My goal for 2019 is to write at least a little something about every show I see, preferably by the next day, we’ll see how it goes. I will compile weekly and post here as-is.
So, in that spirit, this is the twenty-ninth of hopefully 52 posts…
17jul19
Aimee Mann at MHOW
I’ve seen Aimee Mann probably 4 or 5 times and it’s always a delight. She’s just a goddamn pro who has amazing songs, a great band and knows how to put on a great show. I was struck last night by how generous she is with Jonathan Coulton who was the opener, but is more like a collaborator who contributed some heavy lifting on the songwriting on her last record and has been touring with her for a couple years. It would be so easy for her to take credit for the work he did, but she does the opposite and gives him a spotlight during the set.
Anyway, great show. My review is here: https://thebowerypresents.tumblr.com/post/186378334537/amhow
Wayne Krantz, Josh DION, Orlando Le Fleming @ 55 Bar (late set)
In lieu of reviewing another spectacular set with the same trio two weeks in a row (not sure he’s done that yet this year), I’m just linking to this must-read interview with Wayne that came out today. It sums up so much of what I’ve tried to capture writing about this gig every week, but much more coherent in his own words.
http://www.abstractlogix.com/a-chat-with-wayne-krantz/
I will say that Orlando and Josh were so fucking great last night, especially that bass. Sorry to be missing this gig next week.
18Jul19
Trying to actually use all my days off this year, so trying to squeeze in some random days for tooling around the city, etc and yesterday seemed like a good opportunity to do so. Of course, it happened to be the day that had the worst forecast in a while, but I didn’t get too rained on and got to see three great free outdoor shows all the while.
Fantastic Negrito @ BAM Metrotech
It’s been a long while since I’ve seen one of these free Thursday noontime shows in downtown Brooklyn. Back when I was living down the street with a newborn, I made it to a couple of them, but otherwise not that easy to hit. Part of the reason for taking this Thursday off was to hit one of these and I targeted this one as a show-to-hit. I saw Fantastic Negrito at Newport last year and he clearly has that magnetic frontman thing that I don’t think you can learn… he clearly was made to be up on stage singing his music and he didn’t disappoint Thursday. Although I do think he was a bit disappointed with the lunchtime crowd who were almost entirely content to sit in their chairs and take in the music from their relaxed positions. He tried his best the whole set to get people up and dancing, but I think he underestimated the “this is my lunch hour, bub” aspect of the show. I mean, what did he expect?
But that’s getting a little ahead of myself as this show actually had an opener which was the Brooklyn United Marching Band, a drumline of kids who looked to range from early middle school to maybe a few high schoolers. They were pretty great and their teacher/director/hype man did a nice job letting people know about the program they’re in and the places they’ve gone/are going to without being too blabby. Was tough not to love these kids, they were entertaining and groovy and had some fun choreography and lasted just long enough before it came close to getting tedious.
Negrito played from about 12:30 til almost 2. His band featured a lead guitarist, a drummer and a guy playing all sorts of keys including the synth bass which sounded pretty great the whole show, I thought. His sound is kind of a deceptive blues music, the first few songs were more overtly bluesy, but as it went on, he added so much more depth to it that it was easy to forget what was buried underneath it all. The band was quite good, but this is really a one-man thing, it’s Fantastic Negrito’s presence and songwriting and everything else is just supporting that. I looked it up later, I was surprised to see that he’s 51 years old! I would’ve guessed 30 maybe. But it does explain some of the more old school vein of content for some of his songs that border on inappropriate at times. There was a lot of political subtext, immigration, inequality, etc. all found their way into the music. A few of his songs are so freakin’ good, with these almost chanted melodies, dark and kind of weird and awesome, that sound like they’ve come from somewhere ancient. Even though he was playfully frustrated with the crowd, he did get people to sing along and is the kind of guy who is going to put on a killer show no matter what the audience gives him back. I thought it was great and definitely recommend checking him out if/when he comes back to town.
Low Cut Connie @ Wagner Park
Enjoyed a nice stroll across the Brooklyn Bridge and a fantastic sandwich and some pensive moments at the 9/11 Memorial before leisurely making my way to Battery Park City. It struck me that around the same time period when I saw a show or two at the Metrotech series, we were also taking the kids regularly to see free shows in Lower Manhattan, which there used to be so many more, it seems. The River & Blues series at Wagner Park persists and always has some great acts playing in a beautiful spot with the river behind, boats passing behind the stage and the Statue of Liberty hanging out in the distance. I definitely recommend hitting one of these shows if you can (War & Treaty play there next week), it’s a nice spot and the shows start/end early so, like, easy. Having outmaneuvered the rain thus far, the radar was looking incredibly iffy for this one and I was certain I was going to get poured on. Surprisingly, there were a few drops at the start, but ended up not being a problem.
