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SFGate has an AP story on Vince, with some nice quotes from Mickey Hart:

“The big thing about Vince was that he had that fearlessness to be able to go and just jump into our madness and just operate on it like it was a normal, everyday procedure,” Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart recalled Saturday. “A lot of people can play but with us they just don’t know how to navigate. Our music is different.”

Suicide is a terrible thing to deal with, for all parties and bystanders. But blaming anyone but the prime actor in a suicide is unjustifiable in virtually every case. We can’t know what drove Vince to it.

I posted this on DeadNet Central just now, and since I’m trying to keep all my thoughts on this matter collected in one place, I’m copying it over here.

I was responding to a post by Joe Jupille.

The really good histories and accounts of all of this are and will be the ones that try to reconcile the darkness and the light that seemed inextricably bound up in the whole thing.

Absolutely, Joe.

Look, this situation is way more complicated than any of us can know. It’s cheap and facile to read nothing but callousness into the way Vince was treated after the demise of the band. It’s not necessarily the wrong way to bet, but I can assure you the truth still lies somewhere in between.

I got to know Vince pretty well after his Dead days. We played a lot of gigs together in various places and configurations. I hung out with him, rehearsed with him, traveled with him, got high with him, sang with him, and performed with him. Vince was sweet, kind, talented, crazy, self-absorbed, obsessed, and a long list of other adjectives – full of contradictions and conflicting impulses, just like the rest of the human universe. He had two completely insane rock’n’roll lifetimes, similar in some ways but also very different; before he joined the Dead he and Lori were flat broke and ready to move to Mexico. Imagine going from zilch to a million dollars a year (literally).

And imagine stepping into a profoundly dysfunctional “family” in which the patriarch is a bizarre combination of Santa Claus, Jesus Christ and Howard Hughes, depending on where you’re standing on what day. Where the roadies have more power than the musicians, and where the fans have an even greater sense of ownership than the most rabid sports fans, and stronger opinions, too.

I’ve always felt that Vince’s unalloyed joy at his good fortune made his bandmates uncomfortable after Jerry’s passing, because everyone else in that scene was so deeply conflicted about their role in Jerry’s demise. This is, of course, “coffee-table psychoanalysis at its cheapest” (Jerry’s wonderful phrase), but still.

Nobody’s entirely clean in this story, but nor is anyone entirely to blame. Go ahead and use this as an excuse to boycott what’s left of the Grateful Dead music scene if it makes you feel better, but there’s no high principle in operation: every shitty thing you think you’re seeing now has been happening for years and years, and it didn’t stop you from enjoying the music back then.

Vince Welnick died on June 2, an apparent suicide. From the San Jose Mercury News story: “…he’d never seen the likes of such music, friendship and spirit and did not know if he ever would again.”

Vince’s webmaster, Mike Lawson, posted a tirade on Vince’s site.

We can’t know all that went down between Vince and the band. He arrived on the scene very late in the story, and at a time when his own professional life wasn’t going all that well. So it’s no surprise that he spoke of “believ[ing] in Santa Claus” at Jerry’s memorial.

I played with Vince in a variety of settings, and one thing I can tell you for certain is that Vince Welnick was a skillful, talented and inspired musician. I learned a lot from him, and we had some really good times together. One of my favorite touring experiences of all time was in 2003 when Vince and I played some gigs in Arizona with XTraTicket, and we were joined by Jerry Lawson of the Persuasions. Singing with those two was a huge thrill.

I have to head out for a gig. I’ll add more thoughts to this post in the next day or so.

John Rottet posted a couple of nice shots of Vince: #1, #2

November 2003 interview @ jambands.com

From Don McAllister, posted here with permission:

As someone who was busting Vince’s chops only just last week, I feel acutely
ill right now. The post from his webmaster is shattering–even though there’s nothing in it I didn’t sort-of already know.

Vince, if you can hear me, I never meant anything personally–I just felt you weren’t the right guy for the band. At the same time, I can imagine how magical it must have been for you. I looked at you on 9-7-90, the first show back after Brent, and I said, well son, you’ve stepped right smack into the pot o’ gold with this gig. The energy in the room was amazing. A rainbow had appeared over the arena that afternoon, a strange, circular rainbow almost directly overhead (others saw this too–not an
hallucination.) I said, well that’s the Big Guy (in whom I do not actually believe) letting us know that he approves of the Grateful Dead carrying on in this stalwart fashion, spitting in the eye of tragedy, and declaring that We Will Survive.

Vince is to be thanked for helping to make this possible rather than derided, but I’ve spent the last eleven years sort-of blaming him for Jerry’s decline. I’ve been looking for anyone and anything to blame–I’m even writing a novel about it–and it was easy to say, oh, part of the problem was this guy they hired on keys, Jerry’s got no rapport with him, he can’t hang with the big dogs, he doesn’t have the chops.

I was so down on his playing that at the Family Reunion, I acknowledged that it was shitty to exclude him, but because my friend Rob Barraco was playing instead, that’s all that mattered to me. Once I picked up my VIP passes and excellent tix I didn’t give Vince another thought…
L

Until walking around at Alpine I saw someone with a homemade t-shirt: Where The Fuck Is Vince?? And then I said, jesus, how true, how shitty. But still–I got to go backstage! Cool! Look there’s Barlow! Look there’s Mountain Girl? Who gives a shit where Vince is? Playing in a campground outside the gates of the show? Weird, pathetic, a little sad–but oh wait there’s Kreutzman standing there! And Mickey! And Phil! Vince who?

There may have been no Vince there that day, but now he’s everywhere, including back in my heart. You did us all a favor, Vinnie. You got us the HC Sunshine, you almost got us the Stephen and Cream Puff and who knows what else if only JG hadn’t been so tired, so bored with it all. And to think I wanted to foist some misbegotten responsibility upon you for that which was so far from your control! Shame on me. Shame on me.

-dmac

Update: And another great photo of Vince, with the Tubes.