The Rex Foundation, Activism, Philanthropy & Next Steps

On Sept. 13, 1988, the media assembled on the United Nations for a press convention. Representatives for the nonprofits Greenpeace, Cultural Survival and Rainforest Motion Community sat earlier than them, alongside the U.N. Setting Programme’s director and three, much less anticipated emissaries: the Grateful Lifeless’s Jerry Garcia, Bobby Weir and Mickey Hart.

The band was about to start a multinight fall run at Madison Sq. Backyard and had determined to make the ninth and last live performance of the stint a rainforest profit. Garcia, Weir and Hart weren’t on the U.N. as rock stars; they had been there as activists.

“Any person has to do one thing,” Garcia instructed the assembled crowd, earlier than including wryly, “In truth, it appears pathetic that it must be us.” Because the viewers applauded and Hart and Weir voiced their settlement, Garcia lower via the din: “This isn’t our common work!” Eleven days later, in a extra acquainted setting, the band invited Bruce Hornsby, Corridor & Oates and Suzanne Vega, amongst different artists, onstage on the sold-out profit present, which grossed $871,875, in keeping with an October 1988 concern of Billboard.

On the press convention, Garcia had stated, “We hope that we are able to empower our personal viewers with a way of with the ability to do one thing instantly and truly having an impact that’s seen not directly.” However he’d additionally expressed the Lifeless’s trepidation regarding activism.

“We don’t need to be the leaders, and we don’t need to serve unconscious fascism,” he stated. “Energy is a scary factor. If you really feel that you just’re near it, you’re feeling such as you need to be sure that it isn’t used for deceptive. So all this time, we’ve prevented making any statements about politics, about alignments of any kind.” Whereas Garcia’s remark wasn’t totally correct — the ’88 profit was removed from the primary time the Lifeless had aligned itself with a trigger — its sentiment was sincere: He understood the affect his beloved band wielded.

“As a younger fan, I actually realized concerning the concern within the rainforest from the Grateful Lifeless after they did that press convention,” recollects Mark Pinkus, who began seeing the band in 1984 and was a university pupil in 1988. “If a band just like the Grateful Lifeless took the time to care a couple of trigger, it positively received our consideration as younger followers.”

For a then-17-year-old David Lemieux, who had began seeing the Lifeless the 12 months earlier than and whose father labored on the U.N. from 1953 to 1973, “it added this large degree of legitimacy to this band I used to be following round” for his dad and mom. “It definitely had me exit and study extra about [the issue],” he displays. “To today, the best way I view the world may be very a lot what I realized from my days on tour — and seeing the Lifeless take a stance that was so large … meant quite a bit to me.”

On the time, Pinkus and Lemieux had been impressionable younger Deadheads. As we speak, they’re central to the Lifeless’s current and future enterprise. Pinkus is president of Rhino Leisure, the Warner Music Group department that publishes the Lifeless’s archival releases, and Lemieux, the band’s legacy supervisor and archivist, is intimately concerned within the curation of these releases.

It’s telling not simply that the Lifeless’s enterprise is shepherded by members of the very group it fostered, however that the band’s philanthropic work particularly resonated with Pinkus and Lemieux from the bounce. The Lifeless’s members haven’t merely been philanthropically energetic for the reason that band’s 1965 formation within the Bay Space — they’ve been forward-thinking, reimagining the potential of the nice works musicians can do and galvanizing different artists to observe of their footsteps. All of the whereas, their activism has ate up — and been fed by — their passionate followers.

“We’re a part of a group, and so the higher the group is doing, the higher we’re doing,” Weir says at present. “Jerry at all times used to say, ‘You get some, you give some again.’ It simply is sensible.” And for the reason that starting, “that’s been our mode of operation,” the Grateful Lifeless’s Invoice Kreutzmann says. “We assist individuals and provides them stuff. It’s simply a great way to reside life. I want that extra individuals on the earth lived life that means, as an alternative of wars and bombings.”

Since Garcia’s loss of life in 1995, the Lifeless’s surviving members have continued to tour — and continued to advocate for the causes that matter to them. That’s why MusiCares, the charitable group that the Recording Academy based in 1989 to help the music group’s well being and welfare, is recognizing the Grateful Lifeless as its 2025 MusiCares Individuals of the 12 months.

“All of it follows in that custom of educating the business what it ought to learn about,” Hart says. “That’s that Grateful Lifeless form of type, the place we simply did it as a result of we knew it was the suitable factor to do. If we wished to do that the remainder of our lives was the thought, we’ve got to do this stuff, as a result of individuals help us — and we reciprocate.”

“All people had everyone’s again within the Haight-Ashbury, and we had been an enormous functioning organism,” Weir recollects. “And we had roles inside the group.”

