Bill the drummer loves the sheep. They trot away from the golf cart as we tool around on his farmland in rural Kaua‘i, the ewes circling to protect the five new lambs. “Twenty-three of ’em,” he says with an avuncular grin. “Aren’t they cool? Look at all the babies hanging out. They’re forming a little clique.” He’s not raising them for meat, he says; he doesn’t like to kill things, which is also why he gave up fishing. I ask what he plans to do with his growing flock—shear them for the wool?

“Feed them to the wolves?” he says, searching my face for sarcasm.

“No, wool!”

“Oh, wool!” he laughs. Maybe it’s the electric whine of the golf cart or the bleating of the sheep. Or maybe it’s that Bill Kreutzmann, now 73, is a little hard of hearing after thirty years as the drummer for what was without doubt the hardest-working band in showbiz, the Grateful Dead. Since they started in 1965, the Dead toured almost continuously, playing more than 2,300 shows until that seemingly unstoppable train came to a halt in 1995 with the death of its reluctant conductor, guitarist Jerry Garcia. Heartsick and adrift, Bill left California to seek solace in Hawai‘i—a not unheard of transition for rockers on the far side of success. Only he didn’t go for beachfront in Mākena or a Kāhala estate. He moved to Anahola, a tiny town on Kaua‘i known for its local character. A couple moves, a couple wives and a couple decades later, Bill the drummer has ended up here, on these twenty acres at the end of an unpaved road on Kaua‘i’s North Shore.

While the area has its own celebrity luster—Todd Rundgren and Mark Zuckerberg aren’t too far away—he couldn’t care less. These days it’s all—well, mostly—about the farm. Bill surveys the verdant rows of organic vegetables and herbs, the orchards of mango and avocado, with the same proud papa look he gave to the sheep. Some of it he’ll share with friends and family, and for a while he was selling at the Kīlauea Farmers Market, but most of this bounty is headed for the Kaua‘i Food Bank, which is perennially in need of fresh, organic produce. “I’ve always wanted to grow stuff, and I didn’t want to compete in a commercial thing,” he says, gesticulating as he speaks the way you’d expect a drummer to do. “But I wanted to provide something for the community, so this is a good way to do it.” He nods approvingly at the fields, saying, “Pretty cool for a drummer!” then adds, as he often will to the end of a sentence, “It’s a good deal.”

Which is also, fittingly, the title of his autobiography, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead, a courageously candid account of his career as the “invisible member” (his term) of and backbone for what was not just a force of gravity in the cultural revolution of the 1960s, but one of the most enduring and influential rock bands in history. The book is filled with the usual rock ’n’ roll hijinks—like the time the band and crew nearly burned down their hotel in an epic fireworks battle; or when Bill raced across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco to San Rafael at 120 miles an hour; or when San Francisco’s “acid king” Owsley Stanley dosed the coffeepot during the shooting of a 1969 Playboy After Dark episode featuring the Dead, launching Hugh Hefner, the film crew and a fluffle of bunnies into orbit (that amusing episode is on YouTube)—as well as other psychedelic and carnal adventures that you’ll have to read the book for because they sure don’t belong in an airline magazine.

Just after Deal was published in 2015, the surviving members of the Grateful Dead reunited for “Fare Thee Well,” a run of five shows at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, and Chicago’s Soldier Field, where the Dead had played their final show before Garcia’s death. As the name suggests, it was to be a farewell and thank-you to the ardent fans—a.k.a. Deadheads —many of whom had supported them since the beginning fifty years before. Filling in for Garcia was Trey Anastasio, guitarist for Phish, the mega jam band that bears the torch for the Dead’s musical ethos of spontaneity and exploration. In an interview with Jeffrey Brown of PBS’ NewsHour just before the sold-out shows at Soldier Field, Bill—sporting his trademark red baseball cap with the name Hanalei embroidered over the visor—lamented the end of the Dead’s long, strange trip but struck a hopeful chord. “I know I’m gonna be playing a lot more,” he told Brown. “I’d like to do it more,” the “it” meaning playing in something like the Dead. But Anastasio had his own train to conduct, and without an heir apparent who could fill Garcia’s enormous shoes, it was far from certain whether or not the Dead would have any enduring afterlife.

