If My Words Did Glow: Honoring the Grateful Dead, Bonnie Raitt, Francis Ford Coppola, Arturo Sandoval and the Apollo Theater at the Kennedy Center

Photo: Michele Crowe/CBS ©2024 CBS Broadcasting, Inc.

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On Sunday, the 47th Annual Kennedy Center Honors took place in Washington. D.C. The event “recognizes and celebrates individuals whose unique contributions have shaped the way we see ourselves, each other and our world. Recipients have each had an impact on the rich tapestry of American life and culture through the performing arts.” This year’s honorees were the Grateful Dead, Bonnie Raitt, Francis Ford Coppola, Arturo Sandoval and the Apollo Theater.

The following piece draws on interviews from the red carpet, as well as reflections from the stage, and a choice quote or two made by the recipients at Saturday’s formal luncheon which appeared in the video presentations for each artist.

The honorees did not perform at the event. Instead, they were feted from the stage, watching it all unfold from the Presidential Box, alongside their family members, as well as President Biden, First Lady Jill Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff.

In their official statement, the Grateful Dead, set the tone for much of what would follow, in acknowledging the accolades, while also emphasizing the reciprocal energy they have long shared with their fans. They wrote: “It goes without saying that the Kennedy Center Honors represents the highest of reaches for artistic achievement. To be recognized alongside the artists who have in the past received this honor is beyond humbling. The Grateful Dead has always been about community, creativity, and exploration in music and presentation. We’ve always felt that the music we make embodies and imparts something beyond the notes and phrases being played—and that is something we are privileged to share with all who are drawn to what we do—so it also must be said that our music belongs as much to our fans, the Dead Heads, as it does to us. This honor, then, is as much theirs as ours.”

Coppola evoked a similar spirit, as he affirmed: “I consider myself very fortunate to have been able to collaborate with great artists and wonderful people throughout my career, and I have never stopped learning. There is no greater honor than to be included along with those who inspired me, who I looked up to, and who gave me encouragement when times were dim. I am grateful to the Kennedy Center, my beloved colleagues, to those who equate beauty and truth, and to all the children of the world.”

An overview of this year’s Honors appears here. The event will air on December 22, 2024 from 8:30-11:00 p.m., ET/PT on the CBS Television Network and Paramount+.

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Bob Weir

This is nothing short of the Medal of Honor. It puts us in pretty distinguished company here and around the world for the Grateful Dead and for our fans—those kindred spirits who were right there with us with what we were trying to do over the decades. It’s always been the storytelling that leads us on, gives us direction and fulfillment. It’s been about reaching something deeper that connects us all.

Mickey Hart

Back in 78, 79 working on Apocalypse [Now] was magic. Music is magic. Tonight is magic. It all feels great, especially when you have community. This is the San Francisco takeover of the Kennedy Center!

Bill Kreutzmann (on reconnecting with Hart and Weir, in anticipation of the band’s 60^th anniversary)

I want to do the 60^th, big time. We’re talking about getting together with at least the three of us and putting on a 60 show. I think Deadheads would like that and I would like it, too. I’m actually the first Deadhead.

Grahame Lesh (on initially hearing from his father about the KCH)

My folks called my wife Claire and me. When they told us, he was so excited, I know they all were. It was a good chance for all the band to connect and just sort of revel in how much of an honor this was. They were able to catch up and realize what they’d accomplished. It’s amazing stuff.

Maggie Rogers

Grateful Dead is really about listening and a practice of active listening. The way that improvisation circles through, the way that they’re reacting to both the crowd and the space. To me, circling through the catalog of the Grateful Dead, it’s like twirling in a circle that never ends. You can never quite find yourself and that you’re always there.

I got to play with Dead & Company in 2019 and Madison Square Garden, and it completely changed the way I structured a setlist. Before, I basically had the same set every night and there’s a really beautiful meditation in that repetition. But since then, I have my whole catalog on fridge magnets on the bus, and we’re constructing the setlist every night and it gets to be different.

They showed me what it’s like when you can just relax into the confidence of your own musicianship and not be afraid to take a risk.

Nancy Pelosi

I saw the Grateful Dead many, many times. I love them very much. It’s so exciting to see them be honored and to see how they are responding to it all and their families, as well. I was telling them that I took the purse down from my closet a few years ago and then it had a button that said Deadheads for Dukakis, 1988.

