In the row behind me, a couple of seats to my right, Geraldine couldn’t believe that I’d never seen Dead & Company before.
“Wow, really?”
“Nope.”
“This is, like, my eighth show this year.”
“God. And here’s me, a perfect virgin.”
It was a grey night at Citi Field, the home of the New York Mets. The summer solstice of 2023. Fifty thousand people in the stands, and on the field. In section 129, Geraldine struggled to comprehend my shortcomings.
“Wow,” she said. “That’s, like… incredible.”
To the majority of the band’s constituents gathered for the first of two house-full nights at this Major League ballpark, likely it was. On a campaign called ‘The Final Tour’, it seemed that every attendee had history, not just with this band, but with the Grateful Dead, the mother-ship from which they emerged. (The group, which features original Dead members Bob Weir and Mickey Hart, was formed in 2015 at the behest of John Mayer, who sings and plays lead guitar.) Geraldine had flown in to La Guardia, an airport so nearby that it seemed as if inbound planes were on a collision course with the centre field scoreboard, on a flight from Tennessee. Her husband didn’t “dig the Dead”, so she’d come alone. In the seats to my left, meanwhile, Tom and Miranda, a late middle-aged couple furtively toking on the first of many joints, were embarked on a road trip from southern New Jersey. After convening with Dead & Company here in Flushing, in Queens, they would head north for a two-night stand at Fenway Park, in Boston. In the past week or so, they’d already watched the band play in similarly vast spaces in Pennsylvania and upstate New York.
“This is what will happen,” Geraldine explained. “When the band come onstage, everyone in the seats will stand up for both sets. You know there’s two sets, right?” I did, yes. “Okay, good. So, the songs they play tonight will be completely different from whatever they play tomorrow.” Right. Training an index finger on a group of people on the fringes of the outfield, my new friend said, “Those guys down there are all on LSD. They’ll start dancing when the music starts and won’t stop until its time to go home. That’s their section for every show.”
Makes sense, I thought. Outside, in the thick outer-borough air, the parking lots surrounding Citi Field fizzed with an agreeable kind of lawlessness in which numerous tie-dyed strangers had offered to sell me magic mushrooms and LSD. Entrepreneurial youngsters were doing brisk business exchanging balloons filled with nitrous oxide for ten and twenty dollar bills. Wherever I looked, shit-faced people as old as my mother gambolled about the place.
“And, oh,” Geraldine concluded. “Apart from saying they’ll return after the break, at the end of the first set, the band won’t talk to the crowd.”
The scene that awaited me as I stepped off the graffiti-proof subway train at Mets-Willets Point station a good four hours earlier was unlike I’d ever seen. As a temporary resident of New York City, I’d gotten used to riding the 7 train out to the ‘burbs to see the luckless Mets toil in the name of entertainment for as little as four bucks a game. No problem there. But for the visit of Dead & Company, the battalions of blue and orange caps had been replaced by an invading army of fabulous furry freaks. They were Deadheads, ladies and gentlemen, the attentive and committed platoon who, from about 1971 onwards, followed the Grateful Dead, and now Dead & Company, from city to city, for year upon year. Quite how they make it work, I do not know. But no matter how hardcore a band’s audience may believe itself to be, this one is harder.
You might even think of it a resistance against an increasingly corporatized concert industry. As afternoon slipped into evening, beneath the subway platforms, thousands of people roamed the aisles of Shakedown Street, the informal bazaar comprised of many dozens of stalls erected in the shadow of all the group’s shows. Here, one could purchase verse written to order by a suited poet seated at an early Twentieth Century typewriter on a Formica-topped trestle table; five-dollar-beers from unlicensed vendors; edible marijuana; grilled cheese sandwiches; cocktails heavy on the Scotch and vodka; and hallucinogenics. Of the many scores of bootleg t-shirts on offer (all of which are sold with the group’s tacit consent) my favourite was a black number with the word “Mayer” fashioned in the style of a Slayer logo.
