Dead and Company Take Us for a Long Ride at Jazz Fest

Dead and Company, by Danny Clinch

The Saturday headliners closed out the rainy day with a blue sky, touching all ages

Dead and Company played for hours. On the surface, catching the last 30 minutes of the Saturday headliner could have easily given you the gist of it. However, the deeper you sunk into the set, the feeling that there was something happening on stage stirred more and more. 

Dead and Company are what you expect to see at face value. Long, sparse guitar solos were the meat of the songs, the same groove seemed to have no beginning or end, and yet people seemed surprised and blown away every time. In total, they played 11 songs over the course of 3 hours. White people with dirty barefeet swayed back and forth. A young woman on the verge of passing out sat in the mud. The majority of the audience was a sea of bros in tie-dyed t-shirts seemingly having a spiritual experience. Some parts of the crowd almost felt like a Tulane frat, juxtaposed strongly against old, fully gray Deadheads. 

As the band went into “The Other One,” it started to make sense. “Spanish lady come to me, she lays on me this rose / It rainbow spirals round and round, it trembles and explodes,” Bob Weir sang as the crowd erupted in realization, his voice fraying at the edges. As the groove kept pulsing, you couldn’t help but feel that something buried in the past was coming alive.

Dead and Company consists of three original members of Grateful Dead (Bob Weir, Mickey Hart, and Bill Kreutzmann) plus John Mayer on lead guitar