bogged down in the process.''

Living in the moment, particularly on stage, and not getting bogged down is something Weir has done since his teens.
''I live in a dreamlike existence anyway. Time really is relative,'' he says. ''I went up and lived with what we would call Eskimo people in Alaska and kicked around their community. They have all these numerous words for snow and ice and no word for time. I got there and I got 'it.' It's an illusion. I live my life that way, really. I can make plans somehow and get on stage somehow but I don't pay a whole lot of attention to (time).''

Children's Album w/ Bobby nominated for Grammy

From the Chicago Parent:


HOUSE PARTY, Dan Zanes and Friends, Festival Five Records, $15, http://www.festivalfive.com/; ages 3-8.

Dan Zanes’ music captures parents looking for the best in children’s music. This is Zanes’ fourth and newest release, and to my ears, each of his CDs gets better.
As with his other CDs, Zanes mixes up some fabulous original songs (“Shining Star”) with great traditional songs (“Old Joe Clark,” “Down in the Valley”) and treats them all with an edgy rock/folk style. And the star-studded cast of support on all of Zanes’ recordings is impressive. This project features Bob Weir, of the Grateful Dead, singing “Wabash Cannonball” and Philip Glass collaborating with Zanes on the final piece, “A Place for Us.” If you haven’t listened to any Dan Zanes music, this would be a great place to start.


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Mickey, Nirvana, & the Library of Congress

From JS Online:

Every year, an advisory board of roughly 20 musicians, composers, representatives of the recording industry, academics and historians reviews several hundred nominations for the registry and then makes its recommendations to the librarian of Congress who makes the final decision. Among those serving on the advisory board is drummer Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead.

Here are some of the recordings on the National Recording Registry for 2004:
"Nevermind," Nirvana (1991)
"Fear of a Black Planet," Public Enemy (1990)
Recordings of Asian elephants, Katharine B. Payne (1984)
"Star Wars" (Soundtrack), John Williams (1977)
The Allman Brothers Band at Fillmore East (1971)
Remarks by Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong broadcast from the moon (1969)
King James version of the Bible, Alexander Scourby (1966)
"Pet Sounds," The Beach Boys (1966)
"Live at the Apollo," James Brown (1965)
"The Girl from Ipanema," Stan Getz, Joao Gilberto, Antonio Carlos Jobim and Astrud Gilberto (1963)
"Peace Be Still," James Cleveland (1962)
"Giant Steps," John Coltrane (1959)
"Messiah," Eugene Ormandy, conductor; Richard Condie, choir director. Mormon Tabernacle Choir; Philadelphia Orchestra (1958)
Tuskegee Institute Choir Sings Spirituals, directed by William L. Dawson (1955)
"Earth Angel (Will You Be Mine)," The Penguins (1954)
"Old Soldiers Never Die (Farewell Address to Congress)," Gen. Douglas MacArthur (1951)
"Foggy Mountain Breakdown," Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs (1949)
Jack Benny radio program, show of March 28, 1948
"Manteca," Dizzy Gillespie Big Band with Chano Pozo (1947)
Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky. Piano Concerto No. 1, op. 23, B-flat minor. Vladimir Horowitz, piano; Arturo Toscanini, conductor; NBC Symphony Orchestra (1943)
We Hold These Truths, radio broadcast (1941)
Edward R. Murrow broadcast from London (1940)
"In the Mood," Glenn Miller and His Orchestra (1939)
"Gypsy Love Song," Eugene Cowles (1898)
"Some of These Days," Sophie Tucker (1911)
"The Castles in Europe One-Step (Castle House Rag)," Europe's Society Orchestra (1914)
"The Lord's Prayer" and "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" as recorded in 1888 by Emile Berliner, the inventor of the microphone
Booker T. Washington's 1895 Atlanta Exposition speech in which he promotes racial cooperation and African-American self-reliance
"Swanee," Al Jolson (1920)
"Stardust," Hoagy Carmichael (1927)
"Porgy and Bess," recorded by the original cast (1940-'42)
"White Christmas," recorded by Bing Crosby (1942)
Elvis Presley's Sun Records sessions (1954-'55)
"Roll Over Beethoven," Chuck Berry (1956)
"Dance Mania," Tito Puente (1958)
"Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," The Beatles (1967)
"At Folsom Prison," Johnny Cash (1968)

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Grateful Dead legacy thrives

From Mercury News:

Grateful Dead legacy thrives
DESPITE GARCIA'S DEATH, BAND REMAINS ALIVE FOR FANS
By Seth Schiesel
New York Times

One of the icons of modern U.S. culture now resides in a nondescript warehouse about 30 miles north of San Francisco, in a windowless, climate-controlled, heavily alarmed room built like a bomb shelter that is called simply the Vault.

There, in towering rows of 13,000 audiotapes, 3,000 videotapes and about 250,000 feet of traditional 16-millimeter film lives the recorded history of the Grateful Dead, a seminal U.S. rock band.
The Grateful Dead ceased to exist Aug. 9, 1995, when the band's lead guitarist and most recognizable figure, Jerry Garcia, died at age 53 of a heart attack at a drug treatment center. Yet 10 years later, the man and the band remain alive for millions of fans, and the once notoriously ad hoc Grateful Dead business operation has become a model for a music industry struggling with the Internet and digital democracy.

Loyal fan base
``When I first got into the record business I learned that it wasn't cool to be into the Grateful Dead,'' said Christopher Sabec, 40, an attorney who said he saw the band more than 250 times and is now chief executive of the Jerry Garcia estate, controlled by Garcia's heirs. ``But if you look at where the music business has been forced to go by technology, now it's not about selling records. It's about live shows and inspiring a fan base to be absolutely loyal.''

The Jerry Garcia company and Grateful Dead Productions are separate businesses each generating millions of dollars of revenue a year. Just how many millions is not publicly known. But consumers still buy more than 1 million J. Garcia-brand neckties each year, and Cherry Garcia is often the top-selling brand of Ben & Jerry's ice cream, each pint generating royalties for the Garcia heirs.

The band's four surviving members -- the drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, the bassist Phil Lesh and the guitarist Bob Weir -- have toured occasionally as the Dead, though not this year. They control the Grateful Dead's licensing business, which oversees thousands of products sold around the world, like gas tank caps, incense burners, golf club covers and sandals. (The Garcia company receives a share of the proceeds.)
But for cultural and practical matters, the heart of the Grateful Dead's legacy resides in the 10,000 cubic feet of space in Novato. The Vault feeds a continuing business based on regular releases of old concert recordings on iTunes, on the band's Web sites and in stores. Physically, there is only one key to the Vault, and only two people know where to find it. David Lemieux, 34, the band's archivist, is one of them. Jeffrey Norman, one of the band's engineers, is the other.

J. Garcia brand
In addition to ties and ice cream, the Garcia company has expanded into rugs and wine. An artist as well as a musician, Garcia signed his work ``J. Garcia.''
``I'm not trying to turn the J. Garcia brand into something you find at Target, but I am trying to broaden it,'' Sabec said. ``There are J. Garcia carpets that my mother would be happy to have in her house, and she's not a Deadhead. If you were to position it only for people who were fans of Jerry's music, it would be a much smaller market than what we're going for.''

Ratdog Review

From the Post Standard:


Tuneful jam band works hard for fans
Monday, August 29, 2005
By Mark Bialczak Staff writer

When Bob Weir ambles onto the outdoor stage in his trademark shortish shorts and bare feet, it's without a doubt still summer in Syracuse.

The famous Californian led his latest band, RatDog, through a jam-happy set Sunday night at the state fair Grandstand. And to the crowd of 4,206, it was obvious that the outside party was a great chance to relive the greatness of Weir's original band, the legendary Grateful Dead.
From the first meandering strains of the opening song, fans seemed to breathe in a big gulp at once. Diehard Dead fans probably knew what the song was from the start. But as Weir and his guitar and his considerably talented band mates built slowly but surely to one of the Dead's most popular and recognizable tunes, the air got let out in a big cheer.

"Truckin' " it was, and truck the band and fans did for the rest of the night.
"What a long, strange trip it's been," they sang along on the opening cut.
From there on it was a dance fest, even through the less mainstream songs.
Fans broke off in small packs to dance in the spaces left open on the floor on both sides of the stage. The impromptu dance floors were right underneath the two big screens. Better for the dancers to keep track of the show as well as the beat.

Others stood at their seats and swayed. Hardly anybody sat except to take a load off every now and again.
The band worked hard the whole time. With Mark Karan on guitar, Jeff Chimenti on keyboards, Kenny Brooks on saxophone, Robin Sylvester on bass and Jay Lane on drums, Weir's RatDog is a tuneful jam band.
Weir and his golden vocals undoubtedly led the way, but all appeared ready to make the time-tested break-ins and breakouts from song to song.

