A crusader rabbit bunnyhops onto my hard drive, and the .shns clinch it. A month or so later here I am in Polaris Ampitheater, Columbus, OH. One of the "big sheds" disparaged by the coastal cognoscenti but, to this first-timer, an ideal setting - a pavilion/lawn setup with great sightlines and accessibility, and big screens both over the stage, and further back.I'm with my friend Linda, who has gamely driven all the way from Kent (Ohio) in a heatwave to share this dip into a native subculture she has managed to overlook/avoid so far. I'm in awe of Linda's musical taste -- she's credited on the sleeve of The Gun Club's second LP, for heaven's sake, which is good enough for me. I am not worthy. But she likes brevity, wit, the adrenalin rush, the few necessary chords. Jeffrey Lee and Co could certainly accept chaos, live, but...five hours of post-GD jammin' might well be stretching things. We'll see.
Initial omens are not good - seven bucks to park in a field. But there's a Shakedown St going on and a relaxed attitude to beer, vending and and tailgating which makes a mellow scene to
wander around for half an hour or so, buying shirts and decals, munching on tourgrade
(read yummy) pizza. There's a laid back box office scene too - plenty left on sale, and when I pick up the ones Ruby has obligingly arranged at short notice, I have to remind them to accept payment. "Oh, ok."Drug of choice- I'd like to say Owsley's orange juice, but in fact it's Mike's Hard Lemonade, a US alcopop of endearingly jumbo proportions. Just right for the heat, though. I'm wearing my Phil Lesh 60th Birthday show shirt, which incites compliments. "Nice shirt!" says someone. "Funny, though, you don't look sixty."
This is catching-up time for me. Usually when seeing US shows, I've been keeping up with tapes, and can slip easily into the musical context. I was lucky enough to catch Phil's hugely atmospheric, musically uneven birthday, but though the setlists arrive on cue I haven't really listened in depth to the various permutations of Friends, and Ratdog less so apart from an enthusiasm for the new CD.
The other thing is that despite everything I've read and know about attendance at these post-GD affairs, it still comes as something of a shock to have the intensity, so thrilling at my first US Dead shows, so diluted. Maybe not true for the small venues, but these are big summer spaces for solo members to fill, during a year when concert attendance is down across the board. The sold out arena, the scalpers and buzz and predictions, the jostling for space, the huge roar as the lights suddenly go down... not today, and not just because it's mid-afternoon.
Once inside we can sit pretty much anywhere we like. Capacity can be 20,000 but the place is never anything like full, and to start with it's as if hardly anyone is there. Around 4.30 we gradually wander back like everyone else from the concessions area to find Bobby already on schedule, in those timeless shorts and leafy shortsleeve. It's just him and Rob and Mark, strumming into KC Moan. I wonder what he feels like, opening for Phil on a workday afternoon to rows and rows of empty seats and maybe a 10 per cent audience. And to his credit he never once lets on, trouper that he is, in strong voice from the start.
Without a break, into a spare, rhythmic reading of The Winners, familar from the Bob/Rob CD, but always an inescapably weird concept, the Poet of Empire goes to the Haight. But Mr Kipling does bake an exceedingly good tune, hardly Deadlike in sentiment of course, yet "heretical" by its own admission. One may fall but he falls by himself-/Falls by himself with himself to blame... (then again, if you fall, then who's to guide you? Hmm).
Wasserman wobbles precariously on his stool, a lot bigger-seeming than when I last saw him - over a decade ago, ouch! - with Lou at the Palladium. Kenny, the new sax guy, is a study in contrast, diminutive and teenage-looking. He's all over the music, more so than Karan's guitar. The breaks feel just right on Maggie's Farm, with an initial slow funky feel, and Bob switching to electric and a wild acceleration towards the end. Nothing like the Dead's roundelay versions (see the new Vaults II RFK 91 video for a nice one of those) but a really promising reading of a standard too often just dashed off. Weir makes it his own, never easy with Dylan, even for him, and I'm struck by how his vocals have deepened and acquired new authority in recent years.