It’s a crisp, mid-November night in Chicago, the place Weir, 77, has simply spent the afternoon doing what he does greatest: taking part in Grateful Lifeless music. He’s on the town for 2 exhibits on the Auditorium Theatre with the Chicago Philharmonic Orchestra, which is able to accompany him and Wolf Bros, his present solo undertaking, and after rehearsing “Climate Report Suite” and “Terrapin Station” — two of the Lifeless’s densest, most bold compositions — he’s again on his tour bus, reminiscing concerning the band’s early days.

Even then, philanthropy was core to the group. It started performing as The Warlocks in mid-1965, and whereas accounts differ about when, precisely, it modified its title later that 12 months, many imagine it debuted its famed moniker on Dec. 10 — at Mime Troupe Enchantment II, the second in a sequence of advantages for a satirical San Francisco theater troupe that always clashed with native legislation enforcement over free speech.

The primary decade or so of the Lifeless’s philanthropy “is an extremely eclectic combine,” Lemieux says. In San Francisco, the band gigged for radical activists, arts areas, non secular facilities (a Hare Krishna temple, a Zen monastery) and music training. Because the band grew, it performed for hippie communes and music venues, for placing radio staff and bail funds, for the Black Panthers and the Hells Angels. It carried out with the Buffalo (N.Y.) Philharmonic Orchestra in 1970 to help the ensemble; in a live performance that turned considered one of its most revered reside recordings, the Lifeless performed in Veneta, Ore., on Aug. 27, 1972, to avoid wasting the native Springfield Creamery.

“We noticed one thing in want, and we might simply write a examine,” Hart, 81, remembers at present. “The Grateful Lifeless, we by no means considered enterprise. We simply wished to play, play, play.”

“That was actually scrumptious for us, to make everyone blissful,” says Kreutzmann, 78. “As a result of that’s the aim: Make everybody blissful, not simply the band.”

However because the band’s following grew all through the ’70s, that charitable strategy — guided by the band’s beneficiant angle, which meant a number of “yeses” and never many “nos” — turned untenable. It wanted to streamline its operation. “We had at all times been given to group service, however we simply wished to get organized about it,” Weir says, alluding to the tax burden of the band’s preliminary mannequin.

So the Lifeless did one thing that was then novel for a musical act: It began a basis. In 1983, the band’s early co-manager Danny Rifkin (who held plenty of roles within the group’s orbit over time) helped it launch The Rex Basis, named for Rex Jackson, a roadie and tour supervisor for the band who had died in 1976. The inspiration eradicated the necessity for the Lifeless to do the sorts of one-off, cause-based advantages it had achieved beforehand, as an alternative directing earnings from its charitable initiatives into the inspiration, which then disbursed that cash — after approval by its board, which included the band’s members and others in its interior circle — to numerous grant recipients. By refusing to just accept unsolicited grant proposals (functions had been, and nonetheless are, submitted by the Rex board and people within the Lifeless’s prolonged group) and focusing its grants on organizations with small, typically minuscule, budgets, the Lifeless retained the homespun really feel of its earlier charitable efforts.

The Rex Basis shortly turned the first beneficiary of the Lifeless’s philanthropy. The band performed its first Rex advantages in San Rafael, Calif., in spring 1984 and made some extent of staging multishow Rex profit runs — usually within the Bay Space or close by Sacramento — yearly for the remainder of its profession. “They had been simply common gigs, there was no different fanfare, however the cash would go to The Rex Basis,” Lemieux says. “All of us thought that was fairly darn cool. It wasn’t just like the Lifeless performed any much less arduous as a result of it was a profit gig. The Rex Basis mattered to them.”

Over the following decade, the Lifeless performed upwards of 40 Rex advantages. With out the requirement {that a} given present profit a particular charity — and with the bigger grosses Lifeless exhibits now earned — “it allowed the cash to be unfold much more,” Lemieux explains. A beneficiary “wouldn’t be like a multi-multimillion-dollar group that wanted $5,000. It was a $10,000 group that wanted $5,000. That makes an enormous distinction.” (Weir, Hart and Garcia’s widow, Carolyn, and daughter, Trixie, are among the many present-day board members of Rex, which nonetheless holds advantages and disburses grants; in July, Darkish Star Orchestra, which re-creates traditional Lifeless exhibits, performed a profit on the Greek Theatre in Berkeley, Calif., to have fun the inspiration’s fortieth anniversary.)

