A much younger Bruce Ginsberg was helping renovate a holistic healing center in Arizona in 1978 when he struck up a friendship with basketball star and Grateful Dead superfan Bill Walton, who was recovering from a season-ending fractured ankle.
That’s how Ginsberg ended up as Walton’s backstage guest that summer at a Dead show at Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheater. Walton led Ginsberg to a couch, where he motioned him to sit next to Jerry Garcia, who asked him to hold his guitar while the musician headed outside.
Then Bob Weir showed up, Ginsberg recalled, asking, “Who are you and why are you holding Jerry’s guitar?” When Ginsberg replied that Garcia asked him to hold it, Weir said, “Play something.”
It was the kind of experience that underlines the deeply personal connection that Deadheads built with the band, driving much of its success. Those emotions were on full display on at Colony Woodstock on Easter Sunday at a celebration of Weir, who died in January at 78.
“The essence of the Grateful Dead experience is community,” said Ginsberg, 71, who lives in Hurley and was at the show. “It’s the shared experience. When you’re celebrating this kind of man, you do it with others.”
“Let There Be Songs: A Tribute to Bobby Weir—A Musical Gathering to Celebrate His Life and Songs,” featured several hours of music from a range of acts as well as a live simulcast over WKZE (98.1 FM) in Red Hook. Like the Grateful Dead’s live concerts, the event offered a platform for performances that carried the force of a freight train, the hush of a whisper, and just about everything in between.
More than one person in the crowd danced alone, eyes closed. Swirling to the music, they seemed to channel the triumph, despair, resolution and attraction of the Grateful Dead experience.
“I love Bob Weir and he is in my heart for many years,” said Mary Quell, who lives in Athens and attended a plethora of Dead shows.
Among Weir’s links with Woodstock is Mike DuBois, the artist and musician who organizes concerts at the Colony. Dubois, who created artwork for numerous projects for the Dead, offshoot bands and Weir’s various musical incarnations, did the same for Sunday’s event.
DuBois also played drums with an ensemble that featured Kenny Schneidman on keyboards and vocals, Denise Parent on drums and vocals, Garrin Benfield on guitar and vocals, Kyle Esposito on bass, and Kevin Griffin on guitar and pedal steel guitar.
“I hope people feel a sense of what the Grateful Dead had brought to the world, to society—community, joy, happiness, a sense of freestyle dance and expression and a sense that people can relax and forget the woes of the world and get lost in the music and go on a little journey as well,” said DuBois, who created the art for a poster showcasing a long-ago Weir show at the Bearsville Theater.
Weir performed at Levon Helm Studios and held recording sessions for his 2016 album, “Blue Mountain,” at Applehead Recording in Woodstock and Dreamland Recording Studios in Hurley.
Weir and bass player Rob Wasserman performed as a duo at Woodstock ‘94. Prior to that performance, probably on their way to the festival in Saugerties, the two musicians popped into the Cactus Club in Poughkeepsie.
The Deadbeats, a Grateful Dead tribute band, happened to be on stage that night, and Weir and Wasserman arrived toward the end of the first set. The Deadbeats found out during a break that the two were in the audience.
Parent, the Deadbeats drummer, mentioned to Weir that she’d previously run into him at a Rolling Stones concert at Shea Stadium in 1989. The Dead had a night off while playing the Brendan Byrne Arena in East Rutherford, N.J.
When she returned to the Cactus Club stage, Parent realized that a member of the Grateful Dead was in the audience as she played in a Grateful Dead tribute band.
“I was just outside of my own body,” said Parent, who hosts “Covered in Dead with Denise Parent,” a weekly show that focuses on the Dead, at 7 p.m. on Mondays on WKZE.
On Sunday night, she recalled his stage presence.
“He was funny,” she said. “He was animated. He was also someone who could speak to the people and connect.”
For then 23-year-old Ginsberg, that 1978 night at Red Rocks had more to come. He started playing “Friend of the Devil.” Kreutzmann and his fellow drummer Mickey Hart were warming up on drum pads, as was Phil Lesh on his bass guitar.
Hart, Kreutzmann, and Lesh, “fell in behind me,” Ginsberg said.
John W. Barry is a reporter for The Overlook. Reach him at john@theoverlooknews.com.