Dead & Company Steal More Hearts Than Faces at Bridgestone Arena

One thing that’s still true of the Grateful Dead concert experience — and was definitely true when the jam band’s current posthumous incarnation, Dead & Company, trucked into Bridgestone Arena Wednesday night — is that the performance, the jams, the set list, the noodle dancing and everything else that happens in the venue is only part of the picture. One thing that’s true about Nashville is that this city has more street names than streets. Both things were abundantly true when a parking lot at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Korean Veterans Boulevard, one long block from the arena, became “Shakedown Street” — the tailgate hangout for Deadheads, lot rats, DIY vendors, drug dealers, drug revelers, people with dogs, buskers crooning like Jerry and hippie chicks with dreadlocks and double-sided baby bjorns (not kidding!) who traveled Music City way in VW vans and painted school buses. Concertgoers who made a beeline to Bridgestone probably missed it, which is a shame, as this scene provided the most Dead-authentic backdrop we’d see all night.

As The Spin trekked down to the ‘Stone, we wondered if there’d be a lot scene at this show. Did that part of Dead culture die when the band drafted Dead n00b John Mayer (who says he didn’t even start listening to the band until 2011) to pinch hit for the late, great Jerry Garcia? Strolling down Demonbreun, we noticed the odd gaggle of hippies here and there, along with a predictably strong police presence. But as we made our way toward the back of the Convention Center, we saw a growing number of unkempt free spirits with index fingers raised high, hoping for a miracle ticket to the show (which ended up filling to about half-capacity). We were on foot, but by the time we got to Shakedown it felt like we might as well have taken a time machine. To a mixture of equal parts delight and horror (and a generous helping of amusement), we found the traveling circus that orbits around the Dead and its many post-JerBear incarnations was in full effect.

"Doses! K! Mushrooms! Molly!” a half-dozen sketchy randos whispered our way as we passed through the heart of the lot. For a moment there, we were tempted to tune in and drop out. A devil-on-our-shoulder voice kicked in with a when-in-Rome logic, and we started rationalizing why it would be a good idea to partake in an enhanced psychedelic experience. “Dude, it’s the Dead, no brainer, right?” “Seriously, bro, what if they play ‘Terrapin Station’ and it’s epic but, like, you spend the whole jam kicking yourself, lamenting that you could’ve totally been peaking right now!” “Come on, maaan, gonzo journalism, maaaan, do it!” And so, mainly just out of curiosity, but as noted, truly tempted, we engaged a crooked-top-hat-sporting, stoner-Willy Wonka-looking solicitor and asked how much he was selling doses for.

“Ten bucks for a hit, forty bucks for a strip,” he replied.

Now, it’s been a hot minute since The Spin bro'd down with our old buddy Ellis D. Trails, but we thought back to our younger days of bad decisions and instinctually commented that that seemed like a steep price. Our better judgment kicked in and the angel on our other shoulder slapped us across the dome piece, admonished us for being dumb and reminded us we were too goddamn old and gainfully employed to trip balls on motherfucking Wednesday. But even that sensible logic wasn’t enough to make us just say no. As Wavy Wonka, as we’ll call him, watched our mental hemming and hawing play out, he jumped in and tried to close the sale. “But they’re really good,” he said with an Eastwood stare and an assuring nod. “It’s where you wanna be.”

Was it? Was it really where we’d wanna be in the event that John Mayer blasts us with a firehose stream of slick, bluesy guitar splooge? What if the show sucks and its sad and that makes us sad? Trippy freak-out sad is definitely not where we want to be. And so we settled for cheap beer and moved on.

Twenty minutes later, inside the arena, as the band limped into a more-tepid-than-usual opening “Truckin’,” we quickly realized we’d made the right call.

Coming off the heels of this summer’s multi-stadium-sized Grateful Dead Fare Thee Well 50th anniversary reunion/farewell/mega-hot-ticket/pay-per-view bonanza — the biggest concert event of the year — which featured Jerry Garcia heir apparent Trey Anastasio, this Dead & Company trek looked like a cash-grab on paper. That’s mainly because beloved Dead bassist Phil Lesh, guy-who-made-perfect-sense Anastasio and longtime associate and onetime touring keyboardist Bruce Hornsby — who, along with keyboardist Jeff Chimenti, joined Dead survivors Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart — sat this one out. Taking their spots were bassist Oteil Burbridge and, of course, Mayer. So, onstage there was as much Dead as there was Company, resulting in a kind of Chinese Democracy Dead that also felt like a cash-grab in practice.