RatDog has more than a hundred songs on its concert-ready playlist, so fans like to be surprised.
Weir pulled out some cool ones, including the folk-country "Brown-Eyed Women" and spirited "Lucky Enough."
The coolest vibe, though, might have come with "Black-Throated Wind." Before the song, Weir suggested that everybody say a prayer for the opening band, The Neville Brothers, who were facing a return to their hometown of New Orleans, in danger from Hurricane Katrina.

Before the several generations of Central New Yorkers returned home into the pleasant summer night, the range of fans from kids to college students to 40-somethings to grandparents sang together on the classic "Not Fade Away." Weir won't do that, for sure.

The Neville Brothers never mentioned the threat of the hurricane to their beloved hometown.
Instead, singer Aaron, keyboardist Charles, saxophonist Arthur and drummer Cyril and their four band mates put out a lusty R&B set that paid tribute to the funky New Orleans sound they've helped make famous.
Jazzy and soulful, too, as they wove their songs like "Yellow Moon" with classics like "Love the One You're With" and "Thank U for Lettin' Me Be Myself," the brothers let the set crescendo with a robust, rolling "When You Go to New Orleans."

Bruce & Bobby

From Hartford Courant:

Ratdog, Hornsby Pair Up
August 29, 2005
By THOMAS KINTNER, Special to the Courant

Intensely loyal Grateful Dead aficionados looking for booster shots of the fabled jam band's material between reunions of the group's surviving members can't hope for much better than the no-nonsense exploratory style of Bob Weir and his band Ratdog. Weir headlined a double bill Saturday night at the Chevrolet Theatre in Wallingford that also featured Bruce Hornsby and the Noisemakers and delighted a crowd of enthusiastic fans with his expeditions into favorite regions of Dead territory.The house was surprisingly empty when Hornsby took the stage to start the evening, but he showed no ill effects for coming out to the same treatment afforded the average no-name opening act. He led off with a feisty roll through "Take Out the Trash," limbering up on the piano and leading a five-piece band that took its cue from the rat-a-tat drumming of Sonny Emory. Hornsby's ivory tickling was melodically decorative, yet at the same time focused and smart, as he propelled the jaunty "Go Back to Your Woods."

Hornsby punctuated his vocals by matching the grabby pulse of "See the Same Way," and his crisp delivery added starch to the soft sway of "This Too Shall Pass." That the evening's audience did not come to hear his old radio hits was clear when the warmest reception of his set greeted the shifty jam number "Rainbow's Cadillac," familiar to many from its use in a Dead offshoot band of which Hornsby was a member, The Other Ones. "Gonna Be Some Changes Made" brought more life to a roomful of swaying listeners than it ever will to the home improvement store commercials on which it is currently splashed, and Hornsby's peppering of the signature riff of Prince's "When Doves Cry" had a nice hook atop J.V. Collier's bass line. Hornsby was joined by Weir for an encore of "The Way It Is" in which Weir's tasteful electric guitar insertions complemented Hornsby's rippling piano without overwhelming it.Weir opened his set on acoustic guitar, leading his own five-man troupe through a cover of "Blackbird" that sported a homespun, countrified pulse. Not one to chat up the crowd between songs, he then segued smoothly from tune to tune for nearly two hours, working out material such as the hearty "Lazy River Road" and the mellow dance jam "Cassidy." His vigorous singing of "Estimated Prophet" was a crowd pleaser, and his electric guitar playing drizzled finely crafted texture onto the hypnotic, rumbling rock of "That's It for the Other One."

The Boykin Ball 2005

From Earvolution:

The Boykin Ball 2005

The Church Of Universal Love and Music is hosting their annual Boykin Ball September 9th though the 11th.Confirmed acts for this years Ball include: Derek Trucks Band, Ekoostik Hookah, The Benevento Russo Duo, Michael Glabicki of Rusted Root, The Zen Tricksters, Shimmy Shack (Featuring Mike Apirion & Dino English of Dark Star Orchestra), Vince Welnick from the Grateful Dead, Captain Soularcat, Rootstand, Turbine, Jounce, Short Bus Rhythm and Review, All-Star Jam with members of the Zen Tricksters, Rob Wasserman, Melvin Seals, and Michael Glabicki. The Church in rural Pennsylvania was founded on the notion of bringing spiritual people together to celebrate their similarities, create harmony between denominations, and host community events based around the spontaneous and unlimited joy of live music. Since its inception, there has been an ongoing struggle between the Church's founder and local zoning boards (not to mention the highest levels of State and Federal Courts).According to the Church founder William (Willy) Pritts, recent disputes with the State Supreme Court and local zoning authorities on this matter threaten his Constitutional Rights to practice religion and use his own property the way he wishes. According the Church, local land use commissioners have invalidated the claim of Pritts that the Church of Universal Love and Music is a legitimate church despite the fact that it is recognized by the Universal Life Church (Modesto, CA), by local clergy who come to events to provide religious services, and that Pritts himself is ordained as is the entertainment coordinator for the Church, Phil Simon. "The main focus of the Church is to gather people together to celebrate their freedom and religious preferences while in the presence of Live Music. Every event that the church has done has retained that focus," says Phil Simon.The 2005 Boykin Ball Headliners:The Derek Trucks Band - The band has been a work in progress for over 10 years, slowly blending jazz, rock, blues, Latin, Eastern Indian, and other world music into the sound that now defines the DTB. The mission of the band has been to assemble a group of musicians that share a passion for improvisation and musical exploration, and to develop a special musical unity by performing with this core group of players for an extended period of time. The focus of the band is on the art form itself, despite the current trend of image-driven music on the scene today. The DTB aims to create progressive roots music in an effort to move the art form forward and re-establish substance over hype.Ekoostik Hookah - One of the most dynamic acts on the road today, ekoostik hookah is the nucleus of a growing family drawn to its lucid, improvisational treatment of psychedelic rock ’n’ roll, blues, funk, jazz and bluegrass layered with rich harmonies. Born early in 1991 in a smoky basement bar, the band has been continually evolving, cultivating a sound that has perked the ears of contemporaries and attracted thousands of fans who routinely travel hundreds of miles to hear them play.Rob Wasserman - Precious few musicians demonstrate the scope to be dubbed renaissance men, but Rob Wasserman has more than earned the title. His daunting versatility has made him one of the last two decade's most in-demand bassists -- as demonstrated by stints with Lou Reed, Van Morrison and Elvis Costello. His longtime creative partnership with Grateful Dead members Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir have yielded a trove of fertile sounds. And, last but far from least, the albums issued under his own name have won awards from sources in the jazz, pop and rock fields.

SCHEDULE OF PERFORMERS FOR THE BOYKIN BALL 2005:

FRIDAY – September 9th Turbine 3 – 4:30
Jounce 5-6:30 PM
Captain Soularcat 7-8:30
The Duo 9–10:30
Derek Trucks Band 11-1:00ish

SATURDAY – September 10th
Jazzam 12-1:20Michael Glabicki 1:50 – 3:10
Shimmy Shack 3:30 – 5
Rob Wasserman 5 – 5:30 solo
Melvin/Rob & Friends 5:30 - 7
Zen Tricksters 7:30 – 9:30
Ekoostik Hookah 10 – 12 midnight
Rootstand 12:30 – 2am

SUNDAY – September 11th
Short Bus 12-1
Vince Welnick 1:30 – 3:30

Directions and other information is available on the Church's website.

The Legend of John Perry Barlow

Listen to Audio Interview here
From JamBase:


THE LEGEND OF JOHN PERRY BARLOW

Uncharted waters must be discovered before they can exist. John Perry Barlow – 57 year-old computer guru, journalist, lyricist, consultant, economist, speaker, father, former rancher, environmentalist, and nomad – is a Cora, Wyoming (population = 70) native who has always forged ahead with the creative perseverance to make waves. Known by Grateful Dead fans as the co-lyricist, with Bob Weir, of some of the Dead's most recognized anthems, he penned "Cassidy," "Mexicali Blues," "Looks Like Rain," and "Estimated Prophet," among others.

But to know him as just a Grateful Dead lyricist is to miss out on an array of colorful tidbits about Mr. Barlow. He has lived a multi-dimensional life since the old days of growing up as a rowdy young hippie in cowboy country, son of Norman Barlow, president of the Wyoming Senate in 1960-61. Barlow took off to the East and graduated from Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, in 1969. He graduated with high honors in Comparative Religion before operating the Bar Cross Land and Livestock Company - a large cow-calf operation in Wyoming that he sold in 1988. He then dove into the computer world, right as the Internet was but a sprout, and has been credited with coining the term "cyberspace" to describe it.

Around the same time, in 1990, he and Mitchell Kapor founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that promotes freedom of expression in digital media, for which he continues to serve as vice chairman.

