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Internet Message Format | 1994-12-26 | 10KB

From [e-mail] Wed Jun 29 12:41:44 PDT 1994
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Newsgroups: rec.music.gdead
Subject: Rex Foundation Article in NY Times (long)
Date: 29 Jun 94 14:23:37 -0500
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Well, I decided to try out my scanner's OCR software.  I actually had to do
ton's of editing, but I think that it was worth it.

This article was transcribed without permission and all remaining typos are
mine. (actually my software's!)

-Dan Levy
_____________________________________________________________________

>From The New York Times, Sunday, 6/26/94:

WHO ELSE WOULD NAME A FOUNDATION FOR A ROADIE?

               By J. PETER ZANE

The composer Robert Simpson has garnered great praise but little
support during his long career a predicament that has left many of
his works unrecorded "It's Simpson's luck," he says.  "What's
Simpson's luck? It's bad luck." So he was "marvelously astonished"
when he received a $10,000 money order from some outfit in America
called  the Rex Foundation.
    "My agent said they were associated with an American music
group called the Grateful Dead," recalls the 73-year-old composer,
who used the grant to help record his Ninth Symphony.  "I laughed
and said, 'Good heavens, only someone with a name like that would
want to help me.'"
    The Dead call it Lone Ranger Philanthropy.  Brandishing fat
checks instead of silver bullets, the San Francisco rock band has
donated $4.5 million, often anonymously, since establishing Rex,
which is now celebrating its 10th anniversary.  In addition to
supporting obscure composers, it has set up scholarships that have
enabled Salvadoran refugees to go to camp and Sioux women to study
medicine, assisted the saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders and the
Lithuanian Olympic team, and financed programs to eradicate
blindness in Nepal, clean up rivers in Alabama, protect striped
bass in California and feed the homeless in Boston.
    "We look for things that have fallen through the cracks of the
big charities, that need an angel to come down and give them a
shot," says Phil Lesh, the band's bassist.
    Rex is also unlike other charities because of what it doesn't
do: It has no endowment, no fund-raising campaigns and no paid
staff.  It solicits no grant proposals, rarely advertises its good
works and raises almost all its money at rock concerts at which
the Grateful Dead perform.
    "We play some benefits; we make some money; we give that money
away," says Mickey Hart, one of the Dead's two drummers.  "Then we
go play some more benefits so we can have more money to give
away."   In this era of limelight activism, when celluloid
messiahs often draw less attention to their cause than their
celebre, the Dead have been quietly donating time and money since
they formed in 1965.  And at a time when the 1960's are both
overglamorized and rashly demonized, the Rex Foundation is a
reminder that that decade's better impulses are relevant today.

