Fueled by his formative Twilight Zone experience, the Dead & Company bassist continues to spread his own gospel

The Musician’s Religion

I’ve always had some kind of solo project. It was Oteil & The Peacemakers for a while but, when I met my wife Jess, I didn’t want to be on the road all the time. Before that, I would get off the road with the Allman Brothers and then go right back out with my band. It was great— and I don’t regret doing it—but I was ready to not be on the road every day of the year. So I stopped that project and just started developing a home life.

But, fast-forward 10 years, and I was ready to do another side project. When I joined Dead & Company, I was playing with guys that were already nearing their 70s so I thought, “I should put something out there.” I knew, from The Allman Brothers Band, that when you’re working with guys that age, you never know how long it’s really gonna last. So I felt that Dead & Company was going to be a shorter run than a longer run compared to the Allman Brothers, who I was with for 17 years. And I didn’t see that happening with Dead & Co., even when I joined. So I started doing limited Oteil & Friends stuff—I just didn’t want to do it all the time like I did when I had The Peacemakers. That’s the musician’s religion. The orthodox side of the religion is to be on the road constantly, but I was making plans to have children. And I have two kids—they’re 5 and 8—and I definitely don’t want to be away from them, especially in their younger years.

It’s difficult because, since I don’t want to be out all the time, I can’t offer my players enough gigs, numbers-wise, to make it their No. 1 priority. So everybody in the band has another gig that supports them, and my lineups change all the time. That is also fun because it mixes things up, keeps it interesting, keeps me on my toes. It’s like ingredients for food. When you have a different spice, you come up with different flavors. At this age, and after all these years of playing out there, I’m lucky to be able to call on these guys.

Where My Head Is Right Now

At first, with Oteil & Friends, I was trying to do songs that I wouldn’t get to do with Dead & Company. I’m still learning Dead tunes—“Lazy Lightning” and all kinds of stuff. The Dead have 400 songs sitting there for me to learn and I have only gotten to about half of them. And then—and we don’t really have this problem anymore— when I originally put Oteil & Friends together a few years ago, the tempos used to be really slow in Dead & Company. So I would play some stuff in my band just to be able to play it faster. [Laughs.] And then there were these other versions that I didn’t know about—like the fast, funky version of “They Love Each Other” and the funky, faster “Loose Lucy.” I’d be listening to stuff around the house, or friends or Deadheads would suggest things for me to go back and listen to, and I would bring all that back to my band. Currently, I am leaning toward the Jerry Garcia Band material and the gospel stuff. It’s just where my head is right now. I have gotten really into the JGB material from doing gigs with Melvin Seals, Jackie LaBranch and Gloria Jones—I’m so glad that I got to do some gigs with Gloria before she passed away. When I played with them at The Warfield in San Francisco, it was really a different thing, man. I was just captivated by it. I had to learn a bunch of tunes for that gig, which showed me a whole other side of Jerry that I didn’t know about. I knew about Old & In The Way because I played banjo but, at the time, I was just trying to wrap my head around the immense Grateful Dead catalog. But there are so many great songs outside of that—“Cats Under the Stars,” the covers, the gospel stuff.

I’m hoping, when this Oteil & Friends tour hits, that I can also bring in some originals by everyone—me, Duane Betts, Melvin, Steve Kimock, Lamar Williams Jr. And I want to pull out some of this old ABB stuff, which I miss, man. It’s been a very long time since I’ve played all that stuff, especially regularly. And what a crazy feeling to be onstage with Lamar and Duane and to see the continuation of that legacy live on. You feel this karma playing with them or Berry Oakley Jr., who has been a big part of the Roots Rock Revival camp we do each summer. I actually saw this picture of  Berry Oakley’s grandson and Levon Helm’s grandson playing double drums together. It is about continuing the rich legacy of these bands—the Allmans, the Grateful Dead, The Band. And it spills over to my band, too. I want to roll it forward into the future. It’s fun—and cathartic. Now, I’m the old guy. [Laughs.] I said it when I got to speak at the awards ceremony, but when I received the Lifetime Achievement Grammy with the Allmans, I was like, “What am I doing up here?” But then Kirk West said, “You’ve been in the band longer than all of the other bass players combined.” And it took me aback.

Songs of Our Own

When I started singing lead on some songs with Dead & Company, I got a lot of help from [Bob Weir’s manager] Matt Busch, Jeff Chimenti, my friend Traci Thaler and the fans. Every time someone would say, “I’d love to hear you sing this song,” I would just write it down. Eventually, I had this huge YouTube playlist of Jerry songs that weren’t being done. Friends and fans would write in on my Facebook page. And I would just pick which ones were my favorites. “China Doll” hit me right away. A lot of people wanted me to sing “High Time” but, at first, it didn’t grab me so I kept putting it aside and picking other songs. Finally, it was Chimenti who said, “Man, I could just hear you singing ‘High Time.’ So then I learned it, and I couldn’t get it out of my head for two months straight. I would wake up and it would be right there. That’s why it’s such a great song, man. Bill Walton kept asking us to play all these Brent [Mydland] songs but Brent just sings too high. That dude could get way up there— full voice, too. It’s not falsetto at all. I don’t think Mayer could do it—none of us could do it. 

I just finished an album of Garcia-Hunter ballads that I recorded in Iceland, and I dedicated “High Time” to my brother, Kofi, who passed away four years ago. It’s one of the most meaningful songs to me, in my whole life. Kofi never really played Grateful Dead music, but he did do two gigs with my band, which were the last gigs we ever did together. One of them was on his birthday, and he took this flute solo on “High Time” that was just amazing.

