On Friday, June 30, 2006 at 7:17:21 AM UTC-7, Hyfler/Rosner wrote:
> THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE (California)
> June 30, 2006 Friday
> Joel Selvin, Senior Pop Music Critic
> Vince Welnick lived the dream, playing music with the
> Grateful Dead, but depression dogged him to his final days
> When Vince Welnick signed on to play keyboards for the
> Grateful Dead, some people said it probably saved his life.
> He had five good years with the band, five fat years. But
> then Jerry Garcia died and the Dead was no more. Welnick
> spent the next 11 years dreaming that the band would
> reunite, with him, once again, at the keyboards.
> That dream died on the cloudless morning of June 2, when the
> 55-year-old musician stood on a hillside behind his
> Forestville home and drew a knife across his throat in front
> of his wife.
> Welnick's suicide caught many of his more casual friends by
> surprise. A fixture in the Bay Area music scene for nearly
> 40 years and known to thousands of fans of the Dead -- and
> in the '70s, the Tubes -- Welnick was always an upbeat kind
> of guy, with twinkly eyes and a lopsided smile. But his
> cheery exterior was deceptive. Those who knew him better
> recognized that even during the last years of the Grateful
> Dead's long strange trip, Vince Welnick was veering along
> the edge and battling demons that would eventually alienate
> many musical colleagues.
> In the weeks before his death, several old friends who
> hadn't heard from him in a while were surprised by phone
> calls from a cheery, optimistic Welnick, talking about plans
> for the future. On June 1, the day before he killed himself,
> he called pianist George Michalski, who invited Welnick to
> join him at his weekly restaurant job in San Francisco that
> weekend. The two had debuted their four-handed piano act in
> February at Mardi Gras in New Orleans and had just received
> an invitation to return next year.
> "He was all excited about it," Michalski said. "And he told
> me he was going to come by the restaurant and jam Saturday
> night."
> But Michalski had also seen Welnick's dark side and knew he
> was a troubled soul, especially in recent years as he
> struggled with deep depression over the demise of the Dead.
> Michalski said Welnick talked about committing suicide in
> February when they flew to New Orleans. "He told me he was
> going to kill himself," Michalski said. "That's all we
> talked about all the way to New Orleans. He had no qualms
> about it."
> Grateful Dead computer programmer Bob Bralove, one of
> Welnick's closest friends, traveled the country playing
> improvisations with Welnick and another former Dead
> keyboardist, Tom Constanten. They appeared together last
> month in Las Vegas.
> "He was very, very depressed," said Bralove, "even though he
> was headed for a gig, which usually cheered him up. We were
> talking. He said he couldn't stop the bad feelings. He was
> looking for some way this would change. I guess it didn't.
> He had hoped to pull something off."
> After an earlier suicide attempt about 10 years ago, Welnick
> started taking antidepressants, but lately, he had been
> telling friends the pills didn't seem to be working anymore.
> When he died, according to friends, he was trying to wean
> himself from the old medication and begin a new drug
> regimen.
> Nobody knows whether there was a direct link between his
> suicide and the change in his medication, but two years ago
> the Food and Drug Administration asked antidepressant
> manufacturers to add a warning on pill bottles about
> potential suicide risk during changes in dosage.
> Welnick was not in the best health anyway. Just before the
> start of the Dead's final summer tour in 1995, he was
> diagnosed with throat cancer and emphysema. He beat the
> cancer, but the respiratory disease left him increasingly
> weak and often out of breath, although he continued to smoke
> cigarettes and pot. He carried inhalers with him wherever he
> went. "He was on the spray can all day long," said one
> associate.
> Welnick was born and raised in Phoenix, Ariz., where the
> scene in the late '60s was so small, everybody knew each
> other from hanging out at the VIP Room, the town's sole rock
> club. Welnick moved to Los Angeles to make it in music, but
> wound up paying his rent selling office supplies over the
> phone. Guitarist Bill Spooner brought him back to Phoenix
> and formed a group called the Beans. Relocating to San
> Francisco in 1970, the Beans merged with another band of
> Phoenix refugees and renamed themselves the Tubes.
