General News

Rex Foundation: Black Tie Ball with Dark Star Orchestra

frogstorm — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 22:51:47 -0500

The Rex Foundation presented the first Black Tie-Dye Ball in Chicago in March 2004 with Dark Star Orchestra. Since then, there have been Black Tie-Dye Balls in New York City, Washington, D.C., Denver, Colorado, Los Angeles and San Francisco. These festive occasions provide the opportunity to collaborate with gifted performers that care about the Rex Foundation.

On September 25th enjoy a unique musical experience, while also celebrating the Portland area’s talent, enterprise and community spirit. Proceeds help support local area non-profit programs.

The September 25th Black Tie-Dye Ball also helps celebrate the 3rd month-long DSO Rex Caravan Tour, where every show along the way includes $1 per ticket as a contribution to the Rex Foundation.

Friday, September 25, 2009
Crystal Ballroom
1332 W. Burnside
Portland, OR 97209
503-225-0047

6:00 – 7:30 pm Drinks, Food & Reception with Artists in Lola’s Room

(For Ages 21 and Over)

7:00 pm General Admission Doors open

8:00pm Show

(All Ages)

Enjoy a pre-concert, festive party in Lola’s Room, mingling with the artists and other kindred spirits, as well as first access to the Ballroom to enjoy the concert.

RECEPTION and CONCERT TICKETS

(all but $70 is tax-deductible)

American Beauty $200
The party with food & drinks, a goody bag, plus special roped off area stage left for concert + collectible poster

Scarlet Begonia $100
The party with food & drinks, a goody bag, plus first entry into Ballroom

Reception Upgrade
For those who have previously purchased concert tickets. $75 for Scarlet Begonia tickets & $175 American Beauty tickets.

To order Reception and Concert Tickets call 415-561-3135 or download the Ticket Order Form with this link and fax to 415-561-3136, or mail to Rex Foundation, P.O. Box 29608, San Francisco, CA 94129-0608 with your order.

CONCERT TICKETS ONLY: $26 in advance available online or through Ticketmaster.

Call Ticketmaster: 1-800-745-3000
Online: Click here to order online through Ticketmaster
In Person: Tickets available at the Crystal Ballroom and the Aladdin Theater

Bob Weir to Play Benefit for Blue Bear School of Music

frogstorm — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 21:05:29 -0500

The Blue Bear School of Music has announced a special benefit concert on September 12 at the intimate Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley. Headlining the show is Scaring the Children, featuring Bob Weir, Rob Wasserman on bass, and Blue Bear alumnus Jay Lane on drums. The event will also feature special guest Jackie Greene and others.

Proceeds will help Blue Bear School of Music continue to develop and deliver innovative music education programs serving students throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.

Scaring the Children
Featuring Bob Weir,
Rob Wasserman, Jay Lane
With Special Guest Appearances by
Jackie Greene and Others

Saturday, September 12, 2009
Throckmorton Theatre
142 Throckmorton Ave. in Mill Valley, CA

VIP Pre-show Reception at 6:45pm
Doors: 7:30pm • Show: 8:00pm

Proceeds support Blue Bear School of Music

General Admission Tickets: $50
VIP Tickets: $100

Click here to buy Tickets Online or by call 415-673-3600 during business hours, and save on any service charges.

For more info on the Blue Bear School of Music, click here to visit the official site at www.bluebearmusic.org

Phil and Bob Announce September Shows

frogstorm — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 23:51:26 -0500

For FURTHUR info, click here!

SAINT MISBEHAVIN’: The Wavy Gravy Movie

frogstorm — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 16:29:28 -0500

“Saint Misbehavin’: The Wavy Gravy Movie” is a new documentary by director Michelle Esrick, revealing the true story of cultural phenomenon Wavy Gravy, a man whose commitment to making the world a better place has never wavered.

Wavy Gravy is known as the MC of the Woodstock Festival, a hippie icon, a clown and even a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream flavor. In Saint Misbehavin’ we meet a true servant to humanity, who carries his message through humor and compassion. The film weaves together intimate verite footage, reflections from an array of cultural and countercultural peers, and never-before-seen archival footage to tell a story that is bigger than the man himself.

The film features reflections on Wavy and his good works by members of the Grateful Dead, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt and many other friends and associates.

Indiewire called “Saint Misbehavin’” “Perfectly executed and hugely entertaining;” Oscar-winning documentarian Michael Moore described the film as "Wonderful...a moving tribute to a man who today lives his life at the service of others. Everyone at my film festival loved this movie!"

“Saint Misbehavin’: The Wavy Gravy Movie” will be shown in week-long engagements in New York and Los Angeles beginning August 14th, as part of the “DocuWeeks” festival. In New York, the film will screen at the IFC Center; in Los Angeles, at the ArcLight Hollywood Cinemas.

For showtimes and ticket info, click on the theater links above.

Farewell to Marmaduke: John Dawson (1945-2009)

frogstorm — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 10:21:45 -0500

Marmaduke at Capitol Theater, Port Chester, NY in 1970. Photo: Marcia Cohen

The extended Grateful Dead family and Dead Head community lost a great talent and a dear friend on July 21, when John “Marmaduke” Dawson, longtime singer, songwriter and guitarist with New Riders of the Purple Sage, passed away peacefully after a long period of failing health. He was 64 and had been living in retirement in Mexico.

One of the best-loved and longest-running entries in the country-rock field, New Riders of the Purple Sage came into being in 1969, when John Dawson, looking for an outlet for his original songs, conspired with Jerry Garcia, who had started playing pedal steel guitar, to form a little country-tinged bar band. They recruited David Nelson, a musical associate and friend of Garcia’s going back to the thriving Palo Alto folk scene of the early 60s, to play lead guitar. Grateful Dead audio engineer/producer Bob Matthews was the original bassist (later replaced by Phil Lesh and then, more permanently Dave Torbert); Mickey Hart played drums for the band’s first year, after which he was replaced by Jefferson Airplane alum Spencer Dryden.

After gigging for a while in the Bay Area whenever gaps in the Grateful Dead’s schedule allowed, the New Riders began to obtain a higher profile when they began to tour as featured support act with the Dead. Especially memorable were the marathon “Evening with the Grateful Dead” shows during much of 1970, which opened with an acoustic Dead set (with occasional guest appearances by NRPS members), followed by a full set by the Riders and closing with electric GD. John Dawson emerged as an energetic and engaging front man, singing songs from his own rapidly growing body of original work, as well as country standards (“Together Again,” “Truck Drivin’ Man”), and some classic rockers thrown in for good measure (“Lodi,” “Honky Tonk Woman”).

Marmaduke with David Nelson in 2007. Photo: Bob Minkin/minkindesign.com c. 2009

Dawson’s songwriting skills were impressively displayed on NRPS’ eponymous debut album, released in 1971. He was the sole composer of all ten of the records tracks, which included such perennial favorites as “I Don’t Know You,” “Portland Woman,” “Glendale Train,” “Henry” and “Last Lonely Eagle.” Those last two songs, in particular, illuminated a unique aspect of John’s talent: an ability to infuse country songwriting with a distinctly hippie-flavored POV (“Henry” was a rollicking breakdown about a pot smuggler’s Mexican exploits, while “Eagle” was a socially and environmentally conscious lament for endangered nature and lost values). In addition to his notable body of work for NRPS, John has another indelible songwriting credit: as co-writer, with Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, of one of the most enduring songs in the Grateful Dead canon, “Friend of the Devil.”

When Jerry Garcia, stretched a bit thin by his multiple musical endeavors, left NRPS in late 1971, the band didn’t miss a step: with the addition of pedal steel ace Buddy Cage, they were able to emerge from the Grateful Dead’s shadow, adding such excellent albums as “Powerglide,” “Gypsy Cowboy” and “The Adventures of Panama Red” to their catalog, and becoming a popular national touring act in their own right.

John continued touring and recording with the Riders, through various personnel departures and returns, into the 1990s. While his health problems prevented him from joining in on various NRPS reincarnations in recent years, he remained close friends with his old bandmates, and did reunite with David Nelson and Buddy Cage for one final performance together in 2001, at a birthday bash for longtime NRPS friend and archivist Rob Bleetstein.

Thanks for a great ride, McDuke.

The New Riders Return with a Fine New Album

lilgoldie — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 11:42:36 -0500

One of the most satisfying comebacks of recent years is the righteous return of the New Riders of the Purple Sage. Of course, the New Riders (or NRPS…many even pronounce that “Nerps”) have a long lineage with the Grateful Dead—in fact one of the group’s early lineups consisted of John “Marmaduke” Dawson as lead singer/songwriter and rhythm guitarist, David Nelson on lead guitar, Garcia on pedal steel guitar (an instrument he was still learning), Phil Lesh on bass and Mickey Hart on drums.

NRPS(L to R): Buddy Cage, Michael Falzarano,
Johnny Markowski,David Nelson, Ronnie Penque.
Photo: Bob Minkin/minkindesign.com © 2009

Phil was replaced by David Torbert in mid-1970, and by the end of that year, ex-Airplane drummer Spencer Dryden had replaced Mickey. Garcia stuck with the Riders until the fall of 1971, when Buddy Cage took over on pedal steel. The NRPS opened many Dead shows in the early ’70s, but also managed to establish a large following apart from their Dead connection. Still, they’ve always been “family.”

The New Riders’ history through the late ’70s and early ’80s is spotty, as there were many personnel changes and the group clearly lost its early momentum for stretches. By ’82, Nelson had split and John Dawson later picked up the mantle without his former partner. Nelson eventually went on to play for a spell in the Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band and then formed one of the best jam bands in the Bay Area, the David Nelson Band (who continue to play amazing music to this day).

Marmaduke had been limited by health issues for a number of years and, sad to say, passed away on July 21 in Mexico. (This story was completed long before that.) A new version of the New Riders—with Nelson and Buddy Cage from the old band, joined by bassist Ronnie Penque, drummer Johnny Markowski and longtime Hot Tuna associate Michael Falzarano on guitar and vocals—took its first steps back into the limelight in late 2005, and has been picking up steam ever since. Just recently, however, the group put out its first album of new material in two decades, Where I Come From, and it’s a gem: The disc contains seven strong new originals co-written by David Nelson and Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter (including the propulsive title track), plus excellent tunes by the other members—in keeping with Riders tradition, there’s even a doper song, Markowski and Bobby Driscoll’s grower’s anthem, “Higher.” The album was cut mostly live in the studio, and the playing is hot—Cage and Nelson play together beautifully, and they’re not afraid to stretch out and jam a bit, either. Indeed, this incarnation of the Riders is more in the jam band mold than the original country-rock “cosmic cowboys” of four decades ago. It’s a NRPS for a new day, still with a rich catalog of great songs, but also a group pointed forward, eager to create a modern legacy, as well.

Recently, I sat down with David Nelson in a diner near his Petaluma home to talk a bit about Where I Come From and the current state of the New Riders. We kicked off the conversation talking about the decision to revive the group four years ago…

What made that the right time to bring the New Riders back?
Buddy Cage had been playing occasionally with these guys in Stir Fry, doing session work and stuff. Johnny Markowski and Ron Penque were both in it, and they’d have both Vassar [Clements, the great fiddler] and Buddy play with them on certain gigs and on some sessions. One time they were talkin’ and the idea came up—“What would you think of getting the New Riders back together?” and Cage said, “Well, you’d have to talk to Nelson about that.” They called me and that was the beginning of this new thing.

When had you last played with Cage?
He’d sat in with the David Nelson Band a few times, so we’d kept up a bit. Anyway, those guys booked the first shows—we did four or five shows as a trial thing and they went great. People seemed to be really excited about it.

Did you rehearse a lot?
No, and that turned out to be a good thing. [Laughs] I’m the only West Coaster—they were all in the New York area—and we went to Johnny’s house in Orangeburg and somehow we thought that in one night we’d be able to rehearse 40 songs!

I don’t know what we were thinking there. [Laughs] Of course that didn’t quite happen, and even though they already knew a lot of the songs, we had train wrecks on nearly every song. “Do we do it like the record, or do it the live way?” Also, John Dawson sang most of the songs [in the original group], so I had to have my lyric book handy, and we had to figure out who would sing what. Because we couldn’t arrange everything, it caused us to play it more on the fly at those first gigs and that turned out to make it all sound really fresh. Every time we played, it was a little bit different and new ideas came up and so we thought, “Yeah, let’s keep doing this.” We got more gigs and then we got a booking agency involved—when a booking agency is interested, that makes it feel a little more solid.

What had also happened during the many years the Riders weren’t playing was the jam band movement got started, and certainly you’re in one of the best jam bands ever [the DNB]. So you’re more geared that way than you were in the earlier New Riders days, and so are so many of the fans in the scene who follow all these jam bands in different styles. It was cool seeing some of the old New Riders songs suddenly opening up in ways they hadn’t before.
That’s true. It is different now. A lot of it was John [Dawson]—he didn’t really care for the jam stuff as much. When Garcia was with us it was a matter of course—you had to jam a bit. He’d look at you like, “Well”? [Laughs] We limited it to a couple of songs, though—“Portland Woman,” Garden of Eden” and “Dirty Business.”

Don’t forget “I Don’t Need No Doctor” and “Willie and the Hand Jive.”
That’s true. The jamming would make little cameos.

But it never got to 18 minutes, like some of your tunes now.
Our sets can go like that. But it can also wear on an audience when you have long song after long song, so we have these packages that are neat little songs—like “Sutter’s Mill” and “Sing Me A Rainbow” and a lot of others and we still do straight.

From the beginning of this latest revival, too, you’ve brought in fresh material.
That’s part of what makes it fun to do and not just a thing where you’re playing old songs.

Like a nostalgia act…
Right. I brought in one of my songs, “Any Naked Eye,” and we started doing that, and Falzarano brought in a couple, and Ron and Johnny, too.

How did Falzarano get involved?
I don’t know, but it sure is a good thing because he’s more or less the Wise Man. He’s really got his head on his shoulders and he’s connected in New York with all sorts of people in our community, so it turns out to be perfect, because the rest of us—me included—tend to get a little scatter-brained: “Oops, I forgot to do that!” [Laughs] But Falz is always on top of everything.

Also, we go back to a lot of the same roots—we’re from the same schools of music.

How has the process of taking on more of the lead guitar role been for you? In the DNB, you’ve got Barry Sless as a foil. In the Riders you have Cage, obviously, but that’s a little different.
It’s made me come alive to have the job put on me. Like you said, there’s no Barry there, who can just play endlessly like a fountain. So I had to jump in and start playing more, and I’m really liking it. It was kind of rough and ragged at the beginning, but you get used to it and you get a flow going. In the old days sometimes I used to just clam up and say, “Oh, I can’t think of anything,” and Garcia would say, “I can’t either!” So if he feels that way, you feel better and then you can relax, and that’s the whole thing to getting it flowing.

So then the notion of making a new album with new material comes up. Do you approach Robert Hunter or does he approach you?
We actually had started on that idea before I hooked up with Hunter on this. “Any Naked Eye” was being considered, and I had a couple of others, and Johnny had “Higher” and another song. And Ronnie had a couple, and Falzarano had a couple, so we were planning to go up there and rehearse at Turkey Trot Acres, which is a spread in upstate New York which is run by a Vietnam Vet family and a community of guys who are into hunting. They have a lodge where people can pay to stay and hunt wild turkeys. They have a lodge and lunch room that’s like a log cabin and it has really good sound and we played a gig there one time. In fact we made our live DVD there.

So we were planning to go there and hole up and rehearse some new material, and right then—Hunter didn’t know anything about it—he happened to be on one of his [writing] rolls and he went up to his cabin on the Russian River and he sent me an email. “I’m up at the cabin and doing some writing. What do you think of this?” It was the lyrics to something called “Eagle Breeder’s Waltz.” I read over it and I realized that it was a thing between him and me: “Let’s do the Eagle Breeder’s Waltz, like we did in ‘65/ Revive our spirits with smelling salts and act like we’re still alive.” I thought it was pretty cool, so I went to work printing out things and trying to record something. I made it a waltz and tried all these other things, but I couldn’t quite get it. Then he starts sending lyrics just about every other day: “Hey, it’s your turn! How about this one?” The first ones to come in were ‘Where I Come From” and “Ghost Train Blues.”

I think “Where I Come From” is one of his best lyrics in years.
I agree. That was one where the music just came right off the paper. You don’t want to force them. So I might read the words a few times, just say them, not try to put music to them, and then go do the dishes or something. In the middle of doing dishes is one of the best times for ideas to come to me. You shut off the water, dry your hands and go into the other room and work on it. But that was one where I quickly thought, “Oh yeah, it’s that kind of tune.”

There’s a line that jumped out at me from another song Hunter wrote, “Barracuda Moon”: “First mistake we made was coming on too proud/ Next mistake we made was not being proud enough / It’s always all or nothing/ If you don’t like it, tough.” For some reason I got a flash about that being about the San Francisco scene 40 years ago.
I know; I can see that. Me and Falz have been going through the lyrics and saying, “You know what he’s talking about there?” “Barracuda Moon” definitely seems like the idea of starting out in ’65—there’s even that line about August 1964, “Pick up your cards and bet/ Careful what you ask for, it might be what you get.”

“Down the Middle” is pretty obvious about being on the road. There are also seem to be a lot of images that seem to be related to or pointing to the Grateful Dead, though I haven’t actually talked to him about any of this.

I wondered about that myself.
“Last thing I see as light doth fade/ Skull and crossbones on my grave.” [From “Down the Middle”]

That was the first thing I thought of when I heard it—that it was about Hunter’s own legacy.
I think “Ghost Train Blues” is about Garcia’s guitar: “Listen to that wolf wail/ Thunderclap and black hail/ Enough to make my nerve fail, all night long.” ’Cause Garcia used to pester him for songs and Hunter’d be saying, “C’mon leave me alone. I’m doing the best I can!” [Laughs] I don’t know… That’s just another idea.

Well, this begs the question, how do you feel about being a vehicle or a conduit for his ideas about that stuff?
It’s great! I love these songs. Also, I have no idea if any of those notions are right or what he had in mind. I could be completely off-base. And I’m sure other people will have other interpretations, as it should be. His lyrics are so totally artistic and expressive, and he tends to stay away from clichés. Though he does have his own set of symbols and vocabulary. And he has all these different sides of him. He can write the most beautiful and poetic things and do more straightforward rock ’n’ roll songs.

Like “Rockin’ with Nona” on the new album…
Yeah, that’s a really fun song

Jerry used to say the Hunter wrote “him” into songs occasionally; that’s he’d be singing a song and suddenly it would dawn on him, “Shit, this is about me!”
Right! [Laughs] I’ve had those moments, too, but I think I’ve suppressed them so far, because you don’t want to start feeling self-conscious about what you’re singing. What’s great is that so much of what he writes is so open-ended and you can bring what you want or what you imagine to them. In fact they encourage that…Then you get the cosmic idiot moment: “Duh!” [Laughs]

“Where I Come From,” “Big Six” and “Barracuda Moon” were sort of like my symphony that’s been coming out of me for years. They have similar melodic tonalities and harmony structures to some other stuff I’ve written—like “Snakebit”—but they also go in some new directions.

In the past you’ve written some good songs for the DNB with Hunter, like “Long Gone Sam” and “John Hardy’s Wedding.”
Those were done in the reverse of this fashion, and actually it was before I got the [DNB] together. I told him, “I’ve got nothing to do and I’m writing some songs,” so he lent me a 4-track tape recorder and I started making little songs—putting on overdubs with a fake bass part and all. I sent him the music and it had a little melody on the guitar and he thought it sounded like [the traditional song] “John Hardy,” and I guess it does, so he wrote the lyrics that way. So on those earlier ones, they were sent to him as music.

Where did you record this new New Riders album? There are no credits…
We would be on the road and we’d have a day off, or if we were lucky, two days off, and we’d just find a studio, because Falzarano knows different places. There was one near Johnny’s house and we did a couple of days of tracks there, and then we’d take that on a Pro Tools hard drive and then the next place was in Pennsylvania, and the next was in Sacramento. So those were where we did the basics and then we mixed it. Most of them are virtually live studio cuts. Our attitude was like, “If we don’t get it in three tries, we’ll move on.” Most of them ended up being take one or take two. “Barracuda Moon” was only played one time all the way through and it was the one song we hadn’t played in front of an audience. I think we’d worked out an arrangement at Turkey Trot, so we had the concept, but then we didn’t think it was ready for an audience, but we tried it in the studio and blam—one take!

Do you feel the lineage to the older band when you play the new material in the midst of the old material?
Oh yeah, because of the way me and Cage play together. We have all that stuff in our systems.

It’s in your DNA.
It is. And so far the audiences seem to really like the new stuff…

Are you getting young people at the shows?
We are, which is really satisfying, of course. From the beginning of this four-year stretch we’ve seen a lot of young kids—“Oh, my dad used to go see you guys!” [Laughs]

There’s more of these songs coming. Hunter has sent at least four more and I’m working on two of them now. One of them is a beautiful thing called “Five-eo.” This is the first he’s sent along with a chord progression. He said he’d had it lying around for a while and I might as well have it. [Laughs] So I tried his chord progression and there was one spot where I thought it wasn’t quite working right, so I changed it a little and now it works great. It’s really sweet—it’s a walking-home song: “I’m going to Five-eo.”

I know there’s a tradition of “Five-eo” songs, like “Peggy-o” songs.
I think if you wanted a four-syllable word for a place in traditional songs you took “Fennario.” If you wanted three syllables, you took “Five-io.” [Laughs]

This is basically the 40th anniversary of the band. Are you making hay of it?
Not yet, but we probably will!

