Todays NY Times:
The Other Ones: Grateful Dead Resurrected and Truckin'
nytimes.com
By JON PARELES
SAN FRANCISCO -- Some habits are hard to break. From the late
1960s to the early 1990s, the Grateful Dead were on the road almost
every year, playing down-home improvisational rock for twirling,
tie-dyed Dead Heads.
Three years after the death of Jerry Garcia, his fellow members of the
Grateful Dead are back together as the core of a new band, the Other
Ones, that sets out to resurrect and extend the Dead's legacy.
"I believe that Jerry would want us to play, not to sit around and mourn
forever," said band percussionist Mickey Hart in a backstage interview.
"We all have enough money in the bank so we don't have to do this. But it's
in our veins, and it still seems like a natural thing to do."
The band made a triumphant hometown debut in San Francisco on
Thursday night at the Warfield Theater for a sold-out house of 2,400 people
who arrived with loyal but guarded expectations and left the concert
jubilant.
The Other Ones include Hart, Bob Weir on guitar and Phil Lesh on bass,
Dead members since the 1960s, and Bruce Hornsby on keyboards, who
toured with the Dead in the 1990s. Mark Karan and Steve Kimock on
guitars, Dave Ellis on saxophones and John Molo on drums complete the
new band. Drummer Bill Kreutzmann, the other surviving founder of the
Dead, has retired.
This summer, the new band is to headline the third Furthur Festival, an
annual package tour of Dead-related bands. It goes to the Continental
Airlines Arena in East Rutherford, N.J., on June 29 and the Nassau
Coliseum in Uniondale, N.Y., on June 30. Hart said the Other Ones had
made no plans beyond the summer.
The Other Ones' debut was a benefit, raising more than $200,000 for the
Rain Forest Action Network. Like a smaller-scale version of the scene
outside the Dead's last stadium tours, gray-bearded fans from the 1960s
and college students filed in while long-haired fans stood outside with index
fingers held up, hoping for a miraculous last-minute ticket. "It's like church,"
said Robyn Caywood, a 25-year-old fan who got a seat. "And the music
just pulls you like puppet strings."
For their debut, the Other Ones had two things that the Grateful Dead did
not: nearly a month of daily rehearsals (including a change of guitarist in the
last week) and a set list that was chosen before the band appeared onstage.
But like the Dead, the Other Ones rely on the chemistry of the moment.
The band's first few songs were tentative, with the two new guitarists
sounding unduly reticent; recent material like "Easy Answers" (which
appears on Rob Wasserman's album "Trios") struggled to find a groove.
But with the old blues "Going Down the Road Feeling Bad" the music
opened up, and suddenly the Other Ones recaptured the effervescence of
the Dead in its glory days.
The Dead brought the security of American roots music -- country, blues,
Appalachian music, rhythm-and-blues, even touches of Latin rhythm -- to
psychedelic wanderings; they made good-timey excursions out of songs
haunted by death and uncertainty. The two sets by the Other Ones became
both a reminder of what the Dead accomplished and a glimpse of new
prospects.
The band still plays some Garcia songs, and it kept many of the Dead's old
arrangements. Some were familiar from the Dead's stadium era in the
1980s and '90s; others, like the brilliant, elaborately constructed "St.
Stephen," had dropped out of the repertory. And with Hornsby and Ellis, the
music could detour into jazz harmonies and swinging rhythms that the Dead
rarely attempted. "Space," a free-form jam, wandered from scintillating
Minimalistic patterns to a new song, "Banyan Tree" (with lyrics by the
Dead's longtime collaborator Robert Hunter), to quick quotes of the Miles
Davis tune "So What."
Molo has taken up Kreutzmann's role as the steady timekeeper while Hart
knocks out accents and cross-rhythms on an international assortment of
instruments. Hart's fondness for odd meters turned up in a new
arrangement of "Fire on the Mountain" and in a 1960s Dead song, "The
Eleven" (which is in 11/4 time).
Perhaps inevitably, Karan and Kimock's guitars echo the Garcia sound,
bell-toned and perpetually inquiring; Garcia's style is embedded in the
Dead's songs.
The two guitarists revived tell-tale Garcia phrases, like his calmly ambling
blues lines, his floating downward slides and his light-fingered bluegrass
runs. But with two lead guitarists (and sometimes three when Weir
switches from rhythm guitar to lead), the Other Ones can toss around more
bits of melody. They grew more playful as the sets progressed, teasing
each other with overlapping scales or little tendrils of tunes like "Scarlet
Begonias" and "China Cat Sunflower."
In more than three hours of music, the Other Ones celebrated the Dead
with the Dead's own limber, open-ended curiosity, bolstered by the kind of
thorough practice and rejuvenated energy that the latter-day Dead had lost.
There was nostalgia in hearing the reconstituted band, but there was also a
renewed sense of possibility. As Weir sang in "The Eleven," "This is the
season of what now?" |
