In this photo released by Jon C. Hancock, Vince Welnick performs at the Deer Creek Ampitheater in Noblesville, Indiana, on Monday, June 21, 2003. Welnick, the Grateful Dead's last keyboard player and a veteran of several other k bands, including the Tubes and Missing Man Formation, died Friday, June 2, 2006. He was 51. [AP Photo]

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.

He lived in the northern California town of Forestville, but McNally said he didn't know whether he died at home or in a hospital.

McNally said Welnick was 51. The musician's website gives two ages for him, 51 and 55, but several other sources list his age as 55.

With long, frizzy hair and tie-dyed clothes, Welnick clearly looked the part of a member of a band that had been born in 1965 in San Francisco, then the cradle of the country's emerging psychedelic counterculture.

But he was largely unfamiliar with the band's music when he joined in 1990, and he recalled years later that he was so nervous he could barely play at his first show. He was quickly put at ease when the Cleveland audience gave him a warm welcome.

"The big thing about Vince was that he had that fearlessness to be able to go and just jump into our madness and just operate on it like it was a normal, everyday procedure," Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart recalled Saturday. "A lot of people can play, but with us they just don't know how to navigate. Our music is different."

Hart recalled Welnick as not only a "nimble" keyboard player but also a fine background singer whose vocals added much to the group's songs.

"He had this real high harmony. He could go where others couldn't," Hart said.

The musician, who grew up in Phoenix, moved to San Francisco in the early 1970s with the Beans, which soon renamed itself the Tubes. After the group temporarily disbanded in the mid-1980s, he worked with Todd Rundgren before joining the Grateful Dead.

"His service to and love for the Grateful Dead were heartfelt and essential. He had a loving soul and a joy in music that we were lucky to share," the group said in a statement on its website. "Our Grateful Dead prayer for the repose of his spirit: May the four winds blow him safely home."

Welnick was the last in a long line of Grateful Dead keyboardists, several of whom died prematurely, leading some of the group's fans to conclude that the position came with a curse.

Welnick had replaced Brent Mydland, who died of a drug overdose in 1990. Mydland had succeeded Keith Godchaux, who died in a car crash shortly after leaving the band. And Godchaux had replaced the band's original keyboard player, Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, who died at 27 in 1973.

Two other Grateful Dead keyboardists, Bruce Hornsby and Tom Constanten, survived the supposed curse just fine. Constanten worked with McKernan in the late 1960s, and Hornsby and Welnick played alongside one another for 18 months in the early 1990s.

The band retired the name Grateful Dead and quit touring after lead guitarist Jerry Garcia died of a heart attack in 1995. The death of the group's unofficial leader hit Welnick particularly hard, McNally recalled Saturday.

"When he joined the Grateful Dead he really embraced the opportunity, both musically and emotionally," McNally recalled. "And to lose it within five years hurt him maybe worse than anybody else in the band."

In the years following Garcia's death the group's other longtime members have occasionally toured as The Other Ones or The Dead.

Welnick, who formed his own group, Missing Man Formation, occasionally went on the road himself and had been scheduled to perform later this month, according to his website.