The Dead is still kickin' Legendary band keeps jamming

[fearnobush]

Saturday, July 17, 2004 Posted: 7:40 AM EDT (1140 GMT)

MANCHESTER, Tennessee (AP) -- As the Bonnaroo Music Festival began its slow swing into a fever pitch, it was hard not to notice an anticipatory tension in the audience of some 90,000 sweat-soaked fans.

Warren Haynes was delivering a pummeling set with Government Mule, but it almost seemed that the crowd could sense The Dead -- Phil Lesh, Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann and a slumbering Bob Weir -- lurking just yards behind the stage.

Just before kicking off a nationwide tour at last month's Bonnaroo, The Dead -- which carried on after Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia died in 1995 -- spoke to The Associated Press about confounding expectations, jamming in no man's land and surfing their eternal musical current.

Q: A few weeks ago, in an interview with Charlie Rose, Trey Anastasio said that without The Grateful Dead, an event like Bonnaroo would never have happened. Do you find kicking off a new tour here particularly special?

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<http://www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/Music/07/17/celeb.q.a.thedead.ap/index.html>

Note, Check out Bob work with Headcount - Voter Reg drive. The Dead are committed to getting 100,000 dead heads registerd to vote:

Artists such as Bob Weir, a HeadCount board member and guitarist for The Dead, are calling on fans to exercise their fundamental rights as Americans to go to the polls.

"If every Dead Head in the state of Florida had voted in the last presidential election, it would be a very different world today," said Weir backstage at a recent Ratdog show at San Francisco's legendary Fillmore Auditorium, where HeadCount volunteers were on hand registering voters. "If you value democracy, register and vote."

<http://www.jambase.com/headsup.asp?storyID=4770>