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Furthur’s Origin Story: Dead Behind, Furthur Ahead (Relix Revisited)

Photo by Jay Blakesberg

“There’s a misperception that DSO played jams note for note,” he continues. “The best transcribers in the world of guitar music would still take months to [transcribe] one show. Part of my drive in doing the setlist thing was an excuse to do ‘drums and space’ every night—to do that kind of unstructured improvisation and have it be different every time.”

Within a year, Dark Star Orchestra had morphed from a weekly exercise in a Chicago club for musicians on their night off from other gigs into a nationally-touring, full-time venture. In 2006, Weir himself sat in with DSO for the first of a couple appearances with the band. (Of Weir’s guitar style, Kadlecik offers, “My favorite metaphor is that he did for Jerry what John McLaughlin did for Miles Davis—as an aggressive, intelligent, innovative support and foil.”)

After Lesh listened to some Dark Star Orchestra shows, Weir’s manager Matt Busch e-mailed Kadlecik to inquire about his upcoming plans. That e-mail sat in Kadlecik’s spam folder for a little while, until the guitarist was cleaning it out one day. He soon found himself flying west with his gear for an audition that took place on a mid-summer day in 2009, with the other future DSO members who would join the nascent group.

Weir acknowledges that some of Kadlecik’s vocal intonations and guitar tones “were to me at least, a little uncomfortably reminiscent of Jerry.” However, he was soon won over.

“We had done some looking around and a lot of listening,” he confides. “We were going to audition a bunch of guys but John came in and we got to playing with him and Phil and I decided, ‘Why bother shopping around, this guy’s great.’ His approach is open-ended. He studied the scales that Jerry studied and he has the ability to play with a fluid tonic. If you’re in the key of A, the tonic is A. The way the Grateful Dead played, the tonic could change in a jam and that’s kind of unusual. Most jambands, if they’re going to jam, they pick a key and stick with it.

“If a musician is really good at listening and can hear a shift in the harmonic content of what’s going on and push it in another direction, the jam can find its way into another key—it can modulate. Not all that many musicians are gifted with that ability. We’re not looking to recreate the old days by any means but John’s ability to go with the music trumped what I considered to be the downside—that he tended to sound like Jerry.”

During the course of 1700 Dark Star Orchestra shows, Kadlecik had come to refine his methodology and mode of improvisation. “The one thing I struggled with early on, as a jamming improviser with different bands, is how do you keep all the jams sounding different? How do you avoid recycling the same licks?” the guitarist says. “I’m a believer in the idea that the instrumental melodic components that come with a song have a DNA relationship with that song. Sometimes it’s important to throw that out for spontaneity’s sake or just to rattle cages as it were but there’s still a fractal formula for each song that informs the jam. Even if you throw it out, it’s deliberately not the DNA of that song. So it’s still kind of anti-informing the jam but still giving it its own unique relationship to that song in that moment in the evening.”

It was this approach, in part, that ultimately endeared him to Weir and Lesh. But rather than viewing him as a vehicle to recreate the role of Jerry Garcia, the two realized that his deep knowledge of Garcia’s playing gave him the tools and the vision to help carry the Grateful Dead’s music in an original direction.

“The first song we played together was ‘Playing in the Band,’” Kadlecik remembers. “So, right away, we jumped into it to see where we could take things. It was consciousness altering, leave it at that. I had no idea what Bob and Phil had in mind though. I thought it might be a benefit show. I had no idea they were planning a new band together. After the second day of audition/rehearsal, [Weir and Lesh] pulled the Four Js [Jeff Chimenti, Jay Lane, Joe Russo and John Kadlecik] into a room and told us, ‘We think we have a band, do you want to do it? Can you clear your schedule for 2010?’”

All they needed was a name.

“We were calling it PB and Js for a while,” Lesh laughs. “Then one day we were sitting on my patio and Bob and Natasha [Weir] were over, along with my kids and some other folks. It’s almost uncanny. I said something like, ‘Oh, we need a name,’ and Bob says, ‘We have a name—Furthur.’ Boom that was it. It was just like Jerry and ‘How about the Grateful Dead?’ It was uncanny. It was too perfect. I had to say, ‘ This is a moment.’”

“The good ship Furthur is sort of large in our iconic history,” Weir adds. The name, as many likely recall, comes from the International Harvester school bus that carried Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters around the country, as chronicled by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.