    REX DRAWS ITS INSPIRATION from two sources: a former roadie
and an old television series.  "We named the foundation after
Donald Rex Jackson, who was killed in a car crash in 1976,"
explains Mr. Hart.  "He embodied this great generous spirit.  He
was wild, a renegade who'd do anything, and I think Rex has some
of that spirit.
    "It's also like that old show 'The Millionaire' where someone
you don't know enters your life and gives you the chance to turn
it around," he adds "I like to think we're doing that through
Rex."
    It was this James-Dean-meets-Mother-Teresa spirit, he said,
that guided him to use Rex money to go behind the barbed-wire
gates of San Quentin and record the prison's gospel choir.  Like
many Rex grants, it came about through a strange brew of karma and
serendipity.  In 1991 the Gyoto Tantric Choir -- Tibetan monks
whom Mr. Hart helped bring to America -- felt the presence of
"trapped souls" as they passed the prison in a van.  "They wanted
to go right in, but we old them that would be a little difficult,"
Mr. Hart says.  When the monks later performed at San Quentin, he
heard the prison's gospel choir and "was blown away."
    "Here was this flower blossoming in this poison garden," he
says.
    They began rehearsing during the same week that Robert Alton
Harris became the first man in 25 years to be executed in
California's gas chamber.  "The air was thick," Mr. Hart recalls
"It was bristling with lightning.  It was on fire."  And then
something amazing happened.  "The guards started coming off the
towers when they heard the music.  I turn around and there's a
captain playing the drums.  There's a lieutenant on the organ,
guards and inmates were mixing and singing sacred songs."
    The album, entitled "He's All I Need," peaked at No. 28 on the
Billboard gospel charts.  All proceeds went to a fund for victims
of the inmates.
    Mr. Hart knows that the project did not transform the felons
into choirboys -- although they have started a feeder group for
parolees.  "Whether the light goes on, that's up to the
individual, but I think we gave some of them the power to turn it
on."
    It also helped him repay an old debt.  As a child in Brooklyn,
he was sent to camp through a program for I the underprivileged.
Around the campfire, counselors handed out tom-toms and the
youngsters mimicked Mohican rites.  "I'd never seen the drum used
in a ritual setting before as a force of power, spirit, healing
and community," he said, "And a light went on.  I stumbled,
blundered into a life-giving experience that changed me forever."
    Before the Dead had money to give away, the band played for
free; in fact, its first show as the Grateful Dead was a benefit
for the San Francisco Mime Troupe in 1965.
    The idea for a foundation occurred as early as 1972, but every
time the Dead came close to pulling together the necessary funds,
quixotism intruded.  They were in retirement from l974 to 1976.
Once they paid off debts from their failed record label, they
decided to jam at the Great Pyramid in Egypt in 1978.  They spent
$500,000, putting them in a financial squeeze for two more years.
As the 80's dawned, the group moved from playing clubs and
theaters to larger places like Madison Square Garden.  "While
every creep in America started making a billion dollars on Wall
Street, we started making a ton of money," says Dennis McNally,
the group's publicist.  "And coincidentally, we responded by
figuring out a way to give it away."
    He says starting a foundation enabled the band to control the
money, parcel out the proceeds among many causes and have a ready
excuse for saying no to "the three or four hundred groups that
were asking us to do benefits every year."


REX WAS ESTABLISHED as an independent charity.  It raises about 95
percent of its funds at three to five Dead concerts a year.  The
rest comes from private donations: almost all administrative and
personnel costs are absorbed by the band.  Rex has two guiding
principles: limit grants to $10,000 and give the money without
conditions.
    "There are no strings because if we trust them enough to give
them the money, we trust them to know the best way to use it," Mr.
Lesh says.  Most of the 60 to 100 grants awarded each year go to
recipients nominated by a body called the Circle of Deciders.  It
is composed of band members and their families its 50 employees,
and friends like the former basketball player Bill Walton and
Bernie Bildman, an oral surgeon from Birmingham, Ala., known as
the Mouth Man From the Southland.
    Dr. Bildman has been a follower of the band since the early
1970's when a divorce left him "open for adventure."  Like others
in the Circle, he says his nominations are guided by serendipity.
"I'll read about something or someone will turn me on to a group
and if I get a good vibe, I'll do a little more research," he
says, "If it checks out, then it's warp speed ahead."

    Curiously, Rex money has had perhaps its greatest impact on
modern symphonic music.  Under Mr. Lesh's guidance, the foundation
has spent $100,000 commissioning and recording works by avant-
garde composers including Michael Finnissy, Richard Barrett and
Mr. Simpson.  Rex has also helped revive the work of Havergal
Brian, a British composer who had only one of his 32 symphonies
recorded before he died in 1972.
    "Phil Lesh has been key in sparking interest in Brian's
music," said David J. Brown, vice president of the Havergal Brian
Society.  "His money allowed us to record some of his music and
show there was an audience for it.  Now the Marco Polo label is
recording all of his symphonies."  Dressed in the gray sneakers,
jeans and purple pullover he wore on stage seven hours later, Mr.
Lesh recently acknowledged the apparent irony of his patronage.
In fact, he studied music composition with Luciano Berio in the
mid-60's and wrote many classical compositions.  "But life changed
things around on me and I ended up in a rock band," he says.
    He points out that the composers he supports have many
similarities.  "They are all outsiders, and I guess, despite our
success, we're outsiders too," he says "These guys take no
prisoners.  They are not writing down to anybody.  They are not
trying to be comprehensible.
    Mr. Lesh hopes to return to composition one day.  "I'm sure
there is a certain vicariousness for me in giving these grants,"
he says "If I were out there, I'd hope there was somebody like me
out there."