Grahame Lesh (On his father’s collaborations with younger artists)

It was obviously something he believed in a lot. He would be there almost every day at Terrapin Crossroads, the music venue my family had in Marin County. He’d be listening, watching, suggesting things to all of the younger musicians that came through and played there.

We would have Phil School and have him check out our rehearsals. For myself and countless other younger musicians, being a part of Phil & Friends has had a huge impact that’s going to live on for a really long time.

It just speaks to the vastness of the Grateful Dead musical world. I’m happy to be one of many. This music is going to be played for centuries, so I’m very happy to be one of many people who are carrying on playing it.

Bill Kreutzmann

I like to play with young musicians because they have so much energy. I keep it going and they keep things interesting. They’ve also learned the Grateful Dead material really well. The music is what has led them to do that. I’m not surprised it’s happened, I’m just happy. I love doing it.

Mickey Hart

The Grateful Dead was a dance band, and people like to dance and in those days there weren’t a lot of people dancing. So that’s where the community started and the music just moved from there. Then we grew with the music.

photo: Dean Budnick

Bob Weir

We had no plan, we had no itinerary. We were just playing and that’s all we’ve ever done. Our entire agenda has been, “Let’s make some more music.”

Brandi Carlile

I had such a wonderful time talking to Bobby last night, and I have seen him in the strangest of places. The way that man consumes other people’s music and the way that he wanders around and sees concerts—you just run into Bobby all the time, and he’s not in some ivory tower. He’s out there with his fingers on the pulse.

I have a lot of gratitude for him because I feel that the Dead in a sense, created the cult following, and these pockets of passion and these movements have done so much to move this country forward.

Without the Grateful Dead and the legacy that they kind of created for artists like me, I don’t know if I’d be able to have as intimate of a community relationship with my fans as I do. I respect them a lot for that.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus

Whatever she sings and plays, you know instantly that it’s Bonnie Raitt. It’s just all red hair and no bullshit.

Bonnie Raitt always says that slide guitar is easy. She’s such a liar. It’s not easy. That’s like Rembrandt saying, painting is easy. Sure, it’s easy for Rembrandt and maybe sticking a bottleneck on her finger and making that sound on her guitar—that just spine tingling sound, weeping, happy, funny, sexy—maybe that is easy for Bonnie…B.B. King called her the best damn slide player working today, but she’s so modest that the closest you’ll get to a boast from Bonnie Raitt is when she says her slide guitar playing sounds like bacon smells. Yum…

Sheryl Crow

As you get older, you really do reflect on how you got where you got. That is not just in your career, but in life in general, and I attribute a lot to Bonnie. I was a 17-year-old when everything at radio was Boston and Kansas and Supertramp. They  were great but when you’re a 17-year-old girl and you play piano and you go see Bonnie Raitt and she’s ripping and she’s fronting a guy band, and she’s singing truth and living—it is the reason I went out the next day and bought a guitar.

I’ve told her ad nauseum, I would never have picked up a guitar. I would never have seen myself being out front had it not been for her. I will say that I as a kid and even as an adult, I studied her voice. How does she get that sweet and yet totally lived voice? It’s her. It’s her humanity. It’s who she is. She brings it all, and it all is invested in just being totally present.

photo: Dean Budnick

Jackson Browne

I’ve known Bonnie for a long time since right before each of us put out our first album. We met at a club we were both playing. She was very funny. She looked like Little Orphan Annie and she sounded like Mae West. The sassy and provocative stage presence of hers belies the person she is at her core—highly principled and fiercely committed to justice, to fairness and inclusion.

Those of us who have known and loved Bonnie from the very beginning have stood by and watched in awe—not only at the way she inhabits the moment and can summon the deepest emotion, but the way she’s never stopped growing and reexamining herself and her impulses as an artist and making better and better records.

At a certain point, she didn’t have to get any better, but she did. And she just gets better and better…Bonnie and I have always been aligned politically and over the years we’ve played a great many benefits together for a wide variety of initiatives for human rights and for the environment. I’ve always thought she’s the best example of an activist because clearly she has more fun than anybody and I think that’s a very good thing to bring to the fight.

Chris Botti

Arturo Sandoval, you are the trumpet master and perhaps even more important, you are the great ambassador for not only jazz worldwide, but for beauty and purity of everything that is perfect in the world today.

Andy Garcia

Along the way, he discovered jazz. The first time Arturo heard the album by Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, it was like hearing something he had no idea even existed, and yet he felt like somehow he already spoke the language. He was hooked. He became obsessed. And when jazz music was banned in Cuba and marked as the music of the enemy, Arturo went to jail rather than forgo pleasure of the art form.

