Lazo Gitchos
Dead & Company, Summer 2023 Tour
It was July 8th and a hundred degrees, and a hum filled the air. Near George, Washington, twenty-seven thousand people watched the sun set over the Columbia River and welcomed the cooling evening. They had come for Dead and Company’s final show at the Gorge Amphitheater, the second to last stop on the Final Tour.
Behind me that night were a handful of tech-adjacent twenty-somethings, bobbing their heads and drinking from plastic water bottles. They had yet to be born when many of the musicians on stage rose to fame, or when many of the graying audience members saw their first Dead show. Those fans, the older ones, formed a sea of dancing bears and Steal-Your-Face insignias swirled in bright colors; they wore reverential expressions and the sacred psychedelic imagery of the Dead. General admission seating — a grassy, sloping bowl — was a tie-dye carnival. Long before the performers emerged, the crowd faced the stage. Everyone stood. There were no opening acts, no false idols. The showgoers were there to be churned in the spirit.
The band kicked off the night with “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo.” The frontmen were sweating. The upbeat song, heavy on the vocals, mellowed into a drawn-out noodly number. Later in the set, their fingers hot and the crowd warm, the band played “Loose Lucy,” less commonly heard live. John, standing in front of me, had been waiting to hear the song live—waiting, maybe, for years. He stood with his arms spread and raised, his palms facing the stage in benediction. His eyes were closed.
Social scientists and anthropologists, among others, have long struggled to articulate the line between a cult and a religion. It might be said that a cult is a sect of committed members of a cultural in-group who share the practice of beliefs and rituals organized around a charismatic leader, believed to embody the group’s values. It might not.
It is said that a religion is a cult whose leader has died. By this definition, the Grateful Dead are the apostles, and their fans are the believers. Jerry Garcia’s face, jovial, hairy, always smiling, was everywhere at the Gorge. He was printed on t-shirts, stuck on stickers, and inked onto tattoos. Sometimes he was just a disembodied beard, his unshavenness a symbol of rebellion and a fierce and powerful love. Garcia was the prophet of sound. His death in 1995, at the age of fifty-three, brought to an end the three-decade, 2,300-show run of the original Grateful Dead. He died of a heart attack in a drug rehabilitation facility in Lagunitas, California, fifteen miles from San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, the center of counterculture; the holy land of the Dead. Bob Weir, the Grateful Dead’s (and now Dead and Co.’s) guitarist, has said that a fear of crowds and the pressure of fan-worship loaded Garcia with stress and exacerbated his stage fright, driving him to drug use and ultimately to his death. The people have a way of murdering their reluctant messiahs.
When Garcia died, the followers of the Dead splintered into sects. The purists went into hiding. The generalists turned to cover acts like Dark Star Orchestra. Bob Weir loyalists followed Weir’s other bands: WolfBros, Kingfish, Bobby and the Midnites. The original Grateful Dead members, including Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, and Bill Kreutzmann, never stopped playing the Dead. When several of them formed Further — named for Ken Kesey’s psychedelically-painted school bus — in 2009, it represented another rebirth. When Further disbanded in 2014, fans held their breath.
They didn’t have to wait for long. Dead and Company was born in 2015, when Bob Weir and John Mayer played “Althea” together on the Late Late Show. Colloquially shortened to “Dead and Co.,” the group included original Grateful Dead drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann (who declined to join “The Final Tour”), and jazz bassist and vocalist Oteil Burbridge. It was a quick jump from a mainstream talk show to the world of the 21st-century mega-concert. But without Garcia, who formed the nexus of musical styles that made the Dead’s iconic sound, maintaining the culture of the Dead — not to mention the ticket sales — was a challenge. But the Dead, and their fans, have continued to reincarnate.
Two years before Garcia died, the sociologist James T. Richardson described cults as “deriving their inspiration from outside of the predominant religious culture.” Such were the Dead, born in the 1960s, when post-war suburban lethargy had just barely survived the counterculture onslaught of the Beat Generation. The music scene, inhabited by more overtly ideological groups like The Doors, thrived outside of the dominant culture, and The Dead had their own place in the radical mix. From their earliest days in the Bay Area, the Dead were a road band. The tour was a pilgrimage, a community, an ecstasy on par with a traveling tent revival. In thirty years, the Dead played music in front of more people than any group in the history of the world. But as the decades, and tours, went on, the Dead’s zealots settled into the mainstream. The Deadheads became middle-class, middle-aged, white, suburban. At the Gorge, Seattle’s overgrown technology industry and its hangers-on clung to the lingering remnants of that faith. Not believers. Just fans.