NRPS basically started because John Dawson had a bunch of songs and Jerry wanted to learn how to play pedal steel…
That’s right, and the next thing we knew we were in a band together. I remember going up to Jerry’s house in Larkspur with John and we had [Grateful Dead sound engineer]
Bob Matthews fill in on bass and we practiced John’s tunes, and then we thought, “Hey, let’s get a gig! We can get Mickey to play drums!” So we played two or three nights there at the Bear’s Lair student union [on the UC Berkeley campus] and they said, “What do you call the band?” and Jerry blurts out, “The Murdering Punks!” Which was very timely, because right around then the Manson killings happened. [Laughs] So the guy wanted to call it Jerry Garcia & Friends, which Jerry hated, of course. “I’m a sideman!” he’d say. So we got down to thinking in earnest about a name, which is really hard, because once someone starts going funny then it gets crazier and crazier. It’s hopeless! Fortunately we had Hunter there, because he was living with Jerry in Larkspur at the time, and he’s down to earth and serious. Or at least he can be, unlike the rest of us. [Laughs] He said, “How about the Riders of the Purple Sage?” [after the Zane Grey novel]? And I said, “There’s already a Riders of the Purple Sage band.” So we became the New Riders of the Purple Sage.

* * *

For lots more on the New Riders, and to buy their fantastic new album (or the Turkey Trot DVD), check out the band’s very cool website at www.nrpsmusic.com.

ROTHBURY 2009!

frogstorm — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 18:25:57 -0500

ROTHBURY returns to the Double JJ Ranch in Rothbury, Michigan July 2- 5, 2009. Last year ROTHBURY celebrated its inaugural year and went down in the books as one of the best festivals ever. We can’t wait to be part of the experience this year and hope you’ll join us! Check out www.rothburyfestival.com for the full scoop.

GET TICKETS NOW

http://www.rothburyfestival.com/tickets/

ROTHBURY
2009 ARTIST LINE UP:

THE DEAD
BOB DYLAN AND HIS BAND,
THE STRING CHEESE INCIDENT,
WILLIE NELSON & FAMILY,
THE BLACK CROWES,

DAMIAN “JR. GONG” MARLEY AND NAS, STS9,
G. LOVE & SPECIAL SAUCE, GOV’T MULE, BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE,
COLD WAR KIDS, MATISYAHU, GUSTER, LES CLAYPOOL, CHROMEO,
GIRL TALK, THE HOLD STEADY, ANI DI FRANCO
AND MANY OTHERS

THE FOUR DAY CAMPING FESTIVAL ON 4th of JULY WEEKEND
PROMISES EXPANDED VIP EXPERIENCES, UNPRECEDENTED SUSTAINABILITY
INITIATIVES, AND MUCH MORE

HERE'S THE TICKET LINK
AT WWW.ROTHBURYFESTIVAL.COM

The Dead (their ONLY summer appearance!), Bob Dylan, The String Cheese Incident, Willie Nelson & Family, and The Black Crowes will top the bill of over 60 diverse and stellar artists at the second annual ROTHBURY Festival at the Double JJ Ranch in Michigan on July 2-3-4-5, 2009.

Also on the bill are Damian “Jr. Gong” Marley & Nas, STS9 (2 shows: full band/Live PA Set), G. Love & Special Sauce, Gov't Mule, Broken Social Scene, Cold War Kids, Matisyahu, Guster, Les Claypool, Chromeo, Girl Talk, The Hold Steady, Ani DiFranco and many others. A complete list of confirmed artists follows, and many others will be announced in the coming months.

ROTHBURY emerged last year as a new Fourth of July celebration. With The Dead performing their only summer show and The String Cheese Incident together for their only show for 2009, and cultural icons Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, and Ralph Stanley, ROTHBURY 2009 continues to honor America’s extraordinary festival lineage. Interlacing ushers of the new American music scene such as STS9, Chromeo, and MSTRKRFT, globally recognized acts including Femi Kuti & The Positive Force, Damian “Jr. Gong” Marley & Nas, and King Sunny Adé & His African Beats and local Michigan artists The Macpodz, Steppin' In It, The Ragbirds, Four Finger Five, and The Hard Lessons, ROTHBURY delivers music of integrity across all genres. Coupled with a commitment to exploring the integration of art and modern thought and technology throughout the event, ROTHBURY creates a unique 21st century American gathering unlike any other.

ROTHBURY 2009 also unveils its broadened GOOD LIFE VIP offerings. Expanded this year to fit all budgets and tastes, ROTHBURY’s VIP experiences are unmatched by any other U.S. festival. Utilizing the festival’s unique site, fans can choose from a variety of sleeping/living options including beach front and forested environments and a selection of habitats such as safari tents, teepees, pre-fab camping packages and more. Each GOOD LIFE neighborhood offers a distinctly different living experience for a variety of budgets. Visit www.rothburyfestival.com for full GOOD LIFE details.

Building on its mission to create a state-of-the-art large scale sustainable event and to organize and nurture community involvement that makes a difference, ROTHBURY 2009 promises even more cutting-edge festival implementation of ever-changing green technologies. The 2009 ROTHBURY Think Tank, an event within the event, explores the topic of the emerging “New Green Economy.” The Think Tank will host various buzz sessions and roundtables between leading scientists, scholars, writers, progressive political and corporate leaders, youth leaders, ROTHBURY artists, and ROTHBURY attendees. Think Tank Programming details coming soon.

ROTHBURY itself is committed to producing a near zero-waste concert. The first to tackle a green program of this magnitude at an around-the-clock (camping) concert in the USA, ROTHBURY has an on-staff Greening Chief, and has implemented multiple initiatives toward this effort, including replacing disposables with 100% compostables, recycling and composting, choosing clean energy, carbon-offsetting, and Green Ticket options. Visit www.rothburyfestival.com for more information.

ROTHBURY’s current list of confirmed artists is as follows:

The Dead
Bob Dylan and His Band
The String Cheese Incident
Willie Nelson & Family
The Black Crowes
Damian “Jr. Gong” Marley & Nas
STS9 (2 shows: full band/Live PA Set)
G. Love & Special Sauce
Gov't Mule
Broken Social Scene
Yonder Mountain String Band
The Disco Biscuits
Les Claypool
Cold War Kids
John Butler
Chromeo
Ani DiFranco
Matisyahu
Guster
Girl Talk
Femi Kuti & The Positive Force
MSTRKRFT
Martin Sexton
Flogging Molly
Railroad Earth
The Hold Steady
Toots & The Maytals
Ralph Stanley & The Clinch Mountain Boys
Brett Dennen
Zappa Plays Zappa
Grace Potter and the Nocturnals
Shpongle DJ Set
Son Volt
Jackie Greene
Soulive
Man Man
Peter Rowan Bluegrass Band w/ Tony Rice
King Sunny Adé & His African Beats
Lotus
Kid Cudi
STS9 Live PA
The Glitch Mob
Davy Knowles and Back Door Slam
Pretty Lights
Moseley, Law, Sipe and Droll
Rebelution
Quannum All Stars ft. Lyrics Born, The Mighty Underdogs, Gift of Gab & Lifesavas
Toubab Krewe
Sam Roberts Band
Hill Country Revue
Kyle Hollingsworth Band
Lipp Service
2020 Soundsystem
Break Science ft. Adam Deitch
The Hard Lessons
The Low Anthem
Underground Orchestra
Future Rock
The Macpodz
Steppin' In It
Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad
Chris Pierce
Rachel Goodrich
The Ragbirds
Four Finger Five

Additional acts to be announced in the coming months.

Tickets available at www.rothburyfestival.com and at 1-888-512-SHOW (Open Mon-Sat 9am-9pm CST).

ROTHBURY is produced by Madison House Presents and AEG Live.

www.rothburyfestival.com

NEW Video from The Dead

Jonathan Lane — Sat, 02 May 2009 20:17:51 -0500

New: Branford A new web movie directed by Justin Kreutzmann and produced by Jay Blakesberg. Edited by Justin and Stephanie Cinesi.
New: Nassau	New: Letterman Backstage
Goin' Down The Road	4/14 Charlottesville
4/12 Greensboro	The Last Rehearsal
New York Taxi Tour	Till The Morning Comes
The Dead Rehearse (#3)	The Dead Rehearse (#2)
The Dead Rehearse (2/27/09)	The Dead at the Inaugural Ball
The Dead - Frosting on the Cake	We Strike At Noon
Get Weirder	Time in the Groove

The Dead on Letterman

frogstorm — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 12:05:10 -0500

With The Dead appearing on David Letterman on Thursday, April 23, we figured we'd take a quick look through the Grateful Dead's history on Letterman's shows going back more than 27 years.

History of the Grateful Dead on David Letterman

The members of the Grateful Dead, mostly Jerry and Bobby, have a long relationship with David Letterman going back to 1982. The two guitarists first appeared on Letterman on 4/13/82, during the Grateful Dead's Spring tour, on a night off between shows at Nassau Coliseum and the Glens Falls Civic Center. On this episode, they played two acoustic songs, "Deep Elem Blues" and "Monkey & The Engineer," with Jerry and Bobby revealing terrific senses of humour in describing the origins of the moniker Dead Heads. Classic stuff. Bobby had a bit of a cold, and his voice was a bit off, but they played these acoustic tunes very well.

The next visit to Letterman was on 9/17/87 on the night off during a five night stand at Madison Square Garden, at which they played Bob Dylan's "When I Paint My Masterpiece" with the Letterman house band backing them. While talking with Dave, they discussed their new video "So Far," the shows at MSG, and the success of In The Dark. Bobby then did one of the oddest things these guys have ever done on TV, he attempted to lift Jerry via a parlour trick, with Dave and Biff helping out. The sight of an unwitting Jerry, in a nice coat, sitting as the crew tries to lift Jerry with two fingers is one of the most hilarious images of the band I've ever seen. Just the way Dave looked at the camera and said "we're going to lift Jerry" had us all cracking up. I'd been at the two previous shows at the Garden, and they were playing very well and, obviously, having loads of fun.

In 1989, during a five night run at the Brendan Byrne Arena at the Meadowlands in New Jersey, Bobby and Jerry once again visit Dave, on 10/13/89, this time playing "Second That Emotion" with Paul's band once again backing them up. Also very cool during this appearance was during the commercial breaks, they played along with the band on the music the leads in and out of the commercial breaks, including "Good Lovin'," "Mighty Quinn" and "Hideaway," amongst a few other things.

In 2003, The Dead appeared on Letterman with that version of the band, featuring Bobby, Phil, Mickey and Bill, as well as Jeff Chimenti and Rob Barraco on keyboards, Jimmy Herring on lead guitar, and Joan Osborne on vocals. They played a rocking version of "Casey Jones."

Bobby and Jerry also appeared separately on Letterman, the former playing "The Winners" with Rob Wasserman in 1991, and the latter playing "Friend of the Devil" with David Grisman in 1993.

DEAD '09 TOURING THE UNIVERSE OF SOUND

frogstorm — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 17:51:46 -0500

Each night of the tour Mickey Hart connects you with the universe's most celestial vibrations from the Big Bang to the rings of Saturn to the Black Hole. Tune in and drop into outerspace.

4/18 Worcester, MA - Heartbeat of the Sun

http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/gsfc/spacesci/solarsounds/images.htm
spacesounds.com

4/17 Albany, NY - Cassini Saturn/Jupiter Conversation

4/15 Charlottesville, VA - Cosmic Debris

Original sound designed by spacesounds.com

4/14 Washington, DC -Jupiter Magnetos

Click the images below for a closer look at Jupiter Magnetosphere.

4/12 Greensboro, NC - The Big Bang

Click the images below to navigate the inner workings of the Big Bang.

The Big Bang - © John G. Cramer - 2003 The Big Bang Sound in the simulation is derived from the sound propagating as compression waves through the plasma/hydrogen medium of the early universe some 100 to 700 thousand years after the initial Big Bang. The density of this medium was changing as the universe expanded, but should have been considerably more dense than air on our little planet. One does NOT need air to have sound, only some medium in which compression/rarefaction waves can propagate.

A NOTE FROM MICKEY ON THE UNIVERSE OF SOUND

We know parts of our body are vibrating ---pulsing, drumming---a million billion strokes a second. We know we are living on a modest planet that is belting along Time's Highway at nine hundred miles a minute, which might seem like a pretty good clip except we are caught in the slipstream of a Sun that's cruising at nine thousand miles a minute, and are citizens of a galaxy going even faster than that. Yet it feels like we're standing still, doesn't it?

Rhythm is the deep waters we swim in, mostly unaware.

One of the forgotten geniuses of Western science was a Dutch mathematican named Christian Huygens, who approximately 350 years ago discovered one of the fundamental laws of this universe. Huygens noticed that when he moved two clocks close to one another, their pendulums always synchronized and moved as one. Huygens called this phenomena entrainment. The urge of anything rhythmic (and everything is) to move together, to find a harmonious relationship, to share energy, is one of the glues (maybe the glue) that holds Everything together.

Part of the great power of rhythmic entrainment is that one is typically unconscious of the rhythms one most deeply entrains to, and unaware of all those that operate beyond the limited ability of our senses ---voraciously scanning the rhythmscape with a variety of media--- to detect. But these rhythms are with us all the time --- in here and out there.

Modern technology allows us to capture or imagine them ---electric, atomic, magnetic, galactic--- and gives us a way to translate these vibrations into sounds which we can hear. Our radio telescopes have recorded the song of the pulsar, our mathematicians have modeled the domain of the Big Bang. The Black Hole in the center of the galaxy Perseus is singing a steady note -57 octaves below middle C. I have gathered together an unruly sonic zoo of 23 of these magnificent, even dangerous space creatures, and I will be introducing them to you, one a night, as we tour the Universe of Sound, the universe will start to sing.

Check back after the shows to hear the sounds.

Mickey

Images Courtesy NASA/JPL & NASA/JPL-Caltech & NASA/CXC/PSU

Sounds Courtesy of The SETI Institute, and Jonah Sharp

M.E.R.T. Jay Stevens, Howard Cohen, Fred Lieberman, Rose Solomon, Reya Hart, Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute, Karen Randall of the SETI Institute, Deborah Klein

Don't Miss Grateful Dead in Sunday's NYT

frogstorm — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 19:41:22 -0500

The New York Times has a great article about the Grateful Dead in this Sunday's edition. It's the perfect way to tune up and get ready for the tour that kicks off that same night in Greensboro. Click here for an online version.

There's also an interactive feature where fans can vote on "The Greatest Show Ever." Click here to check it out.

On the Road Again: Rockin’ for the Faithful (And Good Causes), A Few Minutes with Phil Lesh

frogstorm — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 21:05:06 -0500

On the day I catch up with Phil Lesh for a few final pre-tour thoughts—Sunday, April 5—he’s about to go into yet another rehearsal for The Dead’s April-May tour. The sextet has logged some serious practice time this winter-spring, with the most recent band get-togethers occurring in public in New York City: On March 30, The Dead (or members thereof) made four appearances over the course of one very long day, performing one song on the popular morning TV chat-fest The View, then staging three free concerts in three different venues—an acoustic shindig (featuring Phil, Bob and Warren) at a place called Angel Orensanz, and then electric sets at the tiny Gramercy Theatre and the 3,000-capacity Roseland Ballroom. More than 4,000 lucky fans earned their right to go to one of the shows via an online lottery. (You can find setlists for each of the shows here.)

Phil and I chatted a bit about that, and also about one of the cooler aspects of the Dead tour: The fact that at every stop on the tour, a selection of some of the best seats at each venue—ranging from 24 seats (in Greensboro) to about 100 (for Madison Square Garden)—are being sold through an online auction to raise funds mostly for the various philanthropic organizations The Dead are connected to; yet another example of The Dead giving back to the community, as they have since their founding. To sweeten the deal, too, The Dead are offering two limited edition band-signed posters for every pair of tickets sold through the auction—a tremendous value (and a fabulous memento)! For more info on Charity Folks—the online group hosting the auction—and to actually place bids on premium show ducats and special VIP packages, click here. Bidding closes about a week before each show.

* * * * * * *

Have I caught you in mid-rehearsals?
Actually, this is our last day.

What happens at the end of rehearsals?
We play our little hearts out until we drop exhausted on the floor, then we give each other a big hug and say, “See ya on the road!”

Is there a natural evolution that occurs over the course of rehearsals?
Well, we sort of imposed one this time. The first two weeks we went over a whole bunch of songs, and this last five days we’ve just been playing, doing a lot of jamming and trying to lock it down. And, of course, we did those three shows in New York which I thought were very well-performed and well-received. It gave all of us a bunch of new confidence. So now we can open ourselves up to that magic and feel like we know what we’re doing. Those shows were a lot of fun.

Tell me about that day.
Well, we decided we wanted to do some free shows for the New York audience, so we put these things together just a few days before. We did The View in the morning—Warren, Bob and I—and that was fine. It was a normal TV show. They’re very nice people. I’ve seen Whoopi at our shows, and she knows Mickey; she’s a long-time pal. She was really stoked that we were there.

Is it hard to get used to cutting your songs down for TV? Last year you did the super-abbreviated “Sugaree” with your band [on Conan O’Brien’s show] and here you had the “Friend of the Devil,” which at least had all the verses…
[Laughs] Yeah, well, that’s TV. Musicians are the poor relations of TV variety shows. I don’t know why that is. I don’t know why they always go on last and you have to cut your song down to three minutes and 30 seconds. I would rather have played long and talked less, but that’s my personal thing. Like I said, they were very nice and it was really a good experience.

I’d never heard of the first venue you played that day, Angel Orensanz…
It’s an old synagogue, if I’m not mistaken, and it’s been turned into an arts center and it’s an amazing place. It looks sort of like an old medieval town hall, with a balcony around three sides of it and all kinds of great old decorations, and it sound sounds really nice in there, too. For acoustic we were able to play so quiet that we could do all the acoustic dynamics that the instruments will allow and get it across to the audience.

Do you plan on playing acoustic music with some regularity on this tour?
We’re going to see what we can do. We set up yesterday to rehearse with the gear and the physical setup. It’s not going to be every show certainly…

More hit or miss, like it was with your band…
Right, it will be selected shows, I suppose.

Then it was on to the Gramercy Theatre…
Right, which I’d never been to before. I think it holds around 600 people; a great little place. That was really cool because I didn’t have to use ear monitors. I could listen with open ears and use wedges for monitors, which I can’t usually do in larger places. That second show was about an hour.

How much time did you have between the three gigs?
We had two hours between them, so that allowed whatever gear needed to be moved to get where it had to go and be set up.

Did you have different audiences each place or were there people who were chasing you around town going to every show?
Well, as far as I know it was set up so nobody got to come to more than one. The idea was to allow as many people to get in for free and see the band as possible.

So did the equipment at Roseland come over from the Gramercy, or did you have enough to set up in both places independently?
I don’t really know for sure. There was some stuff that had to come over, but not a lot. The Roseland show was really great, I thought. We ended up playing a little over two hours there. We couldn’t stop playing. [Laughs]

It’s a great place. Had you played there in any capacity before?
Yeah, I played there in the ’90s with Warren for an Allen Woody tribute concert. The Allman Brothers showed up at that one, and Berry Oakley, Jr. was there, and Phil Lesh & Friends played. I enjoyed Roseland even more this time because it was our gig, of course. We could really work the place.

And you also played with the Allman Brothers at the Beacon while you were in New York…
[Laughs] What a trip, you know? It was an honor for us to have them invite us to play the last show of their 40th anniversary run. Obviously we go way back with those guys.

Let’s talk about The Dead’s involvement with Charity Folks. I was not familiar with them previously, but I see they do work with a lot of great groups, from the ACLU, to Sanctuary for Families, to the Alzheimers Association, to the T.J. Martell Foundation…
That’s one of the reasons we chose them. I haven’t been that involved in the nuts-and-bolts negotiations about this, but I’ve heard a lot of good things about them. And this seemed like a good opportunity: The band gets to hold out some of the best seats for every show—in a lot of cases the very front rows—and we wanted to make these tickets available for people to bid on with the money going to charity. We’re going to benefit the Rex Foundation, the Further Foundation, which is Bob’s foundation, and Unbroken Chain, which is Jill’s and my foundation. There are also a couple of other non-profits involved who will benefit as well. It’s really a continuation of what we’ve been doing for the last 40 years: first by playing for free, then doing benefits, and then with our foundations. Those foundations will, of course, pass that money on to worthy institutions and non-profits.

It seems like in the early days you guys played almost as many benefits as paying gigs…
[Laughs] It does seem like that. It wasn’t just us, either, of course. All the San Francisco bands played a lot of benefits. As we started touring nationally and working more, it became a problem because we couldn’t do all the benefits we were asked, and of course we usually wanted to do them. Eventually, it got really hard to fit it in with our schedules, so that’s one of the main reason we started the Rex Foundation [in the early ’80s].

It must give this tour a slightly special feel to know that every show, in effect, becomes a benefit of sorts, since part of the proceeds of every show will go to charity…
That’s right. It’s always a good thing to be able to give back.

Why do you think this tour has generated so much excitement? It definitely feels like a much bigger deal than the one in 2004? The tickets have sold faster, it’s getting a lot of publicity…
You know, I can’t really put my finger on it. I agree, though, there seems to be a lot of excitement about this tour. I guess what it’s really about is us playing together again. Maybe it’s “absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

I’ve been feeling a groundswell of desire out there for us to play together again. What really jump-started it was doing those shows for Obama. My son Brian said before the California primary, “Dad, you’ve gotta get The Dead for a benefit because it will be so much more powerful and so much more important.” So I called Bobby and he was immediately down with it. Mickey was down. Billy couldn’t make it because he was in Hawaii and it was all put together really quickly. And that was successful musically—it was absolutely wonderful from our perspective. It was such a gas to play again with Bobby. You forget how wide-ranging these guys are in what they play and in how they think. So that was great, and then it was totally a no-brainer when the [Obama] campaign asked us to do the big show at Penn State. And that went so well, that’s when we essentially decided, “Let’s go play some music together.”

