VINCE WELNICK RIP June 2 2006

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

I think you're spot-on there ^ . While it's true that no state of mind is inescapable or lasts forever (happiness or despair alike), a depression so deep that the only thing that matters is making it all stop may not be likely to be given much pause with concern for the niceties of social protocols (especially if it was something about social interaction that had brought on the state in the first place).

[StoneMtn]

Grateful Dead's last keyboardist, Vince Welnick, dies at 55

- Carolyn Jones, Chronicle Staff Writer

Saturday, June 3, 2006

(06-03) 19:04 PDT SAN FRANCISCO - Vince Welnick, a keyboardist who possessed a fluid and precise style and played with the Tubes, Todd Rundgren and the Grateful Dead, died Friday in Sonoma County at the age of 51.

The cause appears to be suicide, Sonoma County sheriff's department said.

Mr. Welnick, whom friends called a gentle and sensitive man, was classically trained and spent hours practicing each day. Although he was a member of the Dead for just five years until the band folded after the death of guitarist Jerry Garcia, he left an indelible mark on his bandmates.

"He was a good soul, a very sweet guy," said band spokesman Dennis McNally. "He was also an exceptionally competent keyboardist."

In a statement posted on its Web site, the band said, "His service to and love for the Grateful Dead were heartfelt and essential. He had a loving soul and a joy in music that we were lucky to share. Our Grateful Dead prayer for the repose of his spirit: May the four winds blow him safely home."

Mr. Welnick was born in Phoenix, Ariz., where he started playing piano as a kid. He and friends put together a garage band called the Beans, which became the Tubes when they moved to San Francisco in 1969.

"Thank God for rock and roll, because it was a place for all us skinny artistic kids to go when it was 115 degrees outside and we didn't fit in anywhere else," said Michael Cotten, a member of the Tubes who designed many of the band's album covers and elaborate stage shows.

The Tubes toured constantly, and their rowdy antics and energetic shows -- which integrated rock music, video technology and outlandish costumes and sets -- earned them a devoted following. The band recorded more than a dozen albums and scored hits with "White Punks on Dope" in 1975 and "Talk to Ya Later" in 1981.

"It was an amazing time. We played everywhere, and I don't think Vince ever missed a show," said Tubes vocalist Fee Waybill. "But even with all the success, we were still a hippie band from San Francisco. We all lived together, traveled on the same bus, shared everything."

Throughout his time with the Tubes, Mr. Welnick also played with Todd Rundgren.

Mr. Welnick auditioned for the Dead in 1990 after keyboardist Brent Mydland died of a drug overdose. He was among a handful of musicians who sought the job, and he immediately impressed the band.

"He just magically appeared and he had the attributes they were looking for," McNally said.

Mr. Welnick cherished his years with the Dead and thoroughly appreciated both the tradition and hoopla of Deadhead lore and of the band, McNally said.

His soulful, high harmony vocals and classical training were a good fit for the band, and his "moment to shine" came whenever the band played The Who classic, "Teenage Wasteland," which begins with an instantly recognizable and utterly unique keyboard passage, McNally said.

It "opens with one of the most amazing riffs in rock and roll," he said. "Vince was great at that."

Mr. Welnick was devoted to his craft and spent hours a day practicing for most of his life, friends said. He was especially proud of his Boesendorfer piano, which is the piano equivalent to a Stradivarius violin.

"His fingers just flew on that thing," Cotten said.

Mr. Welnick was close to Garcia, and when the guitarist died of a heart attack in 1995, Mr. Welnick fell into a deep depression.

"He was extremely shattered by Jerry's death and was very frank about it," McNally said.

Still, Mr. Welnick continued to perform and write. He formed the band Missing Man Formation and performed with Ratdog, a band featuring Dead guitarist Bob Weir and bassist Rob Wasserman.

One of the highpoints of his post-Dead career came in April 2005 when the Tubes had an impromptu reunion at the Rio Theater in Santa Cruz.

Five of the original members were playing, and Waybill invited other alumni. They all wound up onstage, playing together.

"It was amazing, like walking on air," said Cotten, who's working on a Tubes documentary.

