San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Howard Wales — pianist helped Grateful Dead expand audience
The Grateful Dead ballad “Brokedown Palace” begins with the intermingling of a strumming guitar and a slow, saloonstyle piano intro that carries through the song with intricate tinkling to begin each verse. The song was featured on the band’s 1970 album “American Beauty,” which propelled the Dead into a more radiofriendly sound. The piano in that tune was delivered by Howard Wales, who also supplied the driving organ foundation in the band’s most famous song from that album, “Truckin’.”
Wales never recorded again with the Dead, but he made two instrumental albums in duet with Jerry Garcia, and eight solo albums as a bandleader and producer, building entire orchestral moods behind his progressive styling on the Hammond B3.
Wales died Monday at a hospital in Redding, said his manager and close friend Robison Godlove. Wales had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in late November at his home in Weaverville ( Trinity County) and never recovered. He was 77 and lived alone.
“Howard was one of a kind, and an amazing B3 player,” said Terry Haggerty, guitarist with the Sons of Champlin. “The thing with Howard is that he was so much better of a musician than anybody in the Grateful Dead.”
This assessment was backed by Garcia himself, who once said, “For some reason, Howard enjoyed playing with me, but I was just keeping up. ... Howard did more for my ears than anybody I ever played with.”
Howard David Wales was born Feb. 8, 1943, in Milwaukee, where he started taking classical music lessons at age 6. After a brief stint in the Navy, he moved to Chicago to make it as a keyboard player.
By 1968, he was in San Francisco, where he met Garcia. They became the foundation of a Monday night jam at the Matrix, the pioneering Cow Hollow rock nightclub operated by Marty Balin of the Jefferson Airplane. These sessions led Garcia to bring Wales to his band.
“There was a point in which he was going to join the Dead,” said drummer Kevin Hayes, “but Howard was too out there for them.”
After “American Beauty,” Wales and Garcia teamed up to record the album “Hooteroll?,” Garcia’s first recorded work outside of the Dead. A jam album that came out of the Monday night sessions at the Matrix, “Hooteroll?” has reached cult status for its mix of acid jazz and avantgarde experimentation.
In its 1971 review, Billboard wrote, “This album features Garcia on one of the funkiest guitars ever heard in the context of a pop album. Augmented by the understanding organ of Howard Wales.”
But that was Wales’ last record to be commercially released within the music industry. Thereafter, he wrote, produced and financed his own recordings in meticulous private pressings that he packaged and gave away.
Wales performed on a 1969 album by A. B. Skhy, an electric blues band out of Milwaukee that was a standard opening act at the Fillmore. During a show at the Whisky in Los Angeles, Jimi Hendrix came onstage to play with the band.
In 1995, Wales returned the favor by paying tribute to Hendrix, playing solo at a free tribute in the band shell at Golden Gate Park to mark the 25th anniversary of the deaths of Hendrix and Janis Joplin. By then, Wales had moved to Petaluma, where he worked alone on his studio albums before forming a trio, called HTK, with Haggerty on guitar and Hayes on drums, in 2016. HTK regularly played at the Big Easy in Petaluma and also did shows at the Sweetwater Music Hall in Mill Valley.
In 2017, HTK performed live in the studio at KPFAFM in Berkeley, as part of the Grateful Dead Marathon fundraiser. A few tracks from that performance were on his last album, “Undisclosed Location,” released in 2018.
That same year, Wales moved farther north to Weaverville in the Trinity Alps, where he lived without a cell phone or computer. He still came down to do shows with HTK at the Redwood Cafe in Cotati. Wales did his last show on the Hammond B3 there in January. In September, he did his final show of any kind, a solo performance at the Mountain Market Place, a grocery store in Weaverville. He played in front of the produce section.
Wales has no immediate survivors. A memorial service is being planned for after the pandemic.