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Officially, there hasn't been a Grateful Dead concert since 1995, when the musical entity with that name dissolved following guitarist Jerry Garcia’s death. But try telling that to the fans filling baseball stadiums and sheds this summer to see most of the surviving members under the banner of Dead & Company, most lately for two shows this past weekend at Boston’s Fenway Park. Riding yet another wave of popularity following the band’s 50th anniversary last year, the Dead’s 21st century crest also comes with a long-term critical reappraisal by the world outside the band’s cosmos-sized Deadhead bubble, lately including the National’s high-profile, big-budget multi-disc Day of the Deadtribute.
Yet for a certain segment of Dead freaks, Dead & Co. presents a conundrum in the form of a lead guitarist: the blues-pop phenom and human GIF John Mayer, the musical and visual opposite of Jerry Garcia in nearly every regard. Where the autodidact Garcia was a model of psychedelic beardo cool (young) and dope-addled Santa Claus inertia (later), Mayer’s Blues Hammer melodrama, flashy stage moves, and fashion awareness make him an odd substitute for Garcia’s black t-shirts and bluegrass delicacy. One satirical Dead-loving site refers to him frequently as “Josh.”
And during their second night at Fenway Park—the closing show for the first leg of the summer’s tour, which included two headlining sets at Bonnaroo—Josh remained an occasionally awkward musical partner for Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir and drummers Billy Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart. But, despite this, over two sets and three hours of music, Bro & Co. succeeded at achieving what the Dead did so well (sometimes) and conjured mojo at large scale in the unfriendly confines of a major sporting arena on a muggy summer eve. Lurching into motion in daylight, the sextet jammed slowly into “Truckin’” and were on their way, sounding more like a band than the group featuring Dead bassist Phil Lesh and Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio that played five shows last summer, if less musically adventurous.
Bouncing and grinning and no less silly than any number of other replacement Garcias, Josh brought a youngin’s energy to the stage. With the band’s legendarily hypnocratic touring operation slurped into the empire of Mayer manager (and Eagles mogul) Irving Azoff, Dead & Co. are likewise the slickest and tightest version of the Dead in years. But, even still, not too slick. Kreutzmann and Hart’s double-drumming was as chaotic as ever, the group’s miscues and ponderous moments as reliable as Bob Weir’s sandals. While the band’s critical revival is built mostly around their creative activities from 1965 to 1977 or so, Dead & Co. most audibly channeled the group’s ’80s incarnations, years when (not coincidentally) Weir and Hart were increasingly centers of the band’s onstage energies as Garcia withdrew into addiction. It is these years, too, that the band was most popular, achieving their only Top 10 hit in 1987 and activating uncountable swaths of new Deadheads.
More than a quarter-century later, Dead & Co. at Fenway Park presented a truly all-ages (if mostly white) spectacle: children in their first tie-dyes, hard-boogeying septuagenarians, spun-out twenty-something tour rats who never got to see Jerry, and unassumingly bopping middle-aged enthusiasts all sharing the joyful space created by the Grateful Dead’s music. It’s hard to think of another tour this summer that’s as friendly to families as it is to psychedelic users. Besides national parks, there aren’t many institutions that serve both. But unlike members of the Grateful Dead, national parks don’t go on tour.
Though Bro’s vocals still lack a certain cosmic verve, at Fenway Park anyway, this shortcoming was largely neutralized three songs into the show with the arrival of Donna Jean Godchaux-MacKay, the one-time Muscle Shoals singer who performed with the Dead (and the Jerry Garcia Band) through most of the ’70s. Unceremoniously left out of the 50th anniversary shows, Godchaux-MacKay’s return to active Deaddom at Fenway Park (and in June at New York’s CitiField) once again creates an onstage majority of actual Grateful Dead members. Appearing on the second night at Fenway for “They Love Each Other” and remaining for the rest of the show, Garcia’s ’70s duo partner provided a clear and welcome channel to the band’s past, and especially their much-loved 1977 incarnation. Foregoing her signature wail on “Playing in the Band,” her presence—singing backup vocals, or even just sway-dancing—was more than enough to balance Josh’s endless supply of guitar faces, and that much easier to “hear” the absent Garcia. That Godchaux-MacKay remained unannounced (though warmly cheered when she appeared on mic and screen) hopefully suggests a more permanent role for her in the Co. at large.