Barlow has written for a diverse number of publications, including Communications of the ACM, Mondo 2000, The New York Times, and Time. He has been on the masthead of Wired Magazine since it was founded. His piece on the future of copyright, "The Economy of Ideas," is taught in many law schools, and his "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" is posted on thousands of Web sites.

In 1997, he was a Fellow at Harvard's Institute of Politics, and since 1998, he has been a Berkman Fellow at the Harvard Law School. In June 1999, FutureBanker Magazine named him one of the 25 Most Influential People in Financial Services, even though he's not in financial services.

Leslie Peterson, who has known Barlow since he was a kid, called him "one character of a guy." She continued, "He taught himself everything about the computer in what seemed like one night. He has always been brilliant, a good horse hand, skier, extremely sophisticated, and definitely irreverent."

Childhood friend and architect John Carney said, "You could always count on the most interesting people at Barlow's ranch... a Buddhist monk, a rock 'n roll musician, a president's son; people are attracted to him. John has always been frighteningly smart in my opinion... a smart ass too, so he got knocked around a bit as a kid."

With this month being the 40th anniversary of the birth of the Grateful Dead and the 10th anniversary of the death of Jerry Garcia, fans around the country are reflecting upon what made the band and their songwriting legendary. Here's Barlow, in true form, talking about songwriting, his relationship with Bob Weir, politics, his pending 4th Amendment case, and Wyoming in the '60s.

"Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather."— Excerpt from Barlow's "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace." (1996)
So how the hell does a rural Wyoming cowboy kid meet up with the Grateful Dead?

"I was a rebellious kid, and my father was a politician," Barlow began to explain. "Over the course of my fourteenth year, my Mormon Boy Scout troop turned into a motorcycle gang. We all bought little Honda motorcycles. We thought we were a lot worse than we probably were, but the locals thought we were bad enough. My father was told that if he ever wanted to get re-elected anything, he was going to have to get me the hell out of sight. So he sent me off to prep school, and there I met the guy [Bob Weir] who was going to become the rhythm guitar player for the Grateful Dead, and he and I have been one another's official best friend ever since."

Barlow and Weir were two peas in a pod – both having no capacity to follow the rules. Weir eventually got kicked out of Fountain Valley School in Colorado Springs where they had met. Though Barlow wanted to rebel and leave the school as an act of protest, the two didn't reunite until after the Acid Tests.

"I had heard about them [acid tests] and was deeply offended along with everybody else in my sort of Eastern Orthodox Church of LSD," Barlow reflected. "We thought it was a very serious sacrament and should not be handed out in bathtubs for people to drink as much as they want."

Barlow had met and become close friends with LSD purveyor Dr. Timothy Leary while the West Coast acid scene was taking shape. So when the Grateful Dead decided to head east in 1967, Barlow was there to introduce them to a new friend.

"I first saw the Dead the first of June 1967 at a place called Champagne A Go Go, which was a little club in New York that had about 160 seats. Then I took them up to Timothy Leary's estate a couple of days later in Millbrook, New York and got to know them all a lot better... and reconnected with my friend, Bobby Weir, though not before we got the shit kicked out of ourselves sitting underneath the Washington Bridge by some toughs from Long Island who thought our hair was too long. He tried to get them to stop by getting them to sing 'Hare Krishna,' which almost worked."
With LSD becoming a major player in the social scene in the late 60s, it's hard to imagine the Grateful Dead without it, especially with Owsley Stanley around. His obsession with dosing as many people as possible stretched the boundaries further than anyone had anticipated, but perhaps there was a tangible philosophy behind it all. If everyone expanded their senses and could escape their own reality for a few, well, several hours, wouldn't everything change?

"We all had this experience that made us feel like the world that we perceived with our conventional awareness was actually kind of a dream that overlay another reality that was not being taken into account by any of the beliefs or institutions that we knew. In those heady days, I think we all thought that once this insight was generally shared, everything would change. And gradually it is and has. If we had any sense, we would have realized that you weren't going to make a change that fundamental overnight. And, in fact, I think you could make the argument that everything that is going on politically in America is a continuation of that war that was established at that point between the 50s and 60s. Right now, it's still the 50s versus the 60s."

Around 1971, Weir started trying to write songs with Robert Hunter, but they couldn't get along. By this time, Barlow had fallen in thick with the Dead and had been bumming around with them for several years. Caught in the middle of a songwriting battle between Hunter and Weir, Barlow found himself in an unlikely position.
"Hunter turned to me and said, 'Why don't you take him? He's your friend!' I said, 'Well I'm not sure I know how to write songs." He said, 'Well you know how to write poetry,' which was more-or-less true because I had been a poet in college, mostly because I felt like I could ride around on a motorcycle to the women's colleges in New England and recite poetry of my own composition and do OK. I told [Robert Hunter] that I would give it a shot, went out, and tried to write a song, and it was 'Mexicali Blues.'"

"Mexicali Blues" was the first of over twenty-five songs he would go on to pen for the Dead, a majority of which were co-written on his ranch in Wyoming. This was a time when the Dead were going through a cowboy period, so a good cowboy song seemed to fit in just fine. But sometimes the songwriting was more of a struggle, literally.
"Weir and I actually got into a fist fight over one song - 'Feel Like a Stranger.' I was really against that song. It just seemed like (laughs)... like nothing I wanted to write a song about when it started to come, but he was encouraged by the beginnings of it and wanted to make it kind of... Well, he actually turned out to be right, as he was just enough of the time, so I should have known to oppose him as strenuously as I did when I thought he was absolutely dead wrong."
Barlow's catalog of incredible memories with the Dead is more than a book's worth of material, but he opted to share a couple of songwriting memories that stood out as some of the most memorable, for various reasons.

"There was one written in Wyoming, well in large part, which was a song called 'Cassidy.' The chords to that song were written in Marin County in this funny little ranch that we had up in West Marin. There was a girl living on the ranch who had a child the night that Weir was coming up with the chords, and the child was named Cassidy. And subsequently, Bobby came out to Wyoming where we were trying to write songs for his solo album called Ace. We were in an isolated homestead house on another part of the ranch from the main operation... my ranch... and snowed in and kind of crazy, trying to write songs together really for the first time. We fooled around with some words for 'Cassidy,' and nothing much came. Then he had to leave and start recording some of this stuff because he had a tight studio schedule, and we didn't have that one done.

"I found out that my father was dying... took him down to the hospital in Salt Lake. I had to go out with the Caterpillar and plow out a bunch of stack yards so that they'd be able to get the hay sleds in and out while I was gone if I had to be down there with him for a while. While I was out plowing, I kept running those chords around in my head thinking about the girl Cassidy that had been born and also about Neal Cassidy who had died not long before, who had been a great hero of ours. He's one of most remarkable human beings I have ever met. And thinking about how we come in to the world and go out of the world and how there's a kind of continuity. While I was out there plowing snow, the words just formed themselves into a melody that went with the chords and there it was. It just appeared. Then I headed out to watch my father die."

Not only was Barlow writing tunes for the Dead in the 1980s, but he was also starting a family, ranching, and teaming up with Dick Cheney on a number of environmental issues for Wyoming, including passing the Wyoming Wilderness Act and ridding the Wind River Mountains of acid rain. Yeah, that's right - Cheney, but the co-conspirators didn't get along on all of the issues, which eventually led Barlow to write "Throwing Stones."
That's the only explicitly political song we ever wrote. And the story behind that was that I was having a serious argument with Dick Cheney at that point, who I'd helped get elected and been a pretty good congressman for the stuff that I was interested in, which was environmental stuff.

"Then he got into this obsession with the Russians and this conviction that we had a clash of cultures that had to be resolved by whatever means, and so he helped base the MX Missile in Wyoming. And I got so freaked out that somebody was so determined to win a political battle that he was literally willing to endanger all the life on planet Earth that I felt like I had to say something, so I wrote that song. And like I say, I owe Dick a lot for that song."
These days, Barlow is a busy man, working as a consultant and software designer for a British company while also finding time to write some tunes for String Cheese Incident and to hang with his three daughters at Cheese shows. Questioning his experience with SCI brought mixed emotions to the surface.

"They unilaterally changed some things that I wasn't comfortable with having changed, so I'm not sure that I want to do that anymore. But I probably will. I love those guys."

Barlow seems to be as close to Weir as he's ever been. They've spoken about penning more songs together, but their friendship is the first priority.

"The last time we tried, neither of us were happy with the results, and it jeopardized our relationship. At a certain point, you decide whether it's more important to preserve an old friendship than to write a song. Given the various kinds of trouble we've had with one another over the years, I don't know if there's much we could do to destroy that friendship. But nevertheless, it's like being married. It's actually a lot like being married. Bobby has a very interesting mind; it's irregular. Sometimes it can seem like he's just being perverse, and sometimes he is just being perverse. But sometimes he really is on to something and it will take quite a long time for it to be visible."
Aaron DavisJamBase WorldwideGo See Live Music!

