As I watched Madonna’s dumb, hopelessly over-the-top, obviously lip-synched performance during halftime of the Super Bowl, I wondered what the Grateful Dead might have done if they’d stuck around this long and were asked to play at that outsized and cartoonish extravaganza.
When Dead.net’s Dead Covers Project began a month or so ago, I thought to myself, “OK, this could be fun.
I’m writing this the morning after RatDog’s (1/25/12) reunion show at Bob Weir’s TRI Studios complex in San Rafael, Marin County. I haven’t scoured the Internet to gauge fan reaction to the free webcast and I have no idea what it looked or sounded like out there in the real world.
It was nearly four years ago—April 24, 2008, to be precise—that the Grateful Dead announced at a press conference at the Fillmore in SF that the group was donating its archives and assorted memorabilia to the University of California at Santa Cruz and would reside in that sylvan campus’ McHenry Library.
This could verge on the sacrilegious, but I’ve been thinking for some time that Jeff Chimenti may be the best all-around keyboardist to have played with the Grateful Dead or the post-GD bands. This guy can play anything: from raucous rock to convincing jazz to delicate melodic whispers. He is a magnificent pianist and a beast on the B-3. He’s assertive without being a hog.
What a wonderful year it was for the various Dead-connected bands crisscrossing the continent. So many good shows in venues ranging from tiny clubs to cool old theaters to arenas to festival grounds … to our computer screens!
What does it mean that I can clearly remember every New Year’s Eve I spent with the Grateful Dead or post-Dead bands, but can recall almost none of my other December 31sts? I know that in the years after Jerry died, there were a couple of midnights spent with friends, dancing at midnight to a grainy VHS bootleg of the “Sugar Magnolia” from the ’78 Closing of Winterland concert.
Even though I was a rabid Dead Head when I moved from New York to the Bay Area back in the fall of 1973, I didn’t make it to a Dead New Year’s Eve show until 1981-82.
Continuing what has become a cherished early-December tradition for the Grateful Dead Family, the Rex Foundation put on another Wang Dang Doodle of a fundraiser at the Fillmore in San Francisco Dec. 3.
I should be used to this by now and have a tougher skin. But I can't help myself.