"The place was packed. People went nuts," said Waybill. "It was a great, great night. Vince was always up for things like that. He was really excited about playing with the Tubes again."

And so it was that Mr. Welnick's death came as such a shock.

"A few of us were just talking about Vince today and about the incredible music he brought us," Cotten said. "What they call chops, that's what Vince had. That's what we want to remember."

Mr. Welnick's death is the latest in a string of recent tragedies for the Dead. Three other members of the band's extended family have died since May 17 -- crew member Lawrence "Ram Rod" Shurtliff, drummer Hamza El-Din and road manager Jonathan Riester.

He also is the fourth of the band's five keyboardists to die, following Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, Keith Godchaux and Mydland.

"It's not a happy history," McNally said. "Each one of these guys had a fragility, which isn't that uncommon for musicians."

Mr. Welnick is survived by his wife, Lori Welnick.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

Link

[ollie]

Mr. Welnick's death is the latest in a string of recent tragedies for the Dead. Three other members of the band's extended family have died since May 17 -- crew member Lawrence "Ram Rod" Shurtliff, drummer Hamza El-Din and road manager Jonathan Riester.

This is the first I've heard of Hamza passing!

RIP to all the Dead family members that were lost within the last few weeks.

[TimmyB]

May Vince Welnick rest in peace, as it's obvious he didn't find much peace in life, I hope peace finds him in death.

Tim

[MoMack]

Thats weird - it looks like they've taken dead.net off line.

It just goes to a lightnight bold page.

Anyone have a link to Hunter's journal?

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

I tried going there last night and saw the same thing. Curious....

[StoneMtn]

Click on the lightning bolt, and then wait a painfully long time, and it should load.

You can do the same thing at www.gratefuldead.com (not to be confused with www.gratefuldead.ca ).

[bradm]

I've also had problems viewing it with Firefox; Internet Exploder Explorer seems to work better.

Aloha,

Brad

[SteveThe Owl]

I was out of town for the better part of the weekend... and recovering from it, and I didn't hear the news until late yesterday. Breaks the heart.

First Ramrod last month, now Vince...

[Freak By Night]

Grateful Dead's last keyboardist, Vince Welnick, dies at 55

.....

The Who classic, "Teenage Wasteland,"

.....

I can't believe they got the title of that song wrong. Geez!

[phorbesie]

John Perry Barlows comments on Vince:

Thought some of you would like to see this:

VINCE WELNICK SUCCUMBS TO THE CURSE OF THE KEYBOARDS

The Dreadful Great, among our other bad habits, had a reliable propensity for killing off keyboard players. It was a kind of ritual sacrifice, I suppose, but the really terrible aspect of these departures was the bottomless sorrow that drove out of the physical world Ron "Pigpen" Mckernen, Keith Godshaux, Brent Midland, and now, on June 2, Vince Welnick.

Like all of his previously mentioned colleagues, Vince killed himself. But unlike them, he did it very explicitly, using means too appalling for even me to relate.

The Coroner's Reports for his predecessors were somewhat more ambiguous when it came to conscious involvement in their deaths. Pigpen very clearly drank himself to death, though, given the nature of alcoholism, I suspect that even in his last moments, he was surprised to find himself at Death's Driveway. Keith was a passenger in the car wreck that killed him. Brent did his best to tread on the slimy serpent of Thanatos coiled in inside him. And I did my best to argue it back with songs that, as it ironically happened, only amplified the love he could not stand, the approval he was not psychologically equipped to reconcile with his own lousy self-image.

I remember the time when Brent died better than I wish I did. Time magazine, ever the supercilious snot-nose, honored me with the "George Orwell Doublespeak Award," as the result of an interview with me in Rolling Stone, conducted the day after the event, in which I declared that he had "died of rock 'n' roll," when it was plainly obvious that he succumbed to a drug overdose. (Upon winning this dubious distinction, I wrote a letter to the editor of Time in which I said, among other things, that "anybody who can't tell the difference between metaphor and euphemism probably can't tell the difference between poetry and lies." They didn't publish it, of course.

