Audience Is Grateful For Return of “Dead”

"Perhaps my favorite aud show memory, but mostly because of the backstage interview I got with Jerry Garcia before the show (it appeared in the debut issue of Gusto 3 weeks later)." ... Dale Anderson
cheers,
dale

May 1977: reviewed By Dale Anderson

The little luminous sticker on Jerry Garcia’s solid-bodied electric guitar says, “The enemy is listening.” It must be Garcia’s strategy, then, to win them over by rocking their socks off.

That’s the little surprise tucked into the current edition of the Grateful Dead, and it took nearly 4 hours for all its rhythmic delights to unfold Monday night in Memorial Auditorium before 9,000 generally ecstatic witnesses.

With former mate Bill Kreutzman having returned to work beside Mickey Hart, there are two drummers now. And what a fine beat they lay down. It’s like instant power. No waiting.

So forget about that old half-hour warm-up period. The band is cooking within minutes under Garcia’s thin tenor and sensual chording as they open the night with “Help Is on the Way” from 1975’s “Blues for Allah.”

The heat of the following number, “Franklin’s Tower (Roll Away the Dew),” raises the possibility that they’ll boil the crowd out too early, but then they settle back to alternate selections from Garcia and guitarist Bob Weir.

Neatly-bearded Weir is the courtly cowboy on stage, sending up gunfighter ballads and ominous Western swing numbers like “Big River.”

Garcia, bushy-haired and graying, responds with energetic runs and spiffy trills, lifting fans to their feet, halting for intermission only after some rousing cosmic explorations in “The Music Never Stops.”

The second half features oldies like Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away” and the Rascals’ “Good Lovin’” and such Dead delights as “Bertha,” “Ship of Fools” and, finally, “Sugar Magnolia,” a sunny anthem from the height of their popular success 5 years ago.

Another aging talisman is their encore – the whimsical, Latin-flavored “Uncle John’s Band,” which embodies the innocent flipside of the road wisdom of what the kids are yelling for, the band’s all-time rave, “Truckin’.”

All is not perfect in this lively revised edition of the Dead, however. There’s the tuning problem. Long periods between numbers costs them some of their momentum and makes the crowd restive.

The fans, of course, offer a few surprises of their own. There’s the staggering crazy who nearly starts a brawl in this reviewer’s section. Particularly there’s the blond kid down front exhaling the flaming blast of lighter fluid. After half a dozen blasts, even the band is alarmed.