Photo by Keith Griner

Can you talk a little bit about how you guys come up with the setlist for your shows and if you ever try to focus on certain periods of the Grateful Dead catalog in those setlists?

No, not really—it’s open season. I think we have 450 songs, something like that, and if we like a song we say, “Let’s learn this,” and we just get the words up and everyone gets to learn it. We usually prepare John and Oteil and say, “Hey man, let’s work on this song,” and John says, “Well I want to sing that, let’s work up that song.” Okay so we’ve got a few days working on it and John goes back to the trailer, back to his camper, and he’s up half the night learning songs, and then the next day or the day after that, it pops up and we perform it, and if it’s not up to par, we practice it again the next day or the day after until it works its way up to being part of the lineup. We know that, so we all make the call—“That didn’t work,” or “Wow, that was a really great, fresh look at it.” It can go anywhere between those two points. We have a lot to choose from, a lot of material. The only thing that really matters is imagination and passion and commitment.

You guys played that free show at The Fillmore in San Francisco recently. How did it feel to come back there?

That was cool, going back to The Fillmore. It’s a small place, and it’s kind of difficult sometimes, playing a small place after playing stadiums, so it’s a challenge. A small room like that, it’s intimate. But we did it. It was a really fine show. A lot of old memories came back, a lot of my brain cells they found there, lying around. I scooped them all up and put them back.

It’s been about a year since the Fare Thee Well shows with the Dead. Can you talk a little bit on how you feel about those shows looking, back a year later, and how that kind of revitalized the Grateful Dead scene around the country?

It was really wonderful. Five amazing days of playing. The energy, respect, the thank yous from both sides—us thanking [our fans], them thanking us—the peace, the love of it all, it was really in the making there. You could cut it in the air, it was so heavy. The music was good, everybody got along and there was no angst, nothing but good feelings that I felt anyway from the stage. And the other thing is we were able to end it the way we wanted to. We could put the period at the end of the sentence, as opposed to a lot of bands that are forced into something, or disband because of turmoil or all those kind of things. We were able to call the dance, and that’s big. You put it to rest, you put it out in the pasture. It served us well. We rode it hard, we put it away wet.

What were your feelings going into this year’s Bonnaroo, one of the bigger festivals in the market?

You know, usually any place we play good, it’s good for us. It doesn’t matter how big or how small—if we play good, we love it. If we play good if front of a rec center, we get off as much as we would with Giants Stadium or something. It’s that way with us now. Once you can relax in front of your friends and just play your music and not get all jacked up because you’re playing in front of 100,000 people, then you have a chance of success, and by success I mean a good musical experience. When there’s no fear, when you’re relaxed in your work—it’s all about being you. It doesn’t matter how big it is, it matters how you play. I don’t really recognize the hugeness of it, because we’ve played a lot of shows over the years, so that doesn’t intimidate us at all. We’re actually playing for friends, the way I see it, and everybody is listening. I look out there and there’s a bunch of guys wanting to help me and really wanting to like it. I don’t see it as a bunch of critics and people that are what they call “haters.” I don’t have any haters. There are no haters for the Grateful Dead—except for the ones that do hate it, but they don’t come to the shows. [Laughs] Why would you go to a show if you hate the music? The Grateful Dead is not for everybody. We knew that right from the beginning. For those who get it, it means a lot. So that’s how it is. If I do my job, and we have fun up there, I know they’re going to love it. I know it. There’s no way they can’t. So I’m not intimidated by Bonnaroo, or any other roo. It’s another place for you to have a great experience.

