SUMMER TOUR The Dead -- minus Grateful -- rolls on

The band sports new members, new numbers.
SACRAMENTO BEE
The Grateful Dead played its last show with Jerry Garcia nine years ago this month. A month after that, Garcia was dead.
And that, it seemed, was that. The notion of the Grateful Dead going on was unthinkable.
But it has. The Dead -- minus the "Grateful" as well as Garcia -- is well into its summer tour with its four surviving members: guitarist/singer Bob Weir, bassist/singer Phil Lesh and drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann.
Weir, for one, denies that anything essential has changed.
"The band has always been a democracy," he says by cell phone from the band's tour bus. "Jerry was never the boss ... more like something akin to paterfamilias, I suppose. But it's not that different now, except Jerry's opinion is not there for us."
Additions
The original four are augmented by keyboardist Jeff Chimenti and two guitarists -- Jimmy Herring, late of several of the "jam bands" inspired by The Dead, and Warren Haynes, who, in addition to being among the best guitarists on the planet, is also a fine singer.
Together, they debuted in February with a show in San Francisco, then went into rehearsals, re-emerging at the Bonnaroo music festival in Tennessee, where they launched the current "Wave That Flag" tour June 11.
The band's focus has always been squarely on the music, as opposed to personalities, and on pushing its boundaries. The approach of the current edition of the Dead is apparently marked by an even greater taste for improvisation, which grew during the members' time off. Drummer Hart led his own world music groups, Weir fronted the increasingly improvisational Ratdog, and Lesh led the loose-knit Phil Lesh and Friends, which eventually solidified into a lineup that included new Dead guitarists Haynes and Herring.
"We're pretty light on our feet," says Weir.
In addition to improvisation, the band's restless nature has led its members to explore songs far beyond their established repertoire. In addition to playing songs they haven't played in 30 years -- "Dupree's Diamond Blues," "Alligator" and "Cosmic Charley" among them -- they're trying out a slew of cover tunes that go beyond comfortable classics by Bob Dylan, Neil Young and The Band.
With a repertoire of nearly 200 songs, Weir says that the band has, after six two-set shows, repeated only a couple of songs, and they have several more sets in them before they start repeating themselves.
"We just couldn't go back and play a classic 'hits' set because that was like rolling off a log," he says. "We would have been bored."
Weir, whose boyish good looks were once a contrast to Garcia's grizzled visage, now sports an unruly gray beard himself. And he has been learning a number of songs -- Grateful Dead songs -- that he hadn't learned before, since they were sung by Garcia. Weir, Lesh and Haynes split Garcia's vocals among them.
Haynes is also learning those songs, and is thrilled to be doing so.
"I've inherited a bunch of those ballads," he says, naming "Stella Blue," "Comes a Time" and "Morning Dew."
The other part of Haynes is his fretwork, which is among the very best on the road. Rolling Stone named him No. 23 on its recent list of the Top 100 Rock Guitarists of all time (Garcia was No. 13).
He got that attention by fronting his own band, Gov't Mule, playing with Phil and Friends, and above all, for his role taking over for another great classic rock guitarist, the late Duane Allman of the Allman Brothers Band. Haynes has been with the revitalized Allmans since 1989.
"I've sorta done this before," says Haynes, on his role filling a giant's shoes. "And it's easy to be intimidated if you want to dwell on it, but when I joined the Allmans, that was stepping into a pretty high-pressure slot. I try not to think of it that way."