The people want us to play music together. They want us to come out and play the Grateful Dead classics, so that’s what we’re going to do.

I would think that by this point, between being in your band and playing on that previous Dead tour, it must be pretty instinctual playing with Warren, too.
Warren is such a consummate professional and he fits in so beautifully now. It was harder for him, I know, back in ’04, when he was there with Jimmy [Herring] also, and there were two of them playing, plus Bob. It was difficult to know exactly what to do when. But this time he’s really a part of the band, as is [keyboardist] Jeff Chimenti, who has all that history with Bob and with The Dead.

Are there any plans to go on the road after the July 4th Rothbury Festival show, which is being billed as the only Dead show of the summer?
I can say without fear of contradiction that we have not made any plans.

Have you made any plans for your own band?
No, I haven’t. I don’t know exactly what I’m going to be doing for the rest of the year.

Well, I hope you go out again. I love that band.
So do I. And I love to do it, so it’s not like it won’t happen. I just don’t know when.

Go Green For Dead '09

frogstorm — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 19:49:14 -0500

Did you know that over 75% of the carbon footprint of a Dead concert comes from fans traveling to and from the show? The good news is our friends at Reverb are helping reduce this footprint by organizing The Dead's easy rideshare program at PickupPal. Reverb is also helping the band "green up" the spring tour with a wide range of eco-friendly initiatives.

Find out more about The Dead's evironmental touring efforts when you visit The Dead Green Spot.

Lower your impact when you roll to the show in our special 100% organic cotton Reduce Reuse Renew Stealie T-shirt and hat.

What's Reverb?
Reverb is a 501(c)(3) non-profit environmental organization founded by Guster guitarist/vocalist Adam Gardner and his environmentalist wife, Lauren Sullivan. Deeply rooted within the music and environmental communities, Reverb educates and engages musicians and their fans to promote environmental sustainability.

Reverb has coordinated greening programs for the likes of Dave Matthews Band, John Mayer, Jack Johnson, Bonnie Raitt, Barenaked Ladies, Sheryl Crow, Guster and many more. In addition, Reverb has been very pleased to work with Warner Music Group, Live Nation and other industry organizations.

Need a ride? Got a ride?
click here for carpooling info

click here to check out
how the Dead '09 tour is
keeping green

The Dead Perform 3 Free Club Shows in NYC

frogstorm — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 19:58:18 -0500

The Dead--original members Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart, along with Warren Haynes and Jeff Chimenti--performed three special rare club gigs in Manhattan yesterday beginning with an acoustic set at ANGEL ORENSANZ featuring Weir, Lesh, and Haynes, followed by back-to-back electric sets at THE GRAMERCY THEATRE and ROSELAND BALLROOM for a total of 4,100 thrilled fans. The band only announced the show 3 days in advance via a local radio station and to fans via text message and email where fans received free tickets through an online lottery.

The group was in New York preparing for their upcoming spring tour and decided to do what they love most: playing live in front of an audience. The weekend kicked off with Weir and Lesh sitting in with the Allman Brothers Band for the last night of that group’s 15-show Beacon Theatre residency, where they played “Sugaree,” “I Know You Rider” and “Franklin’s Tower.”

The Dead started the marathon day Monday with a performance on ABC-TV’s “The View,” where Weir, Lesh and Haynes performed “Friend of the Devil” and talked about their music and the upcoming tour with two of the show’s hosts, Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar.

At 5pm, the first of three sets began at the intimate Angel Orensanz Center for the Arts with the trio performing a rare acoustic set highlighted by “a largely instrumental, 20-minute version of 'Bird Song,' the three men weaving guitar lines in and around each other,” according to David Browne from RollingStone.com. After a full band electric set at the Gramercy Theatre, the band’s cab tour through New York took them to the largest of the three venues, Roseland Ballroom, for an “expansive, energetic set…[that] began with two up-tempo ballads before moving into renditions of some of the band’s most renowned improvisational vehicles” (Seth Schiesel, NYTimes.com). As Browne also noted, “the Dead awed an enraptured, dancing crowd with nearly two more hours of music” to cap off this historical night.

The group’s 3-set show Monday night featured the following songs:

Angel Orensanz Set List: (capacity: 500)
Dire wolf
Birdsong
Cumberland Blues
Pride of Cucamonga
Lazy River Road
Casey Jones
Enc: Ripple

Gramercy Theatre Set List: (capacity: 600)
Playin in the Band
Good Lovin’
The Wheel
Franklin's Tower
Enc: Touch of Gray

Roseland Ballroom Set List: (capacity: 3000)
Althea
Cassidy
Uncle John's Band
Eyes of the World
St. Stephen
Dark Star
Sugar Magnolia
Enc: Not Fade Away

Yikes! Bob, Rob and Jay Are Scaring the Children!

frogstorm — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 00:27:45 -0500

Here is the set list for the most recent show by Scaring the Children, featuring Bob Weir, his ol’ bass buddy Rob Wasserman, and RatDog drummer Jay Lane:

The Fillmore, San Francisco CA
Thursday March 26, 2009

Opening set: Band of Brotherz
(Jay Lane, Gabby La La, Chris Burger, Zacariah Mose, Andre Marshall,
M. Blake, M. Mcdaniels & Y. Alexandrine):
(about 30 minutes)

Scaring the Children (Bob Weir, Rob Wasserman, and Jay Lane):
Easy To Slip
Fever
Friend Of The Devil
Victim Or The Crime
When I Paint My Masterpiece
Josephine>
The Other One>
Two Djinn>
Bass/Drums>
Dear Prudence*
Throwing Stones>
Not Fade Away

Encore:
Eyes of The World# >
Band of Brotherz
(about 2 hours)

* with Gabby La La (sitar)
# with Kenny Brooks and Andre Marshall

Bob and Gabby La La during "Dear Prudence."

Photo: David W. Clark/daveclarklive.net

Free Tickets to Loyal Fans

frogstorm — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 16:45:24 -0500

The Dead today confirmed they'll perform three shows on Mon., March 30 in NYC at 3 different venues: an acoustic set (Bob Weir/Phil Lesh/Warren Haynes) at Angel Orensanz, an electric full-band (incl. Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann and Jeff Chimenti) set at The Gramercy Theatre and the electric finale at Roseland. As a special thanks to our email and text alert subscribers, soon we'll be sending out a link to an online form where you can enter for a chance to win tickets. The winners will be randomly selected and then notified via email.

IMPORTANT NOTE: IF YOU ARE NOT A LUCKY WINNER WITH TICKETS DO NOT SHOW UP AT THE VENUE - YOU WILL NOT GET IN. NO TICKETS WILL BE AVAILABLE AT THE DOOR IN ANY FASHION. Unless you are one of the lucky winners, you are not getting in or anywhere near the venue. Please respect the wishes of everyone involved with this regard

Some restrictions do apply so please click here for the official rules.

3/30 Dead on The View

frogstorm — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 15:30:33 -0500

It's The View Like You've Never Seen It!

Whoopi, Barbara, Joy, Elisabeth, Sherri...and The Dead! Don't miss this rare TV appearance as the boys get ready to hit the road.

- when: Monday 3/30, 10am Eastern/Pacific, 11am Central

- where: Your local ABC station

- what: Interview & Performance

Click here for more details.

Talkin’ About Music, Laughter and Life with Bill Kreutzmann

frogstorm — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 09:21:08 -0600

The BK3 (L-R: Scott Murawski, Bill Kreutzmann, Oteil Burbridge) Photo: Jessica Shouse

When Bill Kreutzmann came off the stage at Penn State University’s Bryce Jordan Center after the Change Rocks concert last October, one of the first things he said was, “I couldn’t stop laughing up there… I was just having so much fun!” When Kreutzmann is laughing, it’s a good bet that his fellow musicians and the audience are in for a good time as well, because that laughter is a product of the delight Bill takes in surprising himself and his partners in the creation of collectively improvised music. You can look forward to seeing that laughing face a lot in the coming months, most conspicuously when The Dead return to the road in April. But before renewing his longest-standing musical relationship, Bill is eagerly looking forward to reconnecting with his newest creative associates: guitarist Scott Murawski (Max Creek, Depth Quartet, Mike Gordon Band) and bassist Oteil Burbridge (Allman Brothers Band, Oteil and the Peacemakers, Aquarium Rescue Unit), Kreutzmann’s partners in a trio formed last year. The BK3, as the band is known, made a successful debut tour of the northeast last spring, plus a couple of festival appearances later in the year, revealing a level of musical empathy and telepathy that was remarkable in an ensemble that had come together so quickly and spontaneously. Now the other side of the country gets in on the fun, as Bill, Oteil and Scott prepare for a six-date western tour, beginning in Santa Cruz, CA on Thursday, February 12th. A complete list of shows can be found here.

Bill’s excitement over the continuation of the BK3 saga was evident as he spoke to dead.net recently from his home in Hawaii: “This band has been progressing at such an amazingly fast rate,” he said, “especially considering that we don’t get to spend that much time together, since I live here, Scott’s in the Northeast, Oteil’s down South. But I’ve been having real good conversations with these guys, and every time we get together, we just pick it up again so naturally. It means a lot to me that they’re so committed to doing this, with all the other stuff they have going on.”

While he looks forward to reexamining and revitalizing the Grateful Dead repertoire with his longtime brothers in music this coming spring, Bill is just as enthusiastic about the prospect of creating some entirely new music with BK3: “I didn’t want to play too much of the Grateful Dead stuff with this band. That’s a tremendous body of music. I still love playing it, and I love that Phil and Bobby are doing such great things with it with their bands, but I’m mostly looking forward to doing more and more new material with the trio. We’ve got a bunch of new songs with lyrics that Bob Hunter sent us, and depending on how much time we have to prepare them, we’d like to start playing them live, and maybe get into the studio to record some of them. Scott’s writing a lot of new stuff, too.” He does acknowledge, though, that when BK3 tackles some of the cornerstones of the Grateful Dead repertoire, it feels like he’s discovering their potential all over: “even with the older material, you’re always creating new music in the moment, because you’re playing it with new people.”

Kreutzmann also looks forward to sharing some of BK3’s music with those who haven’t yet had a chance to catch the band live: “We got real good video of some of our shows last year… enough for a couple of DVD releases, and 2 or 3 CDs worth as well. And we’ll be recording these shows coming up. I’m really excited for people to hear this band.”

The joy Bill is expressing in his music right now is very much of a piece with the rest of his life. He has great optimism for the future — a feeling that was bolstered by his recent experience at the Presidential Inaugural festivities in Washington, where he and his colleagues in The Dead performed (at the Mid-Atlantic States Inaugural Ball) and met the new President and First Lady. “I gave him a big Hawaiian hug,” he says with a laugh, “and complimented him on his surfing style. It was great to meet him and Michelle. They are just the way you see them — good, real people. I wake up now in the morning with a lot more hope for my country.”

He goes on to give another compelling reason for his optimistic attitude: “I’m real happy now in my personal life. More than I’ve ever been. Love really is the best drug, the best medicine. I understand that now in a way I never did before.”

As our conversation with Bill drew to an end, he told us of one of his favorite things to do while at home in Hawaii: “I’ve got this little trio I jam with, a garage band… I mean really a garage band, because that’s where we play, in my garage. Since it’s always warm here, we leave the garage door open. And the neighbors come around, and they become our audience, dancing in the driveway! I’ve actually met a lot of people doing that who I didn’t know before. They come up and introduce themselves, tell me they live a few houses down, and we get to know our neighbors that way.”

You can be sure that Bill Kreutzmann and his musical cohorts will make a lot of new friends and neighbors, and reconnect with old ones, out on the road in the months to come.

Inauguration Commemorative Guitar

frogstorm — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 13:47:35 -0600

Members of The Dead signed a Gibson Les Paul guitar to commemorate the Inauguration and raise money for HeadCount, the nonprofit group that works to get music fans more involved in the political process. Marking this unique occasion, DC Dead Heads Nancy Pelosi and John Podesta also signed the guitar.

To view the guitar or to bid, visit www.HeadCount.org or click here.

KPFA Grateful Dead Marathon Fundraiser

frogstorm — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 10:45:15 -0600

Saturday January 31st, 2009

From 10AM PST to 1AM PST

The annual KPFA Grateful Dead marathon is a fundraiser for America's first listener-sponsored radio station and a station whose history has been entwined with the Dead's since before the band was born. KPFA has broadcast many GD shows from the Greek, Oakland Coliseum, NYE and others, and of course, is the home of the weekly program Dead to the World.

Dead.Net Will donate 10% of each Dick’s Picks Purchase

During the marathon, buy any of the Dick’s Picks series and dead.net will donate 10% of every sale to KPFA. Fill those holes in your collection and support KPFA at the same time.
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Bill Kreutzmann New Year's Eve Shows

frogstorm — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 16:46:57 -0600

Announcing 2 shows to celebrate the end of 2008, and the start of 2009 - in Hawaii!

Dec. 29 @ Charly's in Paia

Dec. 31@ the Voyage East: 375 W. Kuiaha (Pauwela Cannery)

Tickets are available at Bhounty Music (Kahulaui), Wings (Haiku), Wine Corner (Paia), West Side Vibes (Lihaina)

For Credit Card orders call 808-269-0831

For more tour dates on the mainland, click here.

Mickey Hart presents "The TAO of Wood"

frogstorm — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 19:46:47 -0600

Mickey Hart presents "The TAO of Wood"

the debut show featuring
his sculptures and paintings

Artist Reception
November 22nd, 2008
7pm to 9pm

RSVP required

Dennis Rae Fine Art
781 Beach St. San Francisco, CA 94109
415-292-0387

www.dennisraefineart.com

Artist will be in attendance

Furthur Winter 2010 Tour Announced

frogstorm — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 19:37:38 -0600

For on-sale dates and ticket information, go to furthur.net.

Fri-Feb-05
Miami, FL
Bayfront Park Amphitheatre
Doors 6 PM / Showtime 7 PM

Sat-Feb-06
Orlando, FL
Hard Rock Live
Doors 6 PM / Showtime 7:30 PM

Mon-Feb-08
Atlanta, GA
The Tabernacle
Doors 6 PM / Showtime 7 PM

Tue-Feb-09
Asheville, NC
Thomas Wolfe Auditorium
Doors 6:30 PM / Showtime 7:30 PM

Wed-Feb-10
Charlotte, NC
Bojangles Coliseum
Doors 6 PM / Showtime 7 PM

Fri-Feb-12
Hampton, VA
Hampton Coliseum
Doors 6 PM / Showtime 7 PM

Sat-Feb-13
Fairfax, VA
Patriot Ctr @ George Mason Univ.
Doors 7 PM / Showtime 8 PM

Sun-Feb-14
Ithaca, NY
Barton Hall @ Cornell Univ.
Doors 6 PM / Showtime 7 PM

Mon-Feb-15
Bethlehem, PA
Stabler Arena @ Lehigh Univ.
Doors 6 PM / Showtime 7 PM

Wed-Feb-17
Buffalo, NY
Shea's Performing Arts Center
Doors 6:30 PM / Showtime 7:30 PM

Thu-Feb-18
Manchester, NH
Verizon Wireless Arena
Doors 6:30 PM / Showtime 7:30 PM

Fri-Feb-19
Amherst, MA
Mullins Center @ Univ of Mass
Doors 6:30 PM / Showtime 7:30 PM

Sat-Feb-20
Utica, NY
Utica Auditorium
Doors 5:30 PM / Showtime 7 PM

Mon-Feb-22
Newark, DE
Bob Carpenter Center @ Univ of DE
Doors 6:30 PM / Showtime 7:30 PM

Tue-Feb-23
New York, NY
Radio City Music Hall
Doors 6:30 PM / Showtime 7:30 PM

Wed-Feb-24
New York, NY
Radio City Music Hall
Doors 6:30 PM / Showtime 7:30 PM

Fri-Feb-26
Uncasville, CT
Mohegan Sun Arena
Doors 6:30 PM / Showtime 7:30 PM

Sat-Feb-27
Atlantic City, NJ
Trump Taj Mahal @ Estess Arena
Doors 7 PM / Showtime 8 PM

Tue-Mar-02
Chicago, IL
Auditorium Theatre
Doors 6:30 PM / Showtime 7:30 PM

Wed-Mar-03
Chicago, IL
Auditorium Theatre
Doors 6:30 PM / Showtime 7:30 PM

Mon-Mar-08
Portland, OR
Portland Memorial Coliseum
Doors 6:30 PM / Showtime 7:30 PM

Times local to venue. Please note all doors, showtimes subject to change. Backpacks, bags, subject to search.

For on-sale dates and ticket information, go to furthur.net.

Mickey In Indy for PASIC

frogstorm — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:53:22 -0600

Mickey Hart will be in Indianapolis for his induction into the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame, the society's most prestigious award. Mickey will also be signing autographs at Rhythm! Discovery Center on Friday, November 13 from 12:00pm to 1:00pm.

For more details, click here!

Bob Weir to Perform at Benefit for Global Security

frogstorm — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:05:58 -0500

AT THE TIPPING POINT:
NUCLEAR CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES
FACING OUR GLOBAL COMMUNITY

10th Anniversary Celebration of the
GLOBAL SECURITY INSTITUTE

NOVEMBER 1, 2009
AT THE NAPA VALLEY OPERA HOUSE

PUBLIC FORUM
4 PM- 5:30 PM
Chaired by Rt. Hon. Kim Campbell, former Canadian Prime Minister
Speakers: Ambassador Thomas Graham, Jr., America’s most experienced arms control negotiator and Jonathan Granoff, President of the Global Security Institute
Free admission

VIP FOOD & WINE RECEPTION
6:30- 7:30 PM
$250 per person (includes concert admission)

CONCERT
7:30 - 9 PM
featuring Bob Weir and Scaring the Children
and Lili Haydn and special guests
$75 per person
All proceeds benefit the work of the Global Security Institute, a non-profit organization founded by Senator Alan Cranston in the belief that nuclear weapons are unworthy of civilization

Sponsorships acknowledged in event program:
- $1,000 Friends
- $2,500 Silver Supporters
- $5,000 Gold Supporters
- $10,000 Platinum Supporters
- $25,000 Diamond Circle Supporters
All sponsors receive preferred seating and discounted bulk tickets

Tickets must be purchased at the Opera House Box Office, at

www.nvoh.org

by phone at (707) 226-7372, or by email: info@nvoh.org

For sponsorship opportunities, contact the Fund for Peace Initiatives:
Mr. Les Dewitt, Director: (650) 327-3053,
or Mr. Robert Vogt, tel: (707) 337-5275
Checks payable to: The Fund for Peace Initiatives

Bob Bralove and Henry Kaiser: Space Is the Place on Ultraviolet Licorice

frogstorm — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 00:38:25 -0500

Way back in 1991, Bob Bralove produced one of the more interesting discs in the entire Grateful Dead canon: Infrared Roses is a fantastic and trippy CD of “Drums” and “Space,” tailored by Bralove, who was one of the Dead’s primary electronics gurus from the late ’80s until the end. It was Bralove who eased the band, one by one, into the modern marvel of MIDI sounds, and who, in the their last several years, often participated in creating some of the sonic landscapes of the “Drums” and “Space” segments from his offstage perch near Mickey and Bill’s Drum World. In his post-Dead career, Bralove has continued to deeply explore improvisational music, both alone (as on his last CD, Stories in Black and White) and with other musicians (his best-known collaboration is probably his long-time association with former GD keyboardist Tom Constanten in a duo they call Dose Hermanos (psychedelic pun fully intended).

Bralove’s latest, Ultraviolet Licorice, is a collaboration with avant-guitarist Henry Kaiser, the Berkeley-based wonder who knows a thing or two about freeform music himself (and is also responsible for co-producing two of my all-time favorite albums of African music—A World Out of Time: Henry Kaiser and David Lindley in Madagascar, volumes I and II). Bralove and Kaiser have known each other for years, and played together on occasion (including the excellent mid-’90s album Second Sight, spearheaded by Bralove), but the new CD marks their first as duo. The title, you have perhaps deduced, is a play on Infrared Roses, and those of you who know your Garcia quotes will know the Grateful Dead derivation of the second word in the title—in a 1981 interview with Geraldo Rivera, Garcia famously noted, “Our audience is like people who like licorice. Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice.”

Ultraviolet Licorice consists of a 14 live-in-the-studio improvisations by Bralove and Kaiser, nearly all of them played on top of synthesizer pieces Bralove made years ago as transitional material between “Drums” and “Space” at Dead shows, or as film music cues for other projects. Bralove played grand piano, Kaiser electric and acoustic guitars, depending on the track. For the electric work, he told me, “I used different fuzz boxes on every track. A few years ago, I decided, ‘No more new guitars,' so I decided to get more fuzz boxes instead.” The duo spent a day at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley—“We recorded all the tunes, we had lunch, then we mixed all the tunes,” Henry says with a chuckle. There’s tremendous variety in the improvisations, from sharp, abstract pieces to more sonorous and mellifluous jaunts. Adventurous Heads will definitely want to pick this one up.

What follows are highlights of a recent interview I did with Bob Bralove about the project.

So, how did this project come about?
Well, I had this material I’d been sitting on for a while, as DATs [from the Grateful Dead days], and there were also a few things there that are from film scores that I’ve done; some of them rejected cues that I thought were much better than the ones that were approved.

What do they know!
Eaxctly! [Laughs] But those things are jobs, and you do the best you can and you’re trying to please both yourself and whoever you’re working for. So I had them as DATs and hadn’t really focused on what needed to be done with them, and Henry and I were talking about them and it came up that maybe there was something for us to do around these DATs. So I sent him a CD of the material and he really liked it, and he said, “OK, we’ll find a time to go into Fantasy and record. We’ll throw these over to two tracks of the multitrack and then play live to it.” I said, “Sure, great!”