The act last night was Low Cut Connie whom I don’t think I had seen before. Interesting to go from the kind of frontman Fantastic Negrito is to the kind of frontman Adam Weiner is. Over the course of the set he referenced both Diana Ross (playing in the rain in Central Park) and Tina Turner (he has a song dedicated to herm “Shake It Little Tina”) and I think those two serve as sorts of role models for his stage presence, with a flamboyant touch of Freddie Mercury and Elton John thrown in. Altogether, it’s a bit of a hoot and fuels the live show of kind of gritty R&B rock and roll. Two, sometimes three guitars, bass, drums and Weiner occasionally banging away at his piano, but mostly doing acrobatics on top of it while singing and dancing and working the audience. He invited more and more people to come dance up front and they didn’t hesitate, although it was clear there were a lot of die-hard fans in the audience, singing along to every word and freakin’ loving it. From that datapoint, I imagine they played all their favorites, but it was all just a lot of old school rock-and-roll fun. At one point he let the band jam out a bit and he just walked around the crowd hugging people, which maybe he does that every night, but I found it endearing, I have to say. The band somehow turned this rather sedate early rainy Thursday evening by the water into this no-work-tomorrow lovefest party. Very much enjoyed it., but jetted a little bit early, maybe 40 minutes into the set, to make sure I had time to make it to Brooklyn in time for…
I’m With Her @ Prospect Park Bandshell
I made it in time for the last song from opener Darlingside, but I saw them twice last year and so I’m happy to have traded in their set for the Low Cut Connie extravaganza.
If you don’t know, I’m With Her is Aoife O’Donovan, Sara Watkins and Sara Jarosz, three brilliant, wonderful Americana musicians with careers I’ve been following on their own. They all have great voices, they all can play their instrument(s) and they all can write a fucking song. (and they all are repeat guests on Live From Here, which is not necessarily a reason to love them, but is definitely not not a reason to love them). That all being said, there’s no reason that those three pieces should necessarily fit together to make something good or great, but this is one of those cases where, somewhat impossibly, the whole is greater than the sum. I mean… wow!. I have seen all three of them on their own multiple times, especially Jarosz who I’ve been musically smitten with since seeing her at Grey Fox bluegrass festival many years ago and had the pleasure of seeing at Rockwood Music Hall (the smallest room) multiple times. Over the years she’s gone from mandolin wunderkind (that first time I saw her she was literally in a mandolin workshop with Sam Bush, Ronnie McCoury and David Grisman and totally held her own with probably the three best mando players) to someone who kind of hides her unnatural talents on the instrument while blossoming into the full package singer/songwriter/collaborator extraordinaire. I’d seen all of them, but had only seen any of the trio at Newport a couple years back in a set that was a combination of I’m With Her and the Punch Brothers (and Julian Lage!) and so, was definitely not an honest-to-goodness I’m With Her experience.
It was interesting for me, after seeing the previous two acts earlier in the day, to think about who was the “frontwoman” in this band? Clearly, the answer is “no one,” but the interesting thing was how very true this was, how truly egalitarian the trio is. Maybe behind the scenes there’s one that takes charge and makes the final decision, but I’m guessing not. I’m guessing the “her” in “I’m With Her” is honestly all of them. They all took the lead on different songs, each of their musical points of view came through in the songs, each of their voices carried equally into the Brooklyn night. Although O’Donovan is not really a soloist, her guitar playing held its ground in the mix with the other two who are world-class instrumentalists. And it was easy to forget how good they all are at their instruments, because their voices and their songwriting are so spectacular, so mesmerizing. And while they are quite pretty, they don’t have these “heavenly” voices either, and they’re all so different, O’Donovan with this sweet alto and Jarosz with a slightly-weathered twang and Watkins with a rather ridiculous range and just enough crackle. It was easy to get lost in the voices, how they worked separately and then fit together in twos and threes. Occasionally gusts of wind would blow over the microphones and enter the mix, the atmosphere singing along, bringing a haunted energy to the magic. So, it would come as occasional surprise when they’d actually play those instruments, when Watkins took a fiddle solo, managing multiple notes at a time and coaxing some emotion out it with her bow; when Jarosz showed flashes of her mandolin brilliance, elegance mixed with traditional flair. Sara also played guitar and her 8-string guitar thing (always forget the name of this) that creates such a different sound, like a musical time machine, as well as a banjo that was perhaps the most evocative of all. She’s really a goddamn Americana genius.