> The Tubes would become one of the few authentic San
> Francisco rock phenomena of the '70s. Although the band
> never earned similar acceptance outside of town, the Tubes
> could draw capacity crowds at Bimbo's 365 Club for
> weeks-long runs. Known for outrageous staging, tungsten-hard
> progressive rock and elaborate set pieces for songs such as
> "Mondo Bondage," "White Punks on Dope" and "What Do You Want
> From Life?,"the Tubes drew deeply from the decadent San
> Francisco demimonde of the day. But they were never hippies.
> Welnick was regarded by his bandmates as a highly skilled
> musician, the most musically trained of the group, and a
> relaxed, agreeable colleague. He dressed neatly, often
> wearing satin shirts and even ironed his T-shirts.
> "I can see him sitting around in those wraparound shades,
> that orange suit, a joint hanging out of his lips," said
> Tubes vocalist Fee Waybill.
> The Tubes recorded eight albums and finally scored a Top Ten
> hit with "She's a Beauty" in 1983. By that time, however,
> the group had been reduced to a laboratory for experiments
> by Hollywood session musicians and producers such as David
> Foster and Steve Lukather. Todd Rundgren, who produced "Love
> Bomb," the final Tubes album, took drummer Prairie Prince
> and keyboardist Welnick for his own band when the Tubes
> broke up in 1985. Welnick toured with Rundgren's band and
> can be heard on two Rundgren albums, "Nearly Human" and
> "Second Wind."
> When Welnick auditioned for the Dead in 1990, he was
> sleeping in a barn, separated from his wife, their home
> rented out, and planning to move to Mexico and homestead.
> The Dead, in the band's singularly dysfunctional manner,
> tried out just four or five candidates for the job vacated
> by Brent Mydland, who died of a drug overdose. Only a
> handful of keyboard players who lived nearby were called in
> for the million-dollar post. All the auditions were held in
> a single day at the Dead's San Rafael rehearsal hall.
> "I remember Vince sitting waiting his turn when I got out,"
> said Pete Sears, then fresh off the Starship. "I think the
> decision had already been made."
> Welnick's keyboard skills did not win him the job with the
> Dead, though; it was his ability to hit the high harmonies
> on vocals.
> "We had no stomach for the amount of work it would have
> taken to find the right guy," said Dead guitarist Bob Weir.
> "We took the guy who could sing high and had pretty decent
> chops. That was good enough."
> Bruce Hornsby, a longtime Dead fan who stepped in at piano
> on an interim basis, put his own thriving solo career on
> hold for a year to stay with the band while Welnick found
> his footing. The famously egalitarian band offered Welnick
> almost full participation in the concert revenues,
> merchandise and other partnership holdings, rather than
> simply taking him on as a sideman. At the time, the Dead was
> the most popular rock group in the country, pulling down
> more than $50 million a year at the box office. His earnings
> soared. He started wearing tie-dye. He bought a Mexican
> vacation home.
> He met his future wife on a photo shoot for Rolling Stone
> magazine in the mid-'70s in Los Angeles. During their first
> date at the '70s San Francisco fern bar Henry Africa's, the
> stunning half-Blackfoot model and Welnick decided to spend
> their lives together. Theirs would be a turbulent
> relationship. Guests at the Mexican vacation home overheard
> all-night battles. The Tubes once put the couple out of the
> tour bus on a Texas freeway because they wouldn't stop
> fighting. People in the Dead crew remember Lori Welnick as a
> terrified flier. "She was a real contentious person," said
> Tubes guitarist Spooner.
> "They saw themselves as this epic romance," said Michael
> Cotton of the Tubes, who interviewed the couple last year
> for a planned Tubes documentary.
> Lori Welnick declined to make a statement about her
> husband's death, although she did say one thing for the
> record. "You say one foul thing about me," she said, "and
> you'll regret it the rest of your life. I have been nothing
> but good to the only man I ever loved. And you can put that
> in the newspaper."