Throughout this era, the Lifeless additionally continued to play non-Rex advantages for particular causes, together with AIDS analysis and eye-care group Seva. The 1988 rainforest profit was a hybrid — the uncommon Rex profit with pre-announced beneficiaries in Greenpeace, Cultural Survival and Rainforest Motion Community. “These had been all those who we had already funded to of their infancy,” says Cameron Sears, who managed the band within the late ’80s and ’90s and is at present Rex’s govt director. (Because it occurs, Sears’ entrée into the Lifeless’s world as a current faculty grad within the early ’80s was via philanthropy: He’d pitched the band on getting concerned in California water politics.) As Garcia put it on the U.N., “We’ve chosen these teams as a result of we like that direct factor … We don’t like loads of stuff between us and the work.”

The mannequin continues to reverberate via a music business the place it’s now widespread for main artists to have charitable foundations. “The truth that all these bands now have seemed to that mannequin and replicated it, [the Dead] don’t must take credit score for it, though it could rightly belong to them,” Sears says. “They’re simply blissful that persons are doing it. Their imaginative and prescient has had a multiplier impact now all over the world. What Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam are into is perhaps completely different than what Phish is into and is perhaps completely different than what Metallica is into. However collectively, the quantity of philanthropy that’s being generated via all these completely different individuals makes an unbelievable distinction.”

Pull up nearly any bootleg of a Phil Lesh present from 1999 via his loss of life in October, and also you’ll see a observe between the top of the second set and the beginning of the encore, often known as “Donor Rap.” Lesh acquired a life-saving liver transplant in 1998; henceforth, he used his platform to encourage Deadheads to show to their family members and say that, if something occurred to them, they wished to be an organ donor.

After Garcia’s loss of life, the Lifeless’s surviving members remained energetic musically — and philanthropically. When The Different Ones — the primary vital post-Garcia iteration of the Lifeless comprising Weir, Lesh, Hart and a forged of supporting musicians — debuted in 1998, it did so with a profit, elevating greater than $200,000 for the Rainforest Motion Community. All of them championed causes essential to them: Weir with the surroundings and combating poverty, Hart with music remedy and mind well being, Kreutzmann with ocean conservation, Lesh along with his Unbroken Chain Basis, which benefited a litany of issues together with music training. The Rex Basis has additionally remained energetic, supporting a variety of organizations throughout the humanities, training, social justice, Indigenous peoples’ teams and the surroundings.

And, over time, the band members started to work extra intently with MusiCares. Early within the pandemic, Lifeless & Firm — the touring group shaped in 2015 by Weir, Hart and Kreutzmann and rounded out by John Mayer, Oteil Burbridge and Jeff Chimenti — and the Grateful Lifeless launched weekly archival livestreams that raised $276,000 for the group’s COVID-19 Aid Fund. Lifeless & Firm expanded the affiliation to epic proportions on Could 8, 2023, when the band kicked off its last tour at Cornell College’s Barton Corridor in Ithaca, N.Y., the place it performed considered one of its most revered gigs 46 years earlier to the day; the 2023 present raised $3.1 million, with half going to MusiCares and half to the Cornell 2030 Venture, a campus group devoted to sustainability.

“If you wish to speak about making a press release in trendy instances,” Pinkus says, “right here they return to the venue of arguably probably the most well-known Grateful Lifeless present ever, play the tiniest present that they play on a farewell tour, which is all stadiums, after which they flip round and do it as a fundraiser. It actually spoke to every little thing concerning the Grateful Lifeless and Lifeless & Firm’s dedication to giving again.”

“The business is a really harmful place at instances,” Hart says. “If you get engulfed with the more durable facet of the enterprise and fall via the cracks or stumble and also you want some assist getting your mojo again, that’s actually what MusiCares does.”

During the last decade, Activist Artists Administration has helped information the band members’ philanthropic efforts. The corporate is each the supervisor of file for the Grateful Lifeless — a standing conferred by Grateful Lifeless Productions, an entity comprising the band’s dwelling members and representatives of Garcia’s and Lesh’s estates — and co-manages Lifeless & Firm alongside Irving Azoff and Steve Moir of Full Cease Administration. (Kreutzmann toured with Lifeless & Firm from 2015 to 2022 however didn’t seem with the group on its last tour in 2023 or throughout its 2024 Las Vegas Sphere residency. On Dec. 4, Lifeless & Firm introduced it should play 18 exhibits at Sphere in spring 2025; a consultant for the band confirmed the lineup is not going to embrace Kreutzmann.)

“There was this mosaic of unbelievable good works that this band was doing, and there was a sense that we may assist amplify these good works and people {dollars} by placing a bit extra construction and help round it and a bit bit extra intentionality round it, which is what Activist got here in and did,” Activist founding associate Bernie Cahill says.

When discussing the Lifeless’s activism with the band and its associates, phrases like “apolitical” and “nonpartisan” come up usually. As Kreutzmann places it, “It’s rather more enjoyable to see all of the individuals smiling, not half the individuals bickering on the different half.”