In its way, the world of metal is the kissing cousin to the jam band scene. Certainly, the two communities are united by superior musicality and a remarkable appeal that somehow manages to stay out of the way of what I guess I’m obliged to call the mainstream, but there are also differences. Correctly believing that the Grateful Dead were at their best when playing in front of an audience, their fans don’t bother listening to their albums. Dead & Company, meanwhile, haven’t even bothered to set foot inside a recording studio. Instead, the congregation is united by concerts, live albums, bootlegs official and otherwise, sound-desk recordings, and sets captured by constituents in the official “tapers’ section” of Dead shows. The degree of communal knowledge of this vast catalogue of fleeting moments is, I think, remarkable. Of the 2300-odd concerts staged between 1965 and 1995, it’s widely believed that a performance in May of 1977, at Cornell University in Ithaca, is the best.
But it could always go either way. Certainly, it’s not for nothing that Jerry Garcia, the Dead’s late kingpin, once remarked that his band were good, sometimes for seconds at a time. Even in the twenty-first century, the distance between Dead & Company’s best and worst nights is far wider than it is for any other stadium act. Not that it matters, mind; it doesn’t stop ‘em coming. At the turnstiles at Citi Field, out back of home plate, I saw hundreds of people with their index finger in the air, the Deadhead sign for “I came here without a ticket”. Other bereft would-be attendees walked up and down the queues with signs bearing the words “I need a miracle”.
I gave my own spare to Kyle, a trader on Shakedown Street who, in answering a couple of my questions, proved the exception to a cohort who otherwise seemed to mistake my press card and recording device for an arrest warrant and a handgun. At a stall selling t-shirts, sweatshirts, hats and jackets, Kyle had been shadowing the tour since its opening throw in Los Angeles. Following a concluding three-night stand at Oracle Park, before a combined audience of more than 150,000 people in Dead & Company’s nominal hometown of San Francisco, he planned to head home to swap his stock before putting his wheels back on the road in pursuit of the scene’s other truly blockbusting band, Phish. This spring, a year after headlining Madison Square Garden 11 times, Phish became the second band to take up residency at Sphere, in Las Vegas.
“If I didn’t do this, I’d probably be a truck driver,” Kyle tells me. “Working in an office from nine to five – I just don’t see that in my future.” I ask him whether or not he likes the United States. After a short pause, he answers that indeed he does, with a caveat. “I’m not talking about politics,” he says, “because that’s a whole different thing. But it’s a beautiful country. And for a person like me, who likes their own company as well as being on the road, this is a great place to be. I work hard to make life work – everyone here in this lot works hard to make things work – but what I’ve got is freedom, which is about as American as it gets, right?”
Two hours later, Kyle helped guide me through an occasionally bewildering evening in the presence of Dead & Company. During the second set, in the 24-minute freeform section known as ‘Drums and Space’, I was lost completely. Palms raised upwards in surrender, I admitted that it’d been quite some time since I had any idea what was going on. “That’s okay,” my plus one replied, “no one does. Tomorrow night, it’ll be completely different.” He was right, it was. At other points, though, I was left open-mouthed in admiration. Towards the end of the first set, as John Mayer unfurled an improvised guitar solo during ‘Althea’, Kyle leaned in and, in the manner of a sophisticated patron dining on the signature dish of a celebrated chef, said, “Yeah, this is a good one”.
Never mind that I wasn’t loaded, I’d found my gateway drug. Waiting for the band to amble onto the stage – and amble they did; the night’s first song was preceded by several minutes of noodling – a smaller scoreboard pointed the way to deeper waters. Recognising that catching Dead & Company over two nights in the second largest stadium in New York City was rather like going to see Green Day without having heard a note of Bad Religion, let alone High Vis, I had my sights trained on distant horizons. Luckily, help was at hand. Hanging over right field, the electronic scoreboard advertising forthcoming concerts in smaller venues by a host of bands with unfamiliar names offered me the chance to indulge my favourite pursuit: the fixation.