> Only days before departing for the final 1995 Grateful Dead
> tour, Welnick received a double diagnosis from his doctor.
> He needed an operation for throat cancer that could possibly
> affect his singing voice, and he had emphysema. He postponed
> the surgery until after the tour. When Garcia died Aug. 9,
> shortly after the band returned home, and the band members
> announced that they would no longer continue to perform as
> the Grateful Dead, Welnick felt his world collapse and he
> sank into depression.
> That December, on the RatDog tour bus before a show in Santa
> Barbara, Welnick spilled out the contents of a Valium bottle
> and counted 57 pills. He took them all, climbed in his bunk
> and waited to die. The tour manager accompanied him to the
> hospital, while the rest of the band played the show. After
> he recovered, Welnick sought psychiatric treatment and began
> taking antidepressants. He never played with RatDog again.
> The Grateful Dead has always been very much a man's world
> with a strict code of behavior, carefully developed over the
> many years of the band's history. Many insiders privately
> found Welnick's dramatic grieving out of proportion for
> someone who had belonged to the band as briefly and late in
> the day (Mydland, his predecessor, was still known as "the
> new guy" 11 years after he joined the band). The other four
> members had been with the Dead since the beginning, more
> than 30 years before. Welnick was the last "new man," the
> sixth player to the keyboard slot.
> He bombarded the Dead's office with phone calls, proposals
> to put the band back together, always with himself on
> keyboards. He wrote new songs to already published lyrics he
> found in the book by Dead lyricist Robert Hunter. He
> reserved special anger for Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann, who
> moved to Hawaii right after Garcia's death, effectively
> removing himself from the scene and barring any reunion
> efforts, in Welnick's mind. Tubes drummer Prairie Prince
> found him depressed and miserable in early 1996.
> "He was moping around," Prince said. "I took it on myself to
> bring him around."
> Prince and Welnick went into Cotati's Prairie Sun Studios to
> work on one of Welnick's new original songs, "True Blue,"
> about friends who stayed the course and others left behind.
> The sessions evolved into the Missing Man Formation, a band
> that featured Dead acolytes Steve Kimock on guitar and Bobby
> Vega on bass. The band made its debut in July 1996 at the
> Fillmore Auditorium before a packed house of Deadheads.
> Before long, Kimock and Vega were gone and Prince and
> Welnick, friends since Phoenix, had a falling out. All were
> replaced by a new set of musicians.
> "We lost touch with each other," Prince admitted. "It wasn't
> a really pretty scene when we broke up. I distanced myself a
> little bit from Vince and Lori."
> Welnick was frustrated at every turn. He could not use the
> band's rehearsal hall for his group. He was not allowed to
> borrow equipment from the Dead when he went into the studio
> to record some demos in April 2000. He did play a summer
> 2000 tour with the Mickey Hart Band on the condition that
> his wife stay home. "He never went crazy on my watch," Hart
> said.
> But an announced reunion of all four remaining original
> members of the Dead at a two-day rock festival in Alpine
> Village, Mich., in August 2002 sent Welnick overboard. He
> fixated on certain phrases -- "Grateful Dead family reunion"
> and "surviving members of the Dead" -- wondering how he
> could have been excluded, according to his friend Mike
> Lawson. Welnick went to the festival, Lawson said, played
> the night before at a local Thai restaurant and performed a
> campground show the night of the event, hoping there would
> be a last-minute call that never came.
> The members of the Dead were uncomfortable with Welnick and
> his obsessive behavior. There were certain kinds of
> craziness the Dead circles would not tolerate. "It was
> getting bigger and bigger," Weir said. "We could all feel
> that and we chickened out. Yes, we did. We all had lives to
> lead and we all had bands to play with.
> "I'm sorry," he continued. "I'm sorry for Vince. But stuff
> doesn't always work out the way people want. And he became
> more and more difficult to work with as his disease
> progressed."
> Welnick was reduced to playing as special guest with Dead
> cover bands such as Gent Treadly, Jack Straw or Cubensis,
> performing for small crowds at holes-in-the-wall where he
> was sometimes paid with bad checks. "He hated it," Lawson
> said. "He was miserable because it was embarrassing."
