The Day After

On December 8, 1995, the Grateful Dead was over. Bob Weir’s RatDog had played its first show under that name on August 8, the day before Jerry Garcia died. In the summer of 1996, Weir and RatDog headlined the first Furthur Festival, a touring package named after the Merry Pranksters’ bus. It opened June 20 at the Lakewood Amphitheatre in Atlanta, with Mickey Hart’s Mystery Box, Bruce Hornsby, Los Lobos and Hot Tuna on the bill. “Remember, this is not the Grateful Dead, where all systems were on automatic,” Hart told fans in an online chat that summer.

The year brought more losses and some hard business. John Kahn, Garcia’s bassist for more than twenty years, died in May 1996. Garcia’s estate became the subject of lawsuits from family members and former partners, and his guitars Wolf and Tiger eventually went to their builder, Doug Irwin, who sold them at auction in 2002. Bill Kreutzmann had already moved to Hawaii. “I moved to Hawaii to get healing. I was in a really bad way,” he said later. Robert Hunter kept writing and published new poetry.

The Furthur Festival returned in 1997, with Hart’s Planet Drum, Hornsby and Hunter. Phil Lesh mostly stayed off the road, though he joined both summers’ festivals at Shoreline, and in 1997 he assembled an archival collection, Fallout from the Phil Zone.

The Other Ones

In the spring of 1998 Weir, Lesh and Hart rehearsed at Club Front with Bruce Hornsby, two guitarists, Mark Karan and Steve Kimock, saxophonist Dave Ellis and drummer John Molo. They called the band the Other Ones, a name taken from the Dead’s “That’s It for the Other One,” and debuted on June 4, 1998, at the Warfield in San Francisco, at a benefit for the Rainforest Action Network. That summer they headlined the Furthur Festival, and a double live album, The Strange Remain, followed in February 1999 with new songs by Hart and Hunter.

In December 1998, Lesh had a liver transplant. When he came back, he started telling every audience to become organ donors, a speech that fans called the “donor rap” and that he gave for the rest of his career. He didn’t rejoin the Other Ones when they toured again in 2000. Instead, Bill Kreutzmann joined, with Alphonso Johnson on bass.

Phil and Friends

Lesh had first used the name Phil Lesh & Friends for a one-off show in 1994. In early 1998 he revived it as a band with no fixed lineup. In April 1999, four months after the operation, he played three nights at the Warfield with Phish’s Trey Anastasio and Page McConnell, plus Kimock and Molo. In June he brought in Jefferson Airplane’s Jorma Kaukonen, and those shows became the album Love Will See You Through.

In the fall of 2000 Lesh settled on a steady lineup, later nicknamed “the Q”: guitarists Warren Haynes and Jimmy Herring, keyboardist Rob Barraco and drummer John Molo. They toured until 2003 and recorded a studio album, There and Back Again (2002), with new songs Lesh wrote with Hunter and Haynes. “I discovered there was this enormous pool of musicians who loved this music and were reinterpreting it every day,” Lesh told Relix in 2002.

Weir kept RatDog going, with Jeff Chimenti on keyboards from 1997, and released a studio album, Evening Moods, in 2000.

Back Together

On August 3 and 4, 2002, all four surviving members played together again for the first time since 1995. The occasion was a two-day “Grateful Dead family reunion” at Alpine Valley in Wisconsin, billed as “Terrapin Station,” with each member’s own band also on the bill. Both days sold out. That fall the four toured as the Other Ones, with Jimmy Herring on guitar.

In February 2003 they changed the band’s name to The Dead. “To us, this was the Grateful Dead – without Jerry,” their statement said. Weir wasn’t sure about the change. “I thought it was premature,” he told the Las Vegas Sun. “But the other guys in the band wanted to change it and I was outvoted.” The Dead’s first show was a Valentine’s Day benefit at the Warfield on February 14, 2003. Joan Osborne sang with them that year, and in 2004 Warren Haynes joined on guitar for the summer tour, which Hunter opened at many stops.