The stadium full of Deadheads never quite hit the slow-motion dance throb of yore but, more than anything, the Dead found a reassuring musical coherence—a unity between the myth of the Dead as ’60s magic makers and the reality of the aged musicians performing in the harsh and improbable present. In doing so, the Dead went about their alchemical business, creating something invisible and nourishing in their jams, as if oozing over from the augmented reality of the psychedelic other-world, but also tangible and valuable, freshly generated content for their fans to talk about (and listen to) later, the music’s quality assessed against its rich Deadological context. Perhaps the night’s best improvisations grew from Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter’s “Bird Song,” sung by Weir and Mayer, first accelerating into a full-band free-flight pushing at the song’s form, and later transforming into “Passenger”—the night's best segue—sung as on Terrapin Station by Weir and Godchaux-MacKay.
All night, the band found exciting moments, mostly little and some big. A few even belonged to Mayer, like a just-swinging-enough space-jazz excursion in a 13-minute “Playing in the Band.” The only music of the night that might qualify as new was the “Drumz” segment led by Hart and Kreutzmann. Joined in their sprawling percussion set-up by bassist Oteil Burbridge and abetted by EDMish loops, the sequence was highlighted by Hart’s playing of The Beam, a girder strung with piano wire (inspired by Francisco Lupica’s Cosmic Beam), filling the venue with cleansing low frequencies. In the traditional free-form “Space” segment, Mayer seemed—for perhaps the only time of the night—overmatched by Grateful Dead-brand weirdness, quickly resorting to speedy scales, whammy bar applications, and dexterous two-handed tapping techniques.
Perhaps the first player to step into the Garcia role unburdened by the Dead’s intricate history, Mayer has also succeeded at being a conduit for the band on his own terms. If Mayer is keeping some Deadheads away, others have been hopping on tour like it was the ’90s, appropriating crash pads, buying cross-country plane tickets, and inventing new unlicensed uses for the band’s Steal Your Face logo. Even without the presence of Garcia or Phil Lesh, the Co.’s central product is something worth more than the usual reunion paychecks (though those surely don’t hurt) but a way for the Dead and their extended acid karass to reassert their physical being, if only for a tour or three, and keep their collective metaphysical head together. Judging by the amount of high school and college aged audience members resembling their ’70s counterparts, though, new Deadheads are still being born. While Mayer’s camera-ready growl still seems a bit vanilla for Robert Hunter’s lyrics, during his time among the Dead, Josh’s guitar playing has evolved from soloing on Garcia’s favorite scales to more soulful inventions. On “The Days Between,” Garcia and Hunter’s mortality-facing 1993 meditation, sung with appropriate weight by Weir, Mayer built a slow-developing and glowing solo that was a quiet highlight of the performance.
By the end of the set, it was boogie time again, though, first with the band’s cover of Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away” and its iconic built-in clap-along. At Fenway Park, the clapping emerged midway through the tune in different pockets around the stadium, not in sync with each other (or the song) at first, but eventually coalescing. It was a good moment for the Deadheads, there, getting it together to stomp the Bo Diddley beat more-or-less in time, though the moment ended before the song. Before the encore, one Deadhead could be heard betting $20 that the band wouldn't play “One More Saturday Night,” Bob Weir’s preferred Saturday night closer for decades. “They’ve been playing crazy setlists,” the Deadhead will say in his defense, losing the bet within moments, but winning something rare and different anyway. Coming out with the band once again, Donna Jean provided her only howl of the night at the song’s crescendo, as overblown as it was in the ’70s but somehow better now, a sign of something endangered, a communal freak-flag hoisting in a dystopian America, a good ol’ Saturday night starring the Dead and their occasionally bewildered boy ward, John.
Jesse Jarnow is the author of Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America (Da Capo, 2016) and @HeadsNews