Nyheter
Grateful Dead går for Obama
Datum: 2008-02-06

tre av de gjenlevende medlemmene av Grateful Dead hadde presskonferanse i San Francisco i går der de annonserte at de akter å backe Senator Barack Obama som demokratenes presidentkandidat til høstens valg.

Her er nyhets saken fra Joel Selvin, San Fransico Chronicles senior pop kritiker;

Grateful Dead bury hatchet, reunite for Obama

If Sen. Barack Obama wants to bring America together again, what better way than getting the Grateful Dead back together again?

The famously feuding surviving members of the band showed up Monday night for an primary-eve Obama rally at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco, the first time since 2004 that former bandmates Bob Weir, Phil Lesh and Mickey Hart have performed together.

Waiting for a pre-rally press conference, members of the media huddled in a basement nook while the band finished a 90-minute sound check upstairs on a cover of the Beatles' »Come Together.«

Sitting under a sign with the familiar skull and lightning bolt emblem that read »Deadheads for Obama '08,« the three living Dead all agreed the Illinois Democrat was their man. They said the fourth member, drummer Bill Kreutzmann, also was an Obama supporter and would have joined the party except for a previous engagement in Hawaii.

»I think that we all knew Obama was the guy for us, but we hadn't talked about it because we'd all been doing our own thing,« said bassist Lesh, whose 18-year-old son, Brian, has been working as an Obama volunteer.

»We knew instinctively, intuitively that we were all together on this. We came together, and we're doing it,« said guitarist Weir, who wore an Obama button pinned to the lapel of his sport coat.

The fractious foursome virtually dissolved their business operation several years ago rather than continue to deal with each other. Drummer Hart admitted he hadn't seen Lesh in »years and years.« Weir said he ran into Lesh at the Apple computer store.

Obama, who never attended a Dead concert but is said to have Dead music on his iPod, filmed a special video for the Deadheads. Although Lesh and Hart performed a fundraiser for the John Kerry campaign four years ago (and Hart made numerous appearances on behalf of his friend Al Gore in 2000), the band proper had never before supported a political candidate, something that clearly left Bob Weir feeling somewhat wary.

»We never thought of the stage as a pulpit,« he said. »That's a step forward for this boy.«

Läs mer om Grateful Dead