They played mostly originals, songs they had written for this group, which made the fit very comfortable and it showed. They did a few covers, mostly bluegrassy stuff, John Hartford, John Hiatt, etc. and perhaps the highlight was one they had done writing music for lyrics/poem by Johnny Cash. For a few songs they came up front and did the single-mic thing, each playing one of their own solo songs, here you could really get a taste for how different their individual artistry is and how well it fits together. And then they did a short bit of pure bluegrass numbers. Like the Punch Brothers, I’m With Her uses bluegrass as a platform to explore their collective musical directions. Unlike the Punch Bros, they don’t push on the esoteric side too hard, there aren’t any classical fugues in this band or Radiohead covers for that matter. Not that they couldn’t do that, I have no doubt they can do whatever they want, it’s that it’s not what they want to do. They have a passion for Americana music and exploring spaces of beauty and harmony therein and it comes out in the music they play.
All in all, I though the set was stunning. It was the kind of set that they’ve rehearsed and plotted, with points A, B and C that arc across an evening, a set they’ve probably played a zillion times together. I didn’t notice one reference to a setlist or question about what song was next,the execution just flowed naturally and perfectly. What’s amazing is that they can imbue such stage choreography with such kindness and generosity and genuine happiness and honest emotion towards each other and the music. A real treat to watch, one of the better shows I’ve seen at the Bandshell in a while (and I’ve seen some great ones!).
19Jul19
No Signal @ The Stone
Fun to put the “doesn’t matter what’s going on at the Stone” to test last night as we hit the Friday night set. This week is being curated by clarinetist Aaron Novik, a musician I am not familiar with, but last night his band “No Signal” had several musicians in it that I dig and the lineup looked pretty damn interesting, so why not roll the dice?
The band was actually a two-clarinet, two-guitar, two-mallet-percussion affair, so some sort of weird triple-duo or double-trio thing going on. It was Novik and Jeremiah Cymerman on clarinets, Ava Mendoza and Nick Millevoi on guitars and Ches Smith on vibes (and drums) and Shayna Dunkelman on xylophone (and drums). Apparently the clarinets/guitars part is a maybe-regular band called No Signal and the two percussionists were special guests who played both the first and last songs.
The music was, uh, challenging. The music was apparently all composed with the first piece being a “new” piece that was maybe the most out there of them all. It started with competing trilling from Smith and Dunkelman before the other instruments came in. What he explained about mid-set (an important piece of information!) was that the clarinets were actually a 1/2 set out of key (am I saying this right?) from each other, one an “A clarinet and one a “B flat clarinet” and furthermore the two guitars were tuned a half-step from each other. In a way, the music was supposed to be challenging, in a way, it wasn’t built to be enjoyed per se. Which isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy the set. I enjoyed it, I realized, in a way in which I enjoyed the experience as it was happening, how my mind would seek out patterns where perhaps none existed, where my ear would look for rhythms that weren’t there, the way the negative spaces that were left unfilled with the clamor of clarinet and guitar perhaps held something to “hear.” At one point Novik called it “insanity” and it was chaotic and cataclysmic. It was as if in some post-apocalyptic landscape, these were the only four instruments left and this was the music that best described whatever tragedy had befallen humanity.
They brought Smith and Dunkelman back out for the last piece (of four, I believe). Instead of playing vibes/xylophone, Smith sat at a drumkit and Dunkelman stood in front of two toms with drumsticks in her hand at the ready. The song started in a slightly less chaotic space than the previous three, bits of what you might construe as melody flittered about within the noise, I had this feeling of great anticipation as the two drummers kind of waited as the sound built, like when they came in was going to be some sort of cathartic release, the climax of the 50 or minutes leading up to that moment. This release was delayed as the clarinets and guitars clanged into each other, half-steps growing to millions of miles and mere nanometers and then finally, finally, Novick gave a nod to the drummers and, indeed, it was a glorious rush as they brought some rhythm to the room, an energy that had been missing. I was expecting a minute of this cacophony and then a fare-thee-well into the muggy night. But, no, not even close. They banged away and clamored and evoked the apocalypse for many, many minutes. Just mind-numbing, loud (maybe I should’ve put my earplugs in??), craziness that kept going and going and going. It was intense and, quite frankly, awesome. Going and going and going. Dunkelman seemed to take the focus, banging these simple rhythms and then changing them, perhaps out of boredom or muscle strain, perhaps out of some artistic notion, but she shifted the improvisation 3 or 4 times as it kept going and going, was it getting louder or did it just seem that way? And when it finally did come to a close, well, like a fever that breaks, a rainstorm that ends an unbearable hot spell, the experience was full-on aaaaaaah.
