Grateful Dead Reincarnated

Wed., May. 22, 2002 9:00 AM PDT by Josh Grossberg

Looks like Shakedown Street is alive and well, thank you very much.

Surviving members of the Grateful Dead have announced they're reuniting as a group called the Other Ones to headline a two-day concert festival in East Troy, Wisconsin, on August 3 and 4.

Billed as "Terrapin Station--A Grateful Dead Family Reunion," the special concert marks the first time Bob Weir, Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann and Phil Lesh have played together since disbanding after the death of founder and frontman Jerry Garcia from a heart attack in 1995. (They've since joined each other onstage, but this is the first time they're doing a full show together.)

"We started rehearsing this week and I'm excited. This is going to be very, very good," Lesh said in a statement.

The festival, named after the Grateful Dead's famed 1977 album Terrapin Station, will reunite Deadheads far and wide to celebrate the 30-year musical history, art and culture that was the music world's most famous cult band.

Along with the Other Ones, the four surviving members will also take to the stage with their own bands: Weir's Ratdog, Phil Lesh and Friends, Hart and Bembe Orisha and Kreutzmann's TriChromes, not to mention an appearance by Grateful Dead poet-lyricist Robert Hunter.

"The musicians that created Grateful Dead along with their fans helped give birth to a family and community that has no equal in the history of modern music; when they join forces for Terrapin Station it promises to be the one family reunion that nobody will want to miss," Cameron Sears, President/CEO of Grateful Dead Productions, said in a statement.

The two-day affair will feature two stages, as well as a stage for spoken word and interviews, a Grateful Dead memorabilia tent displaying items from members' personal collections, eclectic food and, of course, lots of Deadheads.

For the uninitiated, those are the patchouli-soaked, tie-dyed diehards who formed a tight-knit, self-sustaining community that followed the Grateful Dead wherever they played--hanging on every improvised note and evolving from a traveling carnival into an institution.

The Deadhead tradition has since been passed on to other jam bands--most notably Phish, the Stringcheese Incident and the Disco Biscuits. The Grateful Dead's legacy for improv has evolved and expanded into a musical genre all its own known as the jam-band scene.

Among the acts scheduled to perform on the second stage are slide guitar master Robert Randolph & The Family Band, the Disco Biscuits, Warren Haynes of Government Mule and Jorma Kaukonen, Donna the Buffalo and Karl Denson's Tiny Universe.

The Other Ones, who will be joined by Jiimmy Herring (Allman Brothers Band) on guitar, Jeff Chimenti on keyboard (RatDog) and Rob Barraco (Phil Lesh & Friends) on keys and vocals, will close out each night at Wisconsin's famed Alpine Valley music theater with two sets of the Dead's music.

Tickets for the event are $44.50 per day, with 50 cents per ticket going to the Dead's charities, Unbroken Chain and Rex Foundations. Advanced tickets go on sale through Grateful Dead Ticketing Thursday.

More information is available at www.dead.net.