And how much space there is in Ratdog's music! There's Weir's trademark clipped guitar, the soloists, but no big chordal fills, and even the climax of Easy Answers is a matter of stabbing, funky additions as, 4 songs in, we're already into some serious jamming, not to mention a tentative lunge or two. But Lucky Enough, a radio-friendly one from the new album, here falls between two stools: not smooth enough to replicate the original, yet with little potential for takeoff despite Jeff C's nice piano intro and break. We start hearing the downside of the sax, too - as with The Other Ones, the solos can be exciting, but too often it just lurks intrusively but unambitiously in the background. The remade Hell in a Bucket is better: instead of the familiar wall-of-sound attack, it sneaks up on us unexpectedly from a piano-guitar intro, and gets the warmest welcome so far.
Tennessee is a mess, with words and music both hopelessly adrift. So as if on cue we get a Lost Sailor, Rob's bowed bass and Kenny's sax trills setting it up nicely, and this is where it really starts to take off for me, with a powerful St of Circumstance with piano rain
fallin' down and a climax that drifts down into...a Wheel! None of the mandala-like stateliness with which the Dead's versions asserted themselves out of chaos... but then Jerry's studio version was pretty speedy, and the coup of the set for me is its a capella ending, first voices/sax, then just voices: won't you try just a little bit harder, won't you try just a little bit more?The Rabbit did something similar with Cassidy at Sweetwater ("let the words
be yours...") but this is a nice surprise. Linda's not impressed - they're ragged Dead-style harmonies, of the kind maybe only Deadheads can love. It's the first time she's heard the song, so the variant is meaningless. I'm trying to imagine what it must be like not knowing *any* of the material apart from the odd standard. Especially, this laid-back afternoon,
denied the thrill of the packed arena and the full-on tribal consensus.(And meanwhile here am I, of course, with perhaps the opposite problem, making demanding comparisons with a band who last played six years ago, instead of trying to listen anew to the ins and outs of Ratdog itself. Maybe I'm an anachronism, here among the Ratheads. The Phil and Ratdog shirts around us, together, outnumber the Dead shirts. Am I, and others hung up on former glories, holding them back? They don't make it easy though, with very little of Bob's solo output on show tonight.)
Then comes an endless Cryptical tease, just keeps revolving. When will it take off, and will there be a Rob Moment to rival that Phil Moment to launch it? Not really, but Bobby spaces out the vocals, doubling the music intervals between each line, stretching it out with some
eerie jamming in between, and continuing the rhythm into the expected drum/bass solo.
A measured, dramatic and STRANGE Other One.What I hadn't expected to follow was such a direct foray by Weir into the heart of Jerrydom. So Many Roads is sung well enough, but to me it's wedded to that grizzled Garcia timbre. Still, with that KC Whistle making its second appearance of the evening it rounds things off nicely.
Straight into Sugar/Sunshine with its power chords restructured and Bobby in Full Lunge mode: then, out of it, an untogether Touch of Grey which is never more than a (wonky) elevator version of a greatest hit.
A shame since overall, I'm impressed. A bit of a bumper-value package, Dead Lite and the rest of it, but at its best offset by quirky, against-the-grain soloing and interesting dissonances from musicians given enough rope, and Bobby's vocals newly appreciated. No warm-up set, but a band continuing to stake a claim (and an opening slot longer than some of the subsequent headline shows in the Fall, by the looks of them).
Lesh on at 7.10, looking rather thinner and wispier than before, longer haired and intense, not much sign of the old "geeky" Phil. A fast freeform jam, hinting almost immediately at The Other One - surely not two in one show!- and Scarlet, before Warren's slide calms it down. A lasting revelation for me tonight is all the creative ways a slide can be used - it's the dominant sound of the evening. And it launches into something vaguely Deal/Misissippi-ish which is actually Rock and Roll Blues. It's new to me and largely passes me by, Phil's vocals impossible to discern, but it's spot-on as an opener: I come to whistle and strum my guitar, sing for my supper...
