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Grateful Dead Drummer: In the Key of Kreutzmann
Crawdaddy!: When did you move to Hawaii?
Kreutzmann: I’ve only been back to Hawaii about two years ago now, but I actually bought a place here in 1996, right at the beginning of the year. I was surfing at a place near where I live. I drove back up by the house and there was a “For Sale” sign, and I thought, “Jesus, only a quarter mile away from where I love to surf.” I went in and got five acres, and it was when the real estate market was totally down, so that allowed me to put some money into the house and fix it up nicely. I’m real happy here.
Crawdaddy!: It must be nice having the ocean at your fingertips.
Kreutzmann: I love to surf and I love to take my boat out. Right now, it’s whale season, so we take it out to watch the whales. You just turn the motor off and they come right around you. It’s illegal to go toward them or anything. We go camping a lot at a place that you can only get to by boat. You have to be really careful parking a boat out there so that it’s still there in the morning. The water around Kauai is never really flat.
Crawdaddy!: Jerry Garcia really enjoyed Hawaii, too. You shared a connection there with your love for the island.
Kreutzmann: We went to Kona a whole lot and got our diving certifications there together. It was a load of fun diving with him; he really liked it, man. He loved being down there with the fish where he could have his own space. We had a wonderful dive guide from Jack’s Diving Locker named Jeff—he was one of the owners there—and he knows all of the best places. He even got us near some pilot whales, and we got out in the water with the pilot whales as long as we could. Once we had a white-tipped oceanic shark come up and chase us back to the boat. We got to go on some great dives here.
Crawdaddy!: Why Hawaii?
Kreutzmann: Because it’s less crowded. I could never live in LA or Southern California with the strange weather and the mudslides and all the rain and the fires. But it’s all the people mostly that would drive me mad. I couldn’t deal with that. I’m really into the ocean. It’s only an island in your mind. There’s a quietness and peacefulness here, and you’ve got surfing and stuff. But it’s really “Aloha.” People really get along here. But since I’m going to be doing a lot more work over the next two years, I
‘m actually thinking about moving back to the West Coast for a while and renting this place out or something. I don’t want to be the airplane addict, flying all the time.
Crawdaddy!: Besides working with the BK3 tour, you’re also gearing up for a spring tour with the Dead.
Kreutzmann: I want to bring this brightness that I’m feeling now into the Dead again. Each of us playing in different bands and coming back together again is very helpful. They’re beautiful aspects of each other. With Bobby playing in RatDog, he’s bringing in new ideas from there, and Phil playing in his band, and Mickey. It’s really interesting because we’re bringing in all this new information. For the Dead tour, we’re going to do about 20 rehearsal days before we go out.
Crawdaddy!: What was the impetus to get back together?
Kreutzmann: I’ll tell you what I did. Bob asked me if I would do an Obama gig, right? That was the very first one in San Francisco [at the Warfield in February 2008]. I had just traveled for hours, from Tahiti or maybe coming up from Costa Rica, and they wanted me to fly to San Francisco the next day to do a gig. I was so out of it, that was just impossible. But then I got another call from Bobby later in the year asking if I’d like to do an Obama gig at Penn State. Pennsylvania was a swing state, and playing at the college would affect a bunch of young people to help Obama’s chances—and it did. I said “Okay, but this is my deal. If we take the trouble to get back together to do the Obama gig at Penn State, then I want to do a tour in early spring and summer.” And everybody agreed.
Crawdaddy!: So you were the initiative behind this whole tour?
Kreutzmann: Yeah, actually, I was. I just thought, “Hey, we’re all together, why not keep being together? We can work through those old problems. We don’t have to bring that old stuff to the table anymore.” I love playing with those guys.
Crawdaddy!: What do you think of the extraordinary amount of ticket scalping going on these days?
Kreutzmann: I hate that scalping thing. It’s one of my pet peeves. It’s legal robbery. There should be a law against it. I’m not going to mention names, but the bigwigs in the business, the promoters—whatever you want to call them—one of them now owns a ticket company, and they were going to try to take a whole lot of tickets and scalp them, and we got them to stop that. It’s asking our fans to pay too much money for something that really should almost be free. Garcia always said, “Music is so good for you, it should be free.” That’s a famous Jerry quote. It’s a sore subject with me. Our ticket prices are 80 bucks, and that seems like a fortune to me. I mean, in today’s market, “Am I buying food for my family or gas? Am I taking my kids to school, or am I buying outrageously expensive tickets?” It doesn’t make much sense to me.
Crawdaddy!: What did the band do to curb that?
Kreutzmann: They were going to scalp a very high number of tickets, and we cut it way, way down. The whole idea is that you’re taking money from people that you shouldn’t be taking money from. You want to give them something. It’s simple. We got ’em to bring back a whole lot of the tickets. Way more than half. So we did a pretty good job with them.
Crawdaddy!: You’re working so much these days, have you been finding time to work on your digital art?
11 Comments
This is a really nice, rare chance to hear what Bill Kreutzmann has to say about his new and old musical experiences. Thanks so much for the peak into Bill The Drummer’s world! http://darkstarjamblog.blogspot.com
Do your homework, sir. Kreutzmann was given an extended credit for writing Dark Star since it was an improvisational piece that all of the GD members “wrote” differently each time they played it, but he really had nothing to do with the reality of the song’s genesis. Phil’s book SEARCHING FOR THE SOUND: MY LIFE WITH THE GRATEFUL DEAD (2005) directly conflicts with this claim of yours, as do countless other sources.
fantastic article!
