The Grateful Dead tribute band Half Step was about to go onstage Saturday night at the Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum and Planetarium in Centerport when they heard about the death of Bob Weir, the Dead’s guitarist, songwriter and a founding member.
“It was quite a shock,” Scott Bardolf, a Levittown native and a co-founder of the tribute group, said Sunday. Having to go play just minutes later “was really tough,” he said.
But “there was a beautiful energy in the room,” said Tom San Filippo, the band’s lead guitarist for the past 15 years. “We were sharing something.”
Half Step, a Long Island-based Grateful Dead tribute band, during a performance. Credit: Artie Raslich
The Grateful Dead launched in San Francisco and was a part of the West Coast counterculture, but Long Island harbored dedicated groups of Deadheads over the years.
The band played on Long Island from the 1970s and, after the group’s iconic co-founder and lead guitarist Jerry Garcia died in 1995, continued to perform as Dead and Company as recently as last summer. Fans packed the Nassau Coliseum, where they gathered hours before the concerts to mingle, play guitar, and sell tie-dye T-shirts and homemade food.
The band stopped playing the Coliseum for a time in the 1970s, in protest against heavy-handed harassment of Deadheads in the venue’s parking lot by local police, Newsday previously reported.
For some, hearing the Grateful Dead play for the first time could kick off a lifelong quest, and a career. Bardolf attended a concert at Madison Square Garden in 1987, when he was 17, “and I’ve been chasing them around ever since,” he told Newsday.
Bob Weir, of the Grateful Dead, outside his home in Mill Valley, California in 2004. Credit: AP/Eric Risberg
San Filippo first saw the Dead perform in 1981, at age 15, “and as they say, I got on the bus.” The group inspired him to write his own music and he has been playing and performing their music for many years.
Mathew Fleisig, 65, of Huntington, started listening to the Dead at 14 and went to his first concert at 17, in 1977.
Since then he has seen “a lot of shows,” up to a performance in 1995 during the last tour before Garcia died, which he attended with his wife and two children.
What really stands out about the Dead, Fleisig said, is “it’s a community.” He gets together for a potluck dinner every six weeks with a group of friends who all met in the 1970s at Grateful Dead shows — and they happened to be having dinner on Saturday when they heard of Weir’s death.
“Jerry was the soul of the band,” Fleisig, said. “But there’s no Grateful Dead without Bob Weir.”
Weir and Garcia met when Garcia was 21 and Weir was just 16, and soon formed the band that would later become the Grateful Dead. They played together for the next three decades. Weir, who co-wrote and sang some the band’s classic songs, “was like the glue that kind of kept everything together,” San Filippo said.
San Filippo also said Weir is thought to have spent more time performing on stage than anyone else in the world.
His style as a rhythm guitarist was distinctive, said Bardolf, who also plays rhythm guitar. “He approached it like really no one else in rock and roll.” Bardoff said he has studied and practiced that style for years.
“And it’s been my lifelong work to get it right.”
“Everyone in the band has dedicated their lives to keeping the music alive, and I think that resolve is even stronger now that he’s gone,” Bardolf said.
Jerry Garcia, left, and Bob Weir, of the Grateful Dead, at the Academy of Music in Manhattan in March 1972. Credit: Newsday/Jim Peppler
The Dead, in different forms, kept going even after Garcia died 30 years ago.
But Weir’s death feels different to San Filippo. “I feel like this is really the end,” he said. But then, “that makes my job a little more important now — to keep the music alive.”