New Grateful Dead book digs up skeletons in the closet

Phil Lesh performs at Levi’s Stadium in 2015. The musicians didn’t use a band name for the Fare Thee Well tour. Phil Lesh performs at Levi’s Stadium in 2015. The musicians didn’t use a band name for the Fare Thee Well tour. Photo: Loren Elliott / The Chronicle 2015 Photo: Loren Elliott / The Chronicle 2015 Image 1 of / 32 Caption Close New Grateful Dead book digs up skeletons in the closet 1 / 32 Back to Gallery

The devil has a friend. His name is Phil Lesh.

This is the controversial undercurrent of Joel Selvin’s new history, “Fare Thee Well: The Final Chapter of the Grateful Dead’s Long, Strange Trip,” ($27; Da Capo Press). The book follows the San Francisco band’s “Core Four” of Lesh, Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann as they dealt with the sudden death of father figure and frontman Jerry Garcia while he was in rehab in 1995. The first response was to disband the Grateful Dead. The second response was to spend 20 years patching it back together, leading to the final concert series in 2015, which gave the book its title.

The subplot is that during his research, Selvin, a former music critic for The Chronicle, learned of the deep rifts within the Core Four, particularly between bassist Lesh — along with his wife, Jill — and the other members.

“It turned out that Phil and his wife were Macbeth and Lady Macbeth,” Selvin recently said in his basement record library, with “Friend of the Devil,” from the Dead’s “American Beauty,” playing on the turntable. “Their heads were turned by power.”

The book was released Tuesday, June 19, and Selvin makes his first appearance Wednesday night, June 20, at Book Passage in Corte Madera, a few freeway exits from the music club Terrapin Crossroads, owned by the Leshes.

“This is going to be interesting meeting the public on this one,” Selvin said. “There already seems to be a wide disparity of views on the book, and it hasn’t even been published yet.”

Though Selvin conducted extensive interviews with Weir, the guitarist and singer who along with percussionist Hart became the marquee star after the death of Garcia, Kreutzmann, the other drummer, agreed at first to be interviewed by Selvin but eventually declined. Selvin says Lesh was the only band member who did not respond to email entreaties or interview requests that Selvin submitted via intermediaries.

Selvin was not waiting by the phone. Lesh has not spoken to him since he described him in a 1997 concert review as looking “like Ichabod Crane.”

More Information “Fare Thee Well” book signings: 7 p.m. Wednesday, June 20. Book Passage, 51 Tamal Vista Road, Corte Madera; 7 p.m. Thursday, June 21. Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz; 7 p.m. Friday, June 22. Copperfield’s Books, 140 Kentucky St., Petaluma; 7:30 p.m. Monday, June 25. The Bindery, 1727 Haight St., S.F. Joel Selvin dissects the Dead on his whiteboard: http://bit.ly/joelselvin

“This story that Joel has done is entirely new,” said Dennis McNally, author of “A Long Strange Trip,” the only authorized biography of the Grateful Dead. McNally, the band’s longtime publicist, said the book is “99 percent accurate. There certainly are details about the inner workings of the band that have never been put in print before.”

Upon seeing these inner workings in print, two leading Grateful Dead journalists, Blair Jackson and David Gans, withdrew their offers to blurb the book.

“This is a valid story, and Joel is within his rights to be telling it,” said Gans , co-host of a talk show on the SiriusXM Grateful Dead channel. “But it is going to upset people. It is going to reopen old wounds.”

Photographer Jay Blakesberg sold Selvin images of the band, then abruptly canceled the deal and sent back the check.

“I decided on my own that I couldn’t sleep at night if I participated in this book,” said Blakesberg, just back from photographing Dead & Co. in concert in New York. “The Grateful Dead are at a high point in all places, and I want my work to be associated only with good things.”

Selvin can understand the resistance of all these sources. Rock is often a small and vindictive world with new money and old grudges. In their position, Selvin would have turned him down too, he said.

Phil and Jill Lesh did not respond to requests for comment. In addition to a portrayal of Jill Lesh that would have made Yoko Ono look like the healer of the Beatles, Selvin goes after Phil Lesh’s musicianship. By Selvin’s telling, Lesh did the band a disservice by his insistence on singing songs that were once handled by Garcia and would thereafter have been handled better by just about anybody other than Lesh.

“Fare Thee Well” is Selvin’s 15th book on rock ’n’ roll and follows his 2016 bestseller “Altamont: The Rolling Stones, the Hells Angels and the Inside Story of Rock’s Darkest Day.” Sorting out the details of one homicide and three other deaths in a mob of 300,000 in 1969 was easy compared with sorting out the zigzagging plotlines of the Dead after Garcia.

To make sense of it, co-author Pamela Turley set up a whiteboard in Selvin’s Potrero Hill dining room — made available as an office/war room after Selvin’s most recent divorce. The board was crammed with details to map out the shifting of personal alliances and regroupings into the spinoff bands RatDog, the Other Ones, Phil Lesh and Friends, the Dead, Dead and Co., Furthur, 7 Walkers and so on.

The band and its offshoots have run through so many names that they did not bother to give a name to the band that played the Fare Thee Well series in Santa Clara and Chicago.

Though Selvin contributed liner notes to a Grateful Dead box set, he does not consider himself a Deadhead. In his 40 years as a rock music critic, he attended more Dead shows than any other band he reviewed, but he never attended shows on consecutive nights, which is the line of demarcation.

To make up for this, he read at least two dozen books on the Grateful Dead as background, and in order to make sure his would be different.

One thing Selvin seems assured of is that there will no follow-up to this book. As “American Beauty” nears its symbolic end with “Attics of My Life” on the turntable, Selvin opens “Fare Thee Well” to page 253 and reads aloud from the final line of the book. “Fare Thee Well was a genuine Grateful Dead concert. The last one.”

Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: swhiting@sfchronicle.com. Instagram: sfchronicle_art