And as we get up to go, Novick is like “if you like this music, the album just came out today” and I can definitely say that yes, I enjoyed my time in the Stone last night, but I would never put that music on in my house or car or earbuds. The experience is where it was at.
Dave Harrington’s Merry Pranksters @ Nublu 151
The trip to the Stone was a bit of a timekiller to help get us to the midnight set at Nublu, but even that only got us partway there. We actually caught a movie in between shows, which is fun.
Made it to Nublu around 12:30, maybe halfway into the first set and it always is when you walk into Nublu for a set already in progress, it was like stepping out onto another planet. Actually, at that point, it was July 20th, the 50th anniversary of the moon landing and so, the appropriate metaphor for the show was definitely a journey to the moon, just outside the Earth’s atmosphere, but a completely alien terrain with just a fraction of our gravity.
The band last night was Harrington, Spencer Zahn on bass, Jeremy Gustin on drums, Yuka Honda on keys, Stuart Bogie on horns (sax, clarinet, flute) and Mauro Refosco on percussion. (Kenny Wolleson was billed as a second percussion but wasn’t there and as superlatively awesome as Wolleson is, I don’t know how much better he could have made the show last night… which is to say, he was missed but also not missed). The latter half of the second set was really driven by Bogie, I thought, spacejazz explorations of saxophone and clarinet (what a different clarinet than what we had seen at the Stone, but also, how often do you see two shows featuring clarinet in a night?). Compared to the second set, I thought it suffered in this way… not that it wasn’t brilliant, it was, it was supremely interesting and groovy and all that, but it did have this horn focus that left the rest of the band meandering a little bit.
The band broke a little after 1 and we were treated to a nice long danceparty DJ set from Chris Tart that was, as usual, quite awesome. So often in these situations, I’d succumb to the maybe just time to go home urge, I mean, the setbreak was going to be 40+ minutes, but also the Merry Pranksters are built for late night and I had absolutely nothing to do the next day, and so there was no way I was going home. The amazing thing about Nublu is that people just keep streaming in, 1, 1:30, approaching 2am and not only are people not going home, but more people are arriving, randos coming in out of the East Village to grab a drink and dance and livemusic weirdos looking for the latenight jams. They all happily mix on the dancefloor at Nublu and Tart had them all feeling pretty good.
This is all significant because the room was kind of locked into the DJ pretty well as the band, who had mostly been mingling around the room, took the stage again a little bit before 2am. Whatever deep groove was coming from the DJ booth bled to the stage by osmosis, first by Zahn on the bass and then bubbling to the rest of the band. The transition was smooth — I’ve seen Harrington projects do this at Nublu before — so fucking smooth as the funk that was coming from the side of the room was now there in the flesh on stage in front. They took that groove deeeeep. As good as the early set was, the late set started in almost perfect fashion and just got better from there.
Here I must point out something you may already know if you’ve read these regular babblings. That is that Harrington, Zahn and Gustin have a kinda-regular thing at LunAtico, a not-quite-monthly thing that was a thing and now is a band that’s coalesced around some material and maybe is recording an album (or already has?). They play for 10 or so people in BedStuy and make some of the most magical, groovy, without-a-plan music you could imagine. They’re terrific together and seem to get better each time they play. And this is important because when you have a band like this, where the three of them are there, but surrounded by these other musicians, that magic is still in the room, the chemistry between them exists and fuels the jams, those three motherfuckers are locked in like {pick your favorite three musicians with great chemistry} and maybe it’s not obvious to everyone in the room, but it’s obvious as the giant disco ball hanging above the floor to me. And the thing is, last night, that shit was pervasive. it allowed the band to move so easily, to transition from the DJ to the stage, from one spacegroove to another. Here Bogie was more integrated, he respected the core trio and worked to make what they were doing better.