Have you ever seen Moby Dick with Gregory Peck? These guys are in the rowboat, Ahab is hanging onto the whale, Moby Dick. The whale is going up and down, and he’s beckoning to the crew who’s in row boats to follow him and kill the whale. He’s going down, and the guy, the Scottish guy, he said, “Hey, that’s no devil, it’s just a whale. It’s a big whale, but it’s just a whale.” I’ll always remember that. So Bonnaroo is just another whale. It’s a big whale, but it’s just another whale. That’s our business, that’s what we do—we’re music hunters. We go out and hunt that music, and if we get scared, then we have all of our people there to support us. I won’t mention the person, but recently within the last month, we played something and one person said, “I’m scared,” or something like that, and I looked at him and I go, “Scared? You’re scared?” I couldn’t believe it. I said, “Over this? Over a TV show?” We played on Kimmel or something like that. “I’m nervous,” he said. I laughed, and he saw all the confidence in me and everybody around him, and he became confident too. His nerves had totally calmed down because he had all these people supporting him. And of course this person has played in the band for a long time, and there was no reason to be nervous. That was just his emotion at the time. With all this support around you, nothing can let you down, and everybody’s going to support you in whatever way.

Do you feel any difference between big venues or festivals like Bonnaroo as opposed to doing theater shows like The Fillmore or an even smaller place?

Well that’s a good question, and that’s really the art form. I remember once—and Jerry was the key to it—we were playing our first stadium show somewhere, maybe it was Giants Stadium or RFK or something. When you play your first stadium you’ve got butterflies and everything, it’s not like a shed. We played sheds, but then all of a sudden it was like, “Whoa, this is a big whale.” I played so hard, so hard, all night, and I was trying to reach that guy, way up there in the very far edge of the stadium, way in the back, the last row, in the nosebleed section, we were trying to get into his head. And I came off the stage and I was exhausted, totally, I mean I could hardly walk. I had to sit down before I could even think about putting my feet underneath me. Jerry passed by and I said, “Man, I’m really beat, you know, I played so hard.” And he said, “Hey man, everybody was playing hard. You don’t have to play that hard, let the PA do it.” If we have an intimate atmosphere on the stage and we can get our own stage sound together, that’s all you need, and then you let the PA take it to the back seats, because you could never reach that guy. So the idea was to be able to get an intimate setting where you could talk to each other musically and not be intimidated by the size of it and not overplay. That’s the difference—in the stadiums, you tend to overplay. But if you can get into the secret language and start talking about things musically like you would in a theater, it’s intimate. Then you have a chance of making some superb music. So that’s the challenge in the big ones—to relax. Let the PA do it. And we have the best PA in the fucking world. So use it. That’s what came out of that conversation. He was overplaying it, too. He said, “Me too.” I mean, we had to come to grips with this. We can’t play for that last guy, the PA can help you.

Last question: How far in advance will you plan a setlist for a show Bonnaroo?

We typically figure it out the day before, or maybe the day of. It’s not that kind of thing. We can play a lot of songs. We’ll sit down and say, “Eh, let’s do that.” “Okay, good.” But nothing is in stone. Anything could pop up, anything that’s not on the list. And I encourage that, myself, I love that. I love when stuff comes out of other things, when other ideas and other songs come out of some song that’s not on the list. We have a setlist now—we didn’t used to have a setlist, we just went on there and played, it started and ended—but now we have two new guys, and you can’t be telepathic with new people in the band. But it happens. So that’s what we’re working on now—telepathy. I think that’s one good word to describe what it takes to really play this kind of music. It’s not always in the technique; it’s in the synchronizing and the being able to communicate at rapid rates—I mean milliseconds—all night long, without fading. It’s called the flow state. When you get in the flow state, you get in the moment, and that’s all that really counts. Everything comes after that. Then you just flow into the river, you just bounce around, you go down that river, enjoy every current of that river. Flow and bounce and entrainment, all these words mean the same thing: being in the now, in the moment, all those things are—that’s the currency. It’s worth the whole shot, once you reach that state of mind and you’re all one mind and you can be up there, then it’s thrilling. Then it seems effortless. We try to do that. We try to make it easy, if you know what I mean. It’s hard to make it easy. [Laughs] It can be done. All you got to do is have the goal in mind—what is the goal? Where do you want to go? Do you want to sing a song perfectly or do you want to raise people’s consciousness? Maybe you could do both.

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