Waking the Dead

From Rolling Stone:

The untold story of the Dead's first breaths By DAVID HAJDUPhil Lesh was impeccably credentialed -- twenty-five, broke and idle, having been forced out of his job at the post office for growing his hair long enough to graze the top of his ears -- when he moved with a friend into 1130 Haight Street early in 1965. He mothballed his undergraduate dream of becoming a composer or conductor of avant-garde music, and he spent his days wandering the streets around the intersection of Haight and Ashbury, a mixed-race, working- class San Francisco neighborhood of storefronts and calendar-quaint Victorian houses that was just on the verge of becoming Haight-Ashbury, the synonym for the Sixties. In the afternoons, when Lesh awoke, he would walk a few blocks from his house to buy a doughnut, and music would follow him. From one window, he would hear an AM radio blaring a Top Forty hit of the week: "Downtown" or "This Diamond Ring"; from the floor above it, he'd hear an album track: say, Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues," from Bringing It All Back Home; on the next block, he'd hear a passage of Bach or Mozart from the San Francisco classical station KDFC; around the corner, there would be some jazz from Miles Davis or John Coltrane; then, a bit of R&B from Ray Charles . . .

"All sorts of people from different generations were living here, and when you walked past their houses, the wind would blow every variety of music through the air," Lesh recalled this summer, shuffling down Haight Street to retrace those steps. At sixty-five, Lesh is still wiry (he is meticulous about his diet, in part because he had a liver transplant in 1998) and exudes an unlikely boyish quality (an effect of his effusive high spirits, which his new liver helps sustain). "It was a kind of musical stream of consciousness, like the sound of the inside of your mind when you're not thinking or focusing on anything in particular -- all this flux of feeling and thought. It reminded me of Charles Ives, because that's where I was coming from."

It was also a hint of where Lesh would soon be going -- and where he would help take American music with the band he joined as bass player in June 1965. The nucleus of that group -- leader and string-instrument master Jerry Garcia, 23 at the beginning of '65; rhythm guitarist Bob Weir, 18; and singer and blues-harp player Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, 20 -- had come together in Palo Alto, California, some time earlier to play old-timey music as members of Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions. Early in '65, the three of them dropped the jugs and washtubs, and added a hard-driving drummer, Bill Kreutzmann, 19, to become an electric bar band, the Warlocks. By the end of that year, the group was transformed for good and had come to embody its time and place -- steeped in the San Francisco Bay area's tradition of unorthodoxy, entwined with the blossoming psychedelic culture, the band found its name, the Grateful Dead, by chance (Garcia opened the dictionary to a random page and took a phrase that caught his eye) and found unique sources of identity in its mercuriality, submission to happenstance and inclination to anarchy. Comprising musicians with wildly divergent backgrounds and creative orientations, spontaneous and volatile, the Grateful Dead embraced the effect of a walk down the streets of Haight-Ashbury in 1965, making surprise, collusion, indulgence and disorientation the stuff of its art.

How, in the course of one year, did a jug band from the Northern California peninsula become one of the most important -- and by far the most durable and influential -- musical phenomena to have risen out of Sixties San Francisco? "There are these power centers, like Machu Picchu, like Everest, like Stonehenge, places like that, and one of the main power centers on this continent is the manhole cover at the center of Haight and Ashbury," says Wavy Gravy, the jester of the psychedelic court, who may or may not have been the one who poured the acid in the Kool-Aid that Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters served to the multitudes seeking psychoactive kicks. "I'm certain of this because, in an altered state, I happened to walk onto the manhole cover while the Dead was playing at the Haight Street Fair, and at that exact moment, I saw a rainbow over Jerry Garcia."

OK . . .
"Haight-Ashbury was like a giant Certs commercial," Wavy Gravy explains, "with the Cert shooting out these waves in all directions -- ding, ding, ding, ding, beep, beep, beep, beep! The Dead were caught in those waves. You see?"
Yes. Definitely. There seems no harm, though, in considering a few somewhat less trippy notions.

In fact, the Grateful Dead weren't born in Haight-Ashbury. Despite the band's eventual prominence in the flower-power scene and the budding of its long-term fan base in the tie-dyed fields of the Haight's Buena Vista Park, the Dead were a product of another place about thirty miles to the south: Palo Alto, where an amalgam of cultural forces was coalescing just as the core founders of the band were entering adulthood. Stanford University, a major center for Cold War weapons research, filled the vicinity with parents allegiant to the hard sciences and Eisenhower-era values. When their kids started maturing, they began asserting their own generational identity by dressing like farmhands -- in bluejeans -- and listening to simple music played on wooden instruments and sung in a plaintive vernacular. Folk music was suddenly voguish, replacing jazz in the coffeehouses that had sprouted up in the bohemian student areas in Palo Alto (and virtually every other college town in the United States) during the postwar years. The Kingston Trio, the boy-band avatars of the folk craze, started in Palo Alto. So did Joan Baez, the imperious folk queen of the early Sixties.

And so did Jerry Garcia. Son of a leader of a big band (who named him after songwriter Jerome Kern, composer of the musical Show Boat and standards such as "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes"), Garcia moved to Palo Alto, after finagling his way out of the Army, because he knew a girl in the area, and he found work teaching banjo and guitar at an instrument shop. Garcia had toyed with rock & roll as a teenager in San Francisco (and even played electric guitar on Bobby Freeman's 1958 hit "Do You Want to Dance," according to Grateful Dead legend) but became obsessed with traditional acoustic music in Palo Alto. A few years before he got together with Weir and McKernan, he was developing a reputation among musicians in Northern California for his work in a couple of string bands: an old-timey trio, the Sleepy Hollow Hog Stompers (with guitarist Marshall Leicester and fiddler Dick Arnold), and a bluegrass trio, the Wildwood Boys (with guitarists David Nelson and Robert Hunter, the latter of whom would later reunite with Garcia as a lyricist for the Dead).

Garcia was also developing an extramusical mystique. "He was very advanced at the time, compared to everybody else," says Nelson, who continued to play with Garcia over the years and now tours with a Dead-style jam band. "People thought he was arrogant, but I never saw that. The first time I saw him, sitting in a bookstore, it was summer, so it was hot, and there's this guy with an open shirt, and he was incredibly hairy, and he's kind of dark and surly, and he's strumming a twelve-string, real kind of quiet, with this really kind of intense-like stare. He had a little wreath of something in his hair, like some girl had woven some vines into a wreath. He was playing quietly -- you could hardly hear it, but it was very intense, very captivating. He had some kind of aura. 'Who's that?' I just couldn't take my eyes off him."

Marshall Leicester saw a careerist streak to match -- and facilitate -- Garcia's acute sense of creative purpose. "He was a complicated individual: a guy with a very strong drive to find what it was he wanted to do and do it, even if he didn't know what it was," says Leicester, who is now a literature professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "He would pick up stuff and drop it, and that often involved picking up people and dropping them on the way to finding what he wanted to do. I can say that innocently, because it didn't happen to me. He had an artist's stubbornness about finding whatever that vision would turn out to be and sticking to it."

The store where Nelson first encountered Garcia, Kepler's Books and Magazines, was a modest shop run by a lefty activist, Roy Kepler, and co-managed by a local pacifist guru, Ira Sandperl. It had an open area with tables and a coffee urn on the left, as you walked in, which was the hub of the literary-music axis that gave the Palo Alto scene much of its gravitas and cachet. Ken Kesey, the novelist and LSD-head, had moved to Palo Alto on a fellowship to the Stanford Writing Program and stayed in town, working as an orderly in a psych ward while he wrote a novel drawn from the experience, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. When Jack Kerouac shook off Neal Cassady, the charismatic hanger-on who inspired On the Road's Dean Moriarty, Cassady bestowed the end of his leash to Kesey, thereupon gracing Palo Alto with an accessible -- indeed, ubiquitous -- Beat presence.

To a well-read autodidact like Garcia, and to musicians and writers with scholarly bents like Hunter, Leicester and many of their friends in Palo Alto, books and stringed instruments seemed of a piece. There was earthy poetry in those odd, cryptic folk songs about betrayal, death and spirits, and the process of unearthing the material on old 78s in thrift stores and flea markets had an element of scholarship. Garcia and his contemporaries gathered nearly every day at Kepler's, trading songs and books and ruminating on their meanings. At night they played in clubs such as the Top of the Tangent and the Boar's Head, both of which were rooms on the second floors of bookstores.

