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    Peggy Caserta, Who Wrote a Tell-All About Janis Joplin, Dies at 84

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    Her Haight-Ashbury clothing store was ground zero for the counterculture. But she was best known for a tawdry book — which she later disavowed — published after Ms. Joplin’s death.Peggy Caserta, whose funky Haight-Ashbury clothing boutique was a magnet for young bohemians and musicians, and who exploited her relationship with Janis Joplin in a much-panned 1973 memoir that she later disavowed, died on Nov. 21 at her home in Tillamook, Ore. She was 84.Her partner and only immediate survivor, Jackie Mendelson, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause.The Louisiana-born Ms. Caserta was 23 and working at a Delta Air Lines office in San Francisco when she decided to open a clothing store for her cohort, the lesbians in her neighborhood. She found an empty storefront on Haight Street, near the corner of Ashbury, which she rented for $87.50 a month.At first Ms. Caserta sold jeans, sweatshirts and double-breasted denim blazers that her mother made. Then she added Levi’s pants, which a friend turned into flares by inserting a triangle of denim into the side seams. When the friend couldn’t keep up with the orders, Ms. Caserta persuaded Levi Strauss & Company to make them.She named the place Mnasidika (pronounced na-SID-ek-ah), after a character in a poem by Sappho. “It’s a Greek girls’ name,” Ms. Caserta told The San Francisco Examiner in 1965, for an article about the “new bohemians” colonizing the Haight-Ashbury district.Ms. Caserta was 23 when she opened a clothing store, Mnasidika, in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco.via Wyatt MackenzieWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Phil Lesh’s Life in Pictures

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      Phil Lesh, the bassist and a charter member of the Grateful Dead who was 84 when he died on Friday, will be remembered as a versatile musician and a pioneer for his instrument of choice.Lesh co-wrote songs and was an occasional lead vocalist across his 30-year career with the rock band. But his skill at soaring improvisation and his chemistry with the band’s lead guitarist, Jerry Garcia, ensured that Lesh would also be seen as a main character.Here are some snapshots from Lesh’s life and career.Paul Ryan/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesPhil Lesh, Bob Weir and Jerry Garcia in 1965 as the Warlocks before they became the Grateful Dead.Ron Rakow/Retro Photo ArchiveLesh on Ashbury Street in 1968.Associated PressThe Grateful Dead with reporters in San Francisco in 1967.Don Paulsen/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesFrom left, Bill Kreutzmann on drums, Lesh and Weir at the Cafe Au Go Go in New York in 1967.Leni Sinclair/Getty ImagesFrom left, Garcia, Lesh and Weir in Ann Arbor, Mich., in 1967.Malcolm Lubliner/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesSan Francisco, 1968.Chris Walter/WireImage, via Getty ImagesThe Dead in 1970, clockwise from top left: Weir, Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, Ron McKernan, Mickey Hart and Garcia.Robert Altman/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesSan Francisco, 1970.Bettman/Getty ImagesThe Dead in the late ’60s.Ed Perlstein/Redferns, via Getty ImagesFrom left, Garcia, Weir and Lesh in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, 1975.Ron Rakow/Retro Photo ArchiveLesh at Hollywood Bowl, 1974.Mark Sullivan/Getty ImagesLesh, at right, with David Crosby, left, and Ned Lagin, who both played briefly with the Dead.Ed Perlstein/Redferns, via Getty ImagesSan Francisco, 1978Roger Ressmeyer/Corbis and VCG, via Getty ImagesWeir and Lesh.Roger Ressmeyer/Corbis and VCG, via Getty ImagesWeir and Lesh at a recording studio in San Rafael, Calif.Roger Ressmeyer/Corbis and VCG, via Getty ImagesThe Dead in 1982, from left: Brent Mydland, Lesh, Kruetzmann, Weir, Garcia and Hart.Tim Mosenfelder/Getty ImagesRed Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado in 1987.Thearon W. Henderson/Getty ImagesHart, Wier and Lesh with the mascot of the San Francisco Giants in 2011.Jason Henry for The New York TimesLesh at Terrapin Crossroads in San Rafael, Calif.Associated PressThe Dead at Soldier Field in Chicago in 2015.Jason Henry for The New York TimesLesh at Terrapin Crossroads in 2015.Astrida Valigorsky/Getty ImagesAt the Great South Bay Music Festival in Patchogue, N.Y., last year. More

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      Phil Lesh Didn’t Hold Songs Down. He Lifted Them Higher.

