"BROKEN CHAIN..." A REVIEW OF "FARE THEE WELL" BY JOEL SELVIN WITH PAMELA TURLEY

HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT PHIL LESH? I MEAN, HOW YOU REALLY FEEL ABOUT PHIL Lesh, the total man, is the key to your tolerance for Fare Thee Well: The Final Chapter of The Grateful Dead's Long, Strange Trip by Joel Selvin with Pamela Turley. Whatever position you hold on the man will be confronted across these 250 pages.

I RESISTED READING THIS UNAUTHORIZED CHRONICLE OF THE LAST DAYS OF THE Grateful Dead as we knew them for more than a year. With the permanent absence of Jerry Garcia I just couldn't will myself to have much interest in the official band without his presence even as it celebated its 50th anniversary in 2015. I did not begrudge the surviving members of one of my favorite bands--Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann--to continue on under the same name, to preserve their legacy while extending it and even to make a living "pimping" it. They're entitled, I reasoned. Garica's considerable shadow in life and even in death has overshadowed and unfairly lessened their accomplishments. Nor did I think any less of fans who wanted to join in the celebration and commemoration. I just couldn't be one of them. 

Garcia was too indispensable. Most of my favorite Dead songs he sung and wrote the music. He's one of my favorite guitar players. His image pops up first in my mind when I think of the Grateful Dead. Hell, before I was a fan, he was the only member of the band I had even heard of. 

I loved the idea of the original Dead members existing as repertory leaders of their song catalog both together and separately in various endeavors.Once again they had a right to do so. I have never been deaf to their contributions. When I hear one of my favorite tunes I'm not ignoring their artistry; I want all of them celebrated to the highest extent. I'm always amazed by Weir's guitar playing and singing. Mickey Hart's early embrace of world music drumming styles is not recognized enough outside of Deadhead circles. Billy K. is the most slept-on drummer of all time, and the same is true of Phil on bass, who should be mentioned in the same category as Jaco Pastorious and Alphonson Johnson.

The post-Dead career I have followed the closest has been Phil Lesh & Friends, the ever-changing roster of stellar musicians who have supported him over the decades on barnstorming tours and gigs. A close second was Phil and Bobby's  joint short-lived supergroup, Furthur. If I favored Furthur it was because of the inclusion of Bobby, superior to Phil as a vocalist in every way, and of the songs he brought to the set lists.

No one polarized Deadheads more than Donna Jean Godchaux during her tenure with the band. For many a cat yowling in a back alley somewhere was more preferable a backing singer. For some others a female voice added a little Southern lace to the sound. 

"Let Phil Sing!" had been a popular audience chant among Deadheads from the 1970s on. If the Beatles had continued to tour after 1967(?) maybe their fans would have yelled for Ringo Starr to sing a song. Deadheads wanted to hear at least one song from Phil a concert. No one could have believed that Lesh was some powerhouse vocalist, nor that he was an interesting "character" singer the way say Tom Waits is, or Captain Beefheart was. Lesh wasn't a novelty, but his workingman's voice probably more mirrored their own than Garica's or Weir's, more consummate talents.

Your opinion of Phil being the lead or co-lead singer in a band is likely to influence your opinion of Phil Lesh & Friends. It isn't arguable that his voice worsened with age during his solo career. He's become the "Donna Jean" of Deadheads since the death of Garcia. Either/or.

All this exposition is the crucial backdrop to Fare Thee Well. Selvin posits Lesh(and his wife Jill) as the central figures in the saga of the band following the death of Jerry Garcia. The general public might have suspected the more high profile Weir, but Selvin quickly and defltly corrects the assumption. For neophytes unknowledgeable of the band's history, more current or distant past, this is likely to be an eye-raising revelation. 

Fare Thee Well eschews an overall history of the band to tightly focus upon only the last 20 years after Garcia's death and their final hurrah as a surviving unit. This is a rewarding decision, although it benefits to have a general knowledge of  the Garcia era. Basic histories are available everywhere, from bookstores to Amazon to Wikipedia.

The narrative is taut as a drum skin, chronicling the survivors in free fall from Garcia's death, financial crisis, substance abuse, an unexpected and life and bandchanging Phil Lesh illness, the changing landscape of America, American music and technology as well as their own aging process. (Bob Weir, the youngest member of the lot, is 72). What could be "Behind the Music" fodder is handled with deft sensibility, acute observations and a knowing yet not jaundiced eye. Deadhead or not, the authors have a sense of fair play balanced with reporting accuracy. 

