DEAD’S CHARITY FINDS NEW LIFE
The Grateful Dead's Rex Foundation is experiencing a resurgence in support and activity
by Paul Liberatore
Marin Independent Journal
WHEN JERRY Garcia died in 1995, the Rex Foundation, the Grateful Dead's charitable organization, nearly expired with him.
Between 1984 and Garcia's death six years ago, the foundation gave away $7 million to hundreds of diverse charities, from homeless organizations and AIDS research to the Rainforest Action Network and the Lithuanian Olympic basketball team.
The money came from up to four concerts year that the Grateful Dead performed solely to support Rex, which it had. named after Rex Jackson, a band roadie killed in a 1974 car crash in Mill Valley.
When the Dead stopped touring after Garcia died, funds for the foundation quickly dried up. Activity was limited to three annual grants in honor of Garcia, Bill Graham and the late music journalist Ralph Gleason - money that came primarily from donations from Deadheads.
Recently, though, Rex, once moribund, is coming back to life. It revived its board of directors with some high-powered new members and hired a new executive director, Sandy Sohcot, a management consultant who has worked with nonprofit organizations and small businesses and who just so happens to have the added credential of having been a Deadhead since 1972.
"For me, it was like this incredible dream come true," Sohcot says one recent afternoon in the Rex office in San Rafael. "It's pulling every single element in my life into one place, everything that has ever been near and dear to me in terms of life work, love of music, wanting to make an organization thrive and giving back to the community. It's been perfect."
This Saturday night at San Francisco's Warfield Theatre, the foundation will present its first benefit concert in six years. Billed as "The Healing Power of Music: A Benefit to Renew the Rex Foundation and Celebrate Community," it stars former Grateful Dead bandmates Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann along with Dead family musicians Merl Saunders and Peter Rowan.
Sohcot sees it as the first of many different kinds of fundraising events designed to rally Grateful Dead fans around the foundation and its charitable work.
“There is a huge Grateful Dead community that has been seeking another way to get back together again," she says. "In a sense, we have had to re-invent ourselves. In the past, Rex had been funded by proceeds from Grateful Dead benefit concerts, but that isn't going to happen anymore. So now we must create the attraction to funding ourselves. And that means everyone in the whole community needs to feel that they can participate in different ways.
"We're going to be doing different kinds of creative programs. Music will always be a central part of it, but not necessarily always a concert, but maybe music and some kind of interesting gathering around the issues that we support. We want to be a vehicle for people who share our values to be a part of what we're doing."
Danny Rifkin, who headed the foundation since its inception, has agreed to stay on as a board member, providing a link with the past while the new leadership looks to the future. And longtime Rex board member, Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Garcia, Jerry Garcia's former wife, has been working closely with Sohcot in the push to get the foundation up and running
“We were dealing with a lot of inertia," Garcia says. "We hadn't done anything in six years. Everybody has moved, their phone numbers have been changed. It was really hard to make the contacts back with the. community we used to ride with. We'd just lost track of everybody. So that has been the biggest task: to reconnect. It was like starting over again fresh."
The effort has been made all the more difficult by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, which caused them to reconsider their plans to stage a benefit concert at all.
"In the weeks following Sept. 11, we were told by many people that we should give it up," Garcia says. "They said, 'You can't still be thinking about a benefit concert.'"
But, as it turns out, they were thinking about it even harder than before.
"Now more than ever is the time to do it," Sohcot says. "No matter what is going on in the world, music is still a way to give people a chance to come together. People need to feel good."
Then, on Nov. 10, the Grateful Dead family suffered another blow with the death of author, Merry Prankster and psychedelic pioneer Ken Kesey. Garcia dropped everything to rush back home to Eugene, Ore., arriving just before Kesey died and staying though his funeral
Before she and Jerry Garcia got together, she had a relationship with Kesey that produced a daughter, Sunshine, now 35, a glass blower in, Oregon. Through the years, they remained close friends and both lived in Eugene.
On the day Kesey died, Garcia found solace in music, attending a concert by the Dark' Star Orchestra, 'a top Grateful Dead cover band.
"I went from profound despair to cheery delight in one day," she says. "But Ken passing away was a big shock. It was a lot to deal with in terms of the human spirit , to ask ourselves how we go on."
She is carrying on by committing more than ever to rebuilding the Rex Foundation and the network of friends and fans who have been inspired by Kesey and Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, promulgating the best ideals that come from the '60s.
"I think connecting people to a philanthropic organization is important," she says "What we're going to try to do is reform the community as a philanthropic community, a community of donors. I think that's a perfectly wonderful reason to get together. People understand the need for giving, for being generous, that this is how we can try to live our lives from a heartfelt place, and how we can connect to the world. The Rex Foundation is the best thing we can promote right now."