Which is all a very longwinded way of saying that the music was spectacular. The Merry Pranksters are really built for late night, their first gig was a postshow thing several summers ago and even if it appears to the naked eye that many of the members are the same as Harrington groups with different names, when he calls it “Merry Pranksters” know that the intent is to make the late night scene a killer one. So you get danceable grooves and you get blissed out holyshit-jams and you get electroweirdness. We got all that and more. And the thing about these Harrington projects is that it’s sometimes easy to forget that Dave fucking Harrington is in them, because he shifts to bandleader mode so easily he’s happy to let the rest of his band do the heavy lifting. At times, it was clearly Zahn leading things, melting funk with experimental improvisation, shifting the jam in subtle ways, letting it meander and morph and then shifting it again. But, you know, Dave is in the band and he picks his moments and before you know it, his twinkling little licks, little drops of molten guitar, start to bead up and roll into each other, creating larger droplets and these combine into rivulets, a stream of melody, fingers of electric guitar the light up the room and a steady pace, it grows and grows, drops to streams to rivers to a torrent of music, ecstatic peaks flowing out and, like whooooah, that’s good shit.
And what I love is when it’s good, the band knows it’s good and that makes it even better. At one point, after a rather expansive improv excursion, Dave looked at the band, everyone coming out of a trance, smiles emerging, feeling it and after a moment’s consideration, says to the rest of his Pranksters, “I think that’s it!” It was as simple as that, but so much in those words, so much realization of how good it had been, how adding anything else wouldn’t add anything else. Sure, we got an encore out of them, but the damage was done, another blissful late night at Nublu, what should be a regular occurrence on Ave C. Looking forward to the next one, already… don’t miss it.
21Jul19 High Time @ Union Pool
I have a hard time seeing a band play the Grateful Dead without my head spinning into all sorts of academic wormholes. What is it about this band/music/scene that persists so strongly 50+ years and counting? I am increasingly fascinated with it, the infinite facets of the phenomenon, the band and its music as a lens, on one side all of these different influences and influenced, the mythology, the history, the statistics, all of it, focused through this band and then in the far field, out here in 2019, all of these bands still playing the music or playing music strongly influenced by the music. It’s hard to wrap your head around. I have become convinced that there’s no wrong way to do the Grateful Dead and there’s no way you can be in a room where the Dead is being played and have a bad time, to not enjoy it. The proliferation of bands that play GD music is a natural result.
And so you have all these takes on it: Grateful Dead as bluegrass band, Grateful Dead as jazzfusion, Grateful Dead as bar band. For many, many years Dead cover bands were made up of people who largely saw the band in the 80’s. That may be generalizing, but it’s more or less true and they played, generally, for people who saw the bands largely in the 80’s and 90’s. And the thing about the Dead in the 80’s and the 90’s is that it was a religion at that point, so much built in as canon, with its own Tanach and Talmud and the people playing the music (rightfully) revered it and these axioms as such. All well and good. Today’s newest “cover bands” or “Dead interpreters” are made up of younger people, mostly, people who didn’t grow up going to Dead shows, who probably didn’t see Jerry Garcia play ever, who know the Dead from the recordings. This creates a much different dynamic.
So, that’s all a long way of introducing the fact that I finally saw High Time play last night, their second of two sold out shows at their “home” base of Union Pool. I can’t help but compare/contrast this band with Joe Russo’s Almost Dead. Not the music, per se, or how good they are, whatever that means, but more their philosophy and approach. The main reason why the two bands are kind of linked in my head is that I am pretty sure that High Time played their first gig the same weekend that JRAD played theirs, or if not their first gig, one of their very first gigs, at some small venue in Brooklyn. I may be completely mixing them up with someone else, but I think I’m right and if I am, that’s kind of funny/weird. The thing with JRAD is that it’s a bunch of guys that never saw the Dead play but also didn’t listen to the Dead at all, and so all that religion means nothing to them which is part of the appeal, at least at the start. JRAD is like if the Dead were led by John Bonham and jammed the music out like they were Phish. High Time on the other hand, (probably) never saw the Dead or Jerry but they obviously listened to a fuckton of Dead shows. They pulverized it all and emulsified it and consumed it and it’s flowing through their cardiovascular like vitamins. High Time plays only the music of the Grateful Dead from 1968–1974 and they play it like a band led by Keith Moon who just like the rock the fuck out.