Like the rest of his doomed and gifted predecessors, Vince was a strangely sweet man, apparently too empathetic to endure the cruelties of this world. He had a passion he brought to his music that was electric, a quality that, like his personal shyness, he also shared with them. Writing songs with Vince was - as I've said of the same marvelous process with Brent - the most intimate thing I ever did with a man.

When Jerry Garcia died, Vince was alone among us in his wretched sense of utter loss. He attempted suicide about six months later, thereby 86ing himself from any further creative interaction with what was left of the Grateful Dead.

As a culture, we were never big on emotional vulnerability. Like a caribou herd, we had learned, over a long period of time, to leave our cripples behind on the tundra rather than risk the entire local genome. That's life, Dude. Devil take the hindmost.

At one point, shortly following his suicide attempt and consequent exile, I went up to Forestville, California to encourage him. He was still in a heart-rendingly desolate state. We wrote a song the lyrics of which went like this:

WAITING FOR THE SONG TO COME

Forestville, California , Thursday, January 11, 1996

What do you want from me?

Whatever it is, I am fresh out of it.

Ain't nothing here to see,

Best move along,

There ain't no doubt of it.

I get up in the morning, I go to bed at night

The hours in between seem to pass without a sight

No sight of mystery, no magic round the bend

No expectations 'cept a few I don't intend at all...

Look out on the sea

Big as it is, that's only the top of it.

Down at the bottom of the sea

You can sink forever

Cause there's no stop to it.

No end of trouble, no end of pain

No end of people to tell you you're to blame

No end to this world

And nowhere to go,

Except the music must have ended a long time ago.

Chorus:

So I am waiting for...

Waiting for...

Waiting for something strong.

Waiting for something to sing about

Waiting for the song to come.

When it does, there will light again

There will be colors in the world and birds across the sun

And everything that's been going down so hard

Will be coming right again...

But I'm still waiting...

I'm still waiting...

I'm still waiting for the song to come.

Verse:

Meanwhile, I got you,

Your tender words and all the little good they do.

Meanwhile, you got me

Ain't no great prize, but at least it comes for free.

It's an act of conviction, baby, simply holding on

Keeping forward motion, pretending to be strong,

Listening with all my heart for voices in the wind

That will be singing for us, Baby, when the song begins again.

Chorus:

Till then I'm waiting...

I'm still waiting...

Waiting for something strong

Waiting for something to sing about

Waiting for the song to come.

When it does, there will light again

There will be colors in the world and birds across the sun

And everything that's been going down so hard

Will be coming right again...

But I'm still waiting...

I'm still waiting...

I'm still waiting for the song to come.

As I recall it, this song had a stark and yet occasionally soaring melody. Vince orchestrated it on his beautiful Bösendorfer piano as though he were Beethovan writing a requiem. And now I can't remember a single note of it. It was all in his lovely head and has died there.

Several weeks ago, he called me. He sounded upbeat. He was talking about getting together with me and writing some songs. He told me that he was working on reuniting The Tubes, his original - and marvelously peculiar - band. I was into the idea of writing some new stuff with him, just for the fun of it. And it had been fun, even in our darkest moments. (Perhaps it was fun precisely because of the surrounding bleakness.)

I told him I'd make of point of riding my motorcycle up to Forestville the next time I was on the Left Coast.

I wish I'd done that. But then I wish a lot of things.

When my friend Spalding Grey committed suicide, I wrote this about clinical depression, a nightmare I've experienced myself:

Fighting clinical depression is inevitably a lonely struggle. What could be less conducive to compassion than a disease that make you whine? Laymen and loved ones tell you to get a grip. They make you feel ashamed to be sick. Even if they're more enlightened about the disease, they can't help but harbor a secret, naturally human, belief that you are suffering a failure of will rather than biochemistry. Meanwhile, the doctors consider little but the neuro-soup and turn you into a shambling medical experiment, testing pharmaceutical nostrums on you that are as blunt as the mind is subtle, though just as unpredictable. But, for you, life just trudges on. It remains, despite whatever visible signs of well-being - wonderful spouse, great kids, well-located house, etc. - a purgatory of uselessness, barren of joy and meaning. Love, incoming or out-going, becomes something you think, not feel.

