Vince Welnick Never Had a Chance With the Dead
Vince Welnick was the safe pick — and that is exactly why he never had a chance. When Brent Mydland died in 1990, the Grateful Dead didn’t reinvent themselves; they chose the candidate who wouldn’t change a thing, built him a role with no room to matter, and then forgot him.
By 1990 the Grateful Dead were no longer six men on a stage. They were a touring institution with hundreds of employees, and Jerry Garcia told Rolling Stone the band had become “a board of directors,” “running on inertia,” kept moving by a “huge overhead” of people depending on the next show. So when Brent Mydland died, the question wasn’t who could push the band somewhere new — it was who could be plugged in without disrupting the tour. Bill Kreutzmann admits it in his memoir: Vince Welnick, the synthesizer player from the Tubes, was his “least favorite” candidate, voted in “by default” to keep the “fame-and-fortune machine alive.”
They wanted Bruce Hornsby, but he wouldn’t go full-time. So they hired Welnick for one thing — he could sing the high harmonies — handed him ten cassettes covering a 120-plus-song catalog, and gave him ten days to learn it before the September tour opener at Richfield Coliseum. Don’t innovate. Don’t disrupt. Play Brent’s old rig, fill the textures, stay out of Hornsby’s lane. The band that built its name on improvisation barely rehearsed anymore; when Phil Lesh wanted to revive “Unbroken Chain,” running it four or five times was rare enough to remember.
Hornsby left in 1992
The Shakedown Archives publishes new research on Grateful Dead history each week. If you enjoyed this essay, you can subscribe to the companion YouTube channel below.
Subscribe on YouTube