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Fan websites: RatDog.org | Philzone.com | Furthurmore | OtherOnes.net | Rabhan.com photos | GD Resources Galore

Updates and Articles

12/18/05 - The setlists for the Asheville performances by Trey Anastasio, Mike Gordon, and Bill Kreutzmann have been posted at TreyAnastasio.com with the note:

This is the first official performance of "SerialPod"

On December 17th, Trey, Dad and Mike Gordon (also from Phish) are playing a Christmas show that Warren Haynes does every year. If that goes well who knows....

As for the remaining members of the Dead, Lesh says he expects they may play together at another ''Terrapin Station" family weekend next summer at Alpine Valley, Wis., where they held a similar reunion in 2002.

10/03/05 - Comes a Time review from JamBase

09/28/05 - Comes a Time review from Chico Enterprise-Record

09/27/05 - Comes a Time review from Inside Bay Area

09/27/05 - Comes a Time review from LiveDaily.com

09/26/05 - Comes a Time review from Rolling Stone

08/30/05 - From the Stamford Advocate:

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.''

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.)

06/28/05 - From Diamondback Online, MD:

The diversity of Bonnaroo gave concert goers a smorgasbord of music to choose from, but for many, nothing could make up for the absence of The Dead, who happen to be celebrating their 40th anniversary this year. Bob Weir is indifferent to this though, because the event means very little to him.

“This is my 41st year playing with Jerry [Garcia],” Weir says. “I was playing in a band with him for a year and a half before The Grateful Dead even arose, so this 40th anniversary looks kind of arbitrary to me and I can't make all that much noise about it because I can't make all that much sense of it.” He did assure fans that, although they are not in a rush, The Dead will tour again.

In true Dead play-for-the-moment style, band members say, at this point no major concert or event is planned to commemorate the 40th anniversary of their "long strange trip."

The Dead toured last summer, reconfigured with original members guitarist Bob Weir, drummer Mickey Hart and bassist Phil Lesh. Despite 2005's historical milestone, band members this summer are going their own separate ways.

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This August also marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Dead cofounder and beloved frontman, Jerry Garcia, or, as Weir prefers to call it, "The anniversary of Jerry's departure."

Weir said a major memorial concert is being put together for late summer in the Bay Area featuring Dead members and "Jerry's friends." "It will be a meaningful event," Weir said, although names, dates and location are not finalized.

04/29/05 - From the Arizona State University Web Devil:

[Bruce Hornsby] will also co-headline summer shows with Ratdog -- headed by Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead.

The Grateful Dead's 40th anniversary is this year and members hope to commemorate the occasion but haven't worked out how, Lesh said. In the meantime, he is writing an ambitious cycle of songs based on the afterlife and the planets, and plans a tour with his band in the fall.

After Garcia's passing, the band decided not to perform any longer as the Grateful Dead. But the survivors — Lesh, Kreutzmann, singer/guitarist Bob Weir and percussionist Mickey Hart — have played some shows as the Dead and hope to do so again soon.

[Lesh said in an interview,] “This is our 40th anniversary this year, and in typically Grateful Dead fashion, we want to do something, but we don't know what, and we haven't been able to figure out what it is yet — but we're working on it.”

Despite the absence of Garcia's haunting vocals, the Dead are making much more consistently rewarding music than they did during his last years. (At some point before the end of the year, the Dead will soon have a 40th anniversary celebration, although, Lesh admits, ''In typical fashion, we don't know what we're going to do yet.'')

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Lesh, meanwhile, is helping to pave the road for a future when the Grateful Dead's music could continue without any of the original band members. With Phil & Friends, he says, ''I wanted to treat the body of work the Grateful Dead had created like repertory, like a Shakespeare play or a Beethoven quartet.''

So many people have either played with an incarnation of the Dead or sat in on some shows -- the keyboardist Bruce Hornsby, the saxophonist Branford Marsalis, the singer Joan Osborne, to name a few -- it's not hard to imagine a time 10 or 15 years in the future when the music of the original ''band beyond description'' keeps on truckin' along without any original members at all.

Weir said there are no set plans yet for a Dead amphitheater tour this summer, but they will be on the road, possibly towards fall.

KyndMusic: Is there going to another Dead Summer Tour?

Dennis McNally: As of now it does not appear to be so. The last I heard is maybe a Fall tour.

John Patrick Gatta: The very last thing, thousands of readers would kill me if I didn't bring this up, so you know what's coming. Do you have any summer plans that include rejoining with some old friends over the past several decades?

Mickey Hart: Actually, there are no summer plans. I'd like to remind whoever's interested, when we started all this up that we were going to take it easy and not tour to death, and do it when we really felt like doing it. So, that's what happened. I think that at the right time it'll happen again. When that'll be I can't tell. Everybody's having a little time off now to breathe, enjoy their family and do whatever they want to do. When it happens, it'll be really good.

02/28/05 - From the Colorado Daily:

"I'm still juggling the Allmans and Gov't Mule," said [Warren] Haynes. "This year won't be as busy, because there's no Grateful Dead tour."

Don't be surprised to see [Warren] Haynes involved with another The Dead tour. (The Dead is the post-Jerry Garcia version of the Grateful Dead.)

"They haven't really made any plans," says Haynes of The Dead. "I had a wonderful time doing the tour with them last year and would look forward to working with those guys in any capacity."

No clue yet as to Summer plans for Dead shows, neither who, what, where, when or if..This doesn't mean there aren't any plans, just that we all live on different planets, after all, communicating by rumor and carrier pigeon. Would you want it any other way?

Weir says if the surviving Dead members are to tour again this year, it will be a "modest summer run."

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