How can we ask of anyone that they insist on living in such a world as this? How can we be so arrogant as judge anyone harshly for taking a pass on such demanding material manifestation?

I loved Vince Welnick. I wish, of course, that I'd been able to show him that love in a manner that would sustained him. But, once one has been pitched down that hole, it strikes me that he ought to enter a condition of general amnesty. He took something from me that I cherished, but I certainly won't hold it against him.

[Im going home Donny]

wow. shivers are running up and down my spine.

Thanks for putting this up.

[bradm]

Steve Kimock's eulogy for RamRod and Vince is a good read, too.

Aloha,

Brad

[Esau.]

This probally deserves its own thread I imagine...

Vince & Friends tour is going on as scheduled next week and will feature Grateful Dead keyboardist Tom Constanten. Please let people know

With the passing of Grateful Dead keyboardist Vince Welnick on 6/2/06, the hearts of fans from around the globe have been broken. His untimely end came at a time when they had been mourning several other recent deaths of long term Grateful Dead iconic figures such as their roadie Lawrence “Ramrod†Shurtliff and Egyptian music legend and friend Hamza El Din.

In the spirit of healing and renewal, the decision has been made to continue the Vince Welnick & Friends upcoming tour scheduled to kick off on June 15th at the House of Blues in Chicago with another alumni of the legendary keyboard spot of the Grateful Dead, Tom Constanten.

Constanten, keyboardist of the Grateful Dead in the late 60’s and early 70’s, agreed to fill in for the tour because he felt that a tribute to Welnick was the right thing to do. Recently the two of them have been performing together in a band called the Psychedelic Keyboard Trio which also featured Grateful Dead MIDI Wizard Bob Bralove. Welnick and Constanten became fast friends.

When asked why he agreed to do this tour he replied: “I didn’t hesitate. Vince was a great gentlemen and a soldier of music. For that very reason, I miss him in a way that I can’t explain. I will honor his memory forever. Let’s make this a wonderful experience and let’s make Vince proud.â€

The tour will feature other friends of Welnick and travel throughout the Midwest through June 20th.

6/15 House of Blues; Chicago

6/16 Rock Island; St Louis, MO

6/17 & 18; The Venue; Tulsa, OK

6/19 The Gaslight Tavern; Lawrence, KS

6/20 The Mill; Iowa City, IA

Please come out and shine your lovelight together for Vince and Lorie.

http://www.vincewelnick.com/

[ollie]

That's pretty cool of Tom. I really liked the JPB rememberance as well. Very touching lyrics.

[MarcO]

Hunter weighs in on the situation on his journal:

Dear Sean,

I'll try to answer your concerns as best I can. Your moving letter is representative of what I fear a lot of people are thinking: what's with the breakdown of basic human decency in the Grateful Dead? Probably have to take that point by point. The archive.org fiasco, in my opinion, has to be laid at the feet of lawyers who went over the band's head and made a right mess of things; as they did with the Tiger guitar business, doing news interviews on their own and leaving the band members to clean up the sewage spill with their reputations.

It's quite a delicate beast, this fan/band symbiosis characterizing the Grateful Dead's famous contract with its public. The media loves to get its teeth in our presumptuous jugular. Compensatory spin, also known as self defense, is generally ineffective due to hedged language. You can just tell a lawyer looked it over first. Probably doing a bit of that here myself -- I do feel protective of the family concern, but there you go.

By the way, when I say Grateful Dead I'm not referring to the surviving members of that generational phenomenon expressed as music, but to the Mythos generated around it in which all who believe are able to partake according to their belief. I hate seeing the endemic cynicism of the times hamstring that lofty giant which everyone admits was bigger than any of us.

In the aftershock of the tragic death of Vince, an amiable man and a fine musician, the Grateful Dead is once more a target of public disdain, fueled by passion and indignation. Its ethics and humanity are being publicly questioned on a deeply troubling level. Sic transit gloria mundi. Do I know the score? To a degree. But I'm not concerned here with either justifying or condemning the attitudes which make a group of musicians, who must seal themselves together in that intimate time capsule called a tour, make the decisions they do concerning who they want to travel with and why. It's not necessarily democratic and it's not always pretty. They choose what they choose for reasons as much personal as professional.

