Dead & Company - American Airlines Center, Dallas, TX 12/01/17 (Live) Digital
For such a large and populous state, Texas was never one of the more frequent destinations on the Grateful Dead’s tour itinerary. The band only played 28 shows there during its 30 years of touring, with most of those appearances happening in the 1970s and none later than 1988. To compound the deprivation, as of 2017 various bands featuring Dead alumni had only made it to the state a handful of times in the ensuing two-plus decades. So, it’s not surprising that the roar you hear from the crowd as Dead & Company hits the stage for its Texas debut is as unrestrained and loud as it is. It’s the sound of Lone Star Dead Heads who have been waiting for something for a very long time. And the music that follows that rapturous reception is the sound of patience and anticipation richly rewarded. After setting the table with such popular items from the Dead songbook book as “Shakedown Street” and “Brown-Eyed Women,” the band pays homage to their host city with “Deep Elem Blues,” a song dating back to the 1930s about a neighborhood that looms large in the history of Dallas’ African American community, with Bob Weir, John Mayer and Oteil Burbridge taking turns on lead vocal. A couple of songs later there’s a nod to another part of Texas with Marty Robbins’ classic cowboy ballad “El Paso,” followed by a run of Grateful Dead originals to close out the first set: the sweet Garcia-Hunter tune “They Love Each Other,” with spirited ensemble playing appended to the coda, and then a funky mashup of “The Music Never Stopped” and “Easy Answers.” The second set is a feast of Dead favorites, starting with a “Here Comes Sunshine” that opens up to some high-energy jamming, and segues beautifully into “Scarlet Begonias” and “Fire On The Mountain,” which in turn seamlessly morphs into a hard-swinging “Eyes Of The World” that features spectacular guitar and keyboard trade-offs by John Mayer and Jeff Chimenti. Ethereal Drums and Space sequences carry us gently into the Beatles’ “Dear Prudence” then Garcia and Hunter’s “The Wheel” (with a reggae-flavored tag) and, to close the set, a wild “Casey Jones.” In an appropriate return to the Old West, the band encores with Bob Dylan’s gunfighter’s lament, “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door.”