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Grateful Dead keyboardist dead at 51

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Vince Welnick, the Grateful Dead's last keyboard player and a veteran of several other bands, including the Tubes and Missing Man Formation, has died at age 51, the Grateful Dead's longtime publicist confirmed Saturday.

Welnick died Friday, said Dennis McNally, who declined to release the cause.

Welnick lived in the northern California town of Forestville, but McNally did not know if he died at home or in a hospital.

"His service to and love for the Grateful Dead were heartfelt and essential. He had a loving soul and a joy in music that we were lucky to share," the group said in a statement on its Web site. "Our Grateful Dead prayer for the repose of his spirit: May the four winds blow him safely home."

Welnick was the last in a long line of Grateful Dead keyboardists, several of whom died prematurely, leading some of the group's fans to conclude that the position came with a curse.

Welnick had replaced Brent Mydland, who died of a drug overdose in 1990. Mydland had followed Keith Godchaux, who died in a car crash shortly after leaving the band. And Godchaux had replaced the band's original keyboard player, Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, who died at age 27 in 1973.

Welnick was the last musician to join the group before lead guitarist and unofficial leader Jerry Garcia's death in 1995.

The death hit Welnick particularly hard, McNally said.

"The loss of Jerry obviously affected everybody in the band, but I think in some ways it was just harder on Vince," he said.

Welnick struggled for several years after leaving the Tubes, and embraced the opportunity Garcia and the Dead gave him when they asked him to play keyboards in 1990.

"To lose it within five years hurt him I think maybe worse than anybody else in the band," McNally said.

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Lawrence 'Ramrod' Shurtliff

PETALUMA, Calif. (AP) - Lawrence "Ramrod" Shurtliff, a longtime crew member for the Grateful Dead, died Wednesday of lung cancer. He was 61.

Shurtliff died at Petaluma Valley Hospital, hospital officials said. A lifelong cigarette smoker, he was diagnosed with lung cancer only a few weeks ago.

He got his nickname from Ken Kesey while he was traveling through Mexico with the author.

"I am Ramon Rodriguez Rodriguez, the famous Mexican guide," he boasted - and he was known from then on as Ramrod.

Shurtliff joined the Dead in 1967 as a truck driver and was named president of the Grateful Dead board of directors when the rock group incorporated in the '70s. It was a position he held until the death of guitarist Jerry Garcia in 1995.

Like the rest of the band's few remaining staff, he was laid off last year.

Shurtliff set up and tore down the band's equipment for every Dead show.

He puzzled his way through elaborate situations and circumstances: from the numerous psychedelic dungeons the band played in during the 1960s, to a concert at the base of the Great Pyramids in Egypt in 1977, to the baseball parks the Dead filled during tours of the '80s and '90s.





FROM THE PEN OF ROBERT HUNTER.................................

Elegy for Ramrod

Most never knew his given name.
They called him Ramrod.
Lawrence didn't fit him.
He came down from Oregon,
Prankster sidekick of Cassady,
Kesey and the merry crew,
a silent stoic in a vocable milieu
his heart was stolen by the Grateful Dead.

A country boy, not given to complexity,
his crowning gift was loyalty
for which he was loved more than
the common run of men by friends.
This is not to say more than was so,
the common fault of eulogies
which shine the silver of modest virtue
into the gold of rareness.

Every soul owes life a death.
Between each heartbeat is a moment
within which the pulse is still.
In the longer beat between life and death
a man was here we called a friend,
a father, a husband and a son.
He is us and we are him,
his death is ours, our lives are his.

Some see Heaven as dying's recompense,
some acknowledge only nothingness
in a space we know not of,
in a place we know not where.
But this we know, as a poet said:
"To have been here but the once
Never can be undone."

Some will pray, some just remember.
Those who pray, having prayed,
will go on to pray for others.
Those who remember,
having remembered for awhile,
will in the course of time forget,
more so as the years dissolve.
This is as it should be
lest death overstep its bounds
and impinge too much on life.
Life, being what is, cannot
impinge too much on death.

The circumstance we most desire
in grief which shakes our branches
like some holy hurricane raging
through this barren world of little light,
is that our brother be gathered in glory.
If so, rejoice! If wishful thinking,
give thanks instead
that he was here among us.
Delivered from the testing fire of pain,
a truer heart was never broken.

May 17, 2006

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CRUISE ATTACKS PSYCHIATRIC DRUGS AGAIN

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NOT REALLY!



Although you offer great cleavage shots from time to time, you honey buns are NUCKIN FUTS!!!!!

And to think you were just resigned to three more years on that fucking show.

THIN THE HERD!

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