Never-Ever Land: Dead & Company at Nassau Coliseum, November 6
By Benito Vila
44 years ago I came across two albums: The Grateful Dead, called “WS1689” for its Warner Brothers catalog number, and History of The Grateful Dead, Volume One, also named “Bear’s Choice”. WS1689 was the band’s first album — a somewhat murky, speed-fueled, first-time-in-the-studio 1967 melding of blues progressions, surf organ and polyphonic psychedelia. 1973’s Bear’s Choice offered a completely different sound, the band stripping itself down to its barest roots in a set of crisp and clear acoustic folk and electric blues performances.
Recorded, engineered and curated by LSD-maker, band benefactor and champion soundman Owsley “Bear” Stanley, that 1970 Fillmore East-recorded album features three old-time ditties — “Katie Mae”, “Dark Hollow” and “I’ve Been All Around This World” — an up-tempo “Wake Up Little Susie” and the Jerry Garcia/Robert Hunter ballad “Black Peter” on Side A. Electric Side B presented a charged-up Howling Wolf’s “Smokestack Lighting” and Otis Redding’s “Hard to Handle”, with both songs getting extended instrumental treatments full of the spiraling rounds — the jazz-like musical helixes and the circuitous percussive cadences — that set the band’s music apart from its contemporaries.
Coming into Nassau Coliseum November 6, those albums once again played a role in my experience — with WS1689 serving as my no-one-ever-gets-it license plate and in Bear’s Choice providing me with a point of reference when I was asked whether I liked what Dead & Company is doing. In responding “yes”, I found myself going on about how this “new” band was playing with the same intensity and with the same energy as the original band did on that 18-minute “Smokestack Lighting” 49 years ago.
I scattered everyone when I dropped into saying that this band’s ability to transition into and out of never-played-together Grateful Dead anthems such as “Birdsong” and “New Speedway Boogie” demonstrated an other-level continuum, one where the music was once again playing the band. Seventeen songs and three-and-a-half hours later I realized I was being unfair to these Grateful Dead players: Dead & Company may be playing the same music but the on-stage collective is much more than a set of telepathic marionettes. This band is indeed taking Grateful Dead music to new levels, by adding new infusions of playfulness and precision to a well-honed sound built on the collaborative, empathetic, on-the-fly shifting of melody, harmony and resonance.
Set One
The Nassau Coliseum is no longer the rundown hockey arena I remember from my last Grateful Dead show there in 1993. The unimaginative cut-block-oversized-high-school-gym exterior has been transformed into a ready-to-go silvery spaceship by an undulating set of varying-length metallic horizontal rods. Inside, the structure is open and fan-friendly, with the entrances and concession set-ups creating easy-to-navigate common areas that are airy, well-lit and clean, sort of like a contemporary mall. There was no mooing in the lines; there was no being too close to people you didn’t come to meet.
It felt as if the crowd came to appreciate rather than be entertained. And that makes a big difference: it arrived like a group coming into an ice cream shop specifically looking for its favorite flavors rather than as an unruly ravenous lot trying to get as much as it could for as little as possible. For that little bit of sophistication, on this evening, those that listened closely had a lot to enjoy.
Opening a prompt fifteen minutes after ticket time, the first set ran an hour and fifteen minutes, the band taking everyone there on a tasty journey, opening with something somewhat expected — “Feels Like A Stranger” — and following that up with something a little different — “New Speedway Boogie”. From there, John Mayer and Bob Weir settled into a you-sing-one-I-get-the-next sequence — a Weir/Garcia sun/moon mechanism — that saw Mayer lead “Dire Wolf”, Weir take on Bob Dylan’s “When I Paint My Masterpiece”; and Mayer come back to the mike with “Sugaree” before Weir went into “Cassidy” and then “The Music Never Stopped”.
While that might read like just another set list of Grateful Dead favorites, there was a lot more than just the same old stuff going on on-stage. For one, the pairing of the animated Mayer and the chatty (even behind the keyboard cubby) Jeff Chimenti on the audience’s left placed the three Grateful Dead alumni — Weir and drummers Bill Kreutzemann and Mickey Hart — center stage, with bassist Oteil Burbridge off to the right, in front of the mixing console. For much of the night, if not all of it, the sound came across the stage that way, Chimenti and Mayer tickling out the-high-end leads on top of the sharp, driven, conjuring rhythms of Weir, Kreutzemann and Hart, with Burbridge dropping deep grooves that brought each song together.