The first 2/3 of the first set was just pure rock and roll. The songs were Dead songs — US Blues and Tennessee Jed and Loser and Bertha — and the energy was GD at their primitive rockingest. Fun! The focus for me was the dude on the drums who played recklessly, often at tangents to the rest of the band. That was the tone of the show to me, the appeal of the band is the energy and the energy comes from that drummer. The lead guitarist is an interesting kind of “fake Jerry” who is clearly reaching his FDA recommended dose of Vitamin JG, but all these different Garcia licks and riffs and affectations are chopped and reconfigured, so he’s constantly spiraling htese Garcia motifs out of his guitar, instantly recognizable sound palette, but manages to not sound too much like he’s ripping it off. It works. There’s not this feeling of extreme musicianship or of a band that’s got amazing chemistry — in fact, there were a couple unforgivable trainwrecky moments along the way, missed verses, guys returning from “jams” at different times like cars approaching an intersection where the lights aren’t working. At the end of the first set came the first signs of some psychedelic weirdness and flashes of creativity, an extended outro from Mississippi Half-Step that morphed into a Dark Star jam very nicely and ended up backing into the first verse of Dark Star to end the set, like they had inverted the jam/verse parts. That was cool.
A major part of the show was the visuals, liquid lights and projections done by Macrodose who have become one of the best in the city. I love the way they wrap their visuals around the entire room. Union Pool is kind of a perfect fit for them and they turned the whole place tie-dyed, with a dynamic technicolor display that constantly changed, sometimes in sync with, sometimes in contention with the music. Frankly, part of the appeal to me was the visuals and the room. Part of that thing seeing Dead cover bands is where you never got to see the Grateful Dead jam like they did in 1972 and so it’s great to see a band like High Time capture that spirit, but even better to capture it in a small room with a bunch of young heads capturing some little bit of the essence of that unknowable what-it-must’ve-been-like energy. To see the music played in more-than-reasonable facsimile in a room the size and vibe of Union Pool for $15 on a Sunday night with those bubbles of color popping above, in front and all around you makes the scene.
The second set started with 3 acoustic tunes played without amplification. The crowd sang along to a great Cumberland Blues and a really touching version of Ripple. A good time to mention that a big strength of the band is the vocals, because I think everyone in the band can sing, and they share the vocals nicely without trying to sound like anyone in the band. They plugged back in and did a nice 30–40 minutes of “hits” with some heady Dead-style jamming in between. Eyes of the World and St. Stephen and Wharf Rat and a set closing Lovelight. St. Stephen is the perfect song for this band, the combination of headbanger/fistpumper energy and psychedelic melody. They crushed it pretty good. The band’s jams really crux around the lead guitarist/bassist/drum trio. I had this desire to just see those three guys go hogwild on St Stephen and some other Dead tunes. Does anyone do “power trio Dead?” I’d love to see something like that, just bare-bones shredder style. What was interesting to me was that they kind of led up to the transition to the Eleven after Stephen and it really felt like they were going to drop into it and then they did this veering left turn into Wharf Rat. I was kind of wondering how well they would handle the Eleven, like if they were up to it, and maybe they are and maybe they aren’t, but if they aren’t and their way of compensating is cool segues into a very good Wharf Rat, well, that’s a nice silver lining. I’m not a huge Wharf Rat fan, but this one was actually good, uptempo and well-played and they opened up into another jam that was more or less Mind Left Body. That was on-point, my favorite thing they did, because you don’t even see a lot of Dead cover bands play MLB at all and it really captures the spirit of the era very well, the way the band would coalesce around predetermined themes and use that as a springboard. I imagine it was planned here by High Time and good for them. I say “jams” throughout, but in subtle ways it definitely felt like the guitarist noodling and meandering and the rest of the band following a half-step behind. When they got to Lovelight, it was definitely back into a comfort zone… this band likes to rock.
They came back out for an encore and played a perfect-closer Viola Lee Blues that jammed right up to 11pm on the nose. They really 69-Dead’d this one, out and back, out and back. The return hit wasn’t always 100% tight, but the spirit was there and it worked the crowd pretty good. All in all, a very fun show, a better-than-average Dead cover band who have defined their boundary conditions smartly and seem to know what they’re doing inside those constraints. I have no idea what it was like to see the Grateful Dead in a club in the late 60's/early 70’s, but I do know what it’s like to see High Time try to recreate it and damn, it was pretty great.
