John Mayer with "Dead & Company," MSG, 11/7/15. He just doesn't get it.
The show slips in and out of being entertaining and annoying. It's basically three surviving members of the Dead fronting a Dead covers band.
Mayer's vocal style reminds me a little too much of Dave Matthews. For some, that would be a bonus, unless of course you loathe Dave Matthews.
In part one, you will need to fast-forward about 20 minutes to the actual start of the performance. These two clips constitute the full show.
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In the early years, around 1969 till 1971, at which point Keith (and then later Donna) Godchaux came in to support and then replace an ailing Pigpen, the Dead were a loud, hard-edged, aggressive psychedelic band. They had their moments of quiet...one reason why "Workingman's Dead" and "American Beauty" found their way into a LOT of record collections belonging to non-DeadHeads is that they relied on more of a traditional song structure, that you could listen to them the same way that you might listen to a Neil Young or James Taylor album.
A major issue for me with the concert Dead is Jerry's up-and-down health. The band found their way back from his late-80s diabetic coma, but in the 90s, what you heard was often the sounds of a guy who had indulged in a little too much smack. The hoarseness, the off-key singing, the overall weakness in his voice were all the result of one thing...drugs.
Now, there are DeadHeads who will find magic in every show, but that's not me.
If you listen to Dick's Picks Volume 4...recorded February 13th & 14th 1970 at the Fillmore East...you get to hear a one-hour block that consists of two songs, "Dark Star" & "The Other One." At the 9:41 mark of "The Other One"...coming out of the "Drums" section...you hear the familiar rumble of Phil Lesh's bass, which brought the band into the main "song" section, and then Weir and Garcia's guitars EXPLODE and the band goes nuts into a section that can rightfully be compared to a similar moment in the "Resolution" section of John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme."
But that was one night.
One other nights, during any one of the hundreds of other times they played the same song, they could be sloppy, lacking in focus, lacking in energy, just lacking in general.
In concert, the Dead were all about moments.
And those moments were like snowflakes, pardon the cliche...but a moment for me might not be a moment for you or the next ten guys who hear it. I know people who swoon over those 30 minute crowd chant versions of "Not Fade Away" and they really tried my patience. Same for "Row Jimmy" or "Franklin's Tower" ("roll away, the dew...roll away, the dew...roll away, the dew...roll away, the dew...roll away, the dew..."
some of their highly repetitive "trance" songs might have been nifty with the right drugs but for me are the songs I skip through.
Hendrix was the same way. He was a genius but I have heard some live shows that were just God-awful.
There's plenty of respectable material in the Dead's studio catalog but most people, including the members of the band, will tell you they were never about that, it was all about the live experience.
And it can't be explained or agreed upon. It just is what it is, ya know?