For those accustomed to the bounding movements and the deep-into-the-moment intensity of Phil Lesh in this music, Burbridge’s pausing, listening and smiling create a new platform for the sound to swing out from. Musical clarity is king in Dead & Company: everyone on stage is listening even more closely than you could ever imagine to the music they’ve come to make, with those first set performances being marked by sonic themes that the players and the crowd got into. There was a bluesy yearning to “New Speedway Boogie”, a go-up-one-side-go-down-the-other chasing to “Dire Wolf” and a western swing quality to “Masterpiece”. There’s no describing everything the band was doing during “Sugaree”, “Cassidy” and “The Music Never Stopped”, but basketball legend Bill Walton stood tall at the back of the floor on all three of those songs, arms outstretched, smiling with sheer joy — high praise from someone who’s been following the music since the early Seventies. Walton was clearly and completely enraptured by the nuances and the interplay he found himself a part of.
Set Two
There’s Nothing Like a Grateful Dead concert was a Seventies Deadhead catchphrase that Jerry Garcia made more flavorful when he compared the band’s followers to people who like licorice, saying, “Not everyone likes licorice, but those who like licorice, really, really like licorice.” So it was with the November 6 second set — the songs, the pacing, and the action on stage delivered sonic treats familiar to long-time Deadheads, and also dropped enough savory morsels to guide new listeners along. Opening with a 23-minute playing of the “Help on the Way”/“Slipknot”/“Franklin’s Tower” suite, the band revealed an intense internal empathy, especially in the expanded “Slipknot” which wound around its intricate and wily thematic tones before cascading into a bouncy, booty-shaking “Franklin’s Tower” that set dancers to twirl and non-dancers to shimmy.
With less than a five-second pause, the band then opened “Dark Star”, with Chimenti playing the familiar Tom Constanten organ line with distinct fervor and Mayer howling out the quick-fingered lead guitar part. From there, there was a call-and-response voicing amongst the instruments, one that allowed the song to form long before Weir sang its first verse five minutes into its wandering way. And wandering is a good word for this particular version of “Dark Star”, each player toying with the structures of the piece to create a 17-minute torrent of sound that included an exploration of John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme”.
The segue into “Drums” came on seamlessly, with Kreutzemann, Hart and Burbridge building on a steel drum tone, stretched out whistles and squeaks with Hart finishing out the sequence with a harp-meets-violin-like solo session on his custom-made percussive Beam. Weir, Chimenti and Mayer stepped on stage to take “Space” into a calm, pulsing sonic realm, one that hinted at a fleeting suggestion of “The Wheel” shortly after Burbridge came back to his bass and Kreutzemann and Hart to their drums. Instead, the band went into building “The Other One”, Weir coming back into the song in its second verse — the first verse having been done the night before.
There again came a special moment for close listeners of Dead & Company, and to students of the Grateful Dead canon, as “The Other One” called out a raucous and frenetic connection to the original band’s own “coming around” — before slowing into “Wharf Rat” and lingering momentarily on the song’s midway “I’ll get up and fly away” power chant. Playing in this new tempo, each member of the band worked themselves and the others through the familiar parts of the ballad while also coming back to the “New Speedway” and “Dark Star” themes before moving on into the wiggling rhythm and blues of “Turn On Your Lovelight”.
When band-master Weir called out “Wait a minute” and launched into a “lonely night” rap, with the music picking up its pace behind him, there was a connective joyous ecstasy on the stage and throughout the crowd. It seemed as if everyone there was in tune with the good time that had been had, with the band turning the Coliseum into a revival gospel temple in belting out “Let it shine” over and over. The “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” encore brought a tender close to the evening, Weir and Mayer trading the pleading verses and the Chimenti, Kreutzemann, Hart and Burbridge laying down a triumphant melody that left more than a few still clapping when the house lights went up.
And that was the trip at Nassau Coliseum November 6, Dead & Company doing what The Grateful Dead started doing as The Warlocks in Ken Kesey’s La Honda compound — setting the tempo for a good time, allowing everyone who came to explore their own joys, while the band scrutinized and harnessed its own energies and experience in preparation for the next time it plays. That stopped-time kairos is what made this particular night’s Never-Ever Land so attractive and so poignant: the band and its music were once again much like a compass, pointing its sound and its audience in a certain direction but not telling anyone where to go.
Notes and ephemera
— Nassau Coliseum raised a tie-die “Grateful Dead 44 Dead & Company” banner to the rafters at the halftime/set break to mark the collective number of shows the bands have played in the venue.
— The show-ending “The Other One”/“Wharf Rat”/“Lovelight”/“Heaven’s Door” sequence was the same as the closing of the Grateful Dead’s Philadelphia July 7, 1989 performance featured in its 2010 Crimson White & Indigo live album/concert film release.
— Bill Walton is a gracious and kind man. He’s glad to fist bump and high-five people as they go by; he welcomed all comers who asked for quick selfies during the song breaks. He did not warm to those who wanted to talk, especially during songs, but he wasn’t ever rude. Some people need to remember: he’s there for the music, too — he’s not there to meet you or to talk about old times.
