INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL GAIMAN (PART ONE)Pay Some Attention To The Man Behind the Curtain

Michael took time to speak with us just as the newest line-up of Jazz Is Dead had been assembled for a tour built around a re-imagined Europe ’72, the landmark LP that put the Grateful Dead on the map as an international live act to be reckoned with. The album celebrates its 30th anniversary this year and I can think of few better ways to honor the freewheeling spirit that fueled the original performances than taking the songs out for a fresh drive. The band this time includes legendary jazz drummer Billy Cobham, T Lavitz of the Dixie Dregs (and for a brief time Widespread Panic), Little Feat bassist Kenny Gradney and guitarist about town Jeff Pevar. This group will play the entire double disc set each night.

Pull up a chair, pour yourself a cup of coffee and light up one of those funny looking cigarettes while we explore one of the stronger, more fractuous side roads of the Dead’s legacy.

Dennis Cook: Give me some idea where Jazz Is Dead first came from. When you did you first come up with this idea?

Michael Gaiman: The actual genesis involves an off color story. In 1996, I produced the last Jefferson Starship studio album and it was really really like passing a kidney stone. It’s a fine record and at the end of the day it was not promoted well by its label. When the record was done I did a yearlong sabbatical. Bill Graham had made me their manager. During that time Melvin Seals and John Kahn both called me to see if I could do something for them in terms of the Garcia Band. Everyone had turned them down. I said I would think about it and looked around for a name. I researched the copyright for a nickname all of us of Deadheads used to call the Garcia Band which was J.G.B. and I said to those guys if we pick out 80 or so songs and you play two sets and we get the old gang together then we would do really well. And that’s what we did for the Fall of ’97 and we did extremely well. Melvin then got greedy and fired all his good musicians. He said to me, “I’m Garcia now.” After these experiences of a record and this project that both kinda got away from me, I decided if I could come up with a project that had a clear vision and an understanding with the musicians then it would be more successful.

Read Melvin Seals' Rebuttal

I had a dream that Fall about Billy [Cobham] playing at Radio City Music Hall. I had worked putting together all the Grateful Dead college shows ‘77-’82 and I’d also booked all the Bobby & The Midnites college shows and Jack Bruce & Friends for whom Billy was the drummer. Billy played on Halloween on the Franken & Davis video night. I thought Billy could play anything. If - God forbid - Billy [Kreutzman] or Mickey [Hart] should pass away, Cobham could step right in there. It occurred to me that now that the Dead were gone, remember this was ’97, it would be cool to have a bunch of famous jazz musicians play the arcane Dead material that the Dead couldn’t get themselves up for doing because they were too weird and complex. Stuff like “King Solomon’s Marbles,” “Blues For Allah,” “The Eleven.” They hadn’t done any of these songs in forever, if ever. “King Solomon’s” only got played at the Great American when it first came out. The full “Terrapin” only got played once in ’77 at Winterland. So, I had known that a lot of jazz players had been big Deadheads when they were younger. Al DiMeola was a big Deadhead in the sixties. But Billy was where it started so I called him up in Zurich, where he’s lived for many years. He said we gotta do it sometime. No, I said, we gotta do it now. I got a ton of frequent flyer miles and I’m coming to see you tomorrow.

Dennis Cook: As if to say, I got a vision for you and we gotta get moving on this.

Michael Gaiman: On the third day in Zurich we drove around and saw the sights, talked about musicians, hung out. Finally I said I want to get Alphonso Johnson, your old buddy from the George Duke Band and Bobby & The Midnites, to play bass. He said great. I want to hire T Lavitz, who was almost hired by the Grateful Dead to play keyboards but didn’t get it because he couldn’t sing. True story, they said you got the gig now let’s do some vocal harmonies. He said, "I don’t sing" and that was that.

Dennis Cook: What period was that?

Michael Gaiman: Right after Brent [Mydland] passed away.

So, the period they moved into with Vince Welnick and Bruce Hornsby.

So, Billy says he’d done a tour with T and asked if he was still funny, funny like Richard Lewis? Oh yeah. I was thinking about DiMeola as a guitarist and Billy said let’s not work with Al. Besides, he won’t want to do it. He suggested using Larry Coryell. We call him up and he tells us his nephew is a Deadhead and makes him listen to Garcia all the time so he thinks he can dig his teeth into this.

Especially fits with Larry’s late ‘60s, early ‘70s stuff.

Eleventh House is truly evocative of late ‘60s Garcia.

It’s steeped in the same drugged fueled improvisation.

