The last song the Grateful Dead performed here on Sunday night at Soldier Field — the band’s farewell, 50 years after it was founded — was Attics of My Life. It’s a close-harmony song of thankfulness to a soul, a muse, perhaps an audience. It professes, “I have spent my life/ Seeking all that’s still unsung” and concludes, “When there was no dream of mine/ You dreamed of me.”
Applause quickly gave way to fans clapping and singing the Buddy Holly refrain the band had shared with them a few minutes earlier: “You know our love will not fade away!” Some had been loyal fans since the 1960s; some were under 20, too young to have attended a Grateful Dead concert. None wanted the show to be over.
Evanescence and durability, side by side — that summed up the Grateful Dead’s ever-paradoxical mission. The three concerts I saw over the Fourth of July weekend at Soldier Field, billed as Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years of the Grateful Dead, also revived the band as an enterprise both quixotic and commercial, history-minded and fond of a tall tale, carefully plotted and forever in search of the happy accident. This briefly convened, decisively final incarnation of the Grateful Dead often managed to live up to the band’s name with songs that could turn intuitive, down-home, whimsical, haunted, elegant or euphoric.
Photo: AP
50TH ANNIVERSARY
The Grateful Dead was a band that celebrated the vanishing moment: never playing a song the same way twice, letting every player improvise, singing about a sunshine daydream or a ripple in still water. But it was also the band whose initial run lasted 30 years, whose every performance was obsessively documented by fans and the band, and whose style became the lingua franca of countless jam bands.
The four surviving Grateful Dead members — Phil Lesh on bass, Bob Weir on rhythm guitar and Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart on drums and percussion — put aside past differences to mark the band’s 50th anniversary. Soldier Field was also where the last original Grateful Dead concert took place on July 9, 1995, before the death of Jerry Garcia, the heart of the band. (The new Grateful Dead also played two warmup concerts on June 27 and June 28 in Santa Clara, California, answering a demand for shows in the band’s home state.) After Garcia’s death, his bandmates dropped the Grateful Dead name; they sometimes worked together with other musicians as the Other Ones or the Dead, and they led their own bands. But reviving the Grateful Dead name and establishing these concerts as the band’s last ones set a higher standard. The band is well aware that its constituency of Deadheads — who came to the shows in full regalia of tie-dye, vintage concert T-shirts and every conceivable variation of the Dead’s logos — is admiring but also intently critical.
Photo: AP
Garcia’s replacement in the reconstituted lineup was Trey Anastasio of Phish, who carried off his fraught assignment with grace and head-bobbing enthusiasm. The keyboardists were Jeff Chimenti on organ and synthesizers, who has played in bands led by Weir and Lesh, and Bruce Hornsby on piano, who toured with the Grateful Dead in the early 1990s and whose palette encompasses florid honky-tonk, harmonically advanced jazz and pinpoint quasi-Baroque filigree.
THE BIG GOODBYE
The scale of Fare Thee Well was huge: not only record crowds of nearly 71,000 people each night at Soldier Field, but also simulcasts in theaters nationwide, pay-per-view Web casts, satellite-radio broadcasts and postconcert replays from the Chicago radio station WXRT. DVDs and CDs are planned for the fall.
Yet as pricey and lucrative as the events were — stadium ticket sales alone brought in US$40 million — the concerts didn’t feel like a cash grab. This Grateful Dead could have worked up one set of crowd favorites and played it five times. Instead, it learned dozens of songs, not only longtime concert staples but rarities like Mason’s Children, which never appeared on a Dead studio album, and extended dramas like Lost Sailor. In its five concerts, the band repeated only two songs: Cumberland Blues and Truckin’, which, in Sunday night’s farewell concert, allowed the fans to shout one last time, “What a long, strange trip it’s been!”
QUINTESSENTIALLY AMERICAN
The band had clearly thought through its set lists as both musical and literary excursions. Friday’s show kept returning to songs about music, like Playing in the Band and The Music Never Stopped. Saturday’s show, on the Fourth of July, cast the Grateful Dead as proudly and profoundly American. It opened with a set featuring light-fingered, countryish songs citing particular locales — Tennessee, Texas, Utah — and its encore was the gleeful, sardonic US Blues.
But the Grateful Dead’s American ideal always ran even deeper. Its music drew from urban and rural sources, from deep blues and Latin rhythms, from jazz and the avant-garde. And its performance, then and now, was about disparate individuals forging something together in a participatory democracy in which each member’s choices affected all the others.
Its two drummers were constantly knocking around each other’s decisions about the beat. Its lead and rhythm guitars sometimes meshed, sometimes scuffled. Lesh’s bass lines were an additional layer of counterpoint, tugging against the guitars or talking back to them. Most Dead songs have clear, sometimes tricky structures and passages that are tautly composed — sparkling ones, like Scarlet Begonias and Slipknot! on Friday, and majestic ones, like the Terrapin Station suite on Sunday. But there was wiggle room even in those, and far more when the Dead would toss away the map and go into a group jam and see where it led. When the Dead’s music was working best, it always sounded like a healthy argument among old friends — one that could spark new ideas.
That’s what this Grateful Dead lineup could still accomplish. The band’s live vocals, never a strong point, were gruffer after 20 years, and there were, as always at Dead concerts, patches of clutter or meandering. But they were rare. Anastasio is more country and less bluegrass than Garcia was, and closer to jazz and progressive rock than to blues. But he could emulate Garcia’s phrasing when a guitar line just had to spiral up out of a bass riff like a curl of smoke; he could also let his own guitar tones and sharper attack peek out to challenge the rest of the band. Together, in its loose but attuned way, the band found eerie meditations in The Wheel on Friday, spooky back alleys in West LA Fadeaway on Saturday, bitterness and then affirmation in “Throwing Stones” on Sunday.
Sunday’s concert was full of goodbye songs: I Know You Rider taunted, Gonna miss me when I’m gone. And Cassidy advised, “Faring thee well now/ Let your life proceed by its own design.” That’s what the Grateful Dead’s music always did.
“Fare Thee Well” may well have been the last stadium-scale Grateful Dead experience, with tens of thousands of rainbow-garbed fans singing and dancing along. But the band’s farewell doesn’t mean its music will disappear. Lesh will be taking his own band on the road this fall, including six nights, starting on Oct. 30, at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York. Tribute bands like the Dark Star Orchestra continue to infuse their own energy into the Dead’s catalog. The musicians change, but the Dead’s musical language endures; the healthy argument continues.
Editor’s note: DVD and CD reviews will return to this space next week
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