Henry gets excited…
Yes, he does! [Laughs]

Were some of these piano sketches?
No, it was all synthesizer and samples. Everything from bird whistles to synthesizers to the Cracker Jack stuff—there’s a whole section I did with things I got out of Cracker Jack boxes.

I said to Henry, “You know I haven’t really listened to these in a long time,” and then, in his inimitable style, he said, “Good, promise me you won’t listen to them again until we record,” so we’d both be approaching it with fresh ears.

Well, as someone who has always liked spontaneity, that sounds like an idea you could get behind.
Absolutely! The whole idea was that the material was going to inspire free improvisation, and that’s how it worked out. I’ve been playing piano more than anything else recently, like on my solo record [Stories in Black and White] so Henry said “Let’s use the piano at Fantasy,” which is a Steinway, and then he played electric and acoustic guitars. He also played a ukulele on a track but that didn’t make the CD. It was really a blast.

You must have to concentrate so hard when you do this kind of spontaneous creation…
It was really an intense recording session. It was intense because you’re listening to the track and you’re listening to Henry and it’s a bit of a feeling of not being there—you’re present and you’re trying to respond and let the music through you, but somehow your ego’s not involved. By the end of the session I had no idea what we had. I knew what the material was, but I had no idea whether it was strong or not, and it wasn’t until days later that I began to hear how powerful I think it is.

There are times when we really soar and times when we get very quiet. We have a connection that is undeniable. I feel that all the time with Henry, but it really seems strong on this record.

So all 14 tracks on this album started out as some kind of synthesizer piece or sketch?
Not every one, no. A few we did just the two of us right there; like “Red Queen.” But the overall premise was we would have these sketches, which are very open, and then we would play on top of them. The sketches, if you want to call them that, set the mood and gave us a sense of direction of places to go. But it was very walk-in-and-play; respond immediately. For me, it was so much about being present, I couldn’t really judge what was going on.

How much discussion would you have before you would do a take?
We didn’t really have any discussion [Laughs] Our mentors in this world—the Grateful Dead—didn’t discuss it much. I was part of that. They’d just go out and play.

Even something like “Red Queen,” which has a chord progression and song-like elements?
Actually, that one there was a discussion and that was Henry said, “I have an idea; just follow it.”

Are these one-take performances? Or did you take multiple stabs at each one? There are some overdubs.
Henry did some overdubbing [on two tracks], and there were some things we prepared, like where I put my keys and other things on the strings of the piano, and Henry wired his guitar up to do different things—clipping things on to the strings.

Infrared Roses was heavily edited by you and John Cutler. How much editing is there here? Are some of these from longer jams where you carved out the best couple or few minutes from it?
There’s barely any editing at all. This is pretty much how these actually went down.

All that Pro Tools editing capability going to waste!
But all that wonderful energy of interaction not going to waste! [Laughs] Of course Infrared Roses wasn’t done on Pro Tools. It was tape multitrack and it was quite a struggle to edit that.

Were there times when you tried an improvisation along a certain line based on what you were hearing and then abandoned it: “Nah, let’s try some other approach”? Because, you can’t be expected to nail it every time.
There may have been one or two. But that’s the impressive thing about this project. We did it in a day. And we had more material than is on the record. Of course there are going to be ones that didn’t make it for us, and the ones where we felt we did better are obviously the ones we included.

How about some of the sound effects on there—like the thunder on one track? Were those in place already from your sketches?
Yes. There was a track of thunder that I created in the studio. I grabbed come commercial samples of thunder that I chopped up because I liked the crack of this sample, but the rumble of this other one. But I had also done a lot of sampling when I was on the road. There was this amazing night when the Grateful Dead was in Cleveland where there was a thunderstorm that was terrifying. We were in this hotel that was sort of V-shaped and the reverb and echo in this V was amazing. So I stuck a stereo DAT out my hotel room window and recorded that. It was incredible. So I cut those up and used some of that; actually I used some of that material in a couple of Grateful Dead shows, too.

How did you come up with the song titles? On Infrared Roses you turned that task over to Robert Hunter. I presume “March of the Wind Potatoes” is yours?
[Laughs] I’ve been titling tracks on my own for a while, of course—or with Tom [Constanten]. I think in this case I came up with a list of titles and e-mailed them to Henry. He responded immediately with some alternate titles and some of them were just changing a word. That then went back and forth a couple of times. And sometimes it’s a question of somebody doesn’t like this, and then the other guy will say, “Well, I’m trying to reference X, Y and Z” “Oh, OK, in that case…,” or, “Let’s try a Mark Rothko quote”—which is where “Silence is So Accurate” comes from.

You might even call those discussions you have with Henry “Conversational Algorhythms,” which is another cool title.
Or the music itself! By the end of the process you don’t know whose is whose, and that’s perfect.

Tell me about how your and Henry’s styles mesh. I think of him as being an abstract thinker who’s not tied down by conventional rules and likes to go his own way. And I think of you in much the same way.
Yes. I think of myself as being a little more rooted in traditions—not only song traditions, but classical tradition. Henry is also rooted in traditions, but they tend to be Asian or…

Madagascarian…
Exactly! Some of our connection, of course, comes through the Grateful Dead, and that music had that quality—there was ethnomusicology going on with the Grateful Dead. Phil had all those classical references going on. Everybody was coming from a different place and found this meeting point where they could reference it, but make something original. That’s what Henry and I try to do. I certainly have avant-garde listening in my listening repertoire. I think I came at it from more of a Stockhausen kind of place at first, and then I got turned onto it through jazz, through the kind of free improvisation that happens in the ’60s and ’70s.

Ornette; the Art Ensemble of Chicago, maybe.
Definitely. I remember an Art Ensemble concert in college that totally blew my mind.

Getting back to your question, though, one way our styles mesh is that Henry pushes me to an edgier side in a really wonderful way, and I push him the other way, and that’s a very interesting mesh. Sometimes, playing-wise, it can feel like a struggle, in that we’re going different directions, but the end result of that the struggle is often wonderful to listen to. Sometimes I’ll feel like, ‘Boy, if I had my way, I would’ve gone in this direction,” and then I listen back to it and I think, “Jeez, it would’ve been awfully boring if I’d done it the way I originally wanted to.” [Laughs] I’m hoping people feel the surprise we had in the moment. That’s really what we were aiming for: To surprise each other, and, hopefully, the people who listen to it.

* * *

You can learn more Ultraviolet Licorice and also order it by going to bobbralove.com.

Furthur NYE Show Announced

frogstorm — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 14:17:05 -0500

FURTHUR
PHIL LESH * BOB WEIR
Jeff Chimenti * John Kadlecik
Jay Lane * Joe Russo

December 8 & 9
Hammerstein Ballroom
New York City, NY
Doors: 6:30 / Showtime: 8:00 PM

December 11
Chevrolet Theater @ Oakdale
Wallingford, CT
Doors: 6:30 / Showtime: 8:00 PM

December 12 & 13
Asbury Park Convention Hall
Asbury Park, NJ
Doors: 6:30 / Showtime: 8:00 PM

December 30 & 31
Bill Graham Civic Auditorium
San Francisco, CA
Doors: 6:00 / Showtime: 7:30 PM
All Tickets General Admission
**12.31 Will Be A Special Three Set Show**

GDTSToo MailOrder Presale - 1st Postmark 10.17 Thru 10.19

MusicToday Presale 10.19 @ 9AM PT -> 10.23 @ 3PM PT

Presale Tix Above Available While Supplies Last

Outlet Onsale Starts 10.25 @ 10 AM PT

Please note all onsale, doors, showtimes subject to change!
Backpacks, bags, subject to search

NEW East Coast Furthur Shows Announced

frogstorm — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 12:42:31 -0500

FURTHUR

PHIL LESH * BOB WEIR
Jeff Chimenti * John Kadlecik
Jay Lane * Joe Russo

December 8 & 9 (SORRY,BOTH SHOWS SOLD OUT)
Hammerstein Ballroom
New York City, NY
Doors: 6:30 / Showtime: 8:00 PM

December 11 (SORRY, SOLD OUT)
Chevrolet Theater @ Oakdale
Wallingford, CT
Doors: 6:30 / Showtime: 8:00 PM

December 12 & 13 (SORRY, BOTH SHOWS SOLD OUT)
Asbury Park Convention Hall
Asbury Park, NJ
Doors: 6:30 / Showtime: 8:00 PM

Please note all onsale, doors, showtimes subject to change!

Backpacks, bags, subject to search!

Bill Kreutzmann at the Austin City Limits Festival

frogstorm — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:46:00 -0500

Bill Kreutzmann will be performing with Papa Mali at the Austin City Limits Music Festival on Oct. 3, 2009. This will be Papa Mali's second appearance at the event which drew a crowd of over 218,000 fans last year and was ranked #5 on Billboard’s top festivals of 2008. Performing alongside Papa and Bill will be longtime Papa Mali drummer Robb Kidd (look for some double kit action), Matt Perrine (Bonerama) on sousaphone and Matt Hubbard (Willie Nelson and Friends) on keyboards, harmonica and trombone. A surprise guest wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibilities. This year’s ACL fest will also feature Pearl Jam, Dave Matthews Band, Beastie Boys, Kings of Leon and numerous other monsters of the scene.

Papa Mali, Bill Kreutzmann and Matt Hubbard will then head directly into the studio to record their new CD along with Reed Mathis (Tea Leaf Green) on bass. The sessions will be made up almost entirely of new material that has been co-written by Robert Hunter (Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan lyricist) and Papa Mali. The new CD is expected to be released in early 2010. Papa Mali featuring Bill Kreutzmann’s next gig will be October 31 and November 1 at the Las Tortugas Festival in Yosemite National Park. If you are looking for something to do on Halloween, come get your freak on in one of the most striking locations in the country.

Bill Kreutzmann at Las Tortugas

frogstorm — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 16:33:29 -0500

Bill will be the Honored Guest for the 4th annual installment of Las Tortugas – Dance of the Dead, taking place October 29th – November 1st in Yosemite, CA. After honoring the Dead's legacy the past two year's with sizzling performances from Melvin Seals & JGB, Las Tortugas will continue the festival's warm embrace of the roots of the jam-centric scene at the heart of this intimate, exciting festival. Bill's innovative approach to drumming combined with his deep understanding of the power of rock 'n' roll & improvisation will be on display as he guests with Papa Mali at Las Tortugas.

Click here for ticket info (Heads up: Dead.net doesn't handle ticket sales so this link will take you to another site with all the details. For questions about tickets, your best bet is to contact the vendors directly.).

Also - there's a cool new way to try and keep up with Bill Kreutzmann. He's launched a completely redesigned website at www.billkreutzmann.com where you can get all the latest updates on Bill, watch some great videos and best of all (we think) - check out "The Sounds" section with a generous supply of streaming music!

Click here to see what it's all about.

Shakedown Street - Giant's Stadium 7/9/89

frogstorm — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 13:47:40 -0500

We're happy to present a clip from "Shakedown Street" at Giants Stadium, 7/9/89. It's one of the performances featured on the 95-minute DVD inside the new Grateful Dead Scrapbook: Deluxe Edition. The DVD also includes a rare video from 1968, plus more live footage of the band between 1972 and 1989.

The albums are individually numbered and include never-before-published photos, interactive features like backstage passes and fold-out posters, plus a CD with never-before-heard interviews!

This exclusive edition is only available at Dead.net.

Night Three: Furthur Finale at the Fox

frogstorm — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 18:53:56 -0500

And on the Third Night they really became a band.

I’m underslept, my head is still buzzing and my feet ache from three nights of non-stop dancing (first time I’ve hit three consecutive shows since ’95), but I still have the ecstatic glow of last night’s show to keep me going (until I crash… later).

The Sunday Furthur concert was one of those shows you hit every once in while where it’s clear from the first second that it’s going to be a great night: sound in the hall is fantastic, the parts are all fitting together smoothly—the band balancing itself, like a great orchestra—everyone looks happy and relaxed onstage and in the crowd, and any and all doubts fall away in the face of undisputable evidence that this music—this band—is really happenin’.

It all started with drums— Joe and Jay, all smiles, Jay jumping around his setup like he was on springs— and it was a minute or so before it became clear that, no, this was not going to be an actual drum solo, as it soon headed into that old Sunday favorite, “Samson and Delilah.”

Joe, Bob, Jay and John - Playing in the new band
Photo: Bob Minkin/minkindesign.com © 2009

The band was totally on from the get-go, Phil and Bob perfectly in sync, John firing short bursts of notes, Jeff adding organ sustain as a bed beneath. (Yes, I could finally hear Jeff—all night!) We all sang along lustily on the choruses, even though none of us wants to tear that old building down! The party had begun. “Casey Jones” was next—a total surprise to me—with John handling the lead vocals very well. This seemed like a pretty normal version until the “driving that train” chorus kept going on and on, getting faster and faster, until it was practically a blur (one of my old Dead Head pals, who hadn’t seen any post-GD lineup in several years, noted that he’d never heard the Grateful Dead play that fast!)

It was on the third song of the night, though, that I had my own personal epiphany about this group. I mean, I’d been digging it from the outset, for sure, but on this particular “Mississippi Half-Step,” John Kadlecik’s solo on the closing jam was so amazing, passionate, inspired, so… throw in your own adjective here, and the band had to keep going higher and higher just to keep up with him; it was truly that old familiar feeling in a new guise. That may have been my favorite tune of the whole three-night run.

Bob and John traded vocals on “Sugaree,” which started out slowly but picked up steam when Jeff took a huge solo that began deliberately, like climbing a tall spiral staircase, and just built and built until it crashed to a satisfying climax before the next verse. John later added his own marvelous solo construction on the tune, and before the final verse there was a great musical group-grope, as everyone played parts that interlocked like a giant mechanical wheel threatening to spin off its axel.

Furthur in action (L to R): Jeff, Phil, Joe, Bob, Jay and John.
Photo: Dave Clark/daveclarklive.net © 2009

“Pride of Cucamonga” was one of two or three songs this weekend that let John put his toe into pedal steel territory (Saturday, "Friend of the Devil" was another)—it's uncanny how much he is able to capture that sound on a regular electric guitar, and it was perfect for this tune, of course. The verse parts of the song were as perky and bouncy as the crowd’s “up” mood, and the bluesy middle passage went into some unexpected realms. But one of the most interesting jams of the night came directly after that song. While I was listening to it last night, there was a part of my brain that was saying, “Remember what they’re doing here so you can describe how cool it is,” but needless to say I had lost that thought in the next second and now I have no memory at all of what was great about it—except that it was great. I’ll be anxious to hear that again when I have a moment. Somehow, though, the jam ended up at “Throwing Stones,” which shocked the hell out of me. I hadn’t heard it in a coon’s age, and it was a truly powerful version—again, as he had on “Half-Step,” John took the jam toward the end of the song so far and with so much energy, it was a joy to behold. This guy is extremely impressive. He really speaks this language well; like a native! I thought “Passenger” was a great choice as the set closer. Bob and Jay did the vocals together and the whole band was cookin’. John didn’t go as far on his slide solo as I’d hoped he might (three nights, and I’m already gettin’ greedy on the guy!), but it was still rip-roaring fun. What a set. And you could feel it in the hall that almost everyone agreed. Sometimes it’s that obvious. You can’t miss it.

Set Two jumped out of the gate with a terrific “Viola Lee Blues” (verses one and two, to start), then went into another giant jam—John, Bob and Phil tearing it up on the front line—and eventually that moved quite naturally into “Cumberland Blues,” a song that is always great (really, I’ve never seen a bad one). At the conclusion of that speedy ride (it’s kind of like Thunder Mountain Railroad at Disneyland), Phil led the charge right back to “Viola Lee Blues” and we got the final verse (though no big second jam). Phil’s fabulous but very rarely played instrumental opus, “King’s Solomon’s Marbles” (from Blues for Allah), followed, and that was another personal highlight. The band seemed to have no trouble at all negotiating the song’s myriad twists and turns and rhythmic shifts—indeed, it sounded like they’d been playing it their whole lives.

I now remember that when the aforementioned “Pride of Cucamonga” ended and the big jam after it began, I initially thought that it was going to go right into “Cassidy.” Wrong again! But they did play “Cassidy” in this second set, and it was a warm and heartfelt version with yet another astonishing jam.

A bona fide “space” jam followed, with strong hints of “Dark Star” and then “Dark Star” itself—another test for the new kids, and they passed with flying colors. Jay and Joe really threw themselves into this, mixing power-drumming with delicate shadings as the moment required (Jay had the shaker goin’), and needless to say, John was totally in his element on this tune, stretching out easily, driving the jam to this odd place and that.

And then… What the?... Out of the deep recesses of space, a chord sequence starts to appear, a melody, and all of a sudden we’re in a new song! Now, that was unexpected! Titled “Welcome to the Dance,” words and music by Phil, it was kind of hard to grasp on first listen. I couldn’t make out the words at all, and you know how those Phil tunes are with their unusual chords and rhythm changes… But I liked it, and the band seemed confident playing it, and its easy to imagine it becoming a real powerhouse tune, because the jam near the end was spectacular—sort of one part “Uncle John’s,” one part “Good Lovin’,” a dash of that almost waltz-time lead-in to “The Eleven” (on Live Dead), blended and stirred and mixed in with some other new secret ingredients. Pretty cool. Always fun to hear new stuff!

That drifted back to “Dark Star”—short but sweet flowing into the second verse—and then it was “Uncle John’s” and a sing-along for 3,500 very happy people. That could’ve ended the show and I would’ve been totally satisfied, but Bob tossed in a dynamite “Sugar Magnolia” to close. Wow, that place was jumpin’!

They had one more curve ball for us: A “Cosmic Charlie” encore, played as a rubbery shuffle; a neat way to end a fantastic set of shows.

Whew. This band is for real. Keep an open mind. And don’t miss ’em if they come to your town!

9/20/09, Fox Theatre, Oakland
Samson and Delilah, Casey Jones, Mississippi Half-Step, Sugaree, Pride of Cucamonga > jam> Throwing Stones > Passenger

Viola Lee Blues (v 1 and 2) > Cumberland Blues > Volia Lee Blues (v 3), King Solomon’s Marbles, Cassidy > space > Dark Star (v 1) > Welcome to the Dance > Dark Star (v 2) . Uncle John’s Band > Sugar Magnolia / Cosmic Charlie

Furthur at the Fox, Night Two

frogstorm — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 22:01:08 -0500

I realized when I got to my spot on the first tier for Saturday night’s show and I looked around the still-nearly-empty place, that I had not adequately described the grandeur of the Fox. What I neglected to mention in yesterday’s report is that the overall architectural style is kind of faux Moorish/Spanish Churrigueresque—there’s lots of intricate tapestry-like design (actually painted plaster) on the walls and all around the proscenium and above it, too, and fake window alcoves on the walls at the balcony level that look like they would go out to some enchanted Arabian Nights garden. The ceiling consists of an elaborate pattern of squares that resembles a giant Persian carpet but is stenciled plaster, with each square having a 13-pointed star design and angular cut-out lines; very trippy. Still not sure what to make of the giant statues/idols I mentioned yesterday. They don’t really fit in with the Islamic architectural feel of the rest of the place; it seems more Hindu, or something. But hey, it was the ’20s when the place was designed and the architects were probably just makin’ shit up. I love it!

Last night had an early start time (6:15) because, unlike the other two shows, there was a first act on the bill—a group called Vice. Who? Why? A quick Internet search the other day revealed the answer to both: It’s a band that includes Phil Lesh’s son Grahame on electric guitar and backup vocals, so the ol’ man was giving the group a shot to play before a Dead Head audience; a good gig if you can get it! There were probably about 300 or so folks in the place when the quintet sauntered onto the stage. Grahame, keyboardist Jesse Engreitz, bassist Mac Parish and drummer Eric Saar are really the backup band for singer/acoustic guitarist Brodie Jenkins, who is completely the focal point of every song. An attractive and charismatic woman, Jenkins has a commanding alto voice that reminded me in places of Linda Ronstadt (and Bonnie Raitt less so), and she moved easily from a mild growl to brief soprano/falsetto passages, but mostly stayed in a pleasing midrange. Their songs were mostly a semi-generic “classic rock” style—kinda countryish at times, kinda bluesy, kinda rockin’—but never committing too much in any one direction. Unfortunately, the Fox was not the venue for them—even in my excellent spot, I couldn’t make out one word of what Jenkins was singing (and I was trying hard)—the words just got eaten up in the cavernous, echo-y place. This is obviously a band best seen in a club, where the nuances of Jenkins’ singing (not to mention the content of the lyrics) could stand out more. The instrumental accompaniment was solid, especially bassist Parish, who seemed to me the most creative of the lot.

Now, I’m going to don my “I’ve been writing about music for 40 years, seen thousands of bands come and go, and know a bit about the industry” hat and give these fresh-faced kids some advice: 1) Play a solo occasionally! There was no solo more than a minute long, I’m pretty sure. A good solo bolsters a song immeasurably and gives the singer a momentary rest (and the audience a change in foreground). Using the Bonnie and Linda comparison (I don’t want to overdo that, ’cause Jenkins doesn’t sound that much like either), Linda had Andrew Gold and other great players firing off solos here and there and coming up with intricate arrangements; Bonnie has Bonnie, layin’ it down on slide (and often other soloists, too.) 2) Get rid of the name. Vice? Sorry, not happenin’; maybe if you’re a metal band. But there is nothing about this group that says “Vice.” You’re going to confuse people. Trust me on this. 3) Nashville. Get out of Stanford and the Bay Area and go someplace where soulful singer-songwriters still get respect (and gigs). L.A. could work, but it’s a tougher slog. Nashville is a friendly town filled with creative people. Even though Vice is not a “country” band, Nashville is no longer strictly a country music town. And while you’re there, after you land that deal (certainly a possibility given the type of material the group plays and Jenkins’ strong voice) bring in a fiddle player for a song or two, maybe some dobro—in other words, expand the instrumental palette, which is, as currently constructed, a little dull. Good luck, kids!