Some people are angry at what they perceive as the band's throwing over of Jerry's chosen keyboard player. That's off base. We all chose him. I listened to the auditions and said "He's the one." Everybody was in agreement. As for saying anything further, stick your arm in the sink of gossip and it rises to suck you in. The attacks on the band members are heartfelt and, were they based on accurate assessment, could be accounted righteous. One must not entirely discount a touch of 'rising to the occasion' in the bias of the information shaping perceptions of purported evil doing in the wake of this sad event. But grief is like that, it brings out extremes. Who is entirely guiltless? Not me.

In your letter you say " I don't know how much of my resources I'm prepared to plow into this if half of what I read is true." Hey, me too. But what if what you read is only half true? What if events tally but the interpretation placed on them is wrong? What if events have justifying precedents and antecedents of which you are entirely unaware? Or, if aware, interpret by a code of valuation foreign to the situation of participants? Are you willing to throw over something you truly prize on the basis of hearsay? Listen - I know these people. They're bastards. Yet I find myself here trying to interject a little perspective into their public scorching because they're my bastards. They played the songs I helped write with love, taste and sublime dignity. You know what I'm saying because you heard it too. Otherwise you'd have no problem switching to brand X. You wouldn't ask me to give you a sign so you could continue to believe. I hope this scattershot letter will do, I thank you for your note because it touched me to write this, which I think should be written - if you'll excuse the public reply.

A shelf of books could be written and still only lightly perturb the surface of who the Grateful Dead were, are, and why. A book must have a point of view and I submit there is none extant sufficiently wide and informed to do more than tease curiosity. That possibility probably passed with Ramrod. Think of something approaching your own life's complexity of nuance and multiply it by the number of characters in our scene, past and present, and put the spotlight of the world on it - see what I mean? There is an official Grateful Dead story, chronological highlights which are largely, and rightly, Garcia oriented, but no possibility of a comprehensive estimation. It wasn't a story, it was life. There's a difference.

Judgments for and, more recently, against the Grateful Dead are made relative to a rarefied catalogue of sixties stereotypes. But there are names involved and when those names are sullied, the people bearing them feel distress. Those so offended can even be prodded to say stupid stuff in self justification. In a lose/lose situation wisdom dictates keeping one's own council. Hence the relative silence regarding most internal matters.

But people demand answers. Failing answers they go away. Please don't do that. Just don't expect golf balls from a walnut tree. All I can offer is perspective; a limited one at that. Answers are a different matter.

I may personally believe the only answer is to continue creating one's art while being careful not to live beyond one's means, physically or psychically. Sure. But that's not what people twant o know. What they want to know is: who's to blame? Not the music. If the music were to blame they wouldn't be asking the question in the first place. Play the recordings. I put as many clues there as I could. In a way, they are one long letter to the Grateful Dead. The tensions involved created art. I think that art lives. Go there for answers.

Best to you and thanks again for voicing your concerns.

and from rat-dog.com:

Dear Dog Heads:

Vince Welnick was part of RatDog for a while, and his death on June 2nd is sadder than we can believe. He was a good guy and a fine musician, and we ask you all to say a prayer or light a candle for his spirit. We wish him peace.

RatDog

[MarcO]

and, Vince on Vince (2002):

Did you have any misgivings about the Dead’s keyboard player curse? Three of your predecessors really were dead.

I thought to myself, “I could die doing this, but I’m dying of boredom now, so I’ll give it a shot.â€

Did you have a hard time easing into that role? How receptive were the Deadheads and other band members?

