Just two years ago, Karan was lying in a hospital bed, steeling himself for the first round of chemotherapy for throat cancer, when he asked his wife to hand him his guitar and a piece of paper. In 20 minutes, he'd written “Walk Through the Fire," an inspired rock anthem about fighting back against the disease that threatened to kill him. It would become the title track of his new album.
“It was one of the songs you hope for, when the universe says, 'I've got a gift for you,'" Karan, now cancer free, recalled, sitting in the airy living room of his hillside Fairfax home.
After the 1995 death of the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia, the 54-year-old Karan stirred up considerable controversy in the xenophobic universe of the Grateful Dead when he was chosen, along with Steve Kimock, to hold down the lead guitar slot in the Other Ones, the post-Garcia version of the Dead. Karan played two tours with that aggregation as a surrogate Garcia, not an entirely comfortable job description.
While it was a huge break for him, trying to fill the shoes of a beloved rock icon can be a no-win proposition. Deadheads initially scorned him as an interloper who couldn't carry the great Garcia's guitar picks.
Sitting in his living room, cradling his vintage gold top Les Paul, he looked back and laughed, but it wasn't all that funny then. “They called me the L.A. guy who played on the 'Friends' theme," he snorted. “I said, 'No, that wasn't me.' But I got a lot of that."
When the Other Ones dissolved, the Grateful Dead's Bob Weir formed his own band, RatDog, tapping Karan as his lead guitarist. That was 11 years ago, and he's been a member in good standing ever since, proudly wearing a necklace that is similar to the Dead's famed logo except its centerpiece is a dog bone instead of a lightning bolt.
“During the year I was in treatment, Weir and the boys held my spot in the band," he said. “They were ridiculously supportive. They kept me on pay the whole time I was out, which, needless to say, helped a lot."
When he needed fresh food to stimulate his appetite, Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh personally brought over blueberries that he'd picked from his yard.
Early in his career, Karan, a baby boomer who grew up San Francisco and Half Moon Bay idolizing the Beatles, had scuffled for years in Bay Area bar bands. He briefly played with Marin's Huey Lewis and the News when they were still called American Express.
Desperate for gigs, he moved to West Hollywood, working for a dozen years as a studio musician Trading on his childhood as a member of the San Francisco Boys Chorus, he was called in to do vocal work more often than not.
When he fell into the moneyed embrace of the Grateful Dead family and its legions of ticket-buying fans, he was at long able to make a respectable middle-class living with his music.
Then, just before RatDog's 2007 summer tour, he went to the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center when the persistently swollen lymph nodes in his throat refused to go away. After a biopsy, the diagnosis was shocking: stage four throat cancer with lymph node metastasis.
“Everybody deals with something like cancer in their own way," he said, a faraway look in his eyes. “I never would have predicted that I would deal with it the way I did. I might have had a few seconds of horror, of saying, 'Why me?' Of whiny stuff. But then, for some reason, I just felt this sense of calm. I said, 'OK, I'm not ready to check out, so what do we do now?"
With his wife at his side, he embarked on what he calls “a multiheaded dragon" approach to treatment: traditional Western medicine - three months each of radiation and chemotherapy that caused him to lose his long, dark, thick hair - combined with alternative therapies.
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