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      Some rock bassists make it their job to hold down the bottom of a song: to hone parts that crisply but unobtrusively stake out a harmonic and rhythmic foundation, that are felt as much as heard. Phil Lesh, a founding member of the Grateful Dead who died on Friday at 84, wasn’t one of them. Instead, Lesh’s playing carried songs aloft.In the telepathic tangle of the Grateful Dead’s arrangements — never played the same way twice — Lesh’s bass lines hopped and bubbled and constantly conversed with the guitars of Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir. His tone was rounded and unassertive while he eased his way into the counterpoint, almost as if he were thinking aloud. Lesh’s playing was essential to the Dead’s particular gravity-defying lilt, sharing a collective mode of rock momentum that was teasing and probing, never bluntly coercive.Jerry Garcia, left, and Phil Lesh rehearse with the Grateful Dead in San Francisco in the 1970s.Ed Perlstein/Redferns, via Getty ImagesLesh wasn’t a rock-and-roller by training or inclination. His 2005 memoir, “Searching for the Sound,” notes that his first instruments were violin and trumpet, that he soaked up classical music and big-band jazz, that he studied music theory and composition and drew life-changing inspirations from John Coltrane and Charles Ives. He and Tom Constanten, the Dead’s early keyboardist, were the band’s avant-garde contingent, a key aspect of the Dead’s ever-evolving improvisational fusion.For all their free-form interludes, the Dead’s songs had clear landmarks and structures — some of them far trickier than the band’s nimble performances would let on. Lesh could stick to a riff, as he dutifully did in the intro to “Touch of Grey,” the Dead’s only Top 10 (and only Top 40) single. But when the verse arrived, he was footloose again: nudging, scurrying, syncopating from below. His bass lines held hints of Bach, jazz, bluegrass, blues, Latin music and far more, as he sought out new interstices each time through a song.Phil Lesh performing with the Dead at Woodstock in 1969. Archive Photos/Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Phil Lesh Made Organ Donation His Personal Cause

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      For the past 25 years, the founding member of the Grateful Dead made a nightly speech about a topic that helped him stay performing into his 80s.The Grateful Dead and its various successors and offshoots were famous for making sure no two concerts were the same, changing their set lists with each performance. But since the late 1990s, at most every show featuring the original bassist Phil Lesh, who died Friday at 84, there was one thing that kicked off each encore.It was not a song, exactly, but a brief monologue from Lesh urging everyone in the audience to declare themselves organ donors. The subject was personal to him: In 1998, at the age of 58 and suffering from chronic hepatitis C, he received a liver transplant.“I’m only alive today,” he said before a 2015 concert featuring the three other original living members of the Grateful Dead, “because a man named Cody decided he wanted to be an organ donor. And he did it in the simplest way possible: He turned to someone who loved him and he loved, and said, ‘Hey, if anything happens to me, I’d like to be an organ donor.’”As he told the music magazine Relix in 2002, “If you need an organ, or someone you love needed an organ and one was available, would you accept it? Of course you would. Well, fair is fair. If you’re willing to accept it, then you should be willing to be a donor, as well.”Lesh’s transplant came just three years after the death of Jerry Garcia, his fellow founding Grateful Dead member. Lesh insisted the transplant saved his life and enabled him to undertake a formidable touring schedule for the next few decades with Dead successors such as Furthur and his own band, Phil Lesh and Friends.The pre-encore speech became such a concert mainstay that fans and websites that track set lists for Lesh’s bands would often include it: “Donor Rap” or “Phil’s Donor Rap.”Six years ago, Phil Lesh and Friends played a benefit for the American Transplant Foundation at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre outside Denver in honor of the 20th anniversary of Lesh’s transplant.“We didn’t need to sell him on anything,” the foundation’s executive director, Anastasia Henry, recalled in a brief interview Friday. “He had zero requirements — very simple.”At the encore, before renditions of “Fire on the Mountain” and perhaps the most notable Lesh-penned Grateful Dead song, “Box of Rain,” Lesh gave his donor rap. Referring to his liver donor solely by his first name, Lesh said that he wasn’t the only beneficiary of Cody’s decision, and that he helped half a dozen people live after his death. “Me and Cody,” he added, “have had a great relationship for 20 years.” More

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      Phil Lesh, Bassist Who Anchored the Grateful Dead, Dies at 84