I still think that the average Deadhead can teach me something that I don’t know about the Grateful Dead. I enjoy interacting with fans and talking about their experiences and their favorite songs. I constantly learn stuff that I don’t know yet. It’s great.

Who Needs Acid?

I am a big proponent of everything not being about music. People can be extremists—they can get absorbed in what they’re doing and it will take over their entire life. And we glorify that, to a large extent. If that’s your calling, then do it. It’s better than being an arms dealer. But I’ve seen the price people pay for not having balance in their lives, for everything just being about music. Certainly, my Comes a Time podcast partner Mike Finoia and I are music fanatics. He’s a stand-up comic and producer on Impractical Jokers. Our relationship developed because I did his podcast and I told him about a really intense spiritual experience that changed my life. It made me shift away from everything being about music. That helped me build a foundation for other parts of my life–cultivating a home life like a garden, cultivating a spiritual life, branching out and doing new things. My wife got certified to scuba dive, and diving just adds this whole other thing to my music. I keep saying, “Who needs acid?” My spiritual life adds to my music.  

I’ve seen music save people, but I’ve also seen music not be able to save people. Look at all the musicians that died because they didn’t cultivate these other parts of their life and they didn’t have balance. They didn’t make it for the long haul. They may have changed the world and gone down in history—and I’m grateful for what they all contributed—but I would have preferred for them to have had a long life and enjoyed their children, their wives. So our podcast is about all the facets of humanity—mind, body and spirit. And spirit covers any creative pursuit. My wife is a ceramic artist and does photography and that feels like a spiritual thing. You hear about people getting into these flow states. It’s partially a spiritual process, being creative. Because it comes out of nothing. And that’s a miracle. It doesn’t come from me. I don’t know why I hear this stuff in my head. I will not take credit for it, and I don’t know where it comes from. We can say God or the universe. The gift is to be able to pull it out of wherever it comes from and bring it into reality for other people to be able to hear it. I want them to be able to hear what I hear in my head. It’s another miracle. And another spiritual reality. You can believe it or not believe it, but people pay me a lot of money to do it. [Laughs.]

Right Out of The Twilight Zone

My life-changing experience was right out of The Twilight Zone or any religion or Bible— Old Testament, New Testament. I heard voices. It was around the year 2000, and I was living on the Upper West Side in Manhattan and playing with the Allman Brothers. I was at my bottom. I had so much time and so much money, but I felt so hopeless. I remember laying in bed and just saying, “I can’t do this anymore. I’m done. I’m tapped out. I’ve tried over and over, and I keep failing.” And I reached out and I was like, “God, I don’t know what you are or who’s right about you or who’s wrong about you or what name is even right, but if you’re there, I need your help right now because I am done.” And I heard a voice in my head say, “We’re here for you.” [Laughs.] And I was like, “What?”

I remember calling my mom and saying, “Have you ever heard voices tell you something, but it was really positive?” And she was like, “Since I was 12 years old.” And I didn’t question it. I was so desperate and so at the end of my rope. It may have seemed like I was on top of the world, but I was so miserable. Hopeless is the only word I can use to describe it. And so, I immediately started talking to apparently what were three different voices. One of the things that I asked them was, “Why didn’t you come when I asked you before? And they said, “Well, you didn’t ask in the right way.” And I knew exactly what they meant. I needed to have some humility. When I came to them this time, I was desperate—no ego. Before that, I didn’t want to look in the mirror because I didn’t like what I saw. I talked to them for about 30 minutes, and I asked them a bunch of stuff and they shot me straight. And they did something to me that made me buckle my knees out. I felt all this stuff rushing out of me. If you look at pictures of me the day before and the day after, you can see a drastic difference, physically.

I told all the guys in the Allman Brothers what happened. I emailed them and they either didn’t read their email or they thought I had done a bunch of acid—which I had not, I was completely straight for this whole experience. When we got back to rehearsal, Dickey Betts was the first person to notice. He took one look at me and said, “What’s different about you?” And then he said, “Whatever happened, I’m gonna call you Bright Eyes. Your eyes look totally different.” There was a physical change.

We’re spiritual beings. We’re not just physical beings. Science cannot prove or disprove or quantify consciousness. It’s funny that you can’t even have science without magic because it is your consciousness that’s doing the measuring.

Vanity Pursuits Come Second

Besides my Iceland album, I have another solo album in mind. When my wife and I first got married, she moved to Africa for a year. I was so depressed—I picked up her banjo and started learning how to play it. And those exercises started becoming songs and I wrote a whole album. I was living in Atlanta at the time so I started getting together with Lamar, and he wrote the lyrics and the vocal melodies for all of those tunes. We were actually going to start playing that material with Oteil & Friends before the pandemic—we were in rehearsals in Boca Raton, Fla., where I live, when life took a turn.

It is interesting because the banjo goes back to Africa, but the finger-picking style is American and goes back to my old Col. Hampton days. But everything right now is centered around my kids. So every decision I’m making is basically what’s best for the kids and providing for my family right now. Vanity pursuits come second. [Laughs.] If you live your life fully, then everything is gonna change how you approach music. With this Dead & Co. tour, it’ll be the same thing—all my experiences, everything that we’ve gone through with the pandemic, goes into that.

Every day is a new day. When we play all the Allman Brothers songs with Oteil & Friends, they are different now. They just have to be. I’m gonna be 59 and I was 32 when I joined that band. And it’s funny because the Dead was not the soundtrack of my childhood. But it is the soundtrack of my children’s childhood. So I’m experiencing a lot of things, through their eyes—even professional wrestling. I watch it with my kids and I’m like, “OK, I get it now.”