After Ratdog, it's a full-blooded, busy sound. Surprisingly, a full stop after just the
one song, but then as expected enter Bobby from the wings. Rob runs off a few phrases from
Day Tripper, and then we're into (a close musical relative?) Bird Song. From where I am Warren seems higher in the mix than Jimmy, but they seem to be playing off each other constantly: Warren's slide fixation makes him easier to pick out than Jimmy's fluent, spidery runs. Weir takes it slowly, again letting extra music happen between the phrases, and the jam is incredibly dense, if a bit earthbound. Impossible to pick up on it all as it happens [Thanks, Dave and Sparki, for the CDs].The Cassidy that follows is rock-steady, chunky - forget the delicacy potential of both these songs - but they are powerhouse treatments, the end opening some spaces for Weir's staccato interventions. Then back into Bird Song and Phil's "all I know is something like a bird within HIM sang", Jer's poignant Janis tribute beamed back at its creator and one of several established rewrites tonight.
I'll show you- (stop- a wonderful long pause)//
.... snow & rain.
Nice. Exit Bobby.In Oakland in March last year Phil had two separate microphones, one just for instructing the band! Now he has just one and a footswitch, but he's still the maestro, speaking instructions to the others or using hand signals, visibly excited about the next direction. I didn't recognise the next one at first, in its percussive, Nevilles-ish, makeover. Samson? Another new song with complicated lyrics? Sleepy alligator in the noonday sun ...
Oh, OK. In any case its really just an excuse for a frantic jam which builds up faster until Mason's Children emerges, a real rocking thrill, up there with the definitive (ie. Henry Kaiser's) version. A powerful end to Set 1.
A brief break. I'm enjoying it more than the birthday show, which really belonged to the Little Feat contingent. The jamming tonight is complex with too much going on to take on board as it happens, and there's not enough space for individuals within it: there seems to be some
general remit about texture and complexity rather than individual star turns. We know, of course, that Phil writes the lists in advance, so no-one is following the moment in terms of song choice, and he's visibly emphatic in his signals to get the band on track. There's an enjoyable tension in that, though, the band weaving its way, and occasionally ushered unceremoniously, towards the next appointment with a tune.Linda's not so sure- it's all (of course and gloriously) sprawling and shapeless, and it could well be be boring without any reference points to hold onto. And the tie-dyed lady next to her breastfeeding her baby in mid-jam is also a bit disconcerting, though it's no doubt a synaesthetic trip for the kid in question...
The pavilion has sort-of filled up closest to the stage, but there's still a relaxed attitude to forays down the front, the aisle-clearing half hearted. Tuning up for set II prompts an NFA clap. How they try! Instead a long slinky jam for ten minutes or so suggests it will turn into something like Eyes but instead turns round and launches a rave-up version of Passenger, with
sweeping Hammond from Rob. A long delicate transition into Mountains of the Moon, and the magic really hits for me here... Candace has fewer lumens at her disposal than the Dead gave her (expensive things, lumens) but it's dark now and she uses them to throw marvellous, subtly geometric patterns behind and around the band. We're cocooned in a haunting and magical space, in contrast to the preceding energy, Rob and Jimmy and Warren weaving a musical filigree around...an intermittent centre: maybe it's too obvious, something we Just Don't Talk About.. but for
all the improvements this tour, too often Phil's singing still just doesn't cut it. Tonight on Mountains he's barely there, a background drone. You can fill in by singing along in your head, or out loud!, but the overall vocal strategy - a few lines from Phil followed/rescued quickly by harmonies from the band- is still a glaring compromise. He's a musician and bandleader of genius, he doesn't need a greater singing role than he had with the Dead themselves.Having said that, and having enjoyed Ratdog, I'd have to say Bobby's guest spot was actually all I needed of that combination- if anything, it dragged things down a bit, so simultaneously powerful and yet sprightly is the Phil outfit by itself.
Unearthly trills, a Wharf Rat tease- but not yet: instead an accumulating bounciness and Rob launching into Brown-Eyed Women. A favourite bit of first-set Americana, gone epical, and self-referential -- "it looks like the old man's gettin' on" gets huge cheers each time. Then a longish break and a gentle jam whose direction is pretty obvious from the start: another old man, a Wharf Rat, measured and Warren-wonderful with excellent harmonies and bluesy embellishments from Rob, and nice to hear from scratch.
