Last summer Bob Weir arranged a concert at his TRI studies to celebtrae what would have been Jerry Garcia’s 70th birthday. The webcast was reviewed at the time by Jim Moulton (founder of the ND Grateful Dead group).
In October Eagle Rock issued a truncated – 159 minutes – cut of the show interspersed with interviews of people reminiscing of time spent with Jerry or what he meant to them as a musician or a performer or a person. As you’d expect there are a lot of fine performances of tunes from the Dead’s repertoire. What I was struck by on first view was the range, both in terms of style and age, of the artists on stage.
They clearly spent a fair mount of time getting the show together; one of them remarks it would be pretty stupid to take this body of work in particular and play it like it had been played before. And they don’t. It’s quite surprising seeing Jim Lauderdale taking a lead vocal on Eyes Of The World or Jonathan Wilson and Donna Godchaux trading lines on Mission In The Rain.
The audience is up and dancing in the room and I kept finding myself up on my feet throughout. But then sitting has never been part of the Dead concert experience.
There’s a wedge of stuff from the webcast up on youtube but this one was put up by Eagle Rock. Not too late to get your final requests to the North Pole.
