The Dead
Jones Beach Amphitheater,
Wantagh, NY
August 13 & 14, 2004
We got back Sunday from a weekend trip to Jones Beach to see the latest incarnation of "The Dead". All in all a great time was had by all and it was very much "worth the trip". While overcast all weekend, the rain didn't start in earnest until the second set of the second show.
First off, some words of praise for the venue. This is the second trip I've made to Jones Beach (Long Island) to see The Dead, and this is now one of my favorite "big" venues in the Northeast. There are a few small minuses -- the venue has no roof, so you might get wet, and there are no beer sales -- but they're far outweighed by the plusses (which include no obnoxious drunks and great sound because there's no roof).
The most amazing thing, though, was the lack of traffic. In three trips to this venue, I think the longest wait I had to get INTO the parking lot was a five-minute backup on Friday night (when we showed up right before show time). Leaving was just as fast, and even Saturday night when it was pouring and everyone was leaving at once, it didn't take any more than 10 or 15 minutes to exit the lot (Compare this to Great Woods, where you can easily spend more time getting out of the parking lot than most bands spend onstage).
Things might be different (at least when arriving) on a hot summer day when the beach is packed, but for overcast August weekends, Jones Beach gets my vote as the easiest (big) venue I've seen to get in and out of.
Plus, well, it's just NEW YORK. As Phil Lesh memorably said at the end of the first concert, "We just can't get up here and play the same old stuff for you guys". Even sober, a New York crowd is a high-energy crowd, and any performer is going to get off on that. For the Dead, a loud, boisterous crowd can be pure gold, as evidenced by the large number of official live recordings they've chosen to release from the New York area.
This weekend, as Neil has mentioned, they were clearly the best post-Jerry Dead-related band we've seen. I (and others, I'm sure) were skeptical that they were once again messing with the lineup, losing keyboardist Rob Barraco and vocalist Joan Osbourne at the beginning of the year, and adding singer/guitarist Warren Haynes to the band. Although Warren is a great musician, I was more concerned that the frequently-shifting lineup might not gel easily.
I shouldn't have been worried. Barraco was always merely competent, as a keyboardist and a vocalist, with none of the rhythmic or harmonic sophistication that Jeff Chimenti brings to the band. And Warren Haynes is a (no pun intended) huge addition to the band, in terms of his playing and his vocals.
It probably helped that the Jones Beach shows came at the end of almost two months of touring (with a short break in the middle). This is also the third year in a row that the four original Dead members have toured... the most touring they've done since Jerry died. They're definitely comfortable with who they are now (and who they aren't) and are getting better with every tour at playing to their strengths (although that's still not foolproof -- they wouldn't be "The Dead" if it was! -- and Bob Weir's singing voice seems to be deteriorating at an alarming rate).
While the GD were notorious for almost never rehearsing, this band has taken obvious and infectious delight at digging out some of their most obscure and complex numbers. The baroque creations of the late 60s ("St. Stephen", "The Eleven", "Born Cross-Eyed", etc) and the pseudo-fusion of the mid-70s ("Slipknot", "Unbroken Chain", etc.) were often beyond the reach of the latter-day Grateful Dead. Jerry copped to this in a late-80s interview in "The Golden Road" fanzine where he basically said it was too much trouble to re-learn a complex song like "St. Stephen" because you had to get the arrangement exactly right every time or it would fall apart.
Watching the new band, it's sadly obvious where the weak link was in that regard. In terms of tightness and technical virtuosity, this band is so much better than the old Grateful Dead that at times it's literally awe-inspiring. Not just because of the high-quality sidemen they've brought into the group, but because of how much better the GD guys play when they don't have to worry about the bandleader dropping beats or missing the changes. They're fearless when it comes to re-visiting 'difficult' songs from their back catalog, and the results often reveal musical gold that was sometimes obscured by sloppy performances in past.