The thing is, at its best (during highlights like a wobbly to winning “Playing in the Band” that opened the second set), this band sounded kind of a lot like the Grateful Dead, but they never made it to sounding like the Dead. How could they with a guy like Mayer? Love or hate him, his playing is just too seamless to stand in for Garcia’s wild-card flourishes. Mayer toned down the breathy, raspy wheeze that defined such hits as “Daughters” and “Your Body Is a Wonderland” when singing Garcia classics like “Althea” and “West L.A. Fadeaway” — a song that’s always, to The Spin, sounded like a cross between Glenn Frey’s “Smuggler’s Blues” and a Jell-O mold. He also clearly did his homework, owning many of the songs like an honors student acing a final exam, but the tone from his sunburst POS PRS (Santana much?) not only didn't nail the Jerry sound, but sounded too much like he was trying too hard to do it. And at times his note-y wankiness stepped all over Weir’s crooning, leading us to consider shouting out a rarely uttered phrase: “Let Bobby sing!”

To be fair, Mayer was in a pretty awkward position here, stuck between doing his best Jerry impression — and in the process coming off like Joaquin Phoenix doing Johnny Cash — and finding a way to be himself without overwhelming the jams with inappropriately proficient Clapton-ness. But technicality never trumps feel, at least not in the Dead, and Mayer definitely had an easier time approximating Jerry on the technical end. His biggest hurdle here — and one that would ultimately prove insurmountable — is that he’s just not a psychedelic player, like, not at all. Bash Mayer all you like, though, on some level he deserves credit for realizing how cool the Dead stuff is, even if he was late to the game. He caught a lot of the inflections of Jerry, but he didn’t get weird, because he can’t, and thus reverted to his blues-rock comfort zone when let off the leash. He copped some of the right Garcia licks, but he never got trippy enough to make us regret passing on an LSD purchase.

This band was more of a jazz/fusion-y Dead adaptation. And that’s as much due to Burbridge’s style as Mayer’s. Burbridge is great, and he played really well. But because he’s more of a groove player, it was a bit different. Lesh, in some ways, is the anti-groove player — he hits downbeats the way Charlie Watts hits his hi-hat and snare drum at the same time, as in not at all. That upside-down-and-backwards feel is a cornerstone of what made the Dead so magical. Burbridge, on the other hand, kept the downbeats right in his pocket, realigning drummers Hart and Kreutzmann’s off-calibrated-alternator-belt rhythmic interplay, making for a tighter-but-less-authentic band, and one that kind of frustrated those of us who wanted to hear that weird, disorienting, trippy thing the Dead did in a way that no other band, jam or otherwise, could ever do.

“Truckin’ ” was a perfect example of this. There were some semi-spacey flourishes up front, but after they got through the vocals, the jam was pretty tame, and went briskly into a groovy “Loose Lucy.” The band eventually settled in and the jams did stretch out more and get heavier in the second set, and though this trip was longer than it was strange, it did have its moments. Bobby sounded great and looked like he was having fun, especially during a monster one-two punch of “New Speedway Boogie” and “Estimated Prophet.” Although a set-one cover of Marty Robbins’ “El Paso” was painfully slow, it was a nice send-up for country fans in the house. Predictably, the band further proved it knew where it was with an inevitable “Tennessee Jed,” which predictably was the biggest crowd-pleaser of the night, making a mini Bonnaroo of the densely weed-smoke-filled Bridgestone.

“Drums” and “Space” tested our sober-minded patience, but we’ve gotta give it up to Hart and Kreutzmann for actually getting super trippy with creepy sounds and flirting with EDM territory, conjuring what was truly the most classic spirit-of-the-actual-Dead moment with current sounds over nostalgic ones. But even we couldn’t take “Space” at a certain point, and went for a walk through the concourse, where heads were hanging, happy as clams, like kitchen congregators at a house party.

This show, like most reunions (or near-reunions), was ultimately all about nostalgia. And really, the joy of being there had so much more to do with what was going on everywhere else but the stage. As the band played, balloons bopped over heads and people danced and smiled like a happy swarm of 17-year cicadas having their first night out in a while. Honestly, though the show was musically solid, the performance didn't feel special. But being there was great!