I guess I can liken the jam band scene to a room I didn’t know existed in a vast house in which I’ve lived for the entirety of my teenage and adult life. At this address, I know where the prog-rockers hang out, and even though I don’t visit them all that much, I know most of their names. I can happily spend a few hours in the hip hop wing without making a fool of myself in the company of people whose grasp of its layout exceeds my own. But these jam cats – how long have theybeen living here? Look at ‘em all. We’ve got Billy And The Kids, The String Cheese Incident, Bobby Weir & Friends, Umphrey’s McGee, Dogs In A Pile, Doom Flamingo, Widespread Panic, Everyone Orchestra, Perpetual Groove, Railroad Earth, Space Bacon, Hot Tuna, Zero, and more. On and on they go. Onstage, with impeccable chops, their concerts last for more than three hours a night. They’re always on the road. After whetting the palate with a song-based opening set, the second half of the show presents the possibility, if not quite the probability, for things to go wildly off-menu. I may not like what they’re doing – not exactly, anyway – but in all likelihood, it will blow my mind.
Like a teenager ordering the Bangalore phall during his first trip to a curry house, from the off, I went in deep. Signing up for a tenner a month to the concert streaming site Nugs.net – on which a vast library of sound-desk recordings of gigs by applicable bands can be found – I combed the index for songs that went on for at least a quarter of an hour. Anything else, I reasoned, was for wimps. Foraging away, in pretty short order I’d fostered an admiration for the scene that is more or less unreserved. Like a tourist in a distant country my eyes see only the good and although many of the customs remain foreign to me, I’m doing my best to learn the language. It’s just so different from what I’m used to from the primacy of live music over all other considerations, the anonymity of almost all of the bands, to the fact that studio albums are mere embryos from which magic can take momentary form in the live arena.
In the absence of a house publication (that I know of, at least) to help guide me, it could be that I’m floundering in all this virtuosity. Take my liking for the freewheeling quintet Goose, from Connecticut, for example. Of the group’s 355 concerts available at my fingertips, somehow, I’ve zoned in on a near-22-minute performance of the song ‘Hot Tea’ from last year’s Cascade Equinox Festival in Redmond, Oregon. It’s not even the whole song that has me captivated, either, just the jam at the end, taut and elongated, in which guitarist Rick Mitarotonda takes the floor for a seven-minute shift of ever increasing dynamism and tension. As the supporting musicians stab and swerve at a respectful distance, the solo – and even that’s not quite the right word – snakes in and out of the crevices in a manner that manages to avoid clichés. Taking care of business at the speed of thought, Mitarotonda isn’t a shredder so much as a touch-typist pecking away at 90 words per minute. He’s a grandmaster playing chess against dozens of opponents. Even after listening to the segment for months on end, I keep expecting him to make his way into the kind of clearing from which other musicians would catapult into histrionics. Instead, adhering tight to the parameters of the piece, he never does.
Here’s what I do know: jam bands keep tight company. Whether implicitly or otherwise, few of them venture too far from the exoskeleton of the Grateful Dead. As well as appearing at Dead & Company’s Playing In The Sand festival, in Mexico, for example, Goose have been joined onstage by at least one of its members. Elsewhere, Warren Haynes, the bandleader with the impeccably named Gov’t Mule, is an alumnus of the original Grateful Dead spinoff group, The Dead. At Citi Field, my new friend Geraldine told me that there are so many Grateful Dead tribute bands – I can name 16 of them, if that helps – that their catalogue appears to be immortal. “Improvisational music very addictive to the people creating it because it’s so much fun for us,” Warren Haynes told me in a recent interview. “We’re completely lost in the music. In a good moment, on a good night, you forget what you’re doing and you’re completely wrapped up in it. I feel like musicians who speak that language gravitate towards each other.”
In 1987, with the release of the track ‘Touch Of Grey’, the Grateful Dead attained their first and only hit single. Accompanied by a concert-style video in which the band appeared as skeletons, the song’s success was bolstered by heavy airplay on MTV, of all places. The channel even cleared its schedule for a dawn-to-dusk celebration called ‘Day Of The Dead’. As the parent album, In The Dark, went triple-platinum, committed Deadheads were appalled to discover an army of arrivistes, known as ‘Greyheads’, in their midst. Following one memorable night in 1989 during which newbies bum-rushed a gig at the Pittsburgh Civic Center, mayor Sophie Masloff intimated that the group and their followers – she described them as “Dead-enders” – were no longer welcome in her city.