But the Grateful Dead were never about technical virtuosity or note-perfect renditions. The GD were about MAGIC, and the other thing that's obvious about ALL of the post-GD groups (starting with 1998's Other Ones) is the almost inevitable lack of that magic. The Grateful Dead always gave a lot of lip-service to the idea that they were a "collective" with no real leader (yeah, so was the Soviet Union!), and some of us even bought it, for a while. After all, the difference in sound between the Grateful Dead and Jerry's "bar band" was immense, and there's no question that every member of the GD contributed far more than mere "accompaniment" on any given night.
But they HAD a leader, make no mistake, and almost every aspect of their music was based around responding (one way or another) to his ideas (early on, of course, they had two leaders, Jerry and Pigpen, but Jerry was always the primary instrumentalist). Jerry was almost always the one with the final decision where the music was going to go at any given moment, and the band basically lived or died by his level of inspiration on any given night.
Since Jerry died, they've never managed to find someone who could really fill his shoes in terms of shaping the band's sound. The first couple of Other Ones tours featured two guitarists and a sax player in the "solo" slot and suffered from the inevitable "whose turn is it now?" disease that resulted. In 2002 they returned with only two guitars, Bob Weir and Jimmy Herring. It was an exciting time to see the band -- certainly more exciting than I really expected any "Other Ones" show to be at that point -- and the band was playing better together than they had in a long time.
But over the next year or so, Herring never succeeded in stepping into Jerry's shoes. Nobody expected him to become a note-for-note Jerry clone, but there was always something missing. He rarely seemed to move beyond being a sideman. He's a technical wizard (of the John McLaughlin/Steve Morse school), and his solos were never less than tasteful and well-constructed, but he just never seemed like he was about to cut loose and lead the band on a bat-out-of-hell musical voyage across the cosmos. And really, what do you want to see at a Dead show? Taste and succinctness, or musical voyages cross the cosmos? Thought so.
So this year, along comes Warren Haynes. In Phil's band, Warren was usually the one who DID lead the band on long melodic flights of fancy. Stylistically, he's a perfect match for The Dead, with a killer melodic sense, strong vocals and a huge, varied repertoire (he even sang a Metallica song with The Dead the first night).
Vocally, Warren is a killer, and they have wisely let/asked him to sing a lot, sometimes including songs that the others had "covered" in the past (e.g. Terrapin). He's expressive enough that he can take someone else's signature tune (e.g. "Into the Mystic", sung with The Dead or "Alison", sung solo the second night) and render it in his own voice. His presence frees Phil from any heavy vocal duties, but, curiously, the band chose to do mostly Weir (and Mickey) vocals on Saturday, after a very Warren-heavy show the night before. As I mentioned earlier, Weir's voice sounded pretty bad, and while his new speak/sing style can work to good effect (in terms of differentiating his performances from Jerry's), it can really reveal his limitations as well.
So now the Dead have this strong vocalist, who's also a killer guitarist, and the inevitable question is, "Do they need three guitarists"? Three guitars is usually too much for ANY band, unless they're the Gipsy Kings, and Jimmy seemed the odd man out during much of Friday's first set. But Friday's second set played heavily to his strong points. He covered all the fast "fiddly bits" in "Slipknot" and "Unbroken Chain", and he continues to excel at soloing in that fusion-y style the Dead were playing with at that point in the 70s.
In fact, my opinion of Jimmy Herring's playing has continued to improve almost every time I've seen him. Each night at Jones Beach, he did a "space" segment, accompanied only by Mickey Hart on Beam, that was almost Frippian in its dissonant beauty. His soloing dominated the second night's show, and there was much less of the pointless "woodly-woodly" playing that he sometimes fell back on during previous Dead/Other Ones tours.
But in the end, although each guitarist played exceptionally well throughout the weekend, I still came away thinking that three guitars is too much (unless you're the League of Crafty Guitarists). There were times when Warren took the lead and times when Jimmy took the lead, but at each point, the other one WAS largely superfluous due to the presence of Weir (plus, the band still suffers from occasional touches of "whose turn is it now?"). In Phil's band, Jimmy and Warren always provide great rhythm support for each other, but in The Dead, there's always one guitarist too many.