A long concluding jam reforms as Scarlet, one of the more difficult songs to capture, live, and this one attempting some of the studio polyrhythms, and in a different key. A full jam stops dead for "wind in the willows"- there's lots of discipline here, they can stop on the head of a pin if they wish- and the transition is a delightful, spiralling thing, with the Mountain Jam teases not stale to me, and with Jimmy really coming into his own... but when will it slow for Fire? It isn't going to! Phriendly Fire is a doublespeed, raging thing, with Rob-dominated chorus and Warren taking the last verse. The little Scarlet-reprise coda comes in.... but they miss it and Phil signals to go round again so that they can get in time for the ascent into Midnite Hour: a down and dirty chord intro followed by Warren in belting mode-- with some central meandering around Eleanor Rigby and others before it picks up again for the conclusion.
I imagine Phil's made his concluding donor speech hundreds of times now but who could
resist its inclusive sentiment? "This music wants to be alive. You guys are part of the circle- this music wants to happen, and it can't happen without you."The concluding Brokedown Palace is, for me really splendid, the band in full voice and the unaccompanied last line giving it a Bid You Goodnight feel. A timeless Dead conclusion from the Rainbow 81 (or your nostalgia show of choice), but reached, musically and emotionally, by a convincing new route. God bless y'all and goodnight, for now.
Linda kind of likes Bobby, and it's not just the shorts. But Phil's lot leave her cold. "That was a very long song!" she concludes at the end of Set 1. When she says it again at the end of Set 2, I realise I'm solo for Canandaigua the following week...
Just below Rochester, it's a very pleasant, European-seeming lakeside resort. And just as in Europe, there is no crime in Canandaigua, so the police instead are employed to empty other people's drinks on the ground at random. One lad protests as what remains of his Bud (alcoholic variety) oozes frothily into the sunbaked soil of the lot. "Don't be an asshole," shouts the constable and pushes him over to join it. Every so often a big car labelled Sherriff cruises the central aisle of stalls to keep everyone moving. Pretty tame as cultural standoffs go, though there are also busts happening and somebody in handcuffs. But lots going on in the sunny afternoon, overall mood near-idyllic, with a little lake by the side of the venue, and people wandering off into the foliage.
Finger Lakes Performing Arts Centre is another pavilion/lawn combo but much smaller (8000 maybe), free parking and relaxed security once inside the venue. There's a little coming attractions brochure, with Phil taking his place in the rota along with Tony Bennett and an Evening of Doo-Wop Classics.
Canandaigua pics at
http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~billpannifer/phil.htmlIt's a double-bass evening! Les Claypool opens, crossing over into jam band territory from his career with Primus. He's here in military-surreal combat gear, Zappa/Kupferberg-eque, stalking the stage in shades, NASA fatigues and camoflage helmet. His Fearless Flying Frog Brigade includes Ratdog's Jay Lane on the CD - tonight he has drums, sax, a guitarist who thrashes away at a wooden toy guitar. Les plays bass in a slapped, propulsive manner, foregrounding it in a way quite unlike Phil, his own rather tuneless material alternating with takes on the classics - Smoke on the Water and Beatles No 9 teases, a fully-fledged Space Oddity and an impressive Shine on You Crazy Diamond. (Claypool has gone one better than Phish in the Floyd cover stakes and also released an entire CD of Animals.) Wacky fun all told, and ending with a turn on a standup single-string-thingy whose pitch he varies with a lever on the neck.The hourlong set is well received by those who've bothered to turn up.
Phil starts off with a rapid-fire, lightfooted jam, with Warren and Jimmy all over it- a raised arm from Lesh signals a tempo change then all dissolves to a near-halt- a vaguely Lost
Sailorish opening to an unfamiliar Warren song, from Govt Mule apparently. Tastes Like Wine is a slow ballad, bluesy and meditative and a wonderfully perverse way to start the show.
Even tour followers are asking What's This? At the same time it's great how cavalierly this band can disregard pacing and "format", as if these shows are a rebuke to people who complained of sameiness in the later Dead.But there is method in the slow start, because it all starts to speed up, and then soars... and then turns suddenly jaunty and Phil 1234's us into a song I never thought I'd hear live at all. Donkey's years since I played Mars Hotel, so Cucamonga is a wonderful blast from the past, that odd, heavy r&b break in the middle finally making sense 28 years later as a gift to these guys and milked for all its worth as it speeds up back into the tune. Warren's slide sounds like a violin on this one. Roars of delight all round, especially when Phil take off his specs, towels his face and blows us all a kiss!
