The Dead’s Keyboard Chair “Cursed” Four Men. Not Him.

Four men who held the Grateful Dead’s keyboard chair are gone — Pigpen, Keith Godchaux, Brent Mydland, Vince Welnick. Tom Constanten is the one the “curse” never touched. Here’s why he walked away clean.

Tom Constanten (“TC”) played keyboards for the Grateful Dead for just 14 months, 1968–1970 — the only man to sit in that chair and leave on his own terms. No overdose, no firing, no drama. He met Phil Lesh at UC Berkeley in 1961, studied avant-garde composition in Europe with Luciano Berio and crossed paths with Boulez and Stockhausen, then programmed computers for the Air Force at Nellis — flying out on three-day passes to record prepared piano, ring modulators and tape loops on Anthem of the Sun.

Discharged November 22, 1968, he played his first official show the very next day. For 14 months he defined the band’s most psychedelic period — the swirling organ behind Dark Star on Live/Dead, St. Stephen into The Eleven, the calliope feel of Mountains of the Moon on Playboy After Dark. But he fought a thin Vox Continental he couldn’t hear over two drummers, he’d stopped taking acid for Scientology while LSD was “the point” for everyone else, and the band was turning toward the country-folk of Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty.

So he left. By mutual agreement, weeks after the infamous 1970 New Orleans drug bust (TC and Pigpen were the only two not arrested). He went on to the Incredible String Band, Dose Hermanos, Harvard, and a 1994 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction wi