The concert that nearly wasn’t finally came to pass, and there was joy in Dead-dom.
Though the Grateful Dead’s name wasn’t on the ticket stub for the Terrapin Station festival that played to 70,000 fans Saturday and Sunday at Alpine Valley Music Theatre, this had all the trappings of the first official Deadhead reunion weekend. Ex-Dead members Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann performed together as the Other Ones with three other musicians, and in various solo incarnations during two 10-hour days of music that drew heavily on the Dead songbook.
Police, promoters and Dead representatives were wearing relieved smiles as they watched the party go down with fewer glitches than expected, the feared Deadhead invasion of southern Wisconsin mostly a rumor, thanks to a pricey publicity campaign that shooed away ticket-less fans. Police said they had to turn away only 100 cars filled with fans “looking for a miracle” (a.k.a. a ticket) by midafternoon Saturday, far fewer than expected, and after the first day a routine number of citations (121) and arrests (45), mostly for minor drug violations, was reported.
The show, the first advertised summit of the surviving members of the Grateful Dead since the band’s demise in 1995, was initially slated for the Chicago lakefront, but nervous residents and city officials torpedoed the idea. Next up, Walworth County officials in Wisconsin turned down the concerts at Alpine, only to have the Dead camp pony up an additional $300,000 for promotion and security to put the festival back on the books.
“It looks like we’re gonna pull this thing off,” said former Dead drummer Hart backstage, sipping a carrot juice in between sets with Bembe Orisha, his multi-ethnic percussion-heavy ensemble, and The Other Ones. “It feels like they set us up and shook us down,” he said, referring to politicians who tried to block the show. “This ended up costing us hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra security and lawyers that we didn’t need.”
Indeed, the Dead’s crowd is among the gentlest in the rock world, and the band’s massive in-house corporation one of the most efficient at planning large-scale parties. Trouble is, in the band’s final years, it became all about the party, and as the fan base widened, it became less discriminating, and the Dead started going through the motions musically. “We took each other for granted, our jams became studied, and we started to decompose,” Hart said backstage. “It wasn’t uncharted territory anymore.”
With The Other Ones, however, Hart said the band is “better than where we left off,” because it faces a fresh challenge: breaking in classic songs, some unplayed for decades, with three new accomplices, including a featured soloist in veteran guitarist Jimmy Herring. He steps into the biggest shoes of all: those belonging to Jerry Garcia, the band patriarch, whose death in 1995 signaled the Dead’s demise as a touring entity. Some of the fans were skeptical.
“Ever since Jerry died, the music died for me too — it was like my `American Pie,'” said one die-hard fan, James Ptucha, 36, who had attended 190 Dead shows, and flew in from Long Island with his wife, Dana, 39, to attend both Terrapin Station shows. “Everybody here wants to hear Jerry play guitar, and this new guy is in a tough spot because he’s gonna have to sound like Jerry for people like me to be happy.”
Garcia, with his boundary-defying leaps of imagination as a soloist, is inimitable, and Herring initially sounded tentative as The Other Ones circled the opening “Cryptical Envelopment” from the “That’s It For the Other One” suite, and failed to match Garcia’s boldness during the closing solo of “The Stranger.” But on the New Orleans standard “Iko Iko,” with a rare Hart vocal, Herring started to dance with six-string bassist Lesh, and the band whipped itself into an uncharacteristic frenzy on the triple-time finish of “Casey Jones,” with keyboardist Rob Barraco taking over Garcia’s vocal.
“It looked like a Phish show out there,” one young fan said of the audience, which — in what may have been a Deadhead first — squirmed violently to keep up with the band’s suddenly exuberant tempo.
The second set revisited prized Dead turf, with “China Cat Sunflower” melting into “I Know You Rider”; Weir’s “One More Saturday Night”; and the extended encore triptych of “Help Is on the Way,” “Slipknot!” and “Franklin’s Tower.” Though hardly definitive versions, they tripped enough nostalgia wires to keep the party buoyant. The sole surprise was the band reaching back for the rarely performed “Born Cross-Eyed,” a trippy oddity with darting vocal harmonies that was folded into a brooding 25-minute “Dark Star.”
It wasn’t the equal of the Dead in its prime, and Garcia’s eminence as the maestro of mirth remains unthreatened, but it was a reasonable facsimile, and The Other Ones performed with an enthusiasm — even joy — that was lacking in the latter days of the Dead. There was no attempt to change the original dynamic; even Lesh’s band, Phil Lesh and Friends, opened the festival by playing variations on Dead classics with a similar twin-guitar approach. That was good enough for two college students who road-tripped from Carbondale.
Neither Dave Craig, 22, nor Eric Needham, 22, had seen the Dead. “For the last three years all he’s been listening to is the Dead and saying, `I just want those mothers to get back together and play one more time,'” Needham said of his friend.
For a more seasoned observer, Mike Katzki, 47, who traveled from Springfield, Mass., and has seen more than 900 Dead shows since 1969, Garcia’s absence and the lack of new tunes was troubling. “But it’s still fun,” he said, overlooking the stage like the merriest of the pranksters in his stove-pipe Uncle Sam hat. “It’s a family reunion, and this” — he waved over the crowd — “is my family.”
In this, year seven of LAG — Life After Garcia — the Dead’s role has shifted in the guise of The Other Ones. The new band’s job is to faithfully cover the songs of what was once rock’s most irreverent avant-garde ensemble. In their Alpine debut, they did their job well, and the party ran smoother than any ’60s acid test. A fall tour, contingent upon the success of the Alpine shows, now appears certain. The Dead as we once knew it may be gone, but prospects for the Dead nostalgia business are looking up.