The Dead played rarely after that. In 2008 Weir, Lesh and Hart played a benefit for Barack Obama’s campaign at the Warfield, and in October all four played another at Penn State. In the spring of 2009 they toured arenas as The Dead, with Haynes and Chimenti. On July 4 they played the Rothbury festival in Michigan, their last show together for six years.

The Vault

The music was also coming out of the vault. Dick Latvala, the archivist behind the Dick’s Picks series, died in 1999, and David Lemieux took over the tapes. The band released box sets (So Many Roads in 1999, The Golden Road in 2001), and in 2006 it made Rhino Records the manager of its recordings, archive and merchandise. The Download Series, Road Trips and, from 2012, Dave’s Picks turned a steady stream of soundboard tapes into official releases.

In 2007 the band received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2008 it gave its archive of letters, posters, business records and memorabilia to the University of California, Santa Cruz. “If you ever wrote the Grateful Dead a letter, you’ll probably find it there!” Weir said. In 2012 the Library of Congress named the Cornell 5/8/77 tape to its National Recording Registry. Vince Welnick, the band’s last keyboard player, died in 2006.

Furthur and the Side Roads

In 2009 Weir and Lesh started a new band together, Furthur, with Jeff Chimenti on keyboards, Joe Russo on drums and, on guitar, John Kadlecik, who had played Garcia’s parts for twelve years in the tribute band Dark Star Orchestra. Furthur debuted at the Fox Theater in Oakland in September 2009 and toured for the next four years, with long runs at Red Rocks and on the East Coast. It went on hiatus in 2014 and broke up that November.

The others found their own roads. Hart and Kreutzmann revived the Rhythm Devils in 2006 and 2010. Kreutzmann co-founded 7 Walkers, a New Orleans-flavored band with lyrics by Hunter, and in late 2014 formed Billy & the Kids. Hart released Mysterium Tremendum (2012), with Hunter writing most of the words. In 2012 Lesh opened Terrapin Crossroads, a bar, restaurant and music room in San Rafael, where Phil & Friends played regularly. Weir built TRI Studios in San Rafael for webcast concerts. RatDog played its last show in July 2014.

Fare Thee Well

On January 16, 2015, the four announced three shows at Soldier Field in Chicago for that July, to mark the band’s 50th anniversary. They called them “Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years of the Grateful Dead.” “These will be the last shows from the four of us together,” Weir said. Trey Anastasio would play guitar, with Jeff Chimenti and Bruce Hornsby on keyboards. “I didn’t hesitate for a second to say yes,” Anastasio said. He prepared for months. “I had to learn 90 Dead songs,” he told Rolling Stone.

Demand was enormous. More than 60,000 mail-order envelopes arrived at the band’s ticket office in Stinson Beach. “They literally had tens of millions of dollars come crashing through the Stinson Beach post office,” publicist Dennis McNally said. The band added two shows at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, on June 27 and 28.

On the first night in Santa Clara, during “Viola Lee Blues,” a rainbow appeared over the stadium. Billboard reported that the producers had paid $50,000 for a fake rainbow, then took the claim back. “It was man-made and the man that made it was Jerry Garcia,” producer Peter Shapiro said. The sets reached deep into the band’s history, including “What’s Become of the Baby,” a 1969 song the band had never really played live.

The Chicago shows closed on July 5. That night the band played “Unbroken Chain” and “Days Between,” then “Touch of Grey” and “Attics of My Life” for the encores. “Please, be kind,” Mickey Hart told the crowd as the last show ended. In all, 361,933 people attended the five shows, which grossed $52.2 million, and the pay-per-view broadcast drew more than 400,000 subscriptions, a record for a music event.

The four never played all together again. That fall Weir, Hart and Kreutzmann started a new band, and Lesh went back to his friends. That story continues in the next era.