Critic hat doffed, we’re on to the main event! In speaking with the friends/DSO partisans we’d been with on Friday (and happily found ourselves with again on Saturday), I was quite surprised to hear that to a person none of them had particularly liked the first set Friday, but had loved the second set. I really enjoyed both sets, but maybe because they were seeing it more through the John Kadlecik lens, they were looking for/at different things than I was. Different strokes for different folks (oo-sha-shaaa).

Saturday night, the opening jam involved the full group but never really focused itself in any direction particularly before jumping into an exciting version of “Bertha,” with John and Bob trading off on the vocals. It seemed like the sound was better balanced from the get-go—I could hear Jeff fine on “Bertha”—though strangely enough, as the evening progressed I felt the sound got worse. We lost Jeff again for most of the night (what is the deal with that?) and the vocals weren’t turned up as much, so they frequently got lost in the instrumental wash (OK, sometimes that’s a good thing). But I also felt that the mix was a little less clear and less distinct in general. I was in virtually the same spot both nights, so I don’t think it was me…though ya never know. As “Bertha” crashed to a close the band immediately picked up the old-school (i.e. ’69-’72) intro of “Good Lovin’”—another classic combo brought to life again! It, too, was nicely executed, though when Bob tried to bring the vocals back up again at the end, after a meaty jam had already taken the band elsewhere, it felt a little strained and forced.

“Estimated” came next, and this was the first sign I’d had in two nights that maybe the high energy and best intentions of the newcomers in the band was not always going to be enough to keep the band’s tempos consistently bright. Because, frankly, I thought this version dragged. I still enjoyed hearing it, but I felt a little like my legs were trapped in taffy trying to dance to the lumbering beat. Bob’s timing seemed a little “off” much of the night, more in the first set than the second, for sure. The post-“Estimated” jam was varied and interesting, though. “Friend of the Devil” was peppy and upbeat (again John and Bob traded off on the vocals effectively) and the solo passages by Jeff, then Bob, then John, really cooked—it was almost “Cumberland” fast! “Feel Like a Stranger” was also too slow for my taste… Let me see if I can articulate this better. It’s not like the tempo is “wrong,” because it’s totally the singer’s choice, right? And it wasn’t that much slower than a regular version. But to me it sounds a little like a tape that’s running a tad slow—you do a micro-pitch adjustment up and all of you sudden the sparkle is there! Well, for me the sparkle was not there on this “Stranger” (and Bob even seemed a little lost on the ending vocal interplay), though again the last jam was really fascinating and John and Bob together brilliantly led it all back to the melodic denouement—nicely done, lads!

“Brown-Eyed Women” returned to the upbeat side of things and was beautifully played, John building his solo brightly as he shifted through different tonal colors. The set then ended on real high note with a spankin’ version of “Hell in a Bucket,” a tune I hadn’t heard in a long time and always enjoy live. Bob’s repeated falsetto refrain of “at least I’m enjoyin’ the ride” filled the old place from floor to ceiling, echoing through the hall, maybe even putting a smile on the stern faces of the seated gold-painted idols. My overall impression of the set was that it was very uneven, with more mistakes than either of the Friday sets, but on balance still pretty good.

What is it about Saturday shows that they always seem more crowded than other nights? Friday and Saturday were both sold-out (as is tonight’s) but it felt like there were a thousand more people packed into the place. That then usually leads to more people wandering about during the first set trying to find a decent place to dance and watch, which leads to a more diffused crowd energy in general. That was certainly the case in our little corner of the world during the first half of the first set, but by “Brown-Eyed Women” and “Hell in a Bucket”—not coincidentally two of the best songs of the set—people seemed to finally find their spots and focus on the music more, and it was smooth sailing around us the whole second set.

The jam opening Night Two, Set Two was tremendous and, I thought, had “Help on the Way” written all over it. You know how, as a fan, you lock into an idea about where a jam is going and you start to intuit how they’re going to get to a song from the jam? Well, in my twisted brain I could see exactly how this was going to fall into the majestic opening riff of “Help on the Way”! But I was completely wrong! What followed was one of those earthquake-inducing explosions into “Shakedown,” and you’re sure as hell not gonna hear me bitchin’ about that! It was phat and phunky, nicely sung by JK, with expansive jams between the second and third verse, and of course after the final verse. That eventually found its way to the ominous rumble of “New Speedway Boogie” (with more traded verses) which I thought was one of the best numbers of the night. I especially dug the jam after it when John switched on his octave divider and uncorked this deep but piercing line—good stuff!

But that tune was topped by the magnificent “China Cat”> “I Know You Rider” that followed. This one totally delivered the goods, going to all the places you want it to go, and then some. The jam between the two songs was a marvel, with John and Bob interlocking effortlessly on the unison passages, and in “I Know You Rider,” Jeff shined on a long passage before handing the solo to John, who leaped in with metaphorical guns blazing and took it higher still.

Sheesh, after that opening quartet of songs, I was sated and practically ready to call it a night. The group had other ideas, however! It started with “Playing in the Band,” always a pleasure, and well-performed, though it didn’t really go “deep” before it veered off into a lovely version of “Eyes” (with shared vocals). Again, Jeff had a wonderful solo passage (this tune lets him get his jazz on), and John’s playing was filled with imaginative flourishes.

A rare stop between tunes and then bubbling up out of the ether came “Unbroken Chain,” which has been so solid in recent years. I couldn’t really hear Phil’s lead vocal for some reason, but the playing was superb, the middle jam really taking off and flying away before eventually coming back to the song. Very nice. And then… I got my “Help on the Way”! Yay! Maybe I wasn’t crazy when I “heard” it earlier. Anyway, I was a happy man and I dug this version a lot, but things really got hot when (after a minor stumble) they flipped the switch on “Slipknot!” Here’s something I observed: Right as “Slipknot!” was getting started, Phil leaned over to the drummers and gave them a signal to kick it up a notch, and man, they did! Which brings me to a slight digression—I hadn’t been noticing the drummers as much Saturday as Friday. It could have been a sound issue, but methinks that they were playing less intensely Saturday, too, so it was great to see them really get into the “Slipknot!” with gusto. There were some transitional problems getting out of this particular “knot,” but then the “Franklin’s” closer was really action-packed; the last group of solos was particularly amazing.

You just knew what the encore would be, but that’s cool… it’s Saturday night! And it was a rockin’ version from the first notes all the way through the false-ending (!) followed by another round of “Hey, another a Saturday night…”

Finally, some props to the lighting designer—Groove by name; he works with RatDog. I’ve really enjoyed the subtle, slowly shifting shapes that are projected on the screen (everything from things that look like bubbles, to discs and other things) and the way what’s on the screen is offset by the colored stage lighting. It’s surprisingly psychedelic, without looking like a ’60s light show. (Though at points it reminded me of some of the more abstract moments of the old Joshua Light Show at the Fillmore East…. That’s good). And I really liked it when these slowly rotating pinwheel designs were projected above the proscenium, which is covered with incredibly intricate designs. Gorgeous!

Two down, one to go!

7/19/09, Fox Theatre, Oakland
Jam> Bertha> Good Lovin', Estimated Prophet, Friend of the Devil, Feel Like A Stranger, Brown-Eyed Women, Hell in a Bucket

Shakedown street> New Speedway Boogie> China Cat Sunflower> I Know You Rider>
Eyes of the World, Unbroken Chain, Help on the Way > Slipknot!” > Franklin’s Tower / One More Saturday Night

Furthur Rocks the Fox, Night One

frogstorm — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 18:31:31 -0500

I was as surprised as everyone else when these gigs by a new entity known as Furthur suddenly materialized a couple of months ago, with no warning. After all, Phil’s camp had been talking about him possibly taking the rest of the year off, and Bob was about to hit the road again with RatDog. And why was there a new band at all, when everyone was seemingly so pleased with the spring Dead tour? Where were Mickey and Bill? Too many questions, Grasshopper. Things change. Go with the flow…

OK, I can do that—and what better place to do it than at the newly restored Fox Theater in Oakland? The Fox, built in 1928, had been in crumbling disrepair literally for decades—a once grand showplace that had become another eyesore in a neighborhood that was in steep decline. But a miraculous thing happened: former Oakland mayor Jerry Brown committed to redeveloping the area around the Fox so the city built hundreds of new housing units in the vicinity, and then, over the last few years, the theater itself finally got a multimillion dollar makeover. The new Fox, which opened earlier this year is now a truly stunning venue—sort of like a cross between it’s beautiful art deco neighbor a few blocks north—the Paramount Theater—and San Francisco’s Warfield (which was also once part of the Fox chain) across the bay. Like the Warfield, it has a tiered general admission downstairs, but it’s wider and deeper; same with the mezzanine and balcony, which have plush, comfortable seats beneath the intricately patterned deco ceiling that is lit in a steely blue tint at all times. Capacity is around 3,500, considerably larger than the Warfield. On either side of the stage, out a-ways on the side walls, are massive gold-painted statues of these weird, slightly angry-looking idols sitting cross-legged in front of what look a little like drums, their eyes beaming white light—we joked that it was Mickey and Bill looking down on the proceedings. It’s a weird touch—like something out of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom—but very cool. I had been there once before, to see the Allman Brothers a few months back, and though I didn’t think the sound was great for that show, I certainly loved the venue—and its proximity to my house, which is less than ten minutes away, on the other side of Lake Merritt.

Now, I didn’t really know what to expect musically going into these shows. I had seen Dark Star Orchestra just once, at the Fillmore a year or so ago, and though I was certainly impressed with the skill of all the players—particularly lead guitarist John Kadlecik—I wasn’t knocked out by the whole presentation, for some reason. It seemed a bit too much like an amazing simulation of what the Dead sounded like, but lacking in that feeling of transmission that was so much a part of the Dead’s thing—I mean, when Jerry played, you were hearing his soul and spirit and skill and everything in him that had led him to that moment. Hearing a good approximation of that is just that—a good approximation. And since Jerry’s demise, I think all of us have debated how much we want the guy who is filling the guitar slot in whatever post-GD band we were watching to sound like Jerry (knowing that he will never fully measure up to him), versus having his own style and approach to soloing.

Really, a lot of the evolution of Phil & Friends has been an experiment in finding what sorts of styles and timbres work with this incredible body of work that is the Grateful Dead repertoire. Some felt, for instance, that the classic PLQ, with Herring and Haynes, achieved its magical alchemy because neither player was based in the Dead tradition, so the repertoire went in some really fascinating and unexpected directions. But for every fan who loved the sheer unpredictability of that band, there were others who never had their Garcia Jones satisfied—who missed his melodic brilliance, the logic of his solos, the way he constructed his lines, etc. What’s interesting about Herring is that he took on more of Garcia’s playing personality as the years went on, and the same could be said of Haynes, if you’re comparing his work in the 2004 Dead and the 2009 Dead. One reason I always liked Barry Sless playing with Phil’s band is he was clearly from what I would call the “Garcia School,” but he still had a distinctive style. I think the same could be said for RatDog’s Mark Karan, who clearly “gets” Jerry, but also draws from so many more influences. (Steve Kimock, from those early P&F lineups—and the first Other Ones tour—is an example of a guy who seemed to have internalized a certain approach to playing that was reminiscent of Garcia at times.)

Which is all a long-winded way of saying I wasn’t sure if having the “Jerry” from a Dead cover band—John Kadlecik—would work. Would he just parrot this Jerry solo from ’77 or this one from ’69, as if he was reproducing some classic show with DSO. And what of the drummers? I’d never heard of Joe Russo, and I wondered if Jay Lane of RatDog—a band occasionally weighed down by sluggish tempos—would add the necessary rhythmic spark that Mickey clearly does. But hey, let’s keep an open mind… and I did. Our little group landed a great spot on the first tier, right behind some old friends who are serious DSO partisans. They were way psyched, as you can imagine, and their enthusiasm rubbed off on me.

In an interesting move, the opening jam this time ’round was a duet played by just Bob and Phil as the other members of the group watched—a neat touch, I thought. It sort of felt to me like they were re-connecting musically, asserting themselves at the leaders of the band (true), offering a little prologue to the proceedings. I heard some definite “Wheel” teases, and the jamlet went to some other interesting spaces, as well, but it was quite a surprise to me when the duet then exploded into a full-band version of “The Other One.” Oh, I see—these guys aren’t messing around! Although that was quickly replaced with an unfounded paranoid concern by yours truly: During the first few minutes the band was getting into the “Other One” jam, John was so tentative—really barely playing anything at all—that I had this worried flash: “Oh shit, he’s the wrong guy. He can’t keep up. His playbook of thousands of Dead shows stored in his brain has shorted out and he has no idea what he’s doing. Why did I get tickets for all three nights?” (Hey, I’m just bein’ honest here!)

Needless to say, after Bob sang the first verse and the jam picked up again, this time John was right on it, carefully building his solo, darting in and out of Phil’s bass punctuation and the slashing chords Bob was laying down. Behind him, the dreadlocked Jay Lane was hurling himself around the semi-circle of drums and percussion instruments before him, sometimes using just one stick while hitting other drums and cymbals with his hand, or using a shaker in one hand, a stick in the other. (Jay also offered vocal support on many songs; usually not that distinguishable, but always on-pitch!) It took me a while to figure out exactly what Joe Russo was adding on his traps set, but soon it became clear that he was in the steadier Kreutzmann role to Jay’s more Mickey-esque ornamentation. Together they worked up a solid beat behind the front line—the music never dragged at all, the tempos seemed brisk.

In general there was an appealing airiness to the arrangements that leant a real feeling of clarity to everything they played. I’m going to take a moment here to also praise keys man Jeff Chimenti (you know I’m a huge fan)—although in all honesty I could not hear him that well where I was, dead-even with John on the right side facing the stage. (I had the same problem with the stereo spread at the Allmans show I saw there. I sure hope that folks on the left side could hear John’s guitar OK; it was crystalline and loud where I was. But I wanted more keyboard in my mix.) Anyway, Jeff continues play with great sensitivity and power, when called upon.

“The Other One” got better and better as it went along and John settled in more—he started using more different tones as he’d expand his solos, and you could just sort of feel him warming to the whole proposition. (When I talked to my DSO buddies at the break and said that I thought John seemed nervous at first, they dismissed that completely—“No way!” I say, the guy has never played a concert with Bob and Phil in a new band before a true Dead crowd—not a DSO crowd; plenty of reason for nerves.) Following “The Other One,” the teased “Wheel” came rolling out and it was a good ’un that had everyone smiling and singing along. “Jack Straw” came next and that marked one of the first songs where John “went off” (as they say)—the jam in the middle was electric and he definitely brought his own flair and ideas to it. Phil was positively beaming (as he was often last night) and Bob was at his inventive best.

When “The Music Never Stopped” reared its head, I was wondering if we were going to get a Bob Weir’s Greatest Hits show—three of his best in the first four songs! This one was well done, too (OK, I think there might have been a couple of minor blips in there—John has to learn that Bob’s cues do not always make logical sense, but are rather subject to his whim of the moment, for both better and worse). The long jam before the final instrumental coda was one of the best of the night, with John really asserting himself in ways he hadn’t before, and taking some bold chances with tonalities and solo construction. I was really impressed!

That tune then flowed into a “Bird Song” jam, followed by the song itself. And that’s when a cool thing that happened: When John stepped up to the microphone to sing the first verse (his first lead vocal of the night), there was a great roar from the crowd that must have made him feel really good—“Yes, you are among friends; we’re with you, Mr. K!” Next came another highlight—“Born Cross-Eyed” done just about perfectly, John providing the essential guitar screams, ’68-style, before the verses. See, this is where it’s great that we’ve got a Dead-savvy player in the guitar slot—he knows the elements that should be there and he clearly has no trouble accessing them.

The first set ended with a killer “Let It Grow” that traveled miles away from the song’s usual course on the final jam, and ended up… jeez, I have no idea, really…before the concluding flutter of butterflies or birds or whatever it conjures in your mind magically materialized to bring the curtain down on the set (figuratively). Wow, quite a start. What a song list!

Set two wasted no time in getting right into “Lost Sailor” and “Saint of Circumstance,” two more of my favorite Bob tunes. It had been a while since I’d heard this played by anyone (actually, as fate would, the last time I heard it live was by DSO!), so I was thrilled, and it was a fine version, especially the “Saint.” The familiar opening of “Althea” came bubbling up after, and I wondered who would sing it, since Bob, Phil and John all tackle it in their respective bands. And the nod goes to… John! He acquitted himself very well on the song (again, the roar when he started singing!)—I give him extra points for sticking to Jerry’s impeccable phrasing and for not trying to blatantly imitate him. That said, his is not a particularly strong or memorable voice, and he lacks the authority and gravitas that someone like Warren Haynes brings so naturally to Jerry’s songs. (Needless to say, YMMV). But sincerity goes far in my book, and he’s got that for sure. The jam toward the end of “Althea” provided another highlight—smokin’!

“Scarlet” > “Fire” continued the Cavalcade of Great Song Choices, and it was pretty much a dream version, with John singing lead on both and nailing every solo—he was in full flower there, for sure. Here’s yet another example where its neat to have a guy who knows the Dead vocabulary so well: After the final vocals on the chorus—“Fire … Fire on the Mountain”—John launched into a note-perfect re-creation of that wonderful ’77-’78 Jerry line (which JG played only sporadically later)… heavenly!

Seems like every show I go to features “Saint Stephen”—not that I’m complainin’! It was big and beefy and the middle jam was masterfully constructed, then moved away from the song, then coalesced again on cue. The jam that came immediately after “What would be the answer to the answer man” was clearly pre-arranged, as they instantly switched gears and went into a different key and tempo which, it became obvious after a certain point, was still going to move us eventually to “The Eleven.” (John missed the first cue going into that jam, but quickly recovered and then sent it soaring.). There was a very brief “Foxy Lady” quotation after “The Eleven” concluded (not nearly as pronounced as the versions by The Dead with Warren in the spring), but mostly the jam went other places before ending up at “Terrapin,” where the "Lady with a Fan" section was sung by John and the "Inspiration..." part by Bob; it was all very heart-felt and well-played, especially the ending cascade.

John did some really interesting things during his solos on the concluding “Not Fade Away”—some great tonal shifts and jagged flurries followed by sustained notes. It was a short but hot version. A nice way to end a pretty awesome set.

The encore, “Touch of Gray,” was steady and sparkling, rising to the anthemic heights as you’d expect. I loved the way Phil, Bob and John all sang the “Oh, well, a touch of Gray” couplet together. Beautiful.

All in all, quite an impressive debut. A couple of minor fender-benders here and there, a few missed cues and blown words—nothin’ out of the ordinary or too serious. There were a number of times I wished John was a little less leisurely in building his solos and would instead just dive in and go for it; sometimes the energy dragged a bit as he went through his meticulous constructions (he was rather reminiscent of Steve Kimock in that regard). In fairness, though, there was always a big payoff at the end of his slow escalations. But he’ll undoubtedly become more self-assured with each show, and the band as a whole will get more comfortable. And I loved the youthful energy that John, Jay and Joe brought to the evening. (Why, they could almost keep up with Phil!)

I guess the ultimate question you want to know is, does having a true “Jerry” stylist in that slot make this group sound more like Grateful Dead than, say, The Dead? Yep. Whether that’s a good thing or not is for you to decide. Personally, I dug it a lot more than I thought I would.

The set list:

9/18/09, Fox Theatre, Oakland
Bob and Phil jam > The Other One > The Wheel > Jack Straw, The Music Never Stopped> Bird Song> Born Cross-Eyed> Let It Grow

Lost Sailor > Saint of Circumstance, Althea, Scarlet begonias > Fire on the Mountain, Saint Stephen> The Eleven> jam > Terrapin> Not Fade Away / Touch of Gray

Mickey Hart Performs at Walter Cronkite Tribute

frogstorm — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 15:18:03 -0500

Last night (September 9, 2009), Mickey Hart performed in the Walter Cronkite Tribute at Lincoln Center. Hart first performed with Jimmy Buffett and then with Zakir Hussain and Sikiru Adepoju. Hart, Hussain and Adepoju (3/4 of The Global Drum Project) were also joined by saxophonist Paul Winter.

Hart reminisced about drumming with Walter . Walter turned and asked, "Mickey when do we know we have the groove?" Mickey replied, "Walter you'll know." A short time later, Cronkite exclaimed, "Mickey, I got it!"

Check out the links below for more details about the tribute:

Click to see the entire performance on YouTube.

Read about it on CNN.com

Read about it at the NY TIMES site.

Read about it at WashingtonPost.com.

Bill Kreutzmann and Phish at Red Rocks last night!

frogstorm — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 17:03:02 -0500

It was the final set of Phish's four-night stand at Morrison, CO's Red Rocks Amphitheatre and Bill Kreutzmann joined the band onstage during "You Enjoy Myself." Bill sat in for the rest of the set, which included “Undermind,” “Seven Below,” “2001" and more. For all the details on the performance, check out the links below:

http://www.relix.com/Features/Daily_News/Bill_Kreutzmann_Joins_Phish_Fin
ale_at_Red_Rocks_200908044097.html

http://phishandthedead.blogspot.com/2009/08/bill-kreutzman-of-grateful-d
eadjoin.html

Tonight (8/3) Bill will preform with Papa Mali, Reed Mathis and Matt Hubbard at Boulder, CO's Boulder Theatre. Click here for more info.