“These are goal issues that I feel everybody will agree with,” Lemieux says of causes starting from rainforest preservation to AIDS analysis. “And that’s what the Lifeless had been form of getting on board with and elevating consciousness.”

However whereas it’s true that, each earlier than and after Garcia’s loss of life, the Lifeless’s members have prevented the strident political rhetoric another artists favor, the band has nonetheless superior progressive causes. Within the ’60s, it rubbed shoulders with radical teams in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury. Within the ’80s, when AIDS was a stigmatized matter, it headlined a aid present for Northern California AIDS companies.

That has continued lately. Lifeless & Firm’s Participation Row — an space it allots at its exhibits for nonprofit and charitable companions — has featured entities just like the voter registration group HeadCount and the sustainable-touring group Reverb, amongst different social justice, environmental and public well being organizations, serving to the band to lift greater than $15 million since its 2015 debut. However Lifeless & Firm haven’t shied from utilizing their touring to platform extra contentious causes. The summer season following the Parkland, Fla., highschool taking pictures, Lifeless & Firm included the gun management group March for Our Lives on Participation Row. And after the Supreme Court docket overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, the band displayed pro-choice messages at its exhibits and even bought a “Save Our Rights” shirt benefiting girls’s well being organizations.

“We help artists being genuine,” Cahill says. “If an artist feels known as to talk out … our job is to ensure they’ve all the knowledge in order that they will converse intelligently on the matter. I feel we’ve achieved a extremely good job with that over time. Now we have each protected our shoppers and amplified their positions.”

And the Lifeless’s members have, judiciously, supported political candidates. Weir, Lesh and Hart performed a February 2008 profit dubbed “Deadheads for Obama,” and that fall, Kreutzmann joined them for one more pro-Barack Obama gig. This fall, each Weir and Hart publicly endorsed Kamala Harris. Whereas “you don’t need to inform individuals what to do,” Hart explains, “there are some points you need to converse out [about] in case you really feel proper about it and in case you’re actually behind it.”

Because the Lifeless nears its sixtieth anniversary in 2025 and provides its MusiCares honor to a prolonged listing of accomplishments — induction into the Rock & Roll Corridor of Fame, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, recipients of Kennedy Middle Honors, a recording included within the Library of Congress, amongst quite a few others — its surviving members are emphatic that that is removed from a denouement.

“Clearly, they’re fairly humbled and honored by all of it,” Cahill says. However “they at all times see this stuff as one thing that you just get on the finish of your profession, whenever you’re achieved. And naturally, these guys don’t really feel like that’s the place they’re of their profession. They really feel like they’ve much more forward of them, and I imagine they do.”

Rhino continues to mine the Lifeless’s vault for brand new releases — its ongoing quarterly archival Dave’s Picks sequence helped the band break a file earlier this 12 months beforehand held by Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley for many high 40 albums on the Billboard 200 — and orchestrate merchandising partnerships from Igloo coolers to Nike footwear that guarantee the continuing omnipresence of the band’s iconography. (“We’re at all times open for enterprise — if it feels proper,” Pinkus says.)

Most significantly to Deadheads, Weir, Hart and Kreutzmann are all resolute that they’ll stay on the highway so long as they will; in 2024, Weir toured with Wolf Bros and, together with Hart, staged Lifeless & Firm’s 30-show Sphere residency, whereas Kreutzmann stored his livewire Billy & The Youngsters act alive with Mahalo Lifeless, a three-day November occasion close to his house in Kauai, Hawaii. Final 12 months, Weir toured supporting Willie Nelson, whom he’s shared payments with for many years — and who at 91 is 14 years his senior. “His arms don’t work in addition to they used to,” Weir says. “Nor do mine. However because the years go by, you study to assist the music occur via power of will. And Willie is nearly as good as he’s ever been.”

Willpower is one thing the Lifeless’s surviving members have in spades. “These guys have at all times been the outsider,” Cahill says. “They’ve flourished by being the outsider and by being a maverick and doing issues their very own means. As a result of they’ve written their very own guidelines, they’re not beholden to anyone. They’re not on the lookout for anybody’s approval, and so they proceed to put in writing their very own guidelines and to do issues that encourage them.”

That core ethos is what has pushed, and continues to drive, the Lifeless’s strategy to each its enterprise and its philanthropy — two issues that, because the band continues to be proving to the business at massive, needn’t be mutually unique.

“I would really like to have the ability to have individuals who disagree with me nonetheless be followers of the music or the artwork that I make,” Weir says. “However on the similar time, I’ve received to be true to myself, and I anticipate that they should be true to themselves as properly.”

This story seems within the Dec. 7, 2024, concern of Billboard.