Stage huddle, consultations, a mischievous grin. Stray balloons and bubbles. Despite the heat, Phil is much more animated tonight.... as are some persistent stage-dashers down front who at one stage sneak under the stage itself and have to be extracted by still-genial security. Lots of room in the aisles, and I have no problem wandering down to take some pics.
Hard to Handle is of a kind often referred to as "percolating". Warren growls it out, though it's a relatively short version, expanding on that final keychange of the jam. Brown Eyed Women seems jauntier, with the same cheers. Phil does the last verse: And the old man never was the same again!
Dissolving...meandering... at one point Phil signals the players and draws a horizonal circle in the air, not (as I half hoped) a Wheel directive but a jamming instruction I can't, alas, identify in what follows. He's Gone is toyed with... indecision... Tom Thumb's? Get Together?
A fast Cold Rain and Snow, a bit clunky and lacking in texture, but with Phil (or Jill!) rewrites: I married me a wife/I love you like my life... It quietens for a nice harmony chorus before the end.
Beer, pretzel in the interval, chat with some tapers, spot Candace at the back of the canopy section. I start Set II on the lawn, under the trees. Hot summer evening, moon high above the pavilion in the dark blue sky. Phil's back onstage first, and a lovely fast jam starts, Warren's slide against Jimmy's fingerwork, sounds like we've launched in the middle of a China-Rider transition, till it twists and turns into a Rob-sung Dire Wolf. If there's often no organic logic in the jams' developments, they certainly keep us on our toes.
My first Thalassa sounds, like a lot of new Phil songs, a bit like Eyes of the World to begin with, though the melody asserts its uniqueness after a couple of listenings. Dissolve into Dark Star-ish spaces. Candace takes stars from outside and puts them on the roof.
The wondrous, Other-Ones-style tempo-alternating Uncle John's that follows is a real
highlight, with the band in full robust voice and quicksilver jamming darting about between the verses. I can't imagine why some people don't like this version.Long jam, then Phil signals everyone down into into Cryptical- and I'm getting the chance to compare and contrast Weir and Lesh Other Ones in the space of a week. But not yet, 'cos Cryptical is heading (of course!?!) into Beatledom and a reggaefied He Said, She Said from Warren, powerful if a bit overheavy for me. He had to die, (and I know what it's like to be dead/Dead)... so much lively music about death! What with Dire Wolf and the rest this is for all its vigour a down mortal set, but the resurrection cometh: perversely, via a Phil Other One without Phil's bass intro. This band play it much better- it just lopes along -- but Bobby remade it more adventurously last week, I decide. This TOO goes into some free jamming spaces, with lots of room for Rob's piano and some crucial light and shade (more please!) and we even get the in a circle always missing to these ears -- second chorus only, as it completes -- before a brief Cryptical outro and a wind-down into
... Comes A Time. An all-time favourite, a flashback to my first US show, and a wonderful, measured version, sung by Warren, and the closest thing I've heard from this band, dangerously close even, to a straight Jerry recreation. More robustly voiced, of course, but the concluding solo had surely been to Chicago 1980 or any number of 80s performances. Pure magic.
And then everything stops. No rabble-rouser to end. Just a reflective stop. And half an hour to go before curfew. This second set has really got to me, though, and when Phil lifts his hands upwards and announces, lifting hands high- this music doesn't come from us, it comes from somewhere else. I'm OK with that. He's- we're- channelling it.
Time, luckily, for a double encore. Molo gets a special mention, if a rather unfair one given his agility this evening. Tyrannosaurus Rex got nothing on this guy. What next, Jeepster>Ride a White Swan? You never can tell with this lot, but instead it's Acadian Driftwood, the Band's sad tale of exile, and perhaps a nod to the upstate fronteristas, followed immediately by a Box of Rain left (as often, I gather) without a lid: such a long long time to be gone, such a short time to be... to be...