Jerry Garcia Band: Bay Area 1978

frogstorm — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 16:15:40 -0500

$19.98
Jerry Garcia Band: Bay Area '78

Let Me Roll It to You…

Just in time to celebrate Jerry’s 67th birthday (August 1, of course) comes a new installment in the Pure Jerry series, this one an especially hot selection from 1978. This was a particularly exciting period for the Jerry Garcia Band, which at that time included his perennial bass buddy John Kahn (of course), Buzz Buchanan on drums (who’d played with Jerry since the fall of ’77), his partners in the Dead, Keith Godchaux on piano and Donna Godchaux on vocals, and, at many shows that year, second singer Maria Muldaur, who blended so nicely with Donna.

We’ve drawn together the listenable/usable/releasable parts of four Northern California shows from the first half of ’78 to create this stellar compilation. Much of the material was culled from consecutive shows in February of 1978, shortly after Jerry, Keith and Donna had returned from fine, high-energy Midwest tour by the Dead (documented wonderfully on Dick Picks Vol. 18). Songs from the 2/18/78 JGB show at the 2,000-seat Marin County Veteran’s Auditorium include a barn-burning “Mystery Train,” the loping “Catfish John,” and, best of all, a spectacular “Lonesome and a Long Way Home” that ambles through all sorts of fascinating moods and spaces over the course of more than 20 minutes. The next night, the JGB landed at the Santa Cruz Civic—a similar-sized venue—and this time the fans (and now, you!) were treated to such tunes as the Motown classics “Second That Emotion” and “The Way You Do the Things You Do” (a great version!), “Mission in the Rain,” Dylan’s “Simple Twist of Fate,” and, the piece de resistance, a 30-minute “Don’t Let Go” featuring generous solos all around and ultra-soulful guitar-and-vocals from Jerry on the “Hold me tight and don’t let go…” passage towards the end. Wild!

Rounding out this exceptional package are four tunes from June 1978: The 6/10 show at the tiny Keystone Berkeley gives us the bouncy, rockin’ “Tore Up Over You” that opens Disc Two; then, after a couple more tunes, we move to 6/18 at the Keystone Palo Alto—a favorite JGB haunt for many years—for what is arguably the greatest version of Paul McCartney’s “Let Me Roll It” that the group ever played (and there weren’t many), and then superb versions of the still-new “Gomorrah” and the gospel tune “I’ll Be With Thee”—the latter always a fine showcase for Donna and Maria.

If you loved the ’78 Pure Jerry from the Warner Theatre (3/18/78), this one should be right up your alley, too—it’s definitely primo JG! You can see the full track listing below, and order your copy here!

—Blair Jackson

Track List

DISC ONE

1. Mystery Train (2/18/78, Veterans Memorial Auditorium)
2. Catfish John (2/18/78, Veterans Memorial Auditorium)
3. I Second That Emotion (2/19/78, Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium)
4. Mission In The Rain (2/19/78, Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium)
5. Don't Let Go (2/19/78, Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium)

DISC TWO

1. Tore Up Over You (6/10/78, Keystone Berkeley)
2. Simple Twist Of Fate (2/19/78, Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium)
3. The Way You Do The Things You Do (2/19/78, Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium)
4. Let Me Roll It (6/18/78, Keystone Palo Alto)
5. Gomorrah (6/18/78, Keystone Palo Alto)
6. I'll Be With Thee (6/18/78, Keystone Palo Alto)
7. Lonesome And A Long Way From Home (2/18/78, Veterans Memorial Auditorium)

Mark Karan: RatDog Guitarist Walks Through the Fire to Put Out First Solo Album

lilgoldie — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:40:04 -0500

It might have taken Mark Karan 30 years, give or take a few, to put out his first solo album, but that’s OK—it was definitely worth the wait for his many fans.

Walk Through the Fire, on the Dig Music label (run by Jackie Greene’s manager), is a wonderful and uplifting slice of rock and soul music that reveals much about Karan as both a supremely talented musician and a remarkable human being. The emotional title track, for instance, was written in the hospital when he was undergoing treatments for the aggressive throat cancer that could well have taken him from us when he was stricken in the summer of 2007. Other originals touch on different aspects of his life and career, and there’s also a slew of great cover tunes, including Alex Call’s wonderful “Annie Don’t Lie,” Robert Johnson’s “Love In Vain,” Joe Jackson’s “Fools In Love,” Robert Hunter/The Dead’s “Easy Wind,” and more.

Throughout, Karan’s strong and soulful lead vocals and varied guitar textures carry the day, but he is also very ably assisted by a gaggle of excellent players and singers—besides cohorts from his part-time solo band Jemimah Puddleduck, he also enlisted friends/colleagues such as keyboardists Bill Payne (of Little Feat fame) and Mike Finnigan, long-time Bonnie Raitt bassist Hutch Hutchinson, percussionist extraordinaire (and fellow cancer survivor) Wally Ingram, and some amazing singers, including Delaney Bramlett, Chris and Lorin Rowan, The Persuasions, ex-JGB singers Gloria Jones and Jackie LaBranch, and several others. The songs range from gospel-tinged rock to heavy blues to R&B-flavored workouts, and there isn’t a weak track in the bunch. Ever the band player, the tracks are notable for the solid interaction of the musicians, and for being surprisingly “wank-free” for a so-called solo album. With Karan’s illness and amazing recovery as a catalyst, and his enforced “vacation” from RatDog because of this spring’s tour by The Dead offering a window to complete the album, this labor of love by this warm and compassionate lover of life finally came to fruition.

We’ve talked to Mark about his career and his life with RatDog in previous interviews, so this time around we focused on the making of Walk Through the Fire. We hope you all support Mark by purchasing this excellent CD!

When I put the CD on for the first time and “Annie Don’t Lie” came on, I immediately thought of ’70s Ry Cooder. With the accordion on there and The Persuasions doing the backups, it had the warm and friendly vibe of albums like Ry’s Paradise and Lunch and Chicken Skin Music…
Sure, that’s my favorite Ry period. I’ll take that as a compliment…

But it’s also kind of Little Feat-ish, too, as are a couple of other tunes. Who are some of the other influences on this album?

Oh, God, everything! I don’t know where to start. On the tune “Love Song,” for example, that was originally an acoustic guitar thing, sort of my attempt at a James Taylor song, and I hadn’t done it in years. I even played it for my wife at our wedding. More recently I sort of re-connected with it, but I didn’t want to do it the old, corny James Taylor way, so on that song I tried to evoke elements of what I dug about The Beatles and some of Eric Clapton’s more pop stuff, and also some of the kind of stomp-walk Stax/Memphis type of R&B from back in the day. I wanted to see if I could smush those two worlds together and treat it like that kind of love song, instead of the pretty white-boy love song. [Laughs] So there’s the influence of old soul and Beatles music.

You said you wrote that a number of years ago. What’s the timing on the other original songs? Obviously “Walk Through the Fire” is post-recovery.
The record is a pretty good time-line actually. Half the record is tunes that I wrote, and you could almost say that my life is in the arc of those songs. I’m not a prolific writer. I’ve gone through prolific periods when I’ve had some place to put songs as I’d write them, but when I don’t have any place to put them—and there’s not much room for my contributions in RatDog, for example, because that’s Bob’s baby—I haven’t had that much drive to write. So this record was sort of gathering up all the little nuggets I’d written over the years that had never made it to any kind of a record. I wanted to give those songs an opportunity to exist so I could say, “Well, here’s me up until now, and from here on, who knows what’s gonna happen? Should the unthinkable happen and I check out early, or whatever the story might be, here’s me.”

Who’s Susan Sheller, who wrote “Memphis Radio”? I really like that song.
I love that song. She’s an old friend of mine from Southern California. We did it with her in her band down there, way pre-RatDog. This was predominantly a cover band, but we did some original songs. This is when I was still living down there and eking out a living doing everything from playing blues gigs, to cover bar gigs, to whatever sessions were around; whatever it took to pay the rent. And Susan was one of the blessings of that era, because she was a really cool singer and writer. When we first threw Jemimah Puddleduck together, the first time we did the gig in Ventura—which we’re actually coming up on the ten-year anniversary of—we needed material, and I asked Susan if she minded if we did that song, because I loved it so much.

I also really like your reggae re-invention of “Fools in Love,” the Joe Jackson tune. How did that come to you?
I don’t really remember, other than it was a really good song and not something that everybody and their brother had already covered. I mean, I love the classics, but everybody does ‘em. [Laughs] One of the things I like to do is take songs and present them sort of out of context. With a song like “Fools in Love,” I was a freak in the ’80s for Elvis Costello and Joe Jackson and Graham Parker—the intelligent punk-pop thing. The Jam—I loved a bunch of those bands. So I wanted to find something out of that era to bring into the music I was doing today, and that song—actually that whole album [Look Sharp!]—was always one of my favorites.

You mention taking things out of a context, and I think you do that a bit within the song “Time Will Tell,” which seems like its going to be a fairly conventional blues, but when you get to the big solo at the end it turns into this weird, angular thing that doesn’t go where you expect it to go. It’s a cool juxtaposition of approaches.
Thanks. That song actually started back in the ’90s. I was working as a writer and producer at a studio in L.A. and that’s one of the tunes I came up with. When I initially wrote it, it was kind of a Stevie Ray Vaughan mid- to uptempo blues, but I think it works better this way.

And your “Love in Vain” with Delaney Bramlett—is that more from the Stones version than from Robert Johnson? I feel like I hear the Mick Jagger pronunciation on the word “vain.”
[Laughs] Right. For me, it’s definitely more Stones-derived than Robert Johnson, and I think for Delaney it was probably more Robert Johnson-derived than Stones. Since I produced the track, I’d say the track is probably more Stones than Robert Johnson, too, but in truth, a lot of the production on that track was more influenced by the later British blues stuff—the psychedelic part of Cream—where I start layering in all the electric guitars and all the counter-lines and all.

How about that great Randy Newman song, “Think It’s Gonna Rain”? That’s been covered by a lot of people over the years…
I was familiar with the Randy Newman version, and I think I’d heard Nina Simone’s version a couple of times, but actually that song is one of the few that didn’t originate with me, in terms of suggesting we do it. We showed up for a couple of days rehearsal at J.T.’s house [that’s Puddleduck and Bruce Hornsby keyboardist John Thomas] and I don’t know where he’d heard it, but he fell in love with the chords and the string arrangement, and he’d transposed the string arrangement to ensemble rock ’n’ roll quartet. And the fact that he did that and the fact that I’ve always loved Randy Newman, and we’re always looking for new material with Puddleduck, it was like, “Hell yeah, let’s dive in and do this!” And since we were rehearsing at his house, and he’s got a studio there where we were going to be doing some recording, we recorded that track. The version of that song that’s on the record is probably only the second or third time we’d ever played that song, and there’s no overdubbing at all on that track, and the vocal is the one I cut at the end of that day as a scratch [temp] vocal.

Did most of these tracks start out as small band productions and then get expanded in the overdubbing process?
Yes. They all started out as guitar, bass, drums and keys [Mark, John Molo or Jimmy Sanchez on drums, J.T. on keys, Bob Gross or Hutch Hutchinson on bass], and then we built from there. Some of the songs lent themselves to being mostly that—a quartet—with maybe the addition of an acoustic guitar to flesh things out, or perhaps some backing vocals we couldn’t pull off live.

I’m impressed with how much space you’ve given to the keyboards particularly…
Well, my vibe is more of a band thing, always. I’m not really into the “Look at me, check me out, aren’t I a badass guitarist” thing. [Laughs]

Still, I like how in-your-face the guitars are. They’re not drenched in reverb or anything and the parts are tasteful but still hot.
Well, frankly I modeled this record after a lot of my own favorite records that were cut in the late ’60s and early to mid-’70s—Crosby, Stills & Nash records, Van Morrison records, old Allman Brothers records, Workingman’s Dead; that kind of stuff. Immediate, honest, authentic, emotionally connected records.

Tell me about writing “Walk Through the Fire.” Obviously that’s the most blatantly autobiographical song on there, and it sort of brings us up to date, as it were, from when you were first diagnosed with throat cancer. Was it tough to write, or did it come easily?
It came ridiculously easily.

The good ones often do.
That’s exactly right. They checked me into UCSF [hospital] for the first week of treatment—I was going on chemo 24 hours a day for a full week and the first time around they wanted to keep me in the hospital so they could monitor what was going on. So we moved the whole damn house in—“Bring down guitars, bring laptops, bring everything you got!” They got me all settled in the bed, and I asked [my wife] Maile to hand me my guitar, and I started noodling around for ten or 15 minutes and I started playing this chord progression. Then I said, “Honey, can you pass me that pad and pen?” She did, and about 15 minutes later I had that whole song. I didn’t write that song; it came through me. And now I’m giving it back! [Laughs]

That must be somewhat emotional for you.
Absolutely. I did it for the first time in public ever when RatDog went down to Jamaica [in January 2009]. The first night we were down there [1/28] they threw a little welcome soiree and I played a couple of songs solo and then one by one Robin and Jay and Jeff came up, and so on. So I pulled out “Walk Through the Fire.” I stood up with just an electric guitar, feeling extremely naked, and played it. I was busting up. Somebody shot some video that night and…well, it’s cool, but it’s also a little embarrassing because I’m choking back tears and I’m having a hard time singing it.

I was thinking you should get a copy of that song to Bonnie Raitt. I can totally picture her singing that.
It’s interesting you should mention that, because Hutch [Hutchinson] being the bass player on a lot of this record, and Bonnie’s bass player for so long, is planning to give her a copy of the record.

How did you know when the album was finished? With technology being what it is and no deadline looming, it seems like you could fool around with parts forever. But nothing seems overdone to me, and I like the way you’ve maintained a nice balance between the guitars and the keyboards.
I like to have it so that each part sort of stands on its own—you could maybe mute the other part and the song would still work. And I like to have parts that interlock, so they’re not just going at the same time, but instead there’s more contrapuntal and counter-melodic stuff going on. For my ear, the only way you can successfully achieve that is if you keep things simple: Fewer instruments, or if you’re going to use more instruments, instruments that are supporting a part in kind. So for me, it’s constantly listening to make sure that it still sounds kind of open. If it starts to sound too dense, I know I’m getting too precious and too clever.

You’ve got some great folks helping out on background vocals, from The Persuasions to Jackie and Gloria. Were these all tracks that were essentially done and then you “cast” them by song?
It wasn’t really that they were done and then the backing vocals were an afterthought. In fact, in all those cases, the background vocals were highly present in my mind early on. Really, in some cases, the backup vocals were more important to me than the parts, so once I had the idea of what the backup vocals were going to be doing, then I could put together what the rhythm parts were going to be doing. In terms of who and why… Well, I chose the Rowans [for “Leave A Light On”] because I wanted something that was Beatles/Crosby, Stills, Nash, so who could be better than them? With The Persuasions, we had the connection of them having toured with RatDog and riding with us a bunch. Both “Annie Don’t Lie” and “Rock Your Papa” had always had these wonderful old soul/doo-wop vocals in my mind’s eye, so The Persuasions were obvious candidates there. I grew up with The Persuasions, from KSAN and KMPX days.

I see you have Bill Payne of Little Feat on here. Have you known him long?
Yeah. I’ve played with Little Feat several times; they’re great guys. Little Feat is one of my all-time favorite bands; always have been.

Obviously you’re making a strong personal statement by coming out with this album now. You must have a tremendous sense of accomplishment just for having made this.
It’s a huge sense of accomplishment, because the idea of making my own record has been rolling around in my head for probably 30 years, and it started to get real sexy to me in about the mid-’80s, when they came up with things like sequencers and home multitracks. Yet, I still didn’t do it. Even this record first started coming together about four years ago and it was not making any giant headway toward completion. So the catalyst for me was, quite frankly, the cancer. At the end of the cancer I felt like, “I’ve got these tunes in the can, and there are at least four of them I can build on, and that gives me a foot in the door, and at this point I’m just not willing to wait.” In fact the first post-cancer batch of sessions was one did up here, and those are the ones Jimmy Sanchez played on because John [Molo] wasn’t available. That was chapter one in Mark and Maile saying, “OK, we love Jemimah Puddleduck, but post-cancer we can’t wait on anybody anymore.”

Having come through the cancer, I won’t say that I walk around with the specter of death over my shoulder, or anything silly and dramatic like that, but I do walk around with a brand new sense that I’m not entitled to be here. That I could split at any time, whether I want to or not, and so I thought, “I’m not leaving this planet not having laid these down and left them behind for everybody.”

With what’s going on in the record business and the economy, to any kind of conventional wisdom this is probably a really dumb time to be releasing a record, but for me this was the perfect time. We probably spent more on it than we might have if we’d been more budget-conscious, but we didn’t care. We wanted to get the job done whatever it took this time. We can be more budget conscious on the next record. This was the opportunity of lifetime for me—literally. And the culmination of a life’s work. So whatever happens from here is a mystery. Obviously, we hope the record will be a success, but at the same time we don’t want to be overly attached to the notion of financial success, because really, the success is in the making of it.

For more, go to www.markkaran.com.

Ongoing RatDog Summer Tour Setlists!

frogstorm — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 22:01:40 -0500

Getting mostly great reports from the RatDog tour. For those who like to keep track of the tour from afar, we’ll be providing regular setlist updates. For more details, fan commentary on the shows and photos as they become available, bookmark the fabulous fan site www.ratdog.org!

7/5/09, LC Pavilion, Columbus, OH
Jam> Jack Straw> Easy to Slip> Dark Star> Little Red Rooster, Mississippi Half-Step> Samson and Delilah> Milestones> stuff, Dear Prudence*> Dark Star+ > Touch of Grey+

* with Chris Robinson (vocals)
+ with Jackie Greene (guitar/vocals);

7/9/09, Snagajob.com Pavilion, Glen Allen, VA
Jam> Feel Like a Stranger> Easy Answers, It’s All Over Now Baby Blue, Odessa, Ramble On Rose, Playing in the Band> The Other One> stuff> Standing on the Moon, Quinn the Eskimo*> GDTRFB*

* with Al Schnier (guitar)

7/10/09, All Good Festival, Marvin’s Mountaintop, Masontown, WV
Jam> Truckin’> Tomorrow Never Knows> Lucky Enough, Big Boss Man, Money for Gasoline> Maggie's Farm, Loose Lucy, Eyes of the World> stuff*> Tomorrow Never Knows*> Morning Dew, China Cat Sunflower+> I Know You Rider+

* with Les Claypool (bass)
+ with Al Schnier (guitar)

7/11/09, Mark G. Etess Arena, Atlantic City NJ
Jam> Help on the Way> Slipknot!> Cassidy> Bird Song> All Along the Watchtower> Lazy River Road> Big Railroad Blues, A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall #, She Says> Two Djinn> stuff, Days Between> Bird Song (reprise)> Cassidy (reprise)> Slipknot!> Franklin's Tower / E: One More Saturday Night

7/12/09, Highland Bowl Amphitheatre, Rochester, NY
Jam> The Music Never Stopped> Big River, Senor> Loser> New Speedway Boogie> Even So> October Queen> The Deep End> Samson and Delilah> stuff> Black Peter, St. Stephen*> William Tell Bridge*> The Eleven*> Lovelight* / E: Ripple

* with Jackie Greene (guitar/vocals)

7/14/09 Penn’s Peak, Jim Thorpe, PA

Viola Lee Blues> New Minglewood Blues> Queen Jane Approximately> Walkin’ Blues, Tennessee Jed, Shade of Grey> Hell in a Bucket

Stealin@*, Oh Boy @*> Not Fade Away@*> Iko Iko*> stuff, Come Together> Sugar Magnolia / E: Gloria

@acoustic

*with Jackie Greene (guitar/harmonica/vocals)

7/15/09, Penn’s Peak, Jim Thorpe, PA

Jam> Here Comes Sunshine> Casey Jones, Mission in the Rain> Crazy Fingers> Brown-Eyed Women> Dark Star

Blackbird@, When I Paint My Masterpiece@, Black-Throated Wind@, Lady with a Fan > Terrapin> stuff, Stella Blue> Dark Star> Johnny B. Goode / E: At a Siding> Terrapin Flyer

@ acoustic

7/17/09, Masquerade Park, Atlanta, GA

Jam> Dancing in the Streets> The Golden Road> Wang Dang Doodle* > Milestones*, Picasso Moon, Weather Report Suite

You Win Again@, Jackaroe@, Friend of the Devil@, West L.A. Fadeaway* > Scarlet Begonias* > stuff* > Knockin’ on Heaven's Door, Not Fade Away

* with Bryan Lopes on sax

7/18/09, Masquerade Music Park, Atlanta, GA

Jam> Shakedown Street> Maggie's Farm, They Love Each Other> Easy to Slip> Bird Song> Lazy River Road

Me and My Uncle@, Corrina, He's Gone@ > The Other One*+ > Stuff*+ > Sugaree* > Bird Song* > One More Saturday Night*+

@acoustic

* with Bryan Lopes on sax

+ with Al Schnier on guitar

7/19/09, St. Augustine Amphitheatre, St. Augustine, FL

Jam> Playing in the Band> Cold Rain and Snow, Silvio> Tequila, Althea, Lost Sailor> Saint of Circumstance, A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall@, Looks Like Rain@, Mississippi Half-Step*> stuff > Dear Prudence*> Throwing Stones> Johnny B. Goode

@ acoustic

* with Chuck Garvey on guitar

7/21/09, Greenfield Amphitheater, Wilmington, NC

Jam> Feel Like a Stranger> Mama Tried, She Belongs to Me> Youngblood, Row Jimmy, Cream Puff War, It's All Over Now> Liberty

Catfish John@, Me and Bobby McGee@, The Weight@, Uncle John's Band> The Wheel > stuff, Death Don't Have No Mercy> Corrina / E: Brokedown Palace

@ acoustic

7/23/09, Casino Ballroom, Hampton Beach, NH

Jam> Casey Jones> All Along the Watchtower> Dire Wolf> Little Red Rooster, Odessa, Ship of Fools, Money for Gasoline> Eyes of the World