Recalling those days this summer, Ira Sandperl walks down the aisles of the current incarnation of Kepler's, an airy corner store in a modern building half a block from the original location, which is now a leather-furniture store. "I had to kick the Grateful Dead out of the store every night, before they were the Grateful Dead -- Jerry Garcia and those guys," says Sandperl, who now uses a walker but seems fiery enough to bop an antagonist on the head with it (unless he's still a pacifist). "They would play the same song all night, and they never knew when to stop. I had to get them out of there. They were maddening."

Bob Weir, a high-spirited rich kid with severe but undiagnosed dyslexia, had been expelled from a string of private academies around the Peninsula and ended up in Menlo-Atherton High School, near Palo Alto, in 1964. "He was incorrigible -- he was into being different," recalls his classmate Bob Matthews. "He liked music, liked playing music, played guitar really well, played it a lot and was into snowing the girls. He was pretty -- the girls all went for him, and he was plenty happy with them." Weir and Matthews were sophomores, as Matthews remembers, or maybe juniors, as Weir says, when they started a band with Jerry Garcia.

Matthews recalls that he and Weir hitch-hiked to Berkeley after school one day and sneaked into a twenty-one-and-over club to see a group they had heard on a new record: the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, a raggy-looking ensemble of young people playing a musical hodgepodge, by turns old-timey, funky, bluesy and jazzy, on farmhouse instruments such as washboards, kazoos and jugs, as well as traditional banjos and guitars. "The next day, Bob and I walked into Dana Morgan's music store, where Jerry was in his little tiny cubicle that he taught lessons in -- if he wasn't working, he was always practicing," says Matthews. "We said, 'We decided to start a jug band last night.' Without dropping a note, Jerry said, 'Oh, good -- I'm in it.' And that's how the Grateful Dead started."

Four decades later, Weir, now fifty-seven, remains hardy and attractive, despite his thick, graying beard. Early this summer, he sat on the patio behind the Depot bookstore and coffee shop in Mill Valley, the town on the rim of Northern California's Mount Tamalpais where he has lived for years, and he sorts through his memories of the birth of the Dead. "It all started in places very much like this," he said, slowly turning his head to his right, in the direction of the book stacks inside. "I really couldn't read very well, so I felt a little funny in a bookstore. I still do, though we're outside, so that helps.

"We were pretty much the Dead before we were the Dead," Weir said, staring straight ahead as he talked -- not at anyone in particular, just straight ahead, as if he were onstage. "We were a jug band first, and that band had the whole essence of what the Grateful Dead became." Indeed, with the addition of McKernan, a gut-bucket blues singer who was a fixture in Palo Alto music circles, the group contained not only three core members of the Grateful Dead but also the band's genetic code. Called Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, it was an unstable, anarchic, improvisational troupe of individualists making smart, fun music that conjured a party atmosphere. The heart of the enterprise, the jug, provided both the tuba-style foundation for the music and a symbol of illicit thrills; to the poor folks of the 1920s and 1930s (black and white) who played the original jug-band music, a jug was for holding corn whiskey, and the fact that it had been emptied and was therefore tootable was a sign of feeling good from the inside. It wasn't LSD but the closest thing on the Mississippi River.

As Geoff Muldaur, a guitarist and singer for the Kweskin band, explains the genre, "The essence of the jug-band idea is people jamming music for free and for fun with an extremely unrehearsed, spontaneous nature to it. As we saw it, and Jerry and Bob followed suit, it had no idiomatic boundaries. It was more of a medium to grow things in. It was eclectic, in that there was a lot of jazz playing going on, a lot of blues playing going on." The style was "a springboard, for us and for the Dead," Muldaur says.

"Hipness is a thing that keeps changing, and people who were in their late teens and early twenties in the early 1960s found jug bands incredibly hip," recalls the singer and songwriter John Sebastian, whose own passion for the style has sustained his entire career; he started professionally (under the name John Benson) in the New York-based Even Dozen Jug Band (which included the mandolin player David Grisman, with whom Garcia later recorded several albums' worth of traditional material), he formed the Lovin' Spoonful as an electrified jug band, and he now leads his own winkingly titled J-Band. "A lot of that appeal to those people had a cultural backspin on it -- like, this music has no reference to my frame of reference. It has a sense of fun, of course, but in that sense of fun a kind of deflation of the idea of an entertainer as a big shot. Jug-band music is kind of like compost -- it's this very rich fertilizer."

Weir's specialty in the band was the jug, in part because playing it made him hyperventilate and get high. "Jug-band music was minstrel music," Weir says. "It was blues music -- it wasn't electric urban blues, but it was old-style urban blues. The jug-band tradition went all the way from New Orleans to Cincinnati, and all along those stops the same rhythms and the same harmonic structures that those guys used to play back then stayed. Playing in the jug band, I learned a healthy respect for the roots of the music. You honor the roots, and you're tapping into a vein -- there's juice there.

"Somebody got us a gig at the Tangent, and we became fixtures there. We were putting on a party, and people would dance, and stuff like that. We became popular, immensely popular. We owned the place, almost from the first night."
In July 1964, a couple of Stanford students recorded Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions for a college radio show, Live From the Top of the Tangent. The band's program that night (issued on CD in 1999) shows Garcia and McKernan in strong voice doing material later associated with the Dead (including Jesse Fuller's "The Monkey and the Engineer" and "Beat It On Down the Line"). The broadcast ended with an interview in which Garcia spoke for the group. "We have quite a large area," he said of the group's musical terrain, "and that makes it more fun for us -- certainly more satisfying, because it doesn't restrict us to one particular idea or one particular style. The result, I think, is pretty interesting, and it's just a gas for us. We'll play music as long as we're all together and we all live in the same area. It's fun, and it's rewarding. We don't expect to make a fortune at it or ever be popular or famous or worshipped or hit The Ed Sullivan Show or the circuses or the big top. As long as we can play, we'll play, regardless of what it's for, who it's for or anything. It's fun for us -- that's the important thing."

The importance of things soon changed for Garcia, Weir and McKernan, who were, after all, young and American -- far from immune to the power of The Ed Sullivan Show. By the end of 1964, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones liberated rock & roll from the offices of the Brill Building and revived it four blocks away, right there on Ed's soundstage. "Toward the end of that year," Weir remembers, Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions "started mutating into a rock & roll band."

The Beatles and the Stones "hit us in a big way," Weir says. "I was working in the music store where Jerry worked, and -- well, we were thinking while we were working at the music store, all those shiny electric instruments are starting to give us the come-hither. And just around then, the son of the owner of the music store said, 'Hey, listen, you guys want to start a rock & roll band? I'll loan you the instruments if I can play bass.' The Beatles came out, and there was life to what they were playing. Rock & roll seemed viable -- it seemed less like prepackaged, marketed pap and more like there was some expansiveness to the music. So we became a rock & roll band at that point."

Phil Lesh, who was friends with Garcia and watched his musical progress closely, saw various incarnations of the jug band and attributes its transformation to McKernan, whose tastes leaned far more toward the Stones than the Beatles. Of course, Lesh and Weir have not agreed on much in some time. (Their elemental disagreement over the mission of the band -- carrying on musical tradition or experimentation -- along with more mundane conflicts over business, prevents the surviving members from playing together in their fortieth anniversary year.)

"That was a neat metamorphosis, because Jerry and Pigpen had been trying to work some kind of thing out for years," Lesh says. "In Palo Alto, they finally got it together with this jug band -- a jug band is kind of a magpie's nest of influences, just like the Grateful Dead turned out to be. Pigpen was into the Chicago blues, and it was his idea: 'Let's get a drummer and make it an electric blues band.' It was just such a natural thing to happen."

The drummer they got was the best one they knew and the one they knew best: Bill Kreutzmann, who had played in a local R&B band and was teaching in the instrument store alongside Garcia and Weir. A big, quiet man who said he related to Lenny in Of Mice and Men, Kreutzmann was married with a baby daughter at eighteen, when he was still in high school, though his playing was fiery and wild. Garcia would claim (in an interview with the band's official biographer, Dennis McNally) that he "really, really didn't understand anything [Kreutzmann] said. He was just like, 'Rcty rcty shdd.' You know, what? 'Rrrrou.'" (Kreutzmann, through a representative, declined to be interviewed for this article.) But his drumming spoke to Garcia. "He was all over the place," Garcia told McNally.

The guys chose a dark, forbidding new name -- the Warlocks (which would later be an early name for a band of another sphere, the Velvet Underground). Lesh joined in May 1965, after the first set of a Warlocks gig at a pizza parlor in Menlo Park that Lesh attended, high on acid, and enjoyed so well that he danced by himself in front of the bandstand. Garcia cornered him and announced, "Hey, man -- you're going to be the bass player in this band," as Lesh recalls. Such was Garcia's intuitive sense of the two men's companionability, his faith in Lesh's fundamental musical acumen and his disdain for the rudimentary plunking of the music-store owner's son, whose father repossessed the band's equipment. (Garcia hustled up replacement gear on loan.)