Hi Dave28 aka “Grand trivia poobah of all things Dead”, the last time I checked, and including Lennon/McCartney, if a band member is listed in the songwriting credits, he/she is “co-writer” of said song. According to your theory, since Darkstar is an “improvisational” piece, shouldn’t Bill then be listed in all the Dead’s songwriting credits? The next time I need to “Ask an expert” on everything Dead-related (and all things not), I’ll be sure to ring you up. You are, after all, a walking-talking encyclopedia.
Corbett, get off your high horse. Dave is right and your bratty little response only demonstrates how little you know about songwriting, as does your laughable comment about Lennon/McCartney. The lump sum of their tunes were written almost exclusively by one and then sometimes tweaked by the other. Thier partnership was designed to allevaite potential ego and legal problems and it worked great for years…but it doesn’t mean that they wrote the tunes together. They did NOT.
As with the Dead. Dark Star is largely, as with most of the best Dead tunes, the alchemy of Hunter’s unmatched poetic lyrics and Garcia’s sense of melody. Lesh says in his book that the riff is partially his. That Kreutzman gets co-composer status is probably largely due to his wanting more royalties, as with other band members when they saw Jer’s bigger checks coming in (confirmed by most of the best Dead biographies).
So, decent article, but your knowledge of the Dead is indeed a joke compared to someone like Dave, so shut your mouth and accept your shortcomings. Lennon/McCartney wrote everything together? Ho ho, what a genius you are.
And for the record, though Bill comes off as a sweetheart in this piece, he was probably the biggest dick in the Dead. I spent a lot of years touring with the band and saw first-hand what a coked-out, nasty drunk he was much of the time in their middle years. He also cheated like hell on his wife every night with as many groupies as he could lure into his hotel room. Just for the record.
And yeah, you really ought to consult any expert on the Dead, ’cause you sure as hell ain’t one.
Aha, I see we have two Grand Poobahs of Dead Trivia, the second being even more thoroughly ironic than the first, and likely suffering with a short-person complex to boot. Your point is no more valid than Dave’s. If you really wanna engage, why don’t you come at me with some hard, intelligent data. By all appearances, you’re one of those Deadheads that’s seen 3,496 shows and has the ticket stubs to prove it. Your mud slinging about Bill doesn’t impress me any more than your weak defense of the other trivia guy. Christ, all these experts! When will it end? Anyone else wanna try?
for a bunch of peace-lovin’ beatniks, you guys sure do use some harsh language at each other.
To Tazo: Thank you SO MUCH for your stellar observation. You know, I breeze thru the most popular Dead forums on occasion, and I’ve noticed over and over this clique of mean-spirited people who use these venues to spew out this nasty energy that comes from god-knows-where. And I’m specifically talking about the digital Dead scene, peace-niks or not. When Ryan Adams played with Phil Lesh at Red Rocks a few years back, there was so much poison in Lesh’s forum about Adams that Phil himself almost shut the forum down permanently, shocked at some of the sheer ugliness that emanated from some of these haters. Someone even slandered his wife in such a lewd manner, that one wondered if we’d returned to the Paleolithic epoch. In cyberspace in general, these forums are a great place to debate and stir thought, but there are always those who have to bring in this bizarre negativity, and then more follow suit, and then soon, the whole discussion slips into a grotesque and repulsive product of dark-hearted and cruel intent. It spreads quickly like the disease of road-rage, contaminating the entire environment. What all this stems from we’ll leave to C.G. Jung’s next-generation disciples, but man, you hit it right on the nose. Nobody’s guilty, ya know. We’re all innocent. And I’m merely the Devil’s advocate. But what a puzzling phenomenon, this whole forum-tainting business.
Well, I’d say the orignal negativity started with BC here; Dave merely said, “Do your homework”, and then even added, “sir.” Seems pretty darn polite, especially compared to BC’s subsequent insults. If you can’t publish an article without accepting some gently worded criticism, perhaps you should pursue other avenues of self-expression.
A great article about a wicked drummer. I especially liked the part about Bill and Jerry getting chased by sharks in Hawaii. Also, I have to agree with BC. Just saying ‘do your homework’ is arrogant and is hardly criticism. It’s like saying ‘you’re full of shit’. Dave’s argument is unfounded anyway. Technically Corbett is correct. Kreutzman’s mere contribution of the drums to Dark Star makes him a ‘co-composer’. He’s also listed in the song credits. So what is there to argue about? Corbett didn’t mention anything about the ‘genesis’ of the song, so what’s Dave even talking about? Dave even says Kreutzman was given an ‘extended credit’, so he even agrees with BC! Its obvious that Dave only took the opportunity to try to impress everyone at the interviewer’s expense by twisting the meaning of a single word for his own purposes. Corbett is correct and the point is moot. Who cares about semantics anyway. Excellent interview!
“do you homework, sir” is about the most condescending thing ever. hardly nice.
but ANYWAY, this is a fantastic interview and a great talent.