If I had to pick, I'd say that Warren is more suited to The Dead. Whether he wants to be a full-time member is an entirely different question -- it would probably be pretty creepy after starting his career in the "majors" filling in for Duane Allman -- but even aside from his vocals, Warren's musical personality is much more suited to The Dead. Jimmy seems to be a soloist from the Armstrong/Parker tradition: say what you've got to say and shut up. Warren is much more interested in spinning extended melodic flights, a la Rollins or Coltrane, but more importantly, Warren is a LEADER. As technically proficient and stunning a player as Jimmy is, he still plays like an accompanist when he's in The Dead. He doesn't seem able to "take the bull by the horns" and drag the band around according to his whim.
With Warren Haynes, the post-Jerry band has, for the first time, a leader who's willing and able to step into that position (Bruce Hornsby was certainly able, and probably willing, during the original Other Ones tours, but I don't think he really got the leeway he needed to mold the band in his image). That's a position that I just don't every see Jimmy Herring stepping into, after seeing him play with The Dead for three years in a row now.
Even if Warren doesn't want to continue with the band after this year, I can only hope that they learn from the experience and find SOMEONE with a strong enough musical personality (and fearlessness) to TAKE CHARGE. Because all the tasteful, brilliant, technically flawless accompaniment in the world isn't going to make up for the fact that, until now, The Dead have been Four Sidemen In Search of a Leader. Unfortunately, the fact that Warren was the sideman for most of Saturday's show makes me wonder whether the four GD guys have realized this.
As for Jimmy Herring, as well as he played, and as much as my opinion of him has improved, he still seems like a (sorry) fish out of water when playing with the Dead. This guy should be back playing with Billy Cobham and Alphonso Johnson -- playing FUSION, not Dead covers.
Overall, though, there's no question that this was a great weekend of music. The band was jamming hard the first night, with each song following the previous one like a runaway train. The setlist itself can't capture the feeling, as each song featured top-quality jamming within it, which made each new song transition that much more of a pleasant surprise as they piled classic jamming tune upon classic jamming tune ("What do they have left for tomorrow?" was a commonly-heard question after the first show). Things were definitely chaotic and often out-of-control but this show was the closest to real, on-the-edge "we can do no wrong" playing I've heard from the Dead in a long time (fittingly, it also featured its share of "classic" Dead flubs -- "we can do no wrong" is always a fleeting illusion, after all! -- including a total train wreck at the end of "Shakedown Street" and an impressive double-reverse train wreck with a half gainer that led back into "Slipknot/Franklin's Tower" at the end of the set). As incongruous as it might seem, Warren's Metallica cover ("Nothing Else Matters") fit in perfectly well between "Shakedown" and "Cryptical".
Saturday night was much more of a controlled, rocking show (especially the first set, which was very up-tempo) featuring big hits ("Truckin'", "Iko Iko") and obscure rockers ("Golden Road", "Mason's Children"). The second set got off to a ripping start with a massive "Terrapin" before a rocking "Dancing in the Streets" (which was, unfortunately, marred by truly horrible vocals from Weir; they should transpose this song to a different key for him). The title of "Only The Strange Remain" used to be a self-fulfilling prophecy for the Other Ones as many treated it as an excuse for a bathroom break, but the version from Saturday night was so heavy it verged on "Victim or the Crime" territory.
It was raining pretty steadily by the end of drums/space, though, and unfortunately, Bobby chose to bring the energy level down with a Jerry ballad ("Standing on the Moon"). His slightly-faster arrangement was well-done, but the song really took a lot of the energy out of the set. "China Cat - Rider" followed, but while the previous night's jams had been chaotic and inspired, this one just seemed chaotic (or maybe I was just too tired by then). Lovelight ended the show on an uptempo note with ripping solos from everyone, before a Saturday Night / Ripple encore that was, unfortunately, compromised once again by Weir's vocals. Here's hoping he gets some rest before the Ratdog tour.
There's a couple more shows left in this tour, and then who knows what they'll be up to in the fall and winter. If you don't like the New Dead, you know it, and this version of the band probably won't change your mind. If you've been on the fence, though, you should really check them out this time around. And who knows what next year will have in store?