Defers closure, I guess, but kind of spoils the song. Trust Phil to leave me wanting more. And I know where to find it, where else but the back of a pizza parlour in downtown Cleveland a couple of days later. The Peabody's gig was a late addition to the Tricksters' schedule, and I'm excited, especially after being prepped with some choice CDs [thanks Richard]. Third band onstage at 11 on a Thursday night, the gig continues our theme of shamefully underattended musical events. Still thought of - the meticulously faithful DSO notwithstanding - as the best Dead "tribute+" band around, the ZT's play to me, Linda and maybe forty others - numbers often bettered by the Charlies at the Fountain. It's a warmup perhaps for Wetlands gigs a week later, and there are no keyboards tonight: not because Rob Barraco is With Phil These Days, explains bassist Klyph, proudly, but because his replacement Pete couldn't make it this particular evening. It's hard work with just guitars, says Tom (rhythm). But between them the band supply two shortish but very sweet sets, in some ways closer to the Dead than anything we've heard this trip.
Jeff Mattson's guitar is a dead ringer for Jerry's, and he has of course done his own brief time with the Friends, only to be let go on the bittersweet grounds he was too close in sound to the man himself.
So I get another Box of Rain, five songs in and sung by the bassist, and other highlights including a nicely sung Ship of Fools and a great concluding Sing me Back Home channelled from 1972, just as soulful and quite a bit more harmonious. Linda likes them, and they supply a sense of the first set songs-as-songs missing from what we've heard earlier, with their own material blending in effortlessly, and nimble, accomplished jams for the longer stuff... closer to "perfection" than either Ratdog or Phil, in fact, if that were the issue.
When it comes to the Dead themselves, I think I prefer the interest of their chosen, more hit-and-miss strategies. But the use of the the tribut-ary talent pool remains encouraging, in a way that bodes well for the future, as well as linking the Cleveland club, Tottenham pub and attendees with the larger experience: part of the circle indeed. From what I've heard - and I'm back on line now, sucking in some more of those soundboards from GDLive - Lesh's outfit is certainly his best yet and could consolidate into something permanent, if Phil has the will and Warren isn't too busy, both unlikely: meanwhile, catch 'em while you can! The Rabbit, back again for New Years, and the gigs with Weir confirm obvious and inevitable rapprochements, which economics may force anyway. I'm looking forward to The Other DogBunnies or whatever they decide to call it next time round.
7/18/01 Polaris Amphitheatre, Columbus, OH
Ratdog
K.C. Moan* > The Winners+ > Maggie's Farm > Easy Answers, Lucky Enough >
Hell in a Bucket > Tennessee Jed > Lost Sailor > Saint of Circumstance >
The Wheel > The Other One > Bass/Drums > So Many Roads > Sugar Magnolia >
Touch of GreyPhil and Friends
Set 1: Jam> Rock-n-Roll Blues, *Bird Song> *Cassidy> *Bird Song, Alligator>
Jam> Mason's Children
Set 2: Jam> Passenger> Jam> Mountains of the Moon, Brown Eyed Women> Wharf
Rat> Scarlet Begonias> Fire on the Mountain> Midnight Hour
E: Brokedown Palace
*with Bob Weir
--------------
7.24.01 Finger Lakes Perf. Arts Center
Canandaigua, NY
Set 1: Jam> Tastes Like Wine, Pride of Cucamonga> Hard To Handle, Brown
Eyed Woman> Cold Rain & Snow
Set 2: Dire Wolf> Mirror of Thalassa> Uncle John's Band> Cryptical> She
Said> Other One> Cryptical, Comes a Time
E: Acadian Driftwood, Box of Rain
---------------Zen Tricksters
7/26/01 Peabodys Down Under. Cleveland, OHSet 1
Jack Straw> Eilat, Ship of Fools, Mother Found a Gun> Jam> Box of Rain,
Travelin' Light> Jam> St. Stephen> Terrapin Station> Jam> Done is Done
Set 2
Help on the Way/Slipknot!> Say That I Am> Slipknot! (reprise)>
Franklin's Tower> Sing me Back Home
-----------------
Eyes of the World
billpannifer@easynet.co.uk