They were beautiful. For one thing I had to audition. Before I auditioned I was sceptical, I said, look, I’ll try out and if they want me then I’ll decide whether I want to be in that band and do that thing. But then when I got to the audition and met everybody I definitely wanted in. About two weeks later Bob Weir calls up and says [deep voice], “Hey man, your insurance paid up?†And then Jerry calls up and says [high scratchy voice], “Hey man, come down, get some money!†I did my first gig at the Richfield, Ohio Coliseum, and there was a banner outside saying, “We love you brother Vince†and there was a little sticker on my keyboard saying “Yo Vinnie.†Unlike the Tubes audience, the Dead audience really focuses on the music a whole lot, and things that happen dynamically in the music make them go off, and I’d never been in front of an audience that goes off that much in the middle of a song, and so I was up there kind of paralyzed by the newness of it, and the fact that I had rehearsed very few days before that tour, I had like a hundred songs I had to do. I just realized how forgiving and unconditionally loving they were, and the fact that they go off and appreciate it so much, it just made it so much easier to play in that band. I later found out it was unanimous when I was picked, there were no dissenters in the Grateful Dead. The only thing that didn’t feel good was the way I had to get in that band was having a keyboardist die, and that felt a little creepy, that’s not a good way to get into a band.

You got to be close friends with Jerry Garcia?

Oh yeah. We’d always be the first van to the gig, leaving the hotel about three, and I’d jump in with him, and he had a tent on stage, he had a dressing room but he’d never hang out there, he’d hang out in his tent on stage, which called the Jerry Tent. Jerry and Steve Parrish and Bobby Weir and me would hang out there, so I spent a lot of time with him before the gig, and we were very close. And then after the gig he’d go right to his room and then I’d spend equal time with Bobby, down in the bar, then up in his room later, when the bar would close he’d take everyone left in the bar and invite them up to his room.

What do you think it is about Jerry that he became such an icon?

He’s the kindest, most generous, wonderful man in the whole world except for maybe my dad, he is truly everything you would have figured Santa Claus would have been. If there really were such a guy it’d be Jerry. He just beamed, he had a sparkle on his eye, he just beamed that good vibe thing, it just all came so naturally to him.

How do explain this explosion of jam bands among younger generations?

It’s fun. It’s free-form, American art form, unique to America just like jazz. It’s not as difficult to do as jazz, it appeals to a larger audience than jazz, but you get the same kind of rock-soft, blow your hair back feeling jamming in these bands. What sets them apart is the one that truly jam for the spirit of serving music, like the grateful Dead did, that’s what makes their music so great, they weren’t jamming out, showing off their technical prowess, Jerry wasn’t trying to step on anybody with his guitar solos, everybody would listen a whole lot, it’s what they didn’t play that made them so great, the spaces between and the breath and the listening. It’s just a wonderful way to play and a lot of people are into it. They don’t want to do top 40, they want to hang out and get into the groove.

Some Deadheads have been asking recently on the web why you weren’t invited to the Dead reunion at Alpine Valley. Was there a snub there?

There’s been a snub for some time. To be totally honest with you, back in ‘95 I tried to kill myself on the Ratdog bus, in the winter of ‘95 after Jerry died, and after the band broke up, and after I’d been diagnosed with cancer and emphysema and all this shit, I figured it was pretty much over for me, and I tried to kill myself by taking 57 10-mg. Valiums and bouncing up into the bunk of the Ratdog bus, so that’s something that’s not gone down too well with Bobby.

So how have you been since?

I’m never gonna be over Jerry, but suicide’s no longer an option. I went to the funny farm for a while, and I got out, and I didn’t think there was anything left of me to give, but I sat at the piano and started at it for days on end, and eventually two songs gave me hope, came to me. One of them’s “True Blue†and the other one is “Golden Daysâ€; it’s my tribute to Jerry on the Missing Man album. I hadn’t written complete songs, all the lyrics, all the music, all the everything I just collaborated here and there, mostly musically on all the Tubes songs, like bits and piece of everything but never a whole thing. So actually I’d come out of the experience with a kind of character-building thing that got me a more complete person, what part of me that didn’t die came back big time. And then I started writing more songs than I’d ever written before Jerry died, recording them, and I always kept thinking I could die real soon now because I’ve had cancer already and I felt this urgency to get on with what I was going to do, but the gist of it is I just...after hearing True Blue and Golden Days I thunk to myself, I still got a ways to go here, and I still got something to give, and I just gave it up on my website, I didn’t bother to go to a record company or any of this horseshit, I just put it out there, anyone who wants it can have it, I just want to share it.

