The surviving members of the Grateful Dead have revealed that they were working on plans for a 60th-anniversary reunion before the passing of Phil Lesh.
Lesh, the co-founder and bassist of the San Francisco band, died back in October at the age of 84. A statement shared on social media at the time said that he “passed peacefully” and was “surrounded by his family and full of love”.
In an interview with Anthony Mason of CBS This Morning, Grateful Dead members Bobby Weir, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart opened up about how they were considering a reunion to celebrate the band’s 60th anniversary next year with Lesh and had scheduled time to rehearse. The interview took place only five days after the passing of the bassist.
“I was hoping that we could play with him again one more time,” Kreutzmann said. “So that, that was my sadness…’Cause I know he wanted to play with us again too.”
“We were kickin’ it around,” Weir added. “In fact, we were gonna, we were gonna get together and, and kick some songs around tomorrow.”
“I was hopin’ that we could do it,” Kreutzmann said, with Weir adding, “We were gonna see where it goes. But we were just gonna play the four of us.”
Next month, the Grateful Dead will be recognized as part of the 2024 Kennedy Center Honors.
In other news, the band’s late frontman Jerry Garcia’s voice has been recreated with the use of artificial intelligence (AI) for books, articles, PDFs and more.
The late icon’s estate partnered with ElevenLabs – an AI voice company and an app – to recreate Garcia’s voice and read out audiobooks, e-books, articles, poetry, fan stories, PDFs and more in 32 different languages.