Still the portrait of Phil Lesh which emerges in these pages will be likely to shock most readers. Shattering the myths of band as a jovial brotherhood for good, and of Lesh himself as a tall, geeky and goofy doofus, the portrait emerging skewers shallow assumptions. Phil and Jill Lesh dominate this book, like some rock 'n' roll version of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Even if their roles fit a general archetype of classic rock band dynamics over a long period of time, what separates the Lesh 's story from the Beatles or the Rolling Stones is obviously Phil's life saving liver transplant. The respectful psychological approach Selvin takes is nuanced, reasonable and convincing, although it may change your perception of Lesh once and for all. (Jill Lesh is another story.)

The book ends with the finale of the 50th anniversary concert in Chicago, but not before describing almost detail-by-detail the Sisyphean struggle it took to pull it off at all. (Two words: the Lesh's.) If you are that curious this is a book for you. But even for a casual Deadhead, one more interested in the golden age of the band, this can be a brisk, engrossing chronicle. Just be prepared for a lot of Lesh. Maybe even more Lesh than in his own memoir.

"DOES LENGTH REALLY MATTER?"

THE WONDERS OF THE INTERNET IS THAT IT NEVER STOPS GIVING(OR TAKING away, braincells and moments of your life you will never, ever get back). Every day is an anniversary of this or that. Every day marks some milestone you either never knew of or had forgotten. If you remember the game Trivial Pursuit, that's part of what the Internet, or at least social media, really is. Whether A.I. or human beings the regurgitation of trivia never stops. Unless you unplug from the Matrix.

So your sub-Reddit group informs you that 11/1/19 marks the 40th anniversary of the longest "Scarlet Begonias">"Fire on the Mountain" the Grateful Dead ever performed. Which of course means that you have to scrap everything you were planning to do(and eventually post) in order to reacquaint yourself with this fact. You listen. And you listen again. And again.

What does it mean? What does it matter? Recording the length is a trivial pursuit. It's a piece of knowledge you're probably glad you know, but it's strictly factual. No emotion is imparted within  the statement. It's a hollow notation, in and of itself. Off hand I don't know how tall the Eiffel Tower is, or the pyramids of Giza. I can have the knowledge within seconds, just a few clicks of the keyboard. But the facts aren't guaranteed to connect to my feelings about their height. The facts can aid my sense of wonder, yet I can exist without them. Perhaps they can even impede my astonishment upon the scale of the Eiffel Tower or the Egyptian pyramids. When I day dream of visiting Egypt(like the Grateful Dead once did) it's not the dimensions of the pyramids which dazzle my mind, but the totality of them, the inscrutable mystery of them.

In other words I care more about aesthetics than schematics when it comes to art. I don't need to know how tall and wide a Rothko painting is. What's relevant to me is only my reaction to it.

Initially what I read seemed to exalt more in the length of  the 11/1/79 "Scarlet/Fire" than the quality, which irritated me. Fortunately this attention served a better cause: reminding me of how good--and unique--this version of "Scarlet">"Fire" is. Not that the "Scarlet" is pedestrian, but here it's more of a launch for what is to come.

It's the jam inbetwen the two songs which gives it the "chewy" or "gooey" textures heard here. Brent Mydland had just replaced Keith Godchaux in the lineup, the start of his #-year long run with the band until his overdose death in 1990. As Deadheads will know Godchaux, a marvelous pianist, had frequently resisted the band's demands that he add other electric and electronic textures to the sound. Whether a condition of his employment or his own musical bent, Mydland wasn't at all reluctant. His use of the synthesizer and the clavinet--an electronic keyboard greatly associated with Stevie Wonder and other funk & r & b artist of the Seventies--adds a more "urban" bubbling to the section than typical Dead songs.prior to '79. He's not soloing but supporting the groove, a buttress to Garcia's burbling liquid notes, peals and peals of them before he starts invoking the iconic, beloved envelope filtered effect he used for "Fire on the Mountain."

The "Fire" section clocking in at 14 minutes alone, for those of you interested in the "saber metrics" of such matters, features more epic soloing from Garcia over a percolating rather than scorching accompaniment. 1977 seemed to have some "Fire"'s which were precisely that. Versions with so much enthusiasm they seemed unhinged. This version does not mine the same lava-like flow of that year, yet it's not laid back. It swirls like a demented calypso, connecting Barbados and Marin County, torching "authenticity" for something more interesting.

And that is more important to me than timing the longest version of this pairing at around 35 minutes.

Of course someone will also tell you that the longest version of "Dark Star" clocks in at...oh, never mind.