How is your health now?

I’m free [of cancer], I’m going over five years and my emphysema is new and improved, but I think singing is the cure for emphysema, instead of sitting around sucking on a tank of air I just go out and sing, and it hasn’t kicked my ass when I’ve been up on stage. So it’s cool. I think I’m a better singer and a better player than I’ve ever been in my life, and one thing I know is I’ve never loved playing and being in front of people and doing what I’m doing, never love this more than I do now.

Do you ever think you could lose your love of music?

Oh yeah. Depression can kill all the joy in music, and it did. I didn’t want to hear anything, I’d hear a song and it would make me sad, make me afraid....But it’s like what Jerry and I talked about before he died, he said (raspy voice), “There ain’t no retirement, we ain’t never gonna quit this shit,†and that’s they way I feel about it. I’ll die, hopefully, after having done a really great gig sometime. I’m doing this til I drop and I’m loving it more every minute. Cherish it.

from thread on vincewelnick.com

[MarcO]

hi, it's me again.

perhaps I'm now just talking to myself in this thread but in any event, the cause of death, should you want to know (I know it is just morbid human nature) is revealed in this article.

Open it if you wish, let pass if need be.

[Hux]

Warning - I think it was widely know that his death was self-inflicted, but just to clarify, that link reveals the method used. :crazy:

[secondtube]

not a pretty method.

[timouse]

hi, it's me again.

perhaps I'm now just talking to myself in this thread but in any event, the cause of death, should you want to know (I know it is just morbid human nature) is revealed in this article.

Open it if you wish, let pass if need be.

marco, thanks for posting all of that, including the th elink.

i didn't know that hiring vince was a unanimous decision, and i really liked his description of jerry as "...everything you ever thought Santa Claus would be." i followed the link and i think i'm ok with knowing what it said. i guess he must have really wanted out. i can't even pop my own zits

Edited June 8, 2006 by Guest
speelingh.

[paisley]

thanks for posting all that MarcO... fills in some blanks and helps warm the mind... nice to hear how thoroughly Vince enjoyed his times with the Grateful Dead

also Hunter's "they're all bastards. but they're my bastards."

[MoMack]

Its a weird trip.

[MarcO]

and now here is Phil's response:

The period after Brent’s death, when Vince first joined the band, was one of one of my most difficult years with the Grateful Dead. Jill and I had become quite close to Brent and his wife Lisa and we spent many happy hours hanging together. I was devastated when Brent died, and I still wonder if there was anything I could have said or done to help him.

In hindsight, it would have been better for everyone concerned, especially Jerry, if after Brent’s passing we had simply cancelled the fall 1990 tours; we needed some time to mourn Brent. Grateful Dead Production's huge monthly overhead kept us from taking time to absorb our loss.

Vince helped us more than he knew; not only the speed with which he learned the music, but also that he took to the music and the scene like a kid at the beach. His energy and enthusiasm helped rekindle our own excitement with the music- at least it did for me.

Vince was a generous spirit and a class act; I’ll never forget his first gig as our sole keyboard (Hornsby having moved on)- as we walked out on stage, some folks in the audience on Vince’s side of the stage were holding up a big sign which read “Hey Vinnie- Welcome, Brotherâ€- which almost moved me to tears, not least because of the contrast to Brent’s reception eleven years earlier. I was so glad that the Heads had accepted Vince that quickly.

After Jerry’s death when I started up PLF as a band, Vince was one of my first “Friendsâ€, and we played a goofy, glorious, fun gig at the Fillmore. We tried to get together again later that year, but he had other commitments. I have nothing but warm memories of Vince and I am forever thankful for the grace and enthusiasm that he brought to the Grateful Dead.

I will remember Vince as a man with a soft voice and a sweet smile who openly adored his wife Lori, who came into the Grateful Dead with the utmost respect for the band, the music- and most of all, the fans.

-Phil

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home.

- Wordsworth

[phorbesie]

a year gone already.

RIP vince