Right, especially when Jerry was into having his sound be a little dirty, before he got into the Strato-blaster and all those clean lines in the ‘70s. The late ’60 when he was playing a Gibson, a Les Paul, was very fusiony. As luck would have it things didn’t work out too well. Billy is a fanatically sober individual. He used to be an athlete and he’s very serious. The drug culture was something he was never into even though his music can be pretty far out. So, he says we can’t use Larry, we gotta get another guitarist. And T Lavitz recommended Jimmy Herring. With this thing I wanted to really know who the musicians were, get them under my skin, and I didn’t know Jimmy’s playing at all. He sends me some Aquarium Rescue Unit and it sounds pretty hot. But they were a little odd to me.

I was in the same boat as you. I’d heard Aquarium Rescue Unit but nothing about Jimmy’s playing with them jumped out at me. In retrospect people have spoken really well of the stuff but I’m not sure at the time most people thought that highly of it.

Some people, that H.O.R.D.E generation, maybe that Phish generation, feel differently but I was not feeling what Jimmy was playing as it would apply to my optic of the Grateful Dead. The Aquarium Rescue Unit was structured so what wasn’t solos was funk or like Frank Zappa. Very pungent, short bursts of brilliance. Now it was coming to the point where I had to make a decision. And T compares Jimmy to Steve Morse. I say I’m not really a Dregs fan. Steve Morse is a brilliant player but like John McLaughlin and Robert Fripp it’s so technical. Jerry Garcia played from the heart. The mistakes were part of the beauty of it. It was organic. I didn’t want this to sound like Adrian Belew, like John McLaughlin.

You don’t want a technician. That’s always my standard catchphrase for guys like this. You can tell they’ve done a lot of woodshedding with training manuals but there’s no mess to it.

That still seems to be the pattern with Jazz Is Dead.

Now, as years went on, the jamband scene has filled out, Dark Star [Orchestra] came in. You gotta find your own niche, your own concept. I applaud Dark Star Orchestra for doing a complete, contiguous Grateful Dead show every night. But, we endeavor not to be a cover band but an interpretive ensemble. To wit, one of the brilliant things of Jimmy’s playing was his lead would be the vocal lead not the Garcia lead.

That’s a great thing to tune into because I hadn’t thought about that. On the live recordings from that tour it does seem like Jimmy is singing except in an instrumental voice.

And T [Lavitz] would play a lot of what Garcia was playing. Therein would be the counterpoint. The more subtle nuances of the early weird Weir are there with the singing and the guitar. And Alphonso isn’t an in-the-pocket kind of bass player. He was playing 5- and 6-string bass and Champman stick and playing a lot of lead stuff at the time. It was basically four guys who were so proficient, I’m not gonna say there was an ego problem, but there was a lot of music being played. [Laughter from interviewer.] In the second year, Billy also worked with Peter Gabriel and WOMAD and he couldn’t commit to it. Thankfully the project then had a life of its own and what we decided to do was hire two drummers like the Dead with Rob Morgenstein (Dixie Dregs) and Jeff Sipe, who’d played with Jimmy in the Aquarium Rescue Unit and at the time was in Leftover Salmon. Sipe was the best drummer I’d heard outside of Billy (Cobham) and he played on the smallest kit. He’s a very avant-garde drummer. In his drum solo he’d take apart his entire kit while he was still playing. He might be hitting his stick on the floor or his stool. The drums would be all over but then he’d put the sticks in his mouth and start putting it back together, just hitting the hi-hat for a seconds with his foot to get both hands free. It was a real piece of work. That summer we toured with the two drummers and recorded what many consider their favorite Jazz Is Dead record, Laughing Water, which was all of Wake of the Flood down Jazz Is Dead style. And we had Donna Godchaux do some weird stuff on there, Vassar Clements came in and Derek Trucks.

That was my first taste of Jazz Is Dead, the shows that led up to that record. It was the first time I’d ever heard Derek Trucks as well. So, for me, it was a gateway into a whole other world of musicians.

As a Deadhead there was a selfish aspect in that I wanted to hear the stuff they’d stopped playing like the intro to “Weather Report Suite.” Not to get down on Bob Weir, but his guitar playing earlier is better than what he’s playing in Ratdog. Jimmy, it’s all music to him. Here we had the whole “Weather Report Suite” with the steel guitar mimicked intro. Had Jazz Is Dead not done Keith Godchaux’s “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away,” who’s ever gonna do that? Now we had a whole second level of music added to the repertoire. Towards the end of Billy Cobham’s initial tenure we worked up the entire “Terrapin Station” with the whole second part of the song with the reprise with the drums and staccato guitar, which may be my favorite thing Jazz Is Dead has done. Then they added 8 more tunes in the second tour so shows could actually be pretty crazy. Eventually Sipes started a family, so at the end of that year it didn’t look like he’d be available. And Phil & Friends were coming together. I thought it ironic that Phil was now picking material that the Grateful Dead never touched. I like to think that maybe he saw what we were doing and decided to do “The Eleven” or “Saint Stephen.”

