Grateful Dead

I’ve been asked many times through the years about “the best” Grateful Dead show I ever attended. With 365 concerts spanning 1970 to 1995 to choose from, that’s an extremely difficult choice. “Best” in what way? Some supposedly objective evaluation of the music? Good luck with that. “Favorite”? Even that is completely loaded. I’ve had unimaginable fun at shows that I know were not that spectacular, and I’ve had so-so times at shows that were revealed later to be magnificent.

Last week we talked about the sometimes onerous and unpleasant task of trying to turn friends on to the Grateful Dead. The consensus seemed to be that it’s often not worth the effort, and that maybe it’s better to let folks find the Dead on their own. Quitters! (Just kidding.)

No, not that way. That’s a topic for another time, for sure. But this week I want to talk about the challenges, perils and triumphs of trying to turn friends on to the Grateful Dead.

For the past week-plus, I spent my brisk, daily, hour-long walks around Lake Merritt here in Oakland digging the three mid-February Phil & Friends concerts from the unfortunately named 1st Bank Center in Denver. The shows were fantastic! I had worried that having three lead guitarists—Warren Haynes, John Scofield and Jackie Greene—might make for too thick a stew.

All the excitement around here about the veritable tsunami of videos submitted for the Dead Covers Project got me thinking about the Grateful Dead’s rather slight contributions to the MTV Age. This was a not a band made for that medium, especially in MTV’s early days, when videos were all about fast cuts, tight pants, smoke bombs and scantily clad women.

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.

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!