Bill Walton’s lifelong love affair with Grateful Dead

Photo by Lachlan Cunningham/Getty Images

The summer of 2015 was a high point in Bill Walton’s life. At that point, he had been seeing the Grateful Dead in all its forms for 48 years. He had been to hundreds and hundreds of shows, but like so many Deadheads, the series of 50th anniversary shows in Northern California and Chicago (announced as Farewell) would be monumental: the first time in years that most of the surviving members of the group would play together, and the last time it would happen.

Walton, by then one of the most famous – and, with his 6-foot-tall stature, most recognizable – Dead fans in the world, spent the summer acting as an unofficial liaison for the group, giving interviews about the reunion and writing an afterword for a coffee table commemorating the shows. Walton, who had suffered chronic pain since his first injuries as a teenager, was ready for the grueling series of marathon shows. His spine felt good, he had a new knee, he was ready. Walton stood amid the huge crowds at the shows, which he described in serious hyperbole as “the nine days that changed the world.”

“Everyone was so happy and there were only tears of joy, pride and gratitude,” Walton later said Relix from the experience of seeing the shows up close. “I got to be in the pit, 12 people deep, right in front of Bruce Hornsby. I was Thereand I will never forget, and I feel terribly sorry for the person behind me.”

Bill Walton, who died today of cancer at age 71, was known to most as a Hall of Fame NBA center and later as a famous and energetic broadcaster and co-commentator on national television. But just as important to Walton was his lifelong love affair with the Grateful Dead. Walton became a familiar, unmistakable presence at Dead concerts, relishing in the orchestra pit alongside the band’s most diehard fans.

It wasn’t long before the band itself took notice of the towering giant, who now appeared at all of the band’s West Coast shows. When Dead singer and bassist Bob Weir first noticed Walton in the crowd, “I thought to myself, ‘That’s a really big guy.'” “He was the only one in the crowd,” said the band’s drummer Mickey Hart. “I thought everyone else was sitting, but of course they were standing, and he was standing too.”

Walton’s devotion to the band was so great that he attended over 850 Dead shows in his lifetime, appeared in tie-dye as an announcer at nationally televised basketball games, went viral by sorting recyclables at Dead shows, appeared onstage at Dead & Company’s New Year’s Eve shows as “Father Time” (a reference to the character Bill Graham dressed up as every New Year’s Eve), DJed on the band’s Sirius XM satellite radio channel, and was finally inducted into the band’s Hall of Honor in 2021, which he later described as the most important honor he had ever received.

Yet despite the attention and platform he received as one of the group’s most famous and well-known followers, Walton viewed himself as just another member of the Dead’s ever-growing fan base. “I’m really just a fan,” he said in 2022.

Throughout his career, and especially in the promotion of his 2016 memoirs (titled, how could it be otherwise: Back from the dead)Walton often compared his favorite band to the sport to which he dedicated his life.

“Playing in a band and playing on a basketball team, I’m sure, are very, very similar,” he once said. “It requires tremendous discipline, above all.” The Dead, he later claimed, helped him become the basketball player he once was and the person he became. As a lifelong competitive athlete, being a Grateful Dead fan is a unique reward, Walton explained, because “they play all the time, and they win the whole time.”

Walton’s love for the band was more than a useful sports analogy. His Dead fandom was a shining example and a constant beacon of stability, community and inspiration in a life plagued by pain and setbacks.

“For me, there are so many different reasons why I love the Grateful Dead so much, but they give me strength, they give me confidence, they give me hope and they make me believe that tomorrow will be even better,” he said in 2016. “And at the end of the day, when they run off the stage and walk out of there, I’m standing out there in the crowd and I’m just saying, ‘YeeeeeeeesI am with this Guys.'”

When Walton published his calendar for the nine Farewell shows in California and Chicago in 2015, he had only one criticism of the shows: the fact that they marked an end. “I’ll be there,” he said in the weeks leading up to it. “I’ll be screaming for more.”

In the same interview, a journalist from WashingtonPost wanted to know if Walton had any requests for these special performances? “Sugar Magnolia”? “Uncle John’s Band”?

“I don’t care what they play,” Walton replied. “I just want to go. I just want to listen, I want to learn, I want to be inspired, I want to be healed. I want to think, I want to laugh, I want to cry, I want to dance… Years ago I used to pester them with requests all the time. Then I stopped asking and tried to listen more. And I tried to let life flow like the great river.”