“I’m afraid you might be right,” Bill says when I remark that he was part of something that’ll never happen again. “The energy that provides such a cool thing doesn’t last forever. It comes, it gets into its real momentous, happening, happy thing. And then it all goes away.”

As it’s turning out, though, the Dead’s music isn’t going away. It’s carried on in small venues throughout the country, where untold numbers of tribute acts draw from their expansive catalog. But more than that, the latest incarnation, Dead & Company (“my new band,” Bill calls it), is just now growing into a momentous, happening, happy thing. They’re filling stadiums and drawing legions of young fans—due in part to the unlikeliest of psychedelic guitar heroes, a pop star named John Mayer.

“I came here because I was a wreck,” Bill says recounting the story of his move to Hawai‘i in 1996, after “the worst year of my life,” when he lost both his father and his bandmate. “The Grateful Dead ended, and I was just broken in too many pieces. What do you do when when you’ve done something for thirty years and then it’s just gone? So I came to a place I love.” He’d fallen for the Islands in the late 1980s, when, after taking diving lessons with Garcia in Marin County during the recording of In the Dark, they decided to get certified in the tropics rather than the icy waters of Northern California. “He loved it here,” Bill says of Garcia. “The gentleness, the slack key guitar. We were standing on the back of a dive boat in Kona and said, ‘God, let’s move here!’ We both agreed and said, ‘OK, when the band ends, we’ll move to Hawai‘i.’ He was as serious as could be—we shook hands on it.”

But it seemed the band would never end so long as Garcia didn’t; In the Dark went double platinum—the Dead’s first commercially successful album—and they kept up their grueling tour schedule, only now they were packing stadiums and coliseums instead of amphitheaters. Garcia, who’d had to relearn the guitar after recovering from a diabetic coma in 1986, was looking hale and happy. The band was on fire, and the years 1989–1990 are now regarded among fans as a high-water mark in the Dead’s storied if uneven career. But Garcia’s drug addiction eventually got the better of him, and he died shortly after entering rehab. That, for all intents and purposes, was the end of the Grateful Dead. “What a terrible waste that we couldn’t turn him around,” Bill says. “We couldn’t head it off. It was just the saddest thing. He was smarter than almost all his therapists, I guarantee you. He could talk circles around them.”

After the ceremonies and vigils, Bill kept up his end of the handshake and headed for the Islands to put the pieces back together. Kaua‘i took some of the edge off, partly because there he wasn’t Bill the drummer. He was just Billy—not that people had no idea who he was. Once he was sitting by himself on the beach when two huge local fishermen emerged from the water bristling with spearguns, dead fish dangling. They walked straight toward the lone haole. “Oh man, I was so scared,” he says. “They looked like two hulks with dive gear on. I’m like, ‘Holy cow, they filming a movie around here?’ Realest guys I ever saw. They just came up to me, and one said, ‘Sorry to hear about da kine.’ I knew just enough pidgin to know what he meant: Jerry was ‘da kine.’ Blew me away.”

Anahola wasn’t a place many outsiders landed, and Bill had the good luck to get in with a guy he dubbed the “Ayatollah of Anahola,” the late Joseph Kaumuali‘i Rapozo. “Big Joe” took Bill under his wing, taught him how to fish. “I’d go down to the ramp to put my boat in—it’s pretty tough down there, lotta heavy customers,” Bill says. “But I didn’t want to be a tourist in the place I lived, and I had Big Joe in the boat. The guy knew how to fish—when we went out to the buoy in those days, there’d be hundreds of yellowfin, and there’d be thirty boats, lines everywhere, it was crazy. But nobody messed with me because of Big Joe. We’d be just fishing away, my arms would get tired, I’d almost fall apart. I loved it, and we came home with more fish than anybody.”

