Grateful Dead

by Jesse Jarnow
 

Nobody in the Grateful Dead knew Keith Godchaux before he and his wife Donna Jean turned up at one of Jerry Garcia’s side gigs and informed Garcia that Keith was the Dead’s new keyboard player. And, as it turned out, he was. As improbable and unlikely and outright impossible the story seems, it also seems to have really happened like that. The Grateful Dead Guide and their comment section ran down many of the relevant details, but this episode adds several turns to the story.

But who was Keith Godchaux? Where did he come from? A cipher even to his bandmates and coworkers, the shy piano player from the East Bay came with an incredibly deep musical education that prepared him perfectly for the Dead’s improvisation despite never having played in a rock band before. 

We go deep into the story of Keith Godchaux with his younger brother Brian, also an excellent musician who appeared on 1975’s Keith and Donna. More recently, in addition to appearing with the Heart of Gold Band, Brian has been playing in a duo with Sandy Rothman, an anchor of the Bay Area bluegrass scene going back to the early ‘60s as a member of the Black Mountain Boys and later, the Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band. Together, they recorded The Red Fiddle and the Silver Banjo. In the mid-’60s, Sandy played lead electric guitar in a garage R&B band that rehearsed in the Godchaux family garage, featuring Keith on bass, Ray Scott (later of the Keith and Donna Band) on guitar, drummer Peter Ostwald, and vocalist Steve Carvalho.

Newspaper clippings courtesy of Brian Godchaux.