A week later, the sun would set on Dead and Co. for good when “The Final Tour” ended with three sold-out shows at Oracle Park in San Francisco. But what could have been a tired encore to decades of the Dead’s inventive success had some musical—and spiritual—chops of its own.
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At the Gorge, with expensive sound equipment and a total dedication to the music itself, Dead and Co. sounded clean. Mayer and Burbridge brought a finesse that earlier versions of the Dead had lacked. Most or all of the performers played sober. For a band that got its start playing the Acid Tests of the 1960s, the move away from ritual alteration of mind felt like almost an abandonment of religious practice: no more worship, no more interaction with the devotees in the audience.
After “Loose Lucy,” glancing at each other from mirrored positions on the stage, Weir and Mayer guided the crowd into “Friend of the Devil.” Many in the crowd mouthed the words. Some danced. Several held a frozen water bottle to their chest. The two singers told the story, characteristically absurd and strange. “I went down to the levee, but the Devil caught me there. He took my twenty dollar bill, and he vanished in the air.” Burbridge, in bright tie-dye and his trademark face paint, smiled and looked like a Buddha. Someone next to me said, “I hope Oteil sings tonight,” and several people murmured in agreement. He did not sing that night, but his crisp, upbeat bass line tied the drums’ rhythm to the forward guitars.
As it began to get dark, the tunes shifted from the long-noted twangier stuff to an acceleration that continued — aided by a sophisticated light show rigged at the Gorge for the EDM festivals more typical of the venue — until the rapture-sound of “Drums/Space,” which seemed like it contained more time signatures than there are tie-dye patterns. Hart and drummer Jay Lane, the punk and ska specialist who replaced Kreutzmann for “The Final Tour,” dueled their drum kits against each other in the the song’s chilling, mesmerizing rhythm, a near-omnipresent percussion and improvisation interlude at the show’s sonic peak.
Then Weir stepped up to the mic for the cool-down, belting three classics in a row in the same voice found on concert recordings a half century old: “Dark Star,” “Althea,” “Stella Blue.” The outro of each grew longer, and the audience more rapt. For most revelers, this would be the last stop, the last show. But Dead and Co. had one more weekend. It was dark, and the crowd was dancing. The last song of the night, its title true for the first time in almost three decades, was “One More Saturday Night.”
There was no encore. The five men filed off the stage quickly.
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I joined the river of people walking the fenced path toward Shakedown Street, so-called after the song of the same name. The vendor section at Dead shows got its start as a way for Deadheads to keep touring, selling veggie burritos, tie-dye shirts, pins, or posters to buy gas that would carry them to the next stop. At the Gorge, Shakedown Street was lined with a different kind of follower. Pairs of young men wheeled steel tanks on dollies, fists full of balloons. “Ice cold fatties! Ice cold air!” They sold three balloons of nitrous oxide for twenty dollars. “And he vanished in the air,” Jerry Garcia sang in “Friend of the Devil.” I asked one man where he came from. He said L.A., and that he and the others follow the shows. He didn’t seem to know about the music, or believe in it. The crowd moved on past another pair a few yards down, then another—dozens in all.
Later that night, long after the show, there was a man running back and forth on the road to the campground. He was covering his eyes with his hands. Over and over he repeated, “No more Mr. Nice Guy, no more Mr. Nice Guy.” He had been to hundreds of shows, seen Jerry play dozens of times, and lived a life of devotion. Tonight, in the street beside the men selling nitrous oxide balloons and t-shirts to old-heads and faithful newcomers, it was all fading into myth. Another man with a gray beard and tie-dye shirt was comforting him, afraid he might become violent if left alone. Holy war is uncommon, but not unheard of, among Deadheads. The rest of Shakedown Street was settling down, packing pop-up tents and bins of pins and posters bound for San Francisco, to end it where it all started—with One More Saturday Night.