More sad news for Grateful Dead fans...

Vince Welnick, the Grateful Dead's last keyboard player and a veteran of other bands, including the Tubes and Missing Man Formation, has died, the Grateful Dead's longtime publicist said Saturday.

Welnick died Friday, said Dennis McNally, who would not release the cause. The Sonoma County coroner's office said an autopsy would be performed next week.

Welnick is the 4th Grateful Dead keyboardist to die, following Ron "Pigpen" McKernan (d. 1973), Keith Godchaux (d. 1980), and Brent Mydland (d. 1990). Welnick played with the band from 1990 until the death of Dead frontman Jerry Garcia in 1995.

Sadly, reports suggest that Welnick may have taken his own life.

My favorite Vince story comes from McNally's 2002 Dead bio, A Long Strange Trip, when Welnick learns firsthand how erratic his new bandmates could be...

Vince's real introduction to the Dead may well have been at the next show after the Garden run, in Stockholm, a truly abysmal night. Despite three days' rest after the flight from home, the band was jet-lagged. Garcia had eaten a chunk of hashish and was useless. At the drum break, Vince went to visit the facilities and then stood backstage, wretched, when [I] came up to him and recognized his dismay. "Vince, you don't understand. It's not you. This is a band that really sucks sometimes, and tonight's the night. Don't worry about it."

Vince Welnick was either 51 or 55 at the time of his death (reports vary).

[MyWay] Grateful Dead's Last Keyboardist Dies

From the San Francisco Chronicle...

He was a psychedelic cowboy who rode the bus with Ken Kesey and took virtually every step of the long, strange trip with the Grateful Dead. Known to one and all solely as Ramrod, he died yesterday of lung cancer at Petaluma Valley Hospital. He was 61.

"He was our rock," said guitarist Bob Weir.

[...]

Ramrod joined the Dead in 1967 as truck driver and was held in such high regard by the members of that sprawling, brawling organization that he was named president of the Grateful Dead board of directors when the rock group actually incorporated in the '70s. It was a position he held until the death of guitarist Jerry Garcia in 1995.

[SFGate.com] Mainstay of Grateful Dead crew dies