The Warlocks started as a bar band playing covers, though the tunes Garcia and his bandmates chose betrayed their devotion to traditional music and their archival bent. In their first year together, they were doing lots of old blues numbers updated though electrification, like the Stones -- Slim Harpo's "I'm a King Bee" and Jerry Reed's "Big Boss Man" -- but they mixed them with folk songs such as "I Know You Rider" and jug-band tunes like "Viola Lee Blues" and Gus Cannon's "Stealin'." Musically, their interpretations were always idiosyncratic -- Garcia's solos were never pure blues but were rooted in the diatonic scales of bluegrass, and Lesh remained an avant-gardist, approaching the bass very much like the jazz trumpet he used to play. The band was a farrago of aesthetics from the start.

"They were a cover band with a blues accentuation because Pigpen was their vocalist, but the DNA of the band is a synthesis of all American music, and they had that from day one," Dennis McNally says.

"Everything we ever did was a demonstration of the value of cross-fertilization," Lesh explains. "It was unconscious at first, but when we started looking at each other, we had all these different influences. We had classical, jazz and avant-garde electronica in my case; we had rock & roll, bluegrass and folk music in Jerry's case; we had rock & roll and folk music with Bobby; we had blues and R&B with Pigpen; and we had jazz and rock & roll with Billy. The first song we ever did was an old folk song ["I Know You Rider"], and we rocked it out. Then we took a jug-band song ["Viola Lee Blues"], and we electrified that and rocked it out. I used to think of our music as electric chamber music. Bobby used to call it electric Dixieland."

Like the Beatles in Hamburg, the Warlocks jelled as a group -- as much as they ever would -- when they landed steady work in one spot and got to play set after set, night after night. For six weeks beginning in the fall of 1965, the band played five forty-five-minute sets (with a fifteen- minute break) per night, five nights a week, at a club for down-and-outers called the In Room in Belmont, a suburban town north of Palo Alto. "That's where we started getting a little out," Lesh says. "We'd play one song for forty-five minutes -- 'Midnight Hour,' by Wilson Pickett. We thought it was OK to do that, because the only people who were in there were people who were sitting at the bar drinking, and occasionally some people would come out and dance. I don't know if we drew people in or pushed them away. But I know that over that six weeks we really evolved our playing to a point where we could take it out and be free with it and just listen to each other play and find musical ideas and find whole musical structures -- in the ozone, as it were.
"We borrowed it all from Coltrane. I started encouraging everybody in the band to listen to John Coltrane -- 'Check it out, see what these guys do.' They take one chord, the tonic chord, and just play all over it. 'We can do that too!' I wanted to make our music something really amazing -- I wanted it to be jaw-dropping and turn on a dime and do all of those things that I knew music could do, and nobody told us we couldn't do it. I shouldn't say 'I,' though -- Jerry was behind it the whole way."

It was at the In Room that the Warlocks not only found their voice as a band but began their long-running discourse with inner voices. They were swept -- no, they dived, in group formation -- into the vortex of the LSD culture that Kesey and his troupe of Pranksters were just beginning with their Acid Tests of psychoactive evangelism around the Bay area. At first, the members of the band (or at least most of them, much of the time, Weir excepted) had an unofficial policy of performing while straight (or relatively straight, after smoking pot and/or drinking) and tripping only offstage. Soon, they began to entwine their creative lives and psychoactive lives. In little time, the two were inseparable.

"We got one night off a week," says Weir, "and every Sunday we'd go out and take acid, because that was just starting to come around. There were woolly freaks in the audience, and they were high, and we related to them -- got a kind of contact buzz off them.

"Then, one night -- I guess I was the first guy in the band actually to take acid. I had some, I took it and went to the gig -- I think it was a Tuesday night at the In Room, and all the guys in the band were watching me to see if I was going to make it through the evening. 'Isn't that a little radical?' And I made it through the evening. It wasn't a good night or a bad night. There were some challenges involved, because I think I overdosed myself. I was profoundly disoriented, I'll tell you. But I made it through the evening. And so shortly on the heels of that, the rest of the guys figured, 'OK, if the kid can do it, we're good to go.'

"Sometimes we'd freak out -- we'd plug in, try to play and just jump ship and come back later when we weren't peaking and give it another go, and it would work. The LSD gave us an insight, because once you're in that state of profound disorientation, you play stuff out of muscle memory that you're used to playing, but it will sound way different to you, and in that you'll find all kinds of suggestions of places to take it. Bit by bit, we'd follow those pathways. We were taking acid every week for a couple of months, and I think we learned what we were going to learn with that method in that couple of months. We learned in that time an important lesson, to try to step back from what it is you're playing -- not be there, to step back and let the song be itself. All we were there for was to be there to help the song, to do a few physical things to let the song happen, and the song would take care of itself."
Four decades after LSD was all the rage, neuroscientists have only a partial understanding of how the drug works.
According to Dr. David Nichols, a medicinal chemist at Purdue who has written on the biochemistry of hallucinogens, LSD affects four regions of the brain associated with wakefulness, perception and information processing, enacting changes that can have a profound impact on band musicians jamming while they're tripping. They can go into a state both dreamlike and hyperconscious; things that previously seemed insignificant about the music then seem strikingly novel.

The resulting music is most effective to listeners who are in the same altered state, of course. To others, it may come off as magnificently inventive or numbingly meaningless. Then again, so can performances by utterly straight performers.

"Everybody focuses on the drugs when they talk about the Grateful Dead," notes Mickey Hart, the percussionist who joined the band, alongside Kreutzmann, in 1967. "First of all, the band only played while tripping for a very short period a long time ago. We went on to play for years and years after that, and the music continued to be spontaneous, inspired and unpredictable -- sometimes wonderful, sometimes not. But it wasn't the drugs' fault. That's the function of creative group improvisation. That's the risk we took as group improvisers. We used acid as a tool, and it helped us feel the music in a different way. We continued to use what we learned from that and didn't need the acid anymore."
At some point around the beginning of November 1965, Phil Lesh was record shopping and picked up a single with the name Warlocks on the label. His band had not made the record. (Neither had the New York group that would become the Velvet Underground.) On November 3rd, the band recorded a handful of demos in San Francisco and used the name the Emergency Crew for the sessions. Nine days later, Garcia, Weir, Lesh and Kreutzmann met at Lesh's apartment on High Street (no joke) in Palo Alto, where he had moved from Haight- Ashbury to be close to the rest of the band. As Lesh remembers, he and Garcia flipped through a copy of a book of quotations, spouting phrases for consideration as a new band name, and none seemed better than the idea that Garcia came with: the Mythical Ethical Icycle Tricycle. Finally, Garcia opened Lesh's dictionary to a random page, and a pair of words "jumped out at him." Garcia blurted out, "Grateful Dead -- that's it," and let out a whoop.

Garcia, recalling the occasion some time after the fact, doused a bit of sand on the ostensible magic of the moment. "Nobody in the band liked it," he remembered (in an interview quoted in Blair Jackson's 1999 biography Garcia: An American Life). "I didn't like it, either, but it got around that that was one of the candidates for our new name, and everyone else said, 'Yeah, that's great.' It turned out to be tremendously lucky. It's just repellent enough to filter curious onlookers and just quirky enough that parents don't like it."

Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, "Pigpen" McKernan, Phil Lesh and Bill Kreutzmann were still living in Palo Alto, the band's birthplace, and they had no record contract. But the Dead were now alive, fully formed and beginning to stir up their rich, pulpy stew of American music.

Phil Lesh walks up to the front of 710 Ashbury Street, a decorous three-story Victorian that housed all the members of the Grateful Dead for a few months, a year after the band settled on its name. The block is now gentrified, and the house has been fastidiously restored. At the bottom of the front steps, there's a wrought-iron gate with gold leaf on the filigree. Lesh tugs at it, finding it locked. "We never locked anything," he says with a chuckle. "Of course, we didn't have anything to steal, except our guitars, and everybody else on the street already had a guitar."

On the walk toward Haight from Ashbury, no music came from the windows of the houses, most of which were closed to keep in the air conditioning. Lesh stops for a moment to consider a notion: With Jerry Garcia dead, is silence on the streets of Haight-Ashbury somehow fitting?

"It has a certain poignancy, the silence," Lesh says, gazing down the street. "But I don't think Jerry would have liked it."

Then he smiles. "I don't really hear silence, anyway. I hear music in my head, and that makes me think of Jerry."

Jerry's Dragon Sketch on show in LA

From ContactMusic.com:

GARCIA'S FABLED DRAGON SKETCH ON SHOW IN LOS ANGELES


A mythical JERRY GARCIA sketch, which experts call a "subconscious self-portrait" of the late GRATEFUL DEAD star, is set to raise a furore when it's shown for the first time since the rocker's death at a new Los Angeles exhibition.
The Reluctant Dragon - or Smile, as fans know the piece - is said to be an image of Garcia as the rocker saw himself; a big, old friendly smiling dragon.