That the Grateful Dead declined to play Touch Of Grey in Pittsburgh says rather a lot, I think, about their attitude to success. Despite the blue chip economics, or the shows at Giants Stadium and Candlestick Park, theirs remained a ramshackle operation right to the end. It was almost as if money was regarded as a vulgar by-product that somehow materialised when one played music and consumed drugs. Take the case of Vince Welnick, for example; upon joining the band, in 1990, the keyboardist was astonished to learn that his pay was equal to that of Jerry Garcia. Elsewhere, hundreds of thousands of dollars were lavished on animation for 1977’s The Grateful Dead Movie, and as much again on their heroically unwieldy ‘Wall of Sound’ PA system. This loveable largesse placed the Dead on the brink of perpetual penury. Such was the ongoing profligacy, in fact, that on the day of Garcia’s death, in 1995, the pay of everyone in the organisation – musicians included – was cut in half. Within the month, it had been halved again.
Naturally, in the twenty-first century, Dead & Company have no such problems. Although tickets at Citi Field could be had for the relatively modest price of seventy bucks, many thousands chose to pony up several hundred dollars for the privilege of a preferable view. Although the band have so far stayed true to their word that this would be their final tour, they weren’t done with playing live. With a gross of $130 million, the completion of a 30-night residency at Sphere called time on a debate among members of an adjacent Facebook group that put paid to any romantic notions I may have had about unifying ideologies. After almost six months of push and shove, I adjudge as a draw the donnybrook between Deadheads who reckoned the band would need to give it some welly so as to drown out the sound of Garcia rotating in his grave, and those who regarded such comments as a sign that Communism had taken hold in America.
Even so, despite the transactional orthodoxy, I prefer Dead & Company to the Grateful Dead. I’m drawn to the harder sound, and to the wild electricity of John Mayer’s solos. With his bewildering musicality, Oteil Burbridge, an émigré from the Allman Brothers Band, is the most unusual bass player I think I’ve ever heard. What’s more, I’m quite comfortable with this opinion, not least because I’ve spent enough time putting it together. But I do know that for as long as my preferences are ordered this way, my affinity with the jam band movement is only approximate.
It might easily have been different, though. In a decision that continues to haunt me, three years after seeing ‘Touch Of Grey’ on MTV as a nineteen-year-old, I declined the opportunity to see the Grateful Dead at Wembley Arena in favour of attending a concert by the LA hair-metal group Ratt, who I now can’t abide. I remember standing amid the turmoil of Euston station, somehow knowing I was destined to head down the wrong path.
34 years after failing to see the Grateful Dead on one of their rare visits to Europe on a wind-strewn Thursday night in September of 2024, I caught the bus from Camden Town to the beautiful old theatre at Alexandra Palace to see Dark Star Orchestra. Universally recognised in the jam band community as the best of any number of Dead cover groups, the Chicagoan quintet performed for three hours while still managing not to play any of the tracks I would most dearly have loved to have heard. But in place of ‘Truckin’’ or ‘Wharf Rat’, ‘He’s Gone’ and ‘Standing On The Moon’, what they did do, in the second set, was jam. Up near the barrier, stage right, I saw it happen, insouciantly, and on a cue that was invisible to the naked eye. As if clicking their fingers, the band swerved from a song with a formal structure to a piece lasting 20 minutes, or maybe more, in which the instruments nattered away, eloquently and companionably, in the language of players perched atop a high wire.
At Ally Pally I met Rosie, who’d travelled south from Edinburgh to see the show. Between sets, I had a chat with Sam, who’d flown in from Encino, in California. In the company of people who had crossed borders and continents, I could only marvel at the magnetism of the music. In the washroom, I learned of a forthcoming slate of appearances at the Fiddler’s Elbow in Chalk Farm, by the Grateful Dudes. Only at a concert by a Grateful Dead cover band, I thought, would I pocket a flyer advertising the services of a different Grateful Dead cover band.
Ian Winwood is the author of Bodies: Life & Death In Music