But nowhere did Kaua‘i extend its healing embrace more lovingly than through Aimee Kreutzmann, née Sharp, Bill’s fifth wife, married now for eleven years (“I finally got it right,” he says. “Only took four times getting it wrong”). The story of their meeting is just a couple steps on the charming side of creepy. Sharp was the longtime deejay for community radio station KKCR’s Grateful Dead & Friends, a Saturday night program for all things Dead, which Bill had been listening to and thinking, “God, I need to meet this woman!” he says. “One night I get a call from someone requesting a weird song from a live show,” Aimee recalls. “I said, ‘Were you at that show?’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Were you at every show?’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Is this Kreutzmann?’ and he said, ‘Yeah! I’m at the gate!’” After she calmed down, she says, she invited Bill up to cohost the rest of the show. “But I didn’t know it’d lead to this!”

Maybe that deal with Garcia was prescient if bittersweet. The two were, after all, supposed to spend their days between the Dead and dying together in Hawai‘i. “He’s here, though,” Bill says. “He’s in my heart,” which, thanks to a handshake on the deck of a Kona dive boat, is no longer a wreck.

“Let me assure you that this adventure is far from over, my friends,” Bill writes at the end of Deal. But in what way was an open question—all of the band members had continued to play, both together and separately, after Garcia’s death, but nothing came close to the scale or magic of the Dead. The success of “Fare Thee Well” had made clear that there was still a hunger for the music, and not just among nostalgic old hippies and Gen-Xers who’d boarded the bus after In the Dark. In February 2015 the Dead’s rhythm guitarist, Bob Weir, appeared as a guest on CBS’ The Late, Late Show to promote the upcoming “Fare Thee Well” shows. John Mayer, who just so happened to be temporarily hosting that night, had recently come across the Dead’s music by chance on satellite radio and jumped at the opportunity to jam with Weir on a swingy Garcia classic, “Althea.” Their chemistry was palpable and Mayer’s chops undeniable. Before long the band was rehearsing with Mayer on the down-low even as they were preparing to say goodbye.

To say that there was skepticism among Deadheads in the know about a blues/rock guitarist who wrote top-forty hits like “Your Body Is a Wonderland” and “Daughters” would be an understatement. But Bill, Weir and Mickey Hart—the Dead’s other drummer—knew they were onto something. “I’d come home from the studio at night and say, ‘Aimee, you wouldn’t believe it. He’s a really, really good guitar player! We throw all this stuff at him, and he’s right on top of it. We can’t shake him.’” Mayer, for his part, dived into mastering the catalog and learned to feel his way through the Dead’s stretched-out, quasi-telepathic jams that drift to strange realms but somehow find their way back so naturally you’d think they’d been rehearsed. Bass player Oteil Burbridge signed on to replace the Dead’s original bassist, Phil Lesh, who’d had enough of touring, and keyboard whiz Jeff Chimenti rounded out the lineup.

When Dead & Company started touring in the fall of 2015, Mayer surprised fans with his technical proficiency and tasty soloing that paid homage but didn’t try to imitate the inimitable Garcia. Fast-forward to 2019; Dead & Company’s nineteen shows between May and July comprised the top-grossing tour of the summer, raking in more than $40 million. During one performance at New York’s Citi Field, Mayer had the privilege of playing “Wolf,” one of Garcia’s iconic guitars. “There’s one register on that guitar that says ‘Jerry,’” a very satisfied Bill tells me when I catch up with him after the tour. “All the frets around that area are worn. So when John goes to those frets, he immediately sounds like Jerry. He can’t help it. So that got me. And he felt honored—‘Jeez, here I am holding this guitar, and these guys love me.’ And we do. He’s really in the pocket now—he’s not just filling in. He’s got purchase.

“I always joke that one good band in a lifetime—the Grateful Dead—is great. But if you get two, that’s really great!” For all the high of being back in the saddle as the backbone of a successful touring band, the road is still hard on a body, and Bill the drummer is relieved to get home to the farm and recharge. “I take a week to regain my balance, and then I’m fine. I feed the chickens, take care of the cow water. I’ve healed and come to love it here, and I don’t want to leave for any reason—well, almost any reason,” he says, tracking an albatross sailing across the cloudless sky. “It’s a good deal!” he shrugs. HH