The second-edition print will be among 40 Garcia exhibits on show at the Jerry Garcia Art Tour's first Los Angeles stop, when it hits the Mr Musichead Rock Art Gallery for three weeks from 17 September (05), but it's sure to be a fan highlight as it's rarely seen and has never been available to the general public.

Mystery surrounds the ownership of the original and even Garcia's estate don't know the true identity of the pseudonym CASSIDY ROSE.

The Garcia estate's art curator APRIL HIGASHI says, "This will be the first time the print has been available since Jerry Garcia's death 10 years ago. It has always been a beloved image for fans. It shows the playful side of Jerry.
The exhibition, which will also mark the launch of new Garcia art book JERRY GARCIA - THE COLLECTED ARTWORKS, will also feature three original pieces, including DAVID - the rocker's portrait of musician pal DAVID GRISMAN.

Garcia died of a heart attack in August 1995.

On the road with Weir

From Burlington Free Press:

On the road with WeirPublished: Wednesday, August 24, 2005

By Brent Hallenbeck
Free Press Staff Writer

Bob Weir keeps going and going and going ... .The former Grateful Dead guitarist is on the road with his band, RatDog, which is playing a sold-out show tonight at Higher Ground in South Burlington. He's been touring with the Dead, RatDog and various other bands for the better part of 40 years. At 57, he's showing no signs of slowing down.

We posed 10 questions to the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer in a recent telephone interview from his home in Mill Valley, Calif., outside San Francisco in Marin County.

You've been in Vermont a lot with the Dead, The Other Ones, RatDog -- any particular Vermont memories you'd like to share?
The shows blend together. I like the look of the place.

Any idea how many shows you've played over the years with your various bands?
Between the Dead, The Other Ones, RatDog, my years with Kingfish and Bobby and the Midnites, it's got to be in excess of 5,000 shows, maybe six. It's what I've been doing for quite a while. What would be interesting would be to figure out how much time I've spent on stage. Figure 2 1/2 hours a show, multiply that by, let's say, 5,000 ... what you're going to get is 15,000 hours, so that would be -- (retrieves a calculator) 15,000 hours divided by 24, so that's 600 (days) -- that's a couple of years (reporter's note: It's actually 12,500 hours, or 520 days -- still a long time).

Higher Ground is a pretty small venue for you, 600 or so people. Is a RatDog show any different in a nightclub than the usual auditoriums or amphitheaters you play?
We're going to see when we get there and see what the room feels like and sounds like and go from there. You play the place for what it is, play the ball as it lies. I've never equated the size of the venue with the intimacy.
I've played in stadiums when it felt intimate, and in small clubs where everything seems miles away.

I saw RatDog in 1998 in Albany, N.Y., with 16 Horsepower, an excellent country-gothic band but (based on the booing and back-and-forth insults) not necessarily what the RatDog crowd wanted to hear. What's the strangest double bill you've ever played?
I'm not sure that (16 Horsepower) was a marriage made in heaven. Our crowd is kind of known for -- they're sort of tunneled in on what they like and they know what they like. One of the most challenging bookings was closing the show after having Miles Davis open for us (the Dead). That was interesting. It was daunting. And then we opened one time for Otis Redding. That was great. I remember one time we played an inauguration in Washington, D.C., and the opening act was Bill Monroe.

Is there a musician you'd love to work with that you've never worked with before?
The answer is there are too many; I wouldn't know where to start. I always wanted to play with a top-shelf sitar player or Indian musician, and I recently played with a guy named Krishna Bhatt, an Indian drummer, and (bassist) Rob Wasserman. That was sublime.

Jerry Garcia died 10 years ago this month. What are your thoughts around the anniversary?
It's in the past now, but at the same time it's not as if Jerry is gone for me. He's very much a part of my everyday life. I don't think about it much. The initial shock is over. A certain part of me will always be in mourning, but not all that deeply, because I've got a lot to do. If I were him, I would certainly want it that way.

Where would the Dead be if Jerry were still alive?
After that summer, we would have almost definitely have had to take a break, because there was trouble at all our gigs. It was getting out of hand, the crowd situation. I probably would have gone off with RatDog, etc., etc. I think we were all looking at the certainty that we had to let things cool down.

Ben & Jerry's made Cherry Garcia ice cream right here in Vermont -- what's your relationship like with Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, and what do you think of Cherry Garcia?
Every now and again we're peripherally involved in some environmental project or charitable project. I've never been a big dessert guy. I've had their ice cream and it's real good. It's as good as ice cream gets.

The Dead essentially created the jam-rock scene. What do you think of the scene now, especially since Phish split after its show in Coventry a year ago?
This question is premature. I'm about to go out and play a bunch of festivals. Otherwise I pay no attention to that. If I'm going to listen to music on my own time it's going to be something that's pretty far from current popular music. On my iPod I'm listening to old jazz and new jazz and modern classical and I guess what you'd call world music, and country, old country, like George Jones.

Our talk was postponed 45 minutes because you were at the doctor's office. How is that whole getting-older thing going?
I was just at the optometrist. My eyes have never been perfect, but he put these new contacts in and I can see 20/10 with them, so that's getting better. There's not many people that can do that. My back's a little on the funky side. I've played a lot of contact sports all my life, and that's never good for your back. For years and years, I played a real heavy guitar. That was maybe not the smartest thing I ever did.

If you go
WHAT: Bob Weir and RatDog
WHEN: 8 tonight
WHERE: Higher Ground Ballroom, South Burlington
TICKETS: Sold out
INFORMATION: 652-0777 or http://www.highergroundmusic.com/.Contact Brent Hallenbeck at 660-1844 or bhallenb@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com

Review of "The Jerry Garcia Collection, Vol 1"

From LiveDaily:

Album Review: "The Jerry Garcia Collection, Vol. 1: Legion of Mary" (Rhino)
August 23, 2005 09:51 AM
by Jim Harrington
liveDaily Contributor

Jerry Garcia (music) must have been a true nightmare for his teachers back in grade school. The man born Jerome John Garcia probably couldn't sit still for more than a minute without organizing a dodgeball game or tinkering with some art project.

That's definitely the type of attitude he brought to his professional career, which extended in a plethora of ways outside of the Grateful Dead. He played bluegrass with Old & In the Way, jammed with New Riders of the Purple Sage, explored a jazzier side with organist Howard Wales, recorded with Jefferson Airplane and led his own group, The Jerry Garcia Band. He also, for a seven-month run in 1974-75, fronted the band Legion of Mary.

Rhino marks the 10th anniversary of Garcia's death by unveiling the first official Legion of Mary CD. The two-disc set--which was recorded at concerts in Portland, OR; Berkeley, CA; and San Francisco--is an excellent document of Garcia's eclectic talents and tastes.

The band, which also included keyboardist Merl Saunders, bassist John Kahn, saxophonist Martin Fierro and former Elvis skins-man Ron Tutt, jams through high-flying renditions of Chuck Berry's "Let It Rock," Ray Charles' "Talkin' 'bout You" and Hank Ballard's "Tore Up Over You."

The music, while never too self-indulgent, definitely conveys more than a touch of the Dead's love for experimentation. For the most part, however, the musicians come across more like friendly barroom players--albeit sensationally talented ones--than they do psychedelic soldiers on "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" and "That's a Touch I Like." The album's highpoint is the epic 16-minute-plus jam of Smokey Robinson's "I Second That Emotion."
In all, "Legion of Mary" is a fine start to what should be a very satisfying ongoing series of Garcia releases.

For those who need more Jerry in a hurry, Rhino has also released the first-ever Jerry Garcia Band DVD, "Live at Shoreline." The DVD captures the entire two-hour-plus concert delivered by JGB at the two-tent-shaped venue in Mountain View, CA, back on Sept. 1, 1990. Amazingly, it's one of the few "Jerry Band" performances to have been filmed. Thankfully, it's a good one.

Remembering Vassar Clements

(Clockwise from top left: Vassar and Earl Scruggs (1971), Vassar (1975), Vassar & fellow fiddler Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown (year unknown).

From Paste Magazine:

Vassar Clements (1928-2005)
Just a Good Ol' Boy

Legendary fiddler Vassar Clements lost his battle with lung cancer on Aug. 16. He was 77 years old, and leaves behind a recorded legacy as diverse as it is vibrant.