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      One of the first rock bassists whose instrument regularly took a lead role, he also had a hand in writing some of the band’s best-known songs.Phil Lesh, whose expansive approach to the bass as a charter member of the Grateful Dead made him one of the first performers on that instrument in a rock band to play a lead role rather than a supporting one, died on Friday. He was 84.His death was announced on his Instagram account. No further information was provided.In addition to providing explorative bass work, Mr. Lesh sang high harmonies for the band and provided the occasional lead vocal. He also co-wrote some of the band’s most noteworthy songs, including ones that inspired adventurous jams, like “St. Stephen” and “Dark Star,” as well as more conventional pieces, like “Cumberland Blues,” “Truckin’” and “Box of Rain.”Key to the dynamic of The Dead was the way Mr. Lesh used the bass to provide ever-shifting counterpoints to the dancing lines of the lead guitarist Jerry Garcia, the curt riffs of the rhythm guitarist Bob Weir, the bold rhythms of the drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, and, in the band’s first eight years, the warm organ work of Ron McKernan, known as Pigpen.A source of particular excitement was the relationship between Mr. Lesh’s instrument and Mr. Garcia’s. At times they mirrored each other. At other times they contrasted, in the process widening the music’s melodic nuances while helping to create the kind of variety and tension that allowed the band to improvise at length without losing the listener.Mr. Lesh’s bass work could be thundering or tender, focused or abstract. On the Grateful Dead’s studio albums, his lines held so much melody that one could listen to a song for his playing alone. At the same time, he shared his bandmates’ love for unusual chord structures and uncommon time signatures. In constructing his bass parts, he drew from many sources, including free jazz, classical music and the avant-garde.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kennedy Center Honorees Include Francis Ford Coppola and the Apollo

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      The renowned Harlem theater will be the first institution to receive the honor. Artists being recognized are Bonnie Raitt, Arturo Sandoval and the Grateful Dead.When Bonnie Raitt heard she had been chosen as a Kennedy Center honoree, she kept asking her manager: Are they sure?Raitt, whose song “Just Like That …” beat out higher-charting pop acts last year to win the Grammy for song of the year, said the honor was a surprise because after years of recognition mostly confined to blues and Americana spaces, she did not consider herself a mainstream artist.“I don’t live by the validation of either commercial success or getting awards,” Raitt, 74, said. “But because this is such an esteemed weekend and event and process, I don’t think there will ever be anything that I receive that is as important.”“I don’t think there will ever be anything that I receive that is as important,” Bonnie Raitt said of the Kennedy Center Honors.Peter Fisher for The New York TimesRaitt will receive a lifetime artistic achievement award at the 47th Kennedy Center Honors on Dec. 8 along with the filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, the beloved rock band the Grateful Dead, the Cuban American jazz trumpeter and composer Arturo Sandoval and the Harlem landmark the Apollo Theater.The Kennedy Center Honors will be broadcast on Dec. 23 by CBS and streamed on Paramount Plus.In the past, entities such as “Sesame Street” and “Hamilton,” have been honored, but the Apollo will be the first institution to be recognized. The theater is renowned for its history as a debut venue for many Black performers at its famed amateur nights, including Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Ultimate Dad Rock Playlist

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      What is dad rock? You know it when you hear it, so listen to 10 songs from Wilco, the Grateful Dead, Steely Dan and more.Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, the patron saint of dad rockEnric Fontcuberta/EPA, via ShutterstockDear listeners,This Sunday is Father’s Day, and I would like to celebrate the only way I know how — with a playlist of dad rock.What is dad rock? You know it when you hear it, but it’s difficult to define exactly, as I learned when I considered the supposed genre in an essay I wrote four Father’s Days ago*. One thing I want to make clear is that, while it’s an easy concept to poke fun at, I don’t consider the term “dad rock” to be an insult, per se. A lot of great music falls into the category, and you certainly don’t have to be a dad to enjoy it. Much of what I was grappling with in that essay was the fact that, in my 30s, I have come around to loving a lot of what I once dismissed as “dad music.” Perhaps, spiritually speaking at least, I am a dad.I associate dad rock with a certain laid-back, lived-in proficiency — an age and comfort level at which you no longer feel you have to prove your virtuosity but can just sit back and let it speak for itself. Accordingly, quite a few of the songs I’ve chosen here represent bands (Wilco, the Who and Pink Floyd, to name a few) in the middle years of their careers, polishing the rougher edges of their sounds while remaining indelibly themselves. Quite a few — from artists like Steely Dan, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Bruce Springsteen — are straight from my own dad’s record collection, and, as you’ll see below, he even makes a cameo, offering a corrective to his only complaint about this newsletter.Last week, a website I had never heard of called Merchoid conducted a questionably scientific poll that asked 3,000 Americans, “Which band truly epitomizes dad rock today?” The names that appeared in the Top 10 responses were horrifying: Nickelback, Blink-182, Red Hot Chili Peppers … Limp Bizkit?! Sure, I get that time marches on and that the pop-punk and nü-metal fans of yesteryear are aging into fatherhood. But something about the antic scatting of the Chili Peppers or the teenage-boy humor of Blink-182 does not square with the easygoing cool I associate with dad rock.So consider this playlist a rejoinder to that list, or maybe just an argument starter. But whatever you do, make sure you consider it The Amplifier’s way of saying happy Father’s Day.Turn it up! That’s enough,Lindsay*My own father really enjoyed the article, except the part where I told the entire readership of The New York Times that he used to drive a Ford Taurus. Sorry, Dad.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Bill Walton’s Long, Special Relationship With the Grateful Dead

