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When I lost my best friend, his favorite band helped me mourn
By the time I reached my 40s, there were just a few people I'd stayed in touch with from my teenage years. Dave Endris was one of them. I assumed in another 40 years we'd be sitting on a porch, two octogenarians cracking jokes and wondering how we’d made it so far. Dave was a prankster, the kind of driver who would get rear-ended, then open the door and give the offender a thumbs up — or pull up his ramshackle four-cylinder next to a guy in a V8 Mustang, grin and start revving his engine.
I think he made a deal with the absurdity of the world, and in return, he’d bring levity to the people around him — usually. Dave had demons, too; ones that would retreat, but claw their way back. Until this past summer, nobody realized how deep they ran. Then I saw the name of his brother Joe on my caller ID. Dave and I had been tight for 25 years, but I'd only spoken to Joe for the first time a few months earlier, when Dave drank himself into a coma.
I answered the phone with dread in my chest. "Dave died,” Joe told me matter-of-factly — at least that’s how I recall it. I remember feeling both numb, and like something life-altering went down, all at once. Joe said there were no plans to do anything for Dave: no funeral, no wake, no lacquered horse-drawn carriage to bring him home, nada. This hit me as even more tragic: that a person could die and nothing would be done to honor them.
In the weeks that followed, Joe and I agreed a celebration of life was in order, and a mutual friend and musician in Nashua, Jesse Rutstein, added a brilliant idea: let’s put on a show for the dude. After all, Dave was a singer/songwriter — that’s what drew us together. So it was decided: There would be a hootenanny for our friend.
Joe and his wife Heather would supply the venue and the food, and Jesse and I would handle the music. What kind of music? For anyone who knew Dave, the answer was flashing in neon lights. Dave was the most committed Grateful Deadhead any of us knew. He’d gone on tour with the Dead in 1995. He mounted bootleg tapes from hundreds of shows on his wall — and on his arm: he had a tattoo with lyrics from “Scarlet Begonias.”
I hit up four high school bandmates and every one was down for the celebration. My buddy Jay Smart became my musical confidant — after being strangers in recent decades, we chatted constantly about who would sing and play, what, when and where. Jesse came through on drums, Jeremy Parker held us down on bass and Josh Evans tied everything together on the keyboards. We would celebrate Dave with music from his favorite band — and all were invited.
Dave’s death left a hole in me. But I spent the summer learning — really learning — the tunes we’d landed on for the celebration, and it was a way of coping with the void. And what better way to mourn a Deadhead? The pursuit became an obsession. I picked up my electric guitar for the first time since high school; connected with Facebook groups for Dead-playing musicians; took lessons with a teacher in New Jersey who specializes in Jerry Garcia modalities; befriended a young player in North Carolina who's on the road to mastering the style.
I started to feel that preparing for the show had a spiritual significance — one that might have come from a temple or a priest were I so inclined. But here, it was making music with friends and the gospel of the Grateful Dead. Some actually see the Dead as an “implicit religion”, a faith that doesn’t identify as such. The band is the clergy; the Deadheads are the congregation; the shows are the sabbath services; and the songs are the gospel. There’s even an iconography and the pilgrimage of going on Dead tour. It’s all there — even in the name, the Grateful Dead, an old reference to a man who pays for the burial of a penniless traveler. Asking nothing in return, the Dead gave us a platform to say "fare thee well."
By the time September rolled around, we had time for one full rehearsal and a few smaller sessions to practice the tunes. It was hardly sufficient to do the songs justice, but enough to start reacquainting with old bandmates who hadn't played together for more than two decades.
On the big day, probably 100 people came out to show their love for Dave Endris at the VFW hall in Groton. I inherited Dave’s Martin steel-string, and played it for our first two songs — “Ripple” and “Brokedown Palace” — before laying the guitar in front of the stage for the rest of the show. The remaining members of Dave’s old band, Buckdancer's Choice, performed some of the music he had written. Dave’s other brother-from-another-mother, Jay Williams, delivered a eulogy, and we started calling people up to say something about our friend, whether they liked it or not.
The sad part was that Dave couldn’t enjoy the music — or all the people who came out for him — but he brought us together one last time. Dave's life ended on the saddest of notes, but we were able to sing him home in a way that we won't forget. For that, and for Dave Endris, I’ll be forever grateful.
