According to the San Francisco Chronicle<\/a>, Deadheads have rallied around the 81-year-old and are raising money to help pay for the radiation treatments he is undergoing to treat lung cancer.<\/p>\n\u201cEach round knocks me out for days, though so far that\u2019s the one symptom,\u201d he told the newspaper about his treatment. \u201cIt\u2019s pretty intense.\u201d<\/p>\n
Constanten was the band\u2019s keyboardist in its early days, playing with the Dead for 14 months in 1968 and 1969.<\/p>\n
A GoFundMe set up for him has nearly reached its goal of $70,000.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s not the only one in the Grateful Dead\u2019s entourage who fans are flocking to help.<\/p>\n
A GoFundMe set up for Candace Brightman, who served as the Grateful Dead\u2019s lighting director from 1972 to 1995, has surpassed its goal of $75,000 as she battles financial and medical problems, including failing eyesight. Fans have also chipped in for Betty Cantor-Jackson, a producer and sound recordist for the band, roadie Kidd Candelario and the Dead\u2019s former onstage monitor engineer, Harry Popick.<\/p>\n
The Grateful Dead is one of the world\u2019s most famous rock bands. It was founded in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1965 and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.<\/p>\n
Sometimes traveling the world to see the band, Deadheads have developed their own subculture and community.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re surrounded by a culture that feels like we\u2019ve been living in a house together all these years,\u201d David Gans, a musician who hosts the syndicated radio show \u201cThe Grateful Dead Hour\u201d and co-authored the book \u201cPlaying in the Band: An Oral and Visual Portrait of the Grateful Dead,\u201d told the publication. \u201cWe see it as a family and communal social scene. But the actual structures are different. What is the obligation?\u201d<\/p>\n
Medical debt is an increasing concern for many Americans and has been part of a national conversation that has ramped up as some brace for rising costs with the expiration of tax credits for the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that have helped many afford health insurance.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday House Republicans narrowly passed their own version of a health care bill <\/a>which didn\u2019t include ACA subsidies.<\/p>\nThe-CNN-Wire
\u2122 & \u00a9 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Lisa Respers France, CNN (CNN) \u2014 Tom Constanten wasn\u2019t a part of the Grateful Dead for very…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":88421,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[249,251,250],"class_list":["post-88420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-fort-lauderdale","tag-fort-lauderdale","tag-fort-lauderdale-headlines","tag-fort-lauderdale-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88420"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88420\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/88421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}