Clements was a bluegrass pioneer, having played under Bill Monroe’s charge as early as 1949, but he was also a rare crossover fiddler. He was respected by country music fans, revered by jazz musicians and—after playing with Jerry Garcia in seminal newgrass outfit Old & In The Way—he was adored by Deadheads. Breaking out of the rigid mold of the traditional bluegrass he helped create, Clements blended a wide variety of influences into his singular style.
Born in South Carolina on April 25, 1928, Clements officially joined Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys in 1949 at the age of 21. He remained with the group for seven years, then transferred to Jim & Jesse’s Virginia Boys, another important early bluegrass group. From 1962 until 1967, Clements took a leave of absence from music, in part to battle and recuperate from an alcohol problem.

Upon his return to the business, Clements marketed himself as a session musician and gained recognition as a solo artist, but first he pulled a year-long stint with yet another legend—five-string banjo king Earl Scruggs. But it was Clements’ contribution to the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s hit 1972 album, Will the Circle Be Unbroken, that really certified him as a marquee name. Within the next two years, Clements would cut his first solo album and play music with everyone from Paul McCartney to Jimmy Buffet.

The early ’70s were Clements’ most active years in music, and it was during this time that he first ventured into the world of the Grateful Dead. The band enlisted him for sessions on both Wake of the Flood (1973) and Grateful Dead From the Mars Hotel (1974). Clements became even more intimate with the Dead’s scene as a member of bluegrass supergroup, Old & In The Way, which also featured Jerry Garcia, David Grisman, Peter Rowan and John Kahn. Old & In The Way’s self-titled 1973 live album remains the best-selling bluegrass album of all time.

Clements would associate with members of the Grateful Dead throughout the rest of his career, and he continued doing session work for countless artists from many different genres. As a solo artist, he was also successful, cutting more than two-dozen solo albums, beginning with 1973’s Crossing the Catskills. Clements’ albums—frequently themed—followed his journey of musical self-discovery through jazz and bluegrass, the combination of which he referred to as “Hillbilly Jazz.”

In 2004, Clements released his first and only blues album, Living With the Blues, on David Grisman’s Acoustic Disc label. His last known released recording is a contribution to the eponymous Shimmy Shack, an all-star collaboration project headed by Dark Star Orchestra’s Dino English, on which he performed with members of the Sam Bush Band and Dirty Dozen Brass Band. Right through to the end, Clements continued to branch out and break new ground as a musician. His music is timeless and will live on. But Vassar Clements, the man, will be missed.

More on the Jerry Stamp effort

From CBS 5:

Jerry Garcia's Image Destined For Postage Stamp?

(CBS5) SAN FRANCISCO There's a grassroots campaign that hopes to honor the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia by putting his image on a postage stamp.The effort began with an online petition on August 9, the 10th anniversary of Garcia's death. To date, the Garcia petition to the Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee has more than 6,000 signatures.Backers say it would be fitting, as Garcia was a musician whose work blended many styles. In addition to that, he was a philanthropist. But other say it would be a different step for the U.S. Post Office to honor a rock-era figure associated with hippies and casual drug use. Garcia died in 1995 of a heart attack. He was 53.the Postal Service honored Elvis Presley with a stamp in 1993. The petition can be found at: www.petitiononline.com/Garcia/petition.html

Link to story and Video of News Clip

Jerry Stamp Effort

From San Francisco Chronicle:

Respecting the Dead Petition pushes for postage stamp honoring rock group's Jerry Garcia -
Edward Epstein, Chronicle Washington Bureau
Monday, August 22, 2005

Washington -- As Grateful Dead fans everywhere know, the music never stopped when Jerry Garcia passed away 10 years ago, and now a grassroots campaign wants to memorialize the Dead's driving force with a U.S. Postal Service stamp.

The centerpiece of the effort, so far conducted in the mellow fashion one would expect from Deadheads, is an online petition, first posted on Aug. 9, the 10th anniversary of Garcia's death at age 53.

Everyone involved recognizes that a Garcia stamp would be a leap for the post office by honoring a rock-era figure associated with hippies, casual drug use and a way-laidback lifestyle. But they proudly point out that Garcia was a great musician whose work blended many styles, a father figure to millions of Americans and others around the world and a philanthropist.

Besides, they say, in 1993, the Postal Service honored Elvis Presley -- who died of a heart attack after years of abusing prescription drugs -- and ended up with a best-seller. About 517 million of the 29-cent Elvis stamps were sold, and the Postal Service ended up with a $36 million profit. About 95 percent of those stamps are still in collectors' hands.
So far, the Garcia petition to the Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee has garnered more than 6,000 signatures without any publicity to speak of other than word of mouth or by fans finding the effort at www.petitiononline.com/Garcia/petition.html. Many of the signatures are accompanied by heartfelt messages, part of a response that has overwhelmed the petition's organizer, Steve Castonguay, a 40-year-old machinist who lives outside Rochester, N.Y.

"I'm really surprised by the support, and a lot of the messages put a tear in my eye,'' said Castonguay, a loyal Deadhead who has been to 87 Dead shows, 85 of them before Garcia's death from heart failure at a Marin County drug rehab center. Castonguay's music of choice is his collection of more than 1,000 hours of bootleg Dead tapes, and his home office's walls are decorated with some of his dozens of Dead T-shirts.

Deadheads speak
The messages on the petition are short and sweet.

"Jerry is God,'' wrote signer Annie Dahlkemper.

"He did more for this country than any U.S. president ever did,'' added Tim Lynch.

"Will this encourage people to lick stamps?'' wisecracked Daniel Lange.

"In Jerry we remember,'' wrote Drew Greenspan, signer No. 3,221.

Petitioner Haydon Compton Jr. summed up the Dead ethos. "Peaceful people deserve to be recognized. A stamp would be a wonderful way to do so,'' he wrote on the petition.

Getting someone honored on a U.S. stamp isn't easy. The 15-member Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee wades through about 50,000 ideas a year to recommend choices for new stamps to the postmaster general. Except for presidents, the committee won't consider stamp nominees until they've been dead 10 years.

The panel's members include actor Karl Malden, Harvard black studies Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., former UC Berkeley Chancellor Ira "Mike" Heyman, former University of Notre Dame basketball coach Digger Phelps and Joan Mondale, wife of former Vice President Walter Mondale. The members narrow the field to about 100 and forward their choices to the postmaster general. He trims the field further in making the final choices.

The stamps eventually chosen appear about three years after first getting into the selection process.
As word of Castonguay's effort spreads, so does the support. He's heard from Dead members Phil Lesh and Mickey Hart and from Jerry Garcia LLC, the San Francisco firm that represents Garcia's estate and its marketing efforts.

Garcia's face, Dead T-shirts and other memorabilia and ties carrying Garcia's abstract art remain big sellers.

Talk show host Al Franken has mentioned the idea of a Garcia stamp on his Air America radio program, and a new Web site, http://www.garciastamp.org/, has just sprung up.

"We think it's a great petition. And as usual, it was the Deadheads themselves who started it. It wasn't us,'' said Dennis McNally, Garcia's longtime publicist and author of "A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead.'' McNally pointed out that Garcia was already gathering honors. Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia ice cream, one of the company's top sellers, is named for him. In San Francisco's Excelsior neighborhood, where Garcia grew up, an amphitheater in McLaren Park has just been named in his honor. And he's included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and on the Walk of Fame outside San Francisco's Bill Graham Civic Auditorium.

Foreign stamps
Several "postal stamp republics,'' countries that print stamps expressly to sell them to collectors, have honored Garcia. These include Mongolia, Tanzania and Niger.

Asked whether the United States is ready for a Garcia stamp, McNally said, "Time focuses a perspective on his commitment to music and puts aside everything else. Elvis was not exactly a conventional figure.''
Jonathan Marks, who founded the San Francisco-based company Grateful Graphics 20 years ago to design and sell all things Dead, said he had contacted the state Department of Motor Vehicles long ago about a Grateful Dead license plate. "They finished laughing about 15 minutes ago,'' he said.

Garcia was a central figure for Marks.
"When Jerry Garcia died, a part of me died," said Marks, who has attended more than 330 Dead shows as fan and entrepreneur. "I don't pay enough attention to other music anymore.''

A Garcia stamp could prove a boon for the financially challenged Postal Service, hit by the rise of e-mail, delivery company competitors and the decline of stamp collecting as a hobby.

"For the 'postage stamp republics,' Garcia's a best-seller. They love him,'' said Rob Haeseler of the American Philatelic Society.

He pointed out that at the same time as the Elvis stamp, the post office issued a rock 'n' roll and rhythm and blues series that also honored Buddy Holly, Bill Haley, Ritchie Valens, Dinah Washington and Otis Redding, among others.
"I think a Garcia stamp is a good idea," Haeseler added. "It celebrates a part of America's rich cultural traditions, and it'll make Deadheads everywhere happy.''

As for Castonguay, he plans to gather signatures for a few weeks. He has secured time off from work for late September, when he plans to travel to Washington to turn in his petitions.
E-mail Edward Epstein at eepstein@sfchronicle.com.