K.C. Moan@, Mexicali Blues@, Victim or the Crime@, Two Djinn> stuff, Wharf Rat > China Cat Sunflower> I Know You Rider / E: Touch of Grey

@acoustic

7/24/09, Casino Ballroom, Hampton.Beach, NH

Jam> I Need a Miracle> Truckin’> I Need a Miracle> Jus' Like Mama Said> Big Boss Man> Even So> October Queen> The Deep End> Dark Star> Big Railroad Blues

Me and My Uncle@, Desolation Row@>, Estimated Prophet> The Other One> stuff, Dark Star jam> Come Together> Dark Star> Goin’ Down the Road / E: Attics of My Life

@acoustic

7/25/09, Gathering of the Vibes, Seaside Park, Bridgeport, CT

Jam> Festival> Jack Straw, Lazy River Road, Bird Song> Bertha*, Silvio> Tequila> Scarlet Begonias*, Ashes and Glass> Iko Iko> stuff> Days Between> Bird Song, One More Saturday Night* /E: Ripple*

* with Donna Jean Godchaux-MacKay on vocals

8/21/09, Britt Pavilion, Jacksonville, OR

Jam> Shakedown Street> Mama Tried> She Belongs to Me, Jus' Like Mama Said, Playing in the Band> Festival> Terrapin, Blackbird@, When I Paint My Masterpiece@, Mississippi Half-Step> stuff, Morning Dew> GDTRFB*

@ acoustic

* with Jackie Greene on guitar,harmonica and vocals

8/22/09, Cuthbert Amphitheatre, Eugene, OR

Jam> Jack Straw> Easy to Slip> Lazy River Road> Dark Star> It's All Over Now> She Says> Liberty, Two Djinn, Me and My Uncle@, A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall@, Ashes and Glass> stuff> Dear Prudence> Dark Star*+ > One More Saturday Night*+

@ acoustic

* with Jackie Greene on guitar and vocals

+with Barry Flast on keyboards

8/23/09, Paramount Theatre, Seattle, WA

Jam> Dancing in the Streets> Hell in a Bucket, Even So> October Queen> The Deep End> Milestones, Lost Sailor> Saint of Circumstance

Victim or the Crime@> Black-Throated Wind@, Shade of Grey> The Other One> Samson and Delilah> stuff> Sugaree> Sugar Magnolia / E: Ripple

8/25/09, Martin Woldson Theater at the Fox, Spokane, WA

New Speedway Boogie*+ > Smokestack Lightnin*+ > The Music Never Stopped*> Maggie's Farm, Mission in the Rain, Walkin Blues> Crazy Fingers, Lucky Enough> Tomorrow Never Knows

You Win Again@, El Paso@, Silvio>Tequila> Silvio> Althea> Iko-Iko> stuff> Wharf Rat> Touch of Grey / E: Johnny B. Goode

@ acoustic

*with Jackie Greene on guitar/harmonica/vocals);

+with members of Jackie's band

8/26/09, Wilma Theatre, Missoula, MT

Don't Let Go, Rock Your Papa, Walk through the Fire, Easy Wind> Feel Like a Stranger> Minglewood Blues, Bird Song> Big Railroad Blues

K.C. Moan@*, Fever@*, Friend of the Devil@5*, Good Morning Little Schoolgirl*, Tennessee Jed* > stuff > Come Together* > China Cat Sunflower* > I Know You Rider* / E: U.S. Blues*

@ acoustic

* with Huey Lewis on harmonica and/or vocals;

"Don't Let Go" through most of "Easy Wind" without Bob

8/27/09, The Knitting Factory, Boise, ID

Jam> Truckin’> Loose Lucy> Row Jimmy, Bury Me Standing> Greatest Story Ever Told, Salt Lake City> Truckin’ jam> Deal

Jack-A-Roe@, When I Paint My Masterpiece@, Ramble On Rose> Estimated Prophet> The Wheel> stuff, Ship of Fools> GDTRFB / E: Brokedown Palace

@ acoustic

8/29/09, The Depot, Salt Lake City, UT

Jam> Help on the Way> Slipknot!> Loser, Money for Gasoline, Cassidy> Book of Rules> Little Red Rooster, Odessa> At a Siding> Terrapin Flyer

Me and Bobby McGee@, Catfish John@, Looks Like Rain@, He's Gone> The Other One> stuff* > Death Don't Have No Mercy> Slipknot!> Franklin's Tower / E: One More Saturday Night

@ acoustic

* with Matt Butler on washboard

8/30/09, Chautauqua Auditorium, Boulder, CO

Jam> Casey Jones, Easy to Slip> Stagger Lee> Dire Wolf, Candyman@, Corrina@, I Need a Miracle> Playing in the Band> Mississippi Half-Step> Samson and Delilah> stuff, Black Peter> Touch of Grey

@ acoustic

8/31/09, Denver Botanic Gardens, Denver, CO

Here Comes Sunshine> Easy Answers, Queen Jane Approximately, Lazy River Road, Jack Straw, Peggy-O@, The Weight@, Lady with a Fan> Terrapin> stuff> Standing on the Moon> Playing in the Band (reprise)> Johnny B. Goode / Ripple

@ acoustic

Join Mickey Hart, Bob Weir and Jeff Chimenti at Fundraiser for Senator Boxer

frogstorm — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 19:50:10 -0500

On Saturday, June 20th, Mickey Hart, Bob Weir and Jeff Chimenti will perform at a fundraiser for Senator Barbara Boxer in Marin County, California. They plan on playing for a full hour, and since the venue only holds 150 people, it'll be an intimate group!

The organizers are offering a special price of $75 to Dead.net members who would like to attend the event. There will be delicious food catered by Beautifull! as well as an open bar with beer and wine included in the price of admission. There's also a VIP level of $1000 which includes entry to the VIP photo reception with Mickey, Bob, Jeff and Senator Boxer.

If you'd like to be a part of this very special event, click here to visit Senator Boxer's online RSVP page. You may also email BOXERRSVP@gmail.com with any questions, comments or concerns, or with RSVPs if you'd prefer to mail a check.

Here's the website with all the details:

https://secure.ga6.org/08/ross_june09_facebook?source=deadnet

A Wearable Monet

frogstorm — Wed, 06 May 2009 19:05:57 -0500

Amongst the jillion-and-one elements supporting The Dead’s Spring 2009 Tour is the artwork -- from the interactive spiral galaxy logo on the Tour’s home page, to the nifty musical minuteman dude on the Tour’s laminated working passes, to the designs on the Tour T-shirts sold at the merch stands in the lobby. And if you’ve been to a gig lately, you’ve likely noticed a particularly fine new T-shirt, quite unlike any we’ve seen before...

In advance of each tour, Merch-Maestro George Bross solicits artwork possibilities from various folks, from which he picks the designs that become the tour's trophy T-shirts. This time around, one of the submitted artworks came from Monet Weir, Bobby’s 11-year-old daughter: it’s a lovely, blossomy, viney-twiney take on the familiar skeleton-and-roses motif, done up in yer classic blue, red and white. Monet thought of the drawing she gave George as just a suggestion, really: a rough idea, a sketch, a template if you will, which -- should it by happy chance be chosen for a T-shirt -- would then be whisked away and turned over to some professional-type artiste person to be turned into professional-type artwork. But Maestro George, in one of those moments of insight, foresight, and white-light clarity, swiftly perceived that Monet’s drawing was not a sketch or suggestion or template for any artwork at all, oh no -- Monet’s drawing WAS the artwork. So he had a bunch of T-shirts made up, and, well, hotcakes should only sell this well.

Trouble was, they were only available in Children’s Size L, because the thinking was that it was a children’s shirt. Now Children’s Size L fits some women but not all, and no men to speak of, which to no one’s surprise except maybe George’s left a whole lot of disappointed Deadheads at the merch tables. Well, positive group-think has been applied to this pickle, and the cognitive leap has been made from “shirt for a kid” to “shirt by a kid”, and now Monet’s wonderful design is available on T-shirts in sizes to accommodate pretty much everyone. Get one for yourself (and your inner child) today.

LIVE CDs Available at Every Show

frogstorm — Tue, 05 May 2009 23:39:49 -0500

The Dead are offering high fidelity souvenir recordings immediately following each show!

Here's how it works:

1. Go to the T-Shirt Stand and buy a "the Dead:Live" wristband

2. Enjoy the show!

3. Return to the CD pick up station after the show and trade in your wristband for a CD set.

Don't miss out!

3 CD Set : The Whole Show : $25.00

500 limited edition CD sets per show, available only at the shows, direct from the Dead.

Chicago Exhibit Features Grateful Dead Art

frogstorm — Fri, 01 May 2009 18:38:44 -0500

If you're in Chicago for The Dead shows, be sure to catch this exhibit right across the street from Allstate Arena!

The exhibit will feature limited-edition works created by Bill Kreutzmann and rare signed work by Jerry Garcia. It also includes photography of the Grateful Dead chronicling their 30 year career by Herb Greene and Baron Wolman, plus poster art by Richard Biffle.

Where to see it? Go to Café Le Cave, 2777 Mannheim Road, Des Plaines, Illinois. It's located directly across the street from the concert venue; it's FREE and open to the public.

Hours of the exhibit will be Monday, May 4, 2009 – 12-6 and Tuesday, May 5, 2009 – 10-6.

Denver Exhibit Celebrates Psychedelic Rock Posters

frogstorm — Fri, 01 May 2009 18:32:03 -0500

The Denver Art Museum takes a deeper look into the experimental art of the late 1960s, its message and its meaning, with their new exhibit The Psychedelic Experience: Rock Posters from the San Francisco Bay Area, 1965-71. The show features work by celebrated artists such as Wes Wilson, Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelley and Victor Moscoso. Of course many of the posters celebrate the Grateful Dead, so if you're in Denver for the 5/7 show, check it out!

The exhibit runs from now until July 19th.

Click here for more information.

Rehearsal Photos from Jay Blakesberg

Jonathan Lane — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 18:10:10 -0500

From deep in the heart of Marin County, The Dead have just wrapped the latest round of rehearsals for the upcoming tour. For this Dead adventure, my film-making partner Justin Kreutzmann and I were asked to provide a behind-the-scenes look at what the "boys" are up to. read more...

As a long time Dead Head who has seen many, many shows, I am thrilled to report that this band is on fire! They are breathing new life into many Grateful Dead classics by adding twists and turns that will make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. No song is taken for granted; all of them- including those that you might think these guys can play in their sleep- are being tweaked to sweet perfection. From precise attention to the details of vocal harmonies on songs like "New Potato Caboose" and "Till The Morning Comes," to working out new and eclectic jams on the "Eleven," the band will be firing on all cylinders by the time they hit Greensboro, and will not disappoint.

As we tried to blend in to the rehearsal space and be invisible, it was awesome to watch these guys run through, say, "Terrapin" and play it with such power and force to an empty room (except for the crew, who are busy themselves- making everything "just exactly perfect"). I know that when they get in a building with 20,000 electrified Dead Heads, the energy levels will be so high that everyone's minds will surely be blown. So please enjoy these photos (and videos) as they reveal a group of guys psyched to make music together and bring it to the Dead Heads!

Rock on,

JB

Bill Kreutzmann's New Year's Eve in Maui

Jonathan Lane — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 18:39:27 -0600

Rex Foundation 25th Anniversary Celebration

frogstorm — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 20:05:41 -0600

Bring your friends and family and let's celebrate music and community to benefit the Rex Foundation.

Sweet Music Everywhere
Rex Foundation's 25th Anniversary
Saturday, December 13th
The Grand Ballroom of the Regency Center
1300 Van Ness Ave
San Francisco, CA

featuring:
Peter Rowan with Friends & Family
Michael Kang with Panjea
Jackie Greene
The Brass Mafia
and more...

Please join us!

6:00 – 7:30
Pre-concert reception party
Includes dinner and drinks, plus goodie bags

7:30
Doors open for concert

8:00
Music begins!

For more event details and to purchase special pre-concert party and premium concert seating tickets call 415-561-3135 or visit www.rexfoundation.org.

To purchase special pre-concert party and premium concert seating tickets call 415-561-3135 or download the ticket order form.

Reserve balcony tickets of $40 through Ticketmaster and GDTS,TOO, with limited availability through the Rex Foundation.

KBM at Magfest

frogstorm — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 15:38:05 -0600

www.cloudsurfing.gdhour.com: This is from Dave Roberts, of Crawfish of Love fame, reporting on his experience hearing Bill Kreutzmann at MagnoliaFest with his trio, KBM (Oteil Burbridge on bass, Scott Murawski on guitar). Posted with his permission, of course.

I only got to see The Dead 25 times in my life. Although I became an immediate fan in 1967 upon seeing Harry Reasoner interview the band on national television, I never got to actually see them play live until April 1978 in Jacksonville. My last Dead show was St. Petersburg, October 88, Weir’s birthday. Both my alpha and omega live Dead experiences were replete with many moments of what one now-exiled Grateful Dead scribe called “being lost in that divine sparkling oak grove…,” or in other words, those segments of Dead tunes where the structure of the song has been platformed into a launchpad for Neptunian mental exploration. For me, the weirder the better. Dead Heads called it “Space.” I called it Manna.

My Dead live listening pattern consisted of patiently waiting for verses and choruses to end so the needly searching of Jerry’s guitar could propel Phil’s bubbling low end and Bobby’s odd, beautiful backwardish chording over the rhythm section (two of the master rhythmists on Earth) which stirred the whole beautiful stew into unknown vistas and corners with their four arms and four legs conducting the mad, insane, beautiful orchestra on stage in front of them. Those were the moments I waited for… being lost in that divine sparkling oak grove of my mind… while The Dead played snake music for my mental landscape. That’s why I never danced at Dead shows. I couldn’t. I was traveling.

Until last Saturday night, I hadn’t had an opportunity to revisit my beloved sparkling oak grove since St. Pete of ‘88. That’s twenty years. The Grove was always the place where I could shed my stress and daily tensions like nowhere else. The Grove was where I could just close my eyes and let The Boys lay down the magic carpet for me and just wash, wash, wash the crap out of my brain. And it could only happen at a live show. Had to be live. Like psychotherapy. On the moment.

This is why I approached co-promoter Randy Judy with thankful tears in my eyes last Sunday morning to tell him how much KBM’s set from the previous evening meant to me. For three hours the night before I was able to go back to that Grove I’ve been locked out of since ‘88, and God knows I needed re-entry on an emergency level, and needed it soon. Life hasn’t been kind lately. KBM came to my rescue.

My favorite Dead period came before I ever saw them. 1973/Wake Of The Flood era shows top the list, with 1972 and 1974 coming next. Of course, Mickey was out of the band for most of that period, but Kreutzmann was there. Not just there, but THERE. Damn, on those tapes from ‘73-74 he wasn’t just drumming, he was multitasking as Sparkling Oak Grove Inducer/Accelerator as he progressively stepped on the gas propelling the vehicle. He played like he had seven arms and five legs. His snappy snare synchopations mixed with his dancing drumstick-tipped cymbal work mixed with his bass drum accents always adding counterbeats to the already swirling snare work made me smile and smile and smile and smile AND I’LL BE DAMNED IF LAST SATURDAY NIGHT I DIDN’T SUDDENLY FIND MYSELF FOR THE FIRST TIME IN TWENTY YEARS smiling and smiling and smiling again…. and I didn’t even have to wait for verse/chorus this time to board the spacebus.

The crowd at Magfest gave Kreutzmann a huge wave of love as he settled behind his drums Saturday night, and Bill seemed genuinely grateful for this show of appreciation. I had positioned myself sidestage with a clear view of Kreutzmann, right next to Oteil’s amp. Just watching Bill warm up with a few trips around his drumkit flashed the door open to The Grove. Fuck. There was that snare sound. Damn. There were those familiar cymbal pings. I could tell magic was about to take place. And it did.

The band kicked off with Scarlet. Bill just settled back in that posture I remember from the Dead days… back straight, trunk of his upper body acutally quite still, head tilted slightly back and eyes closed, tight-lipped grin on his face. But from note one and not ending util note last of the final tune, Kreutzmann’s arms and legs and wrists and ankles bounced and blitzed and caressed and crashed and slashed and flashed and PROPELLED ME DEEPER AND DEEPER INTO MY BELOVED DIVINE OAK GROVE and I realized I WAS BACK HOME and I realized IT’S STILL OUT THERE and I realized I’M STILL BASICALLY O. K. and I realized The Grateful Dead has not gone out of my life forever and I was weeping with joy less than two minutes into tune one because I realized what was happening.

Jerry’s death definitely ended that particular avenue to The Grove forever. No other guitarist I’ve heard yet can take me to The Grove. But Jerry’s guitar was not the ONLY key element to The Dead's ability of Grove Transportation. Bill Kreutzmann’s drumming was JUST as pivotal to The Dead’s magic as Jerry’s guitar. What made me so happy Saturday night was the realization that Bill still carried the magic with him. Not to disparage, but I’ve seen and enjoyed Ratdog twice and they couldn’t transport me to The Grove. I saw Lesh and Hart and Weir at a different festival but they could not transport me to The Grove. That’s because Bill Kreutzmann was not in the mix. I discovered Saturday night that Kreutzmann has The Key. And Magnoliafest brought The Grove back into my life at a much needed time. Thank you Beth Judy and Randy Judy for that One Kind Favor again. Each March and October for the last twelve years you have uplifted our lives with some absolutely breathtaking festivals. I always say “this one was the best" after each festival, and I mean it each time. Thanks you guys… this one was The Best.

And thank you, Bill Kreutzmann. You played like a man possessed with an evangelistic passion for percussion. You sent timeless rhythms out into those magic oaks surrounding the amphitheatre Saturday night, and those notes will linger in the Spanish Moss hanging from those trees. Since I only live an hour’s drive from the festival site, I often go down to the Spirit of The Suwannee park during the year when it’s peaceful and quiet and stand in that empty amphitheatre playing past Magfest and Springfest sets through my memory. Now I’m REALLY loaded, pun intended. Thanks, Bill.

Patiently awaiting Next Bus To The Grove,

David Roberts,
Crawfish of Love,
Jacksonville, Florida

Limited-Edition: Family Dog Fine Art Lithographs

ccasal — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 11:00:00 -0500

The Art That Defined A Generation

The Family Dog 1966-1970

Rock and roll in the 1960s exploded into an important and enduring counterculture that impacts fashion, politics, and a broad range of popular social values.

Right in the middle of this mid-60s explosion Chet Helms was organizing a series of weekly dance hall revues at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco.

These events were the epicenter of the emerging psychedelic culture and featured some of the most important bands of the era, including Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, and the Grateful Dead.

Five of the renowned Family Dog artists, known as the San Francisco Five, created artwork to promote these shows that captured the essence of the era, and their "throwaway" handbills became so important that they are now featured in Smithsonian traveling exhibitions, New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Louvre, and Britain's Tate Museum.

Rhino Entertainment, the featured artists, and Jack Gallery have collaborated to print, publish and distribute these images in limited-edition signed and numbered fine art lithographs. The collection currently comprises 18 of the most significant images of the era, with more to be added over the years. This premiere at Jack Gallery will be the first time that this collection of remastered Family Dog images will be shown prior to their traveling to galleries worldwide.

Please join us to celebrate The Family Dog and the Art that Defined a Generation.

Family Dog fine art lithographs will be available for viewing and purchase starting Wednesday, June 18th
Jack Gallery
3rd and Fairfax
(on the plaza between the Farmers Market and the Grove)
Los Angeles, CA 90036
(323) 933-4883

Rest in Peace, Martin Fierro

Analise Dubner — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 11:46:49 -0500

The music world and the Grateful Dead family lost a major talent and a good, good friend when reeds great Martin Fierro succumbed to cancer on Thursday, March 13. Martin (pronounced mar-teen, but you can call him Meester, if you’d like) is probably best known by Dead Heads for playing sax and flute on the Dead’s 1973 album Wake of the Flood and then being a regular member of the Saunders-Garcia band and the Legion of Mary between the fall of 1973 and the middle of 1975. But this fun and spirited cat had a very full lifetime in music before and after his association with Garcia.

Born in Mexico in January 1942 of Native American and Mexican parentage, he moved to the West Texas town of El Paso when he was 10 and from a very early age was intrigued by music. As an adolescent he took up the saxophone, which he mostly learned by ear, and though he played in his high school marching band, he was much more inspired by early rock ’n’ roll and rhythm & blues pioneers such as Fats Domino, Little Richard and Chuck Berry, and was already gigging with a local band in clubs by the time he was 15. Then, “once I started listening to jazz, I couldn’t quit,” he told me in 2005 when I interviewed him for the liner notes of the Jerry Garcia Collection, Vol. 1: Legion of Mary. “I was overwhelmed by it all, but I couldn’t play it, so I had to learn the idiom. Somebody came along from Philadelphia and told me how to listen first, and then little by little they taught me how to play changes, which is something I didn’t know how to do. I paid ten years of jazz dues, learning everything I could, though I still played rock and R&B, too.”

Though he enjoyed some success as a jazz player in the Southwest and in Mexico, in 1968 he heard the siren call of freewheeling San Francisco and moved to the Bay Area. Within a matter of weeks he was adding his fiery sax and mellifluous flute to any jam session that would have him. And he quickly encountered Jerry Garcia: “I met Jerry in Golden Gate Park, but I didn’t really understand who he was at first. I was there with a friend who was a conga player, and there were probably 40 other conga players there, pounding their drums and making a lot of noise. I would play along with them; a lot of horn players would do that. So this guy came up to me and said, ‘Hey, man, you play pretty good. Where are you from?’ I said ‘El Paso.’ ‘How long have you been in town?’ ‘Oh, about a week.’ And then he said, ‘I’m playing a gig at the Matrix, over on Fillmore. You want to come down and play with us?’ We’ve got this organ player, Howard Wales.’ And the funny thing is, I knew Howard from El Paso; he was hanging out there for a while! So I said, ‘Sure, I’ll be there.’ And it wasn’t until I got there that I really understood that this was Jerry! He had Bill Vitt on drums and John Kahn on bass. We had a great time, and Jerry said, ‘I’ll be calling on you.’ We became friends immediately. It was love at first bite, man!” (For the record, I should note that this probably occurred in 1969, not 1968; there’s no record of Garcia and Wales playing together at the Matrix that early.)

