Grateful Web interviewed Billy Martin as part of an early webconference back in 2001.  We are working to transcribe this interview -- we have also managed to salvage the audio portion (see attached). Thanks for your interest.

There are a lot of cover bands around and a lot of those are Grateful Dead cover bands. You've seen them, they're good. Most include the music of Jerry Garcia, Bobby Weir et al with other cover songs and some originals mixed in. DSO is a different breed of "Dead" band. What Dark Star Orchestra does is recreate the Grateful Dead. Not with hippie wigs and fake beards but through the live music. They play the setlist song for song in the same arrangements used by the Dead members of that period.

I'm doing none other than fabulous after 3 weeks of vacation! My friend Jamie arrived on May 18th, and we went directly to the beach so she could sleep off jet lag and be baptised in the Indian Ocean. We then headed south to Iringa town, where we stayed for a stopover on our way to Ruaha National Park. Ruaha National Park is one of the largest and least visited parks in Tanzania, but also one of the most scenic and diverse. You can check out good pictures of Ruaha and other Parks in Tanzania on this great website: http://www.tanzaniasafaris.info. As soon as we arrived in the Park, we were welcomed by a breath taking Kudu buck running across the road. Kudu are large elk like animals, light grey with a few white stripes on their sides and the bucks have huge spiral black horns. They are absolutely magnificent animals! We then encountered a group of giraffes, who at once took off running then stopped to stare back at us. If you've never seen a giraffe run, it is a quite surreal sight. They are surprisingly graceful, and appear as if they are running in slow motion