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      “It wasn’t like he was a fan,” the drummer Mickey Hart said. “He was part of our family.”Bill Walton played 604 basketball games in college and the N.B.A. over the course of his Hall of Fame career. But Walton, who died Monday from cancer at 71, wrote in a 2016 autobiography that he had attended more than 869 concerts by his most beloved musical act, the Grateful Dead.“He loved the Grateful Dead I believe as much as we in the Grateful Dead have loved the Grateful Dead,” Mickey Hart, one of the band’s two drummers and a good friend of Walton’s, said in an interview.“It wasn’t like he was a fan,” added Hart, who is currently performing a residency with a successor act, Dead & Company, at the Sphere in Las Vegas. “He was part of our family.”Walton grew up in San Diego and first became famous for his basketball skills at U.C.L.A., where he won two national titles under the legendary coach John Wooden. Over a professional career attenuated by injuries, he earned a Most Valuable Player Award and championship titles with the Portland Trail Blazers and the Boston Celtics.Walton and the Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart at a 2011 N.B.A. game in Sacramento. Rocky Widner/NBAE, via Getty ImagesHe stayed famous, including as a prolific television commentator, thanks to a winningly oddball style and crunchy interests, like cycling and left-leaning politics. And his personality seemed perfectly suited for — and summarized by — his lifelong love of his fellow California institution, the Grateful Dead.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Excavating Jerry Garcia’s Crucial Bluegrass Roots

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      In 1964, the guitarist took a road trip, hoping to become Bill Monroe’s banjo player. The journey, and his longtime love of the genre, shaped the Grateful Dead.Just off the lobby of the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum is the “picking room” — a cozy, glass-enclosed corner where visitors are encouraged to grab any of the guitars, banjos and fiddles hanging on the wood-paneled walls and play. Located on the Ohio River 35 miles northwest of Rosine, the small farming community that produced the bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe, the museum’s readily available instruments and neighborly spirit are no surprise.What is unexpected? The 1961 Chevy Corvair sticking out of a wall upstairs in the museum’s main hall and the newly unveiled exhibit it anchors: an in-depth look at the Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia’s long and often intense love affair with bluegrass music.Best known as the standard-bearer for San Francisco’s psychedelic sound and the house band for Ken Kesey’s storied Acid Tests, Grateful Dead concerts were not a big draw in the beating red heart of bluegrass country. Of the more than 3,500 shows Garcia played with the Dead and his own bands, only seven were in Kentucky. But the subsequent emergence of the “jamgrass” scene — a bluegrass cousin to the bands who take a cue from the Dead in emphasizing extended improvisations — is one of the ways that time and a widening appreciation have proved the Dead to be one of the most American of bands. It’s also given Garcia a new kind of cultural heft and near-mythological status, 28 years after his death.The new exhibit “Jerry Garcia — A Bluegrass Journey” will run for two years at the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum.Chris StegnerMusicians and listeners alike have long singled out “Old & in the Way,” a 1975 LP from one of Garcia’s side projects, as the gateway recording that introduced them to bluegrass. But much of “Jerry Garcia — A Bluegrass Journey,” the imaginative and carefully curated show that recently began a two-year run at the museum, is built around an intriguing and less well-known event in Garcia’s career: Before forming the Grateful Dead, he aspired to a career as a bluegrass musician and undertook a 1964 cross-country musical pilgrimage, largely in the hope of landing a job as Monroe’s banjo player.“I’ve been with the museum for 13 years and an exhibit on Jerry Garcia has always been on the back burner,” said its curator, Carly Smith. Those discussions were pushed to the forefront when the museum moved in 2018 to a new 64,000-square-foot home that enhanced its ability to present detailed exhibits and includes superb indoor and outdoor performance spaces. Though the pandemic necessitated a two-year delay, the show is an ambitious bid to highlight a little-known connection and build bridges between genres and audiences. Mounted with the cooperation of Garcia’s family, it includes a dozen of his instruments, numerous clippings, artifacts and mementos and a well-researched narrative of Garcia’s formative years on the Bay Area’s folk scene.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More