During this period, however, Martin’s main gig was playing with the fine San Francisco blues-rock band Mother Earth (he appeared on their first two albums), and at this time he also solidified some musical relationships that would bear fruit for years to come: he worked with Doug Sahm’s Sir Douglas Quintet (originally from Texas, too) and he met and played with John Cipollina and Quicksilver Messenger Service. In 1971 Martin and Garcia both played on Howard Wales’s jazzy instrumental album, Hooteroll?, and in the summer of ’73 Garcia asked him to play on a couple of tracks of Wake of the Flood. It was around that time that he started sitting in occasionally with the Saunders-Garcia group. Then, on eight shows of the Dead’s September East Coast tour, Martin and trumpeter Joe Ellis—both of whom were traveling with opening act Doug Sahm—also played as the Dead’s horn section on a number of songs—a move that was, frankly, not very popular with the fans. “The Dead Heads hated me,” Fierro said with a chuckle. “They really didn’t want to hear horns with the Grateful Dead.”

Nonetheless, Martin’s and Jerry’s relationship was strengthened by the experience, and it was shortly after that that the reedsman started playing with Garcia full-time—my own first show seeing Martin with Jerry was at Pauley Ballroom at UC Berkeley in January 1974, and it was clear from the get-go that he had brought a lot of his own influences into the band’s sound. The instrumentals took on more jazz colors, and he also contributed Latin flavors to the brew. He was not afraid to really blow, and I dug his use of wah-wah and Echoplex on some of his solos.

“Jerry wanted to play even more jazz,” Martin said, “and he encouraged me to bring in new tunes. Oh, man we were playing all sorts of stuff…He was always up for anything.

“I asked him one time, ‘Do you mind if I play to my heart’s content?’ and he said, ‘No, man, I want you to. It makes me play better when you give your all, Martin.’ You play with some guys and they don’t want you to play a lot and you can’t really express yourself, but it was never that way with Jerry. We were all on the same page and we were all equals.”

Martin had no trouble finding work following the dissolution of the Legion of Mary; indeed his tenure with Garcia was like a springboard to an expanded fan base and many new opportunities. He continued to play on and off with Merl Saunders—a lifelong friend—and he also played often with various groups led by John Cipollina, including a marathon stint in the great Bay Area jam band Zero. His association with Zero also led to an enduring musical partnership with Steve Kimock, as well. In fact, the last time I saw Martin play was with a re-formed Zero (with Kimock) at Wavy Gravy’s birthday benefit at the Regency Ballroom in SF in 2007. Over the years Martin also sat in with many other jam bands, from String Cheese Incident to Dark Star Orchestra. “I just love to play, man,” he told me, “I’ll show up and it’s, ‘Oh, Martin, you gonna play with us, right?’ And I say, ‘Well, I do happen to have a horn with me…’” he laughed.

When we spoke, he joked about how he had cheated death on numerous occasions: “The worst was a surfing accident in Hawaii [in the late ’90s]. I broke my neck and my back, man. I was dead for close to ten minutes and they brought me back, and then they thought I was brain damaged or I’d be paralyzed. The next day I played a gig with Zero!” He laughed heartily—as he often did. And whether there was a touch of exaggeration in the tale or not doesn’t matter. (He did, in fact, carry a lot of physical pain with him, from that and other episodes) But it shows his zest for life, which he retained until his final days on earth.

Another one gone too soon.

You can share your memories of Martin and leave messages for his loved ones at martinfierromusic.com.

Bob, Phil, Mickey and Friends Rock for Barack at the Warfield

almanac — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 03:40:58 -0600

Word began to get out on the afternoon of Friday, February 1st, and quickly spread like a prairie fire: Phil Lesh, Mickey Hart and Bob Weir were getting together to play some music for the first time since 2004, in the service of a common cause: the presidential election campaign of Senator Barack Obama. At 5 o'clock that afternoon, tickets went on sale for Dead Heads for Obama, a benefit concert on Monday the 4th at The Warfield in San Francisco, designed to raise funds and get out the vote for Obama in the Super Tuesday primaries being held across the country on the 5th. Not surprisingly, the show sold out in a few minutes, but Dead Heads who couldn't get to the Warfield could avail themselves of a streaming video feed on iclips.net, or pick up the audio on Sirius Satellite Radio's Grateful Dead Channel.

Photo: Susana Millman

Just before the band took the stage, Senator Obama himself appeared in virtual form, in a video message recorded especially for the occasion.

The Senator's stirring words were immediately followed by music that was no less inspired and uplifting. From the first notes, it was clear that Mickey, Bobby and Phil hadn't lost a bit of their ability to read each other's minds and create a musical language unlike any other (as Mickey noted at the pre-concert press conference, "it's in our DNA"). They were aided by a great supporting cast, including Jackie Greene, Steve Molitz and the mighty, mighty John Molo from Phil's latest touring group of Friends, and the most welcome presence of unannounced guests Mark Karan and Barry Sless on guitar and pedal steel, respectively (alternating on some songs, appearing together on others to create a gorgeously orchestrated ensemble sound.

Photo: Susana Millman

We'll have more news and photos from this unforgettable evening soon. For the moment we'll just let you know what they played, and remind you to get out there and VOTE!

DEAD HEADS FOR OBAMA
The Warfield
San Francisco, CA
February 4, 2008

I.
Playing in the Band*>Brown-Eyed Women†, Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo†>New Minglewood Blues*, Come Together*

II. (Acoustic)
Deep Elem Blues, Friend of the Devil, Deal, Ripple

III.
China Cat Sunflower*†>The Wheel*†>The Other One*>Sugaree* Eyes of the World*†>Throwin' Stones*>Iko Iko>*†>Playing reprise*†

E. U.S. Blues*†%

Bob Weir, guitar and vocals; Phil Lesh, bass and vocals; Mickey Hart, drums and vocals; John Molo, drums; Jackie Greene, guitar, keyboards and vocals; Steve Molitz, keyboards and vocals.

* with Mark Karan, guitar; †with Barry Sless, pedal steel guitar; %with Hippie Bill, flag

Some Reflections on the Warfield Show…

By Blair Jackson

Many fingers in the air looking for tickets as we arrive at the already forming line outside the Warfield around 4:30, an hour and a half before the doors open. One person offers $300 for a single ticket… Cold winds are whipping down Market Street; many people are under-dressed for the chill… A couple of small, noisy pro-Obama marches go past the line a couple of times… With door opening at 6 and literally every person having to go through will-call, the odds do not look good for everyone getting through the ever-lengthening line by the 7:30 showtime… About half an hour before doors they decide to split the line alphabetically, A-J and K-Z, causing much temporary confusion and frustration and re-jockeying for position. We luck out and move ahead about 20 feet when all the K-Z’s in front of us depart… We get in pretty quickly and score an excellent spot on the first level behind the pit with some friends. We are surprised to see large TV cameras in the center spot right off the pit; we’re thinking the webcast could be pretty cool and call my teenage daughter at home to tell her about it…The place fills up very slowly, which could only mean one thing: the line is moving slowwwwwwly, with nerves on the street no doubt fraying as the 7:30 start time approaches…. But 7:30 is just a number, it turns out, and it’s a whole ‘nother hour before the lights finally dim, a screen lurches down in front of the Warfield’s big red curtain, and there’s Barack himself, on his campaign plane, saying howdy and thanking Bobby, Phil and Mickey for putting the event together. Lots of whooping and hollering; it’s a cool moment, though we all laugh when he tells us to sit down and enjoy the concert—obviously never been to a Dead show!

The curtain rises and it’s a septet onstage, left to right: Steve Molitz, Bob, John Molo, Phil, Mark Karan, Jackie Greene and Mickey. They waste no time launching into “Playing in the Band,” with everyone hitting their marks nicely and a big jam ensuing, driven mostly by Mark Karan, who throughout the evening, is the guy who really pushes the envelope in song after song. So great to have him back, maybe better than ever. Phil is all smiles watching Karan get into it, and the rapport that Mark and Bob have had for years together in RatDog is instantly apparent… “Brown-Eyed Women,” with Jackie on lead vocals, Barry Sless joining the fray on sweet pedal steel, comes next. The sound is still coming together and even standing in front of Jackie’s area, I can’t hear his vocal too well. Karan, is a monster on this song, too…. “Half-Step” gets Phil up to the mic and this version really soars, especially the back half with the solos and the “across the Rio Grande-io” singalong…. After a bluesy Bob-sung “Minglewood” (with Jackie on organ, sounding good), the short first set closes with The Beatles’ “Come Together,” a RatDog staple for a while, but new to Phil and his band. Co-sung by Bob and Mark, it's chunky and snaky, with a nice little jam at the close… All in all, well-played, less tentative than I’d expected. The vibes onstage and in the crowd are good!

Phil comes out in front of the curtain a few minutes later to talk about how he’s fired up about Obama, and that he represents our chance to really change the direction this country if headed, a sentiment echoed by Bob and Mickey, who also come out briefly to talk about the importance of voting…. I call my daughter and she informs me she couldn’t get the webcast, a complaint, alas, echoed by many… A while later, the curtain rises again and the stage is set up for an acoustic set, with Phil and his stand-up bass looming in the center. Bob leads the band down to the mean streets of “Deep Elem,” then spearheads a spry version of “Friend of the Devil.” Jackie sings a rockin’ acoustic version of “Deal” and then the mini-set concludes with a lovely, poignant “Ripple,” with the Warfield Chorus of 2,000 helping out at the end, of course.

Set Three turns out to be the Big One, where it all falls together in that magical way we’ve seen so many times before--sound is perfect, everything is clicking… “China Cat” is sparkling and in the jam following the tune, Bob and Mark and Phil really get the thunder going… You can hear “The Wheel” pulling itself together for a long spell before it actually arrives, and this version is great, one of the real highlights of the show, with five guys in the band harmonizing, the playing powerful and precise, the peaks as big as you’d want ’em… That eventually rolls into an extended, heavily jammed-out “Other One,” which finds the guitar army onstage slashing and crashing and building and receding, only to build again, many times. At the close of the second verse, it sounds like they might go into the “Cryptical” reprise, but instead it drops into “Sugaree,” with Jackie on lead, about which I can only say, WOW! This has become one of Mr. Greene’s best tunes in P&F (and he’s been playing it with his own band, as well) and he freakin’ nails it at the Warfield. He and Mark and Steve are all magnificent soloing between the verses—in fact, after one of the last solos, the crowd erupted into a sustained ovation for half a minute or so before the last verse!... I love Barry on the steel for the loping “Eyes of the World.” In fact, I loved Barry on every song he played on; a great addition to the line-up… It seems somehow appropriate that Bob chooses to play “Throwing Stones” at what is ostensibly a political event (“Well, the kids they dance, they shake their bones/While the politicians throwing stones”), although he always said the song was anti-political--so is it ironic, then? Who knows… I totally assume that “Not Fade Away” will follow, but am pleasantly surprised to instead be treated to “Iko-Iko” (the night before the real Mardi Gras.) Mickey barks it with spirit and gusto and the crowd is in deep party mode by that point, clapping and singing along, of course… And then, to close the third set, the music meanders back to where it had started, as the “Playing reprise” emerges from some fascinating, dissonant extrapolations on the “Playing” riff before resolving joyously--as it must!... Encore is “U.S. Blues,” sung by Bob, punctuated by a grey-bearded guy named Hippie Bill running across the back of the stage waving a giant American flag on the first two choruses, and then, to wild cheers, a version of the flag with a peace sign where the stars would be; I think, “Yeah, that’s my flag!”

We rocked. And I voted...

Photos by Bob Minkin

Dead Heads For Obama

Analise Dubner — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 17:47:13 -0600

DEAD HEADS FOR OBAMA AT THE WARFIELD JUST ANNOUNCED!

DEAD HEADS FOR OBAMA
featuring
BOB WEIR, MICKEY HART, PHIL LESH & FRIENDS
The Warfield Theatre
San Francisco, CA
Monday, February 4, Doors 6:00 PM/ Show 7:30PM
Tickets are $35.00 general admission (main floor) and $35.00 (balcony) plus applicable service charges...all ages
Two-ticket limit per person.
Tickets will be available through Ticketmaster.com ONLY.
Will Call only event.
::Map The Theater

Deadheads for Obama

Grateful Dead Members to Reunite for Barack Obama

(San Francisco) Members of the Grateful Dead will host a get out the vote concert in support of Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama on Monday, February 4th at The Warfield Theatre in San Francisco.

Mickey Hart, Phil Lesh, and Bob Weir, joined by Jackie Greene, John Molo, and Steve Molitz, will play show together in support of Barack Obama.

The video website Iclips will be producing a live simulcast streamed via the Internet on www.iclips.net at approximately 7:30pm PST.

This will mark the first time that the members of the legendary band have performed together since 2004. They have agreed to reunite for this one-time-only event in order to lend support to Senator Obama leading into the crucial “Super- Tuesday” series of primaries held on Tuesday, February 5th.

PLEASE NOTE: Tickets will be available through Ticketmaster.com ONLY. Tickets will NOT be available at the box offices, charge-by-phone or Ticketmaster outlets. Two-ticket limit per person. Tickets are non-transferable. No refunds or exchanges. A service charge is added to each ticket price. In the spirit of fair access to tickets for fans, this is a "WILL CALL ONLY" event. UPS and Ticketfast will not be available as delivery choices. You must bring your government issued photo ID and your credit card used to purchase the tickets to the box office window on the day of the show to retrieve these tickets. You and your guest must enter the venue directly upon picking up your order. **Will Call tickets are not transferable and must be picked up by card holder. Alternate names for will call are not allowed. No will call drop-offs permitted.** *** TICKETMASTER, AT ITS DISCRETION, WILL CANCEL ANY AND ALL ORDERS THAT EXCEED THE TICKET LIMIT WITHOUT NOTICE. THIS INCLUDES DUPLICATE ORDERS HAVING THE SAME NAME, BILLING ADDRESS OR CREDIT CARD. ***

Sirius Satellite Radio Launches "Tales From The Golden Road" on January 20th

almanac — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:37:47 -0600

So far, the recently-launched Grateful Dead Channel on Sirius Satellite Radio has been pretty much about wall-to-wall music by the Dead and its musical descendents, 24 commercial-free hours a day. And that suits us all just fine. But we also know that when Dead Heads aren't listening to the music, they love talking about it, and other subjects near and dear to our community.

Bearing that in mind, the Grateful Dead Channel proudly announces Tales From The Golden Road, a live monthly forum with an emphasis on conversation and audience participation. Grateful Dead members and other guests will join hosts David Gans and Gary Lambert in the studio to discuss a different topic each month, with listeners invited to call in with questions and comments.

The first program, to be broadcast on Sunday, January 20th at 4 pm (ET), will focus on the Trips Festival, the trailblazing 1966 event that helped put the San Francisco music scene on the national map, and was a crucial moment in the development of the Grateful Dead as a performing band and cultural phenomenon.

Joining the discussion will be filmmaker Eric Christensen, who attended the Trips Festival and has just released a fascinating documentary on the event; Grateful Dead biographer/publicist Dennis McNally, who will provide insight into the historical context; and Bob Weir, who saw it all from the inside and lived to tell the tale. Also featured will be audio segments evoking the event, and some Grateful Dead music from the band's formative days.

The Grateful Dead Channel can be found at Channel 32 on Sirius Satellite Radio. If you're not yet a Sirius subscriber, you might want to check out the free three-day trial the service is offering, which will not only allow you to sample all that glorious Dead music, but any of Sirius' other 100-plus channels of music, talk and information for every taste.

For more information, visit www.sirius.com/gratefuldead

Holiday Listening Party!

Analise Dubner — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 15:35:22 -0600

Starting today, Friday, December 7th, at 12:30 PCT and running all the way 'till Monday, December 10th, at 12:30 PCT; we'll be proudly streaming, at your convenience, the entire second disc from our first Road Trips release "Fall '79."

Please enjoy the whole side or just browse the tracks and, in any event, Have a Great Holiday Season and a Healthy New Year.

Higher Education: Grateful Dead Scholars Convene

almanac — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 20:06:29 -0500

One of the more fascinating things about the history of the Grateful Dead and the Dead Head community is the number of subcultures-within-the-subculture that the scene spawned and supported. You had your tapers and your spinners, hardcore tourheads and weekend hippies, parking-lot miracle-seekers, kind-veggie-burrito vendors and a dizzying variety of others. One particularly intriguing faction among all these, and one that has grown significantly in numbers over the decades, is the Dead Head Scholar - professional academics and curious amateurs alike, engaged in serious, intensive research relating to various aspects of the Dead's musical, historical, sociological and cosmological significance. An impressive body of work has emerged from these studies, suggesting that the Dead's legacy will prove to have been, as the song goes, built to last.

This scholarly bent will find its fullest expression thus far on the weekend of November 16-18, when the University of Massachusetts at Amherst plays host to a symposium titled "Unbroken Chain: The Grateful Dead In Music, Culture and Memory." As the university's announcement of the event states: "Scholars, artists, performers, students and members of the extended Grateful Dead family will gather for the event featuring more than 50 presenters for 20 panel sessions ranging from music composition and improvisation to an examination of the band's business model - as well as musical performances, gallery exhibits, and presentations."

The incursion of Dead-friendly subversives into the halls of academe is not an entirely new phenomenon: for example, it's been nearly two decades since sociology professor Rebecca Adams began her groundbreaking studies into the Dead Head culture at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro; and Fredric Lieberman, professor of music at the University of California at Santa Cruz (and co-author of two books with Mickey Hart), has taught classes on the band's music. There have also been previous symposia on the Dead, most notably at the annual meetings of the Southwest/Texas Popular Culture Association. But the upcoming gathering at UMass will be by far the largest, most ambitious such event to date, and the first held under the auspices of a major university.

We had the opportunity to talk to a featured participant in the upcoming conference and a leading light in the world of Grateful Dead scholarship, Nicholas Meriwether. His work in the field has led him to compile three volumes so far in a series called Dead Letters, collections of writings from varied perspectives on the Dead experience, and the recently published All Graceful Instruments: The Contexts of the Grateful Dead Phenomenon. Nick's academic credentials are unimpeachable: educated at Princeton and Cambridge, he is the Oral Historian of the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina. His Dead Head cred is also rock-solid. He tells us that attended his first Dead show either in late 1985 or early ‘86 [NOTE: In the Grateful Dead world, confusion over exactly when and/or where something happened is generally taken as a sign that the experience had the desired effect]. The attraction was instantaneous, according to Nick: "I ‘got it' with a vengeance ... it soon struck me that I was witnessing one of the most profound defining cultural moments of the 20th Century... it was like having a front-row seat at the Eleusinian mysteries... there was a mythopoetic tint to everything you saw." Before long, Meriwether, who had been looking to shift his focus from the specialized field of Southern history to his ever-growing interest in the Beat movement and other aspects of American bohemianism, began thinking of ways to incorporate his passion for the Grateful Dead into his studies. It was not an easy sell in the academic world, he recalls: "There was a stigma and taint attached to it" - not just to the Grateful Dead, but antipathy to the idea that anything associated with popular culture was worthy of serious examination. But with time and perseverance, the resistance began to lessen, and Nick began to find kindred spirits among his peers - including another scholar-turned-Dead Head, Dennis McNally. "In comparing notes with Dennis, we found that we had almost identical reactions to our early encounters with the Dead: ‘look at this intellectual depth!'" Today, Meriwether happily notes, "people are not so immediately dismissive" to the notion of the Grateful Dead as a suitable subject for study - a fact made evident by the willingness of an institution such as the University of Massachusetts to sponsor an event such as the approaching symposium (perhaps it is just as Jerry Garcia said when he jokingly compared the Dead to "old whores and bad architecture," suggesting that you eventually earn respect simply by sticking around long enough).

For Dennis McNally (who will serve as the symposium's keynote speaker), it is especially satisfying that the event is being held at Amherst. It was at UMass that Dennis stepped onto the path that resulted in his becoming the Grateful Dead's official historian/biographer, writing a doctoral thesis on Jack Kerouac that was later turned into an acclaimed Kerouac bio (a connection we discussed here at dead.net a little while ago). In fact, it was an offhand remark made by Dennis to a UMass dean - that an entire college curriculum could easily be built around the Grateful Dead - that set the wheels for the conference in motion.

Joining McNally and Meriwether will be some fifty luminaries to discuss the Dead from their own special perspectives. Among the most notable will be: longtime Dead audio wizard Dan Healy, one of the principal architects of the legendary Wall of Sound, who brings with him an astonishing wealth of technical expertise and a great batch of personal anecdotes; Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Garcia, a cherished member of the family from its beginnings; Bob Bralove, musician and MIDI expert, who helped the band extend its sonic palette immeasurably in the 80s and 90s; David Dodd, author of The Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics; Rex Foundation executive director Sandy Sochot; Lee Johnson, creator of a recent symphonic work based on Grateful Dead themes; the aforementioned professors Fred Lieberman and Rebecca Adams; and many others. A detailed schedule of events is available here.

In addition to the scheduled lectures and panel discussions, there will also be exhibits of iconic Grateful Dead imagery in the form of photographs, posters and other artwork. And to make sure that any notions of all work and no play are banished, the weekend will feature musical performances by the American Beauty Project and Dark Star Orchestra.

Public registration for the event will be limited to 350 people, so prompt action is highly recommended. For full information, visit the official website.

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Higher Education: Grateful Dead Scholars Convene