dp
Deadheads permeate so many different aspects of American society. Reality TV mogul Andy Cohen is among them.
Charles Sykes
hide caption
toggle caption
Charles Sykes
During this year’s Days Between — from August 1 and August 9 — NPR Music is publishing a series of stories about what keeps drawing people to the Grateful Dead, and how they plan to carry the band’s legacy forward.
There’s a common catchphrase used by fans of the Grateful Dead: Weir Everywhere.
It’s a play on guitarist Bob Weir’s last name, but also a nod to the way Deadheads permeate so many different aspects of American society. In every city, across all age groups, there are devoted fans of a band that officially ceased to exist more than 30 years ago. But one way or another, the music has kept going — through archived live performances, new groups led by the Dead’s surviving members and countless tribute bands. Deadheads, in turn, keep showing up to listen.
Reality TV mogul Andy Cohen is among them. Known as the host of late-night Bravo show Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen and beloved for his work as an executive producer for the Real Housewives franchise — not to mention his best-selling memoirs and his CNN New Year’s Eve special with Anderson Cooper — Cohen is a fixture of 21st century television and entertainment. He’s also a huge Deadhead.
Over the last decade, Cohen has often been spotted dancing at concerts for Dead & Company, the band fronted by Weir and John Mayer alongside Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, Oteil Burbridge and Jeff Chimenti. Though many people in the scene know Cohen as one of Mayer’s close friends, his ties to the Grateful Dead span back much furthur (pun intended) than that.
In an interview with NPR Music’s resident Deadheads, Andy Cohen opened up about his relationship with one of America’s most revered bands.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Isabella Gomez Sarmiento: How did you become a Deadhead?
Andy Cohen: I became a Deadhead in high school. My friend group and I, all at the same time, got hit by this wave that started with Pink Floyd and then extended to the Dead. This was 1985 or so. As it goes, once you’re on the bus, you don’t get off — and we were firmly on the bus.
Gomez Sarmiento: Do you remember your first show?
I think it was the summer of ’86. I drove from Saint Louis to Alpine Valley, Wis., in my 1972 Buick Skylark convertible and convinced [my mom] that it was quite all right for me to just sleep in the parking lot in the car. Look, it was a different time. I don’t know how I convinced her to let me do that, but I did, and it was like the greatest 48 hours of my life.
We had general admission, we were all the way in the back of the field. But we made friends all through the weekend, and I was so hooked. Later that summer, I drove to Red Rocks and saw them there. You know, it’s funny when I look back on it now and think about that — I got to see them that summer at two pretty iconic Dead venues. I feel so lucky. Then at some point in the early ’90s, I got a job and I was not able to travel to shows. My life got much more complicated and I moved to New York. I stopped going to shows.
Gomez Sarmiento: When did you tap back into it?
I never left the music and the music never left me. I always listened. I still had all my cassette tapes from the ’90s, and that was how I was listening. Besides Dead cover bands, which I always continued going to see, I had fallen off the bus in terms of going to see Bob or Phil [Lesh] or any of their incarnations. But I went to Fare Thee Well [in 2015] with John Mayer, who by that point was a friend of mine, and he was flirting with them about joining an iteration of the band.
I will never forget that first show at Levi’s Stadium. They started playing and I felt like I was 18 again. I was dancing, my body was moving in a way that I had not physically moved in so many years. I get goosebumps just thinking about it. I felt reawakened. I felt reborn. I just felt like I was in touch with a version of myself that had somehow gone dormant. What a gift then, for me and for Deadheads everywhere, when Dead & Company wound up for the next ten years going on stadium tours.
I view the last ten years as like [the musical] Brigadoon — Brigadoon just came back to life and all of a sudden, this whole world was reborn and everybody showed up. Talk about if you build it, they will come. Everybody was grayer, and people brought their kids. People’s politics may have changed, but we were all dancing to the same music and we were all feeling each other in the same way.
Andy Cohen with Bob Weir and Anderson Cooper on Watch What Happens Live in 2022.
Bravo/Heidi Gutman/Bravo via Getty Ima/NBCUniversal
hide caption
toggle caption
Bravo/Heidi Gutman/Bravo via Getty Ima/NBCUniversal
Gomez Sarmiento: Was it different, or like meta, for you in any way to now have this second chapter of the Grateful Dead, where you also had a personal relationship to the people onstage?
It was different in that my buddy was fronting the band with Bob Weir. I got to know Bob and Natascha [Weir] and Mickey and Caryl [Hart], and I got to know the Real Housewives of the Grateful Dead. I got to kind of be John’s wingman for like, 50 shows. I had my own kiki going with the wives during set break and we had our own little gossip circle. So, yes, all of that was totally surreal and just a joy.
But again, what dominated it for me was the music. All I wanted to talk to John afterwards was, “Did you realize how good that ‘Casey Jones’ was?” I just wanted to talk about the music. I got to have John and Bob on Watch What Happens Live together, and Bob came on with my friend Anderson Cooper once. There were so many crazy moments. John and Bob surprised me at my 50th birthday party and played. So yes, I became bougie and famous late in the run of the Grateful Dead, but I felt like a stinky hippie for hours while they were playing. And that was the only thing that mattered. By the way, I would take the experience back in a second and sit in the nosebleeds and not know anybody in the band just to experience the music.
Felix Contreras: You’re the perfect example of what [Grateful Dead historian] Dennis McNally and a lot of Deadheads say, “Weir everywhere.” Different people, different things. You talked about convincing your mom to let you go to a show early on, how that exposure to the community just sort of resonated through the rest of your life and then amped up towards these last 10, 15 years. But it was that initial contact that has just resonated for you.
It never went away. It was a formative experience for me in my life, and it was one of the building blocks of who I am in a significant way. It could never leave.
It’s funny, I remember at that Red Rocks show, I was with a dear friend of mine who is now the godmother to my son, and she had done a heroic dose of mushrooms. She wound up getting separated from us, and it turned into something of a bad trip for her. So bad that she never went back to another Dead show. All those years of going to Dead & Company shows, she didn’t come with me. Finally, I had intel from John that this touring moment was about to come to an end. It was their last gig at Citi Field that year. I said to my girlfriend, “Look, this is the last stop on the bus here. You’re going to meet me at my show. I’m getting off the air at 8:30. Just meet me.”
I brought a t-shirt for her. Because of John, I got it so my car could drive right up to the backstage, and I had her change into the shirt and we walked into the show and I saw her physically transform into my friend from high school again. I couldn’t believe it. She turned to me and she goes, “I feel like I never left.” It was so magnificent.
Contreras: What do you plan to do? How are you going to stay connected to the music and to the culture now that the principals are gone and the drummers are laying low?
Well, what I’m hoping is that John puts together some kind of a situation that we can go see at some point. But until then, listen, we’ve got 60 years of live music that we can listen to. I just continue to immerse myself in it. There’s a Dead cover band playing in a couple of weeks that I’m supposed to go see. I love hearing them. I don’t care if it’s a bunch of teenagers playing the music, I don’t care who’s playing it. As long as the music’s playing, I’ll seek it out with whoever will come with me.