That brings up a real strong question for me, which is what was the response of the guys in the Grateful Dead to what you were doing?

Interestingly, when I applied for the service mark on Jazz Is Dead, the laws are very strict on copyright and they could have challenged it. What they did was send me a letter commending me on the project and the only thing they asked was that if I died that the project died with me. They know my love and respect for the music. They didn’t want me to sell it to some label. They said the only way Jazz Is Dead can exist is if I do it. They were really generous about it and gave us a good rate on the publishing. At the same time, at the end of the second year, I said to Jimmy once that one of these days Phil is going to call you up and that’ll be the last I’m gonna hear from you. And he says, “No, Michael, we’re buddies, we’re friends. That could never happen.” Of course, Phil called him up and I haven’t spoken to Jimmy much since his whirlwind success with Phil & Friends.

And now he’s been lifted up to play with The Other Ones, which is a strange thing to me because I think he’s a poor fit for that line-up.

The fans call him "Jerry Herring." My wife, who is not a Deadhead but is a musician and has a good ear, was listening to the tapes of Alpine Valley [the site of the recent Other Ones reunion shows] and she said, “Is this Jimmy light?” I had to laugh because relative to what Jimmy did in Jazz Is Dead, where there was no singing and the lead guitar could just shred for the entire song, this was light. Of course, the Grateful Dead, a big part of what they do is the vocals so Jimmy is bridled and contained. It’s true even in Phil & Friends because you have Warren [Haynes], another guitarist who I never thought was compatible with that music. He’s a great blues player and he’s got that Allman Brothers, Les Paul style but with his vocal ability and personality Phil obviously dug him. I guess The Other Ones didn’t need a third guitarist basically. I take some pride in the fact that Jimmy doesn’t play as great in The Other Ones as he did in Jazz Is Dead. Obviously I’m biased.

Who have you found is the audience for Jazz Is Dead? Especially in the early days, was the crowd Deadheads or jazz heads?

I think in the cities where jazz has always done well, I’m thinking New York and Philadelphia in particular, it was probably 50/50. When to get to Colorado and California then it was a lot more Deadheads than jazz fans. I think a lot of the younger fans, the String Cheese and Phish fans, didn’t get that there were no vocals. The irony is that a lot of hardcore jazz fans hate the Grateful Dead so they didn’t give us a chance. And a lot of Deadheads hate jazz so they didn’t give us a chance. The band doesn’t make nearly what the other jam bands make. From a financial standpoint, we make decent money but it’s not what String Cheese makes, it’s not the tribal phenomenon of some of the younger bands. I say with some pride, and nothing against those other bands, this is a small batch whiskey, this is a microbrew, it’s not Budweiser, it’s not even Sam Adams. It’s a much much narrower, defined thing.

Photo by Tony Bittick

At the end of the day, and I’m probably a terrible businessman for doing it, different people even in the band suggest we might want to do some vocals. In fact, when Jimmy left, David Crosby guitarist Jeff Pevar came on board. He's a guitarist of a different sort. On the 2001 tour, we went with a concept more suited to Pevar’s Michael Hedges style playing. We went out with what I called “Workingman’s Beauty,” all material from American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead reworked Jazz Is Dead style. Pevar’s a pretty good singer and succumbing to pressure I asked him if he wanted to sing these songs. He wanted to stay true to the original concept of no vocals. We thought about it a lot and we decided to do two tunes. Pevar would sing “New Speedway Boogie” and we did a few “Ripples” as encores.

That was a dynamite tour. I saw the show at Yoshi's. That’s such a listening hall and everyone had their ears wide open at that show.

It had found it’s audience because here was a third incarnation of the band and a third set of material and it hit the road without a famous name like Billy Cobham. We didn’t have Jimmy Herring, the newly anointed famous player. It was definitely what I describe in a theory I have called the Modular Band Theory, an old time jazz thing where it’s not about the specific musicians it’s about the abilities of the players at any given time.

In Part Two of our conversation with Michael Gaiman he talks about Blue Floyd and the latest Jazz Is Dead line-up heading out to reinterpret the landmark Grateful Dead live release, Europe ’72