> He attended the annual board of governors' awards dinner of
> the local National Association of Recording Arts & Sciences
> chapter last year, at the insistence of friends. Hart was
> there as well. "Should I go over to him?" he said to his
> booking agent, Linda Yelnick, who watched as Welnick walked
> across the room, shook hands with his former bandmate and
> returned.
> "It probably lasted all of 10 seconds," she said. "I felt
> bad. I tried."
> When members of the Dead and their extended family gathered
> to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Garcia's death in
> September at UC Berkeley's Greek Theatre, Welnick again
> found himself excluded. "If he came out onstage to play,"
> said Weir, who served as music director for the event, "I
> don't know how we would have got him off. He was unstable."
> The Dead bought out his interest in the band and he
> reclaimed what little music he wrote with the band from its
> publishing company. He and his wife lived on a 10-acre
> parcel of land with a small three-bedroom home worth less
> than a million dollars, according to Web sources, in Sonoma
> County. He kept a prized Bösendorfer grand piano in his
> music studio and a couple dozen cats wandered the place. The
> couple's home was covered with memorabilia from his days
> with the Dead, but contained little or nothing from his much
> longer stint with the Tubes.
> The Tubes, in fact, had been planning a full-scale reunion
> and Welnick was enthusiastic about it, according to his
> former bandmates. He played in the band's impromptu Santa
> Cruz reunion last year.
> But getting back together with the Tubes wasn't enough. He
> still brooded over the fate of the Grateful Dead. He was
> convinced that his suicide attempt on the RatDog bus was the
> only thing that kept his former bandmates from bringing him
> back. The phone calls to band management began again. As
> recently as a week before he died, he posted a note on his
> Web site about his continued hopes for a reunion, saying he
> had discussed the issue with band management.
> "Here and now," Welnick wrote, "I want to appeal to the
> other members of GD to come together for such a worthy
> cause. Hope you all will pass the message onto the rest of
> the guys. More then ever, the world needs love and the
> Gratefuldead!"
> According to friends and band insiders who spoke with family
> members, Welnick woke the morning of June 2 and told his
> father-in-law, who was staying at the house, that he had
> slept well. A little later, when his wife found a prohibited
> bottle of liquor, she went looking for him. She spotted him
> in the backyard climbing the hill and called his name. He
> turned and cut his throat. His shirt turned red, she told
> friends. She tried to stop the bleeding, but he told her to
> let him go. He also reportedly resisted recovery efforts by
> his sister-in-law, who was also staying at the house.
> An ambulance was summoned at 9:30 a.m. by the Sonoma County
> sheriff's dispatcher. Welnick was still alive when it
> arrived. An hour later, he was pronounced dead at the
> emergency room of Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital, according to
> the Sonoma County coroner's office.
> Friends say Lori Welnick initially directed her rage at the
> Grateful Dead. Weir brought his family to visit. "When I was
> with her, it was different," he said. "Someone in that state
> of grief can be reaching for reasons that may or may not
> exist. She was in that kind of pain."
> Weir spoke about Welnick with the shell-shocked tone of
> someone still trying to make sense of something that
> ultimately will never add up.
> "I wish I could have helped," Weir said. "I tried, but I
> failed. The people closest to him wish they tried, but they
> failed. He tried himself and failed. That's the story and
> it's a sad one."
> GRAPHIC: PHOTO (4)
> (1-2) Keyboardist Vince Welnick, top, played with the
> Grateful Dead for its last five years / Jay Blakesberg 1996,
> and in the '70s with the Tubes, above right, a seminal band
> in San Francisco rock history., (3) Keyboardist Vince
> Welnick (in back) loved being a part of the musical family
> known as the Grateful Dead, including Jerry Garcia (left)
> and interim player Bruce Hornsby./ Jay Blakesberg 1990, (4)
> Vince Welnick battled throat cancer and emphysema, which
> resulted in a need to use inhalers. / Peter Stupar 1978