How does a musician who craves a genre of music that endangers him, express that longing and that trauma he learns to play notes and octaves most can only dream of…Your sublime artistry is a gift to us all.

Dave Chappell

My favorite part of freedom is art. Imagine living in a world where you couldn’t say what you feel or think or have to act in a way that’s unnatural. This country, 90 years ago when the Apollo started, was like that for African Americans, but the Apollo Theater was a church. We could talk like ourselves to ourselves.

Queen Latifah

The Apollo (has been) ground zero for black art and black artists over its 90 years and it has become so much more than a building. It’s where I had my first real scary show, one of the scariest of my whole entire career but it’s also the place that has birthed some of the greatest artists of all time. The Apollo is a shrine to creativity and authentic expression. A landmark of hope, resilience, and liberation. That’s why it’s been called the Soul of American Culture. And tonight we create another historic moment as the Apollo becomes the first institution to receive a Kennedy Center Honor.

Francis Ford Coppola

Of the five honorees, my life runs through all of them one way or the other. I mean certainly through the Grateful Dead. When I was heavier and had my big black beard, everyone thought I was Jerry Garcia.

George Lucas

Most people know me as a director, producer, a digital innovator, but tonight I want to share with you a lesser known title that I truly cherish. Francis calls me his little brother and nothing can be better than that.

Francis is a visionary, a filmmaker who invented new ways to tell stories. He has written, produced, and directed every kind of movie: art films, war movies, musicals, legal dramas, period pieces, science fiction and family movies—most notably about the Corleones. Francis is often described as an ambitious dreamer, a risk taker, a man of action. These are all nice ways of saying he’s crazy, but I mean, why would a sane person jump off a cliff and over and over and over?

What Francis does creatively is jump off cliffs. For over 60 years I have watched him leap into the unknown with his heart taking artistic chances that seemed insane while he somehow always lands on his feet…Here’s the thing: When you spend enough time with Francis, you begin to believe that you can jump off cliffs too.

Martin Scorsese

Truly, Francis is one of the giants of our art form. There’s no other way to say it. He tried to lift up our entire industry while all the time remaining very true to his artistic vision, constantly fresh and visionary. All of this for so many years, and never losing the heart in his work. Francis has always gone way past the cutting edge and lighted the way for the rest of us. Kennedy Center Honors are bestowed upon people who do just that. The trailblazers whose brilliance has changed the art form in our entire culture, and that’s why tonight we honor Francis Ford Coppola.

Miles Teller

For me, the very first time that I heard [the Grateful Dead’s] music live, it was like I’d been struck by lightning. It’s hard to describe, but it felt like an invitation to belong to something bigger than yourself and to take part in some kind of great adventure. The Dead embody that spirit of adventure. And to them, there’s no greater adventure than the present moment. They celebrate the ephemeral magic of the now in the music.

Chloe Sevigny

I first fell in love with the Grateful Dead when I was a sophomore in high school. Well, to be clear, I first fell in love with a boy who loved the Grateful Dead. He and his older siblings were all long hair and deep into tour culture. It was all Dead, all the time. Before long I was right there with him at the shows in the parking lots, driving up and down the East Coast weekend after weekend. It was the music of course, but it wasn’t just the music, it was the magic the Dead conjured, wherever they went, that sonic spell they wove from town to town, amassing the spontaneous, free-flowing, traveling family along the way.

Jerry Garcia once said, “The Deadhead is that person who’s looking for an adventure in America. A chance to get out and scare themselves a little and maybe have a little trouble, but also find a lot of support and make a lot of friends.” As a longtime Deadhead following the band has given me great friends, countless adventures and yeah, a little bit of trouble.

David Letterman

The Grateful Dead created an entire musical culture with its own rules and language and the relationship between the Grateful Dead and the Deadheads is reciprocal. When I asked about letting fans record shows, Jerry said to me, “The shows and music are always different, and when we’re done, they can have it.” And boy, that’s certainly unique in the world of music, but that was the Grateful Dead policy: unique. And now their music fills the universe.

Bob Weir

We were real serious about music. We’d perpetually discover something new that would engage us. The music was always the focus, not fad or fashion. The American musical songbook is so deep, with its heritage of country, blues, jazz, R&B and all else that we’d find intriguing. There’s so much there and it’s never-ending.

Mickey Hart

The spirit of the music prevails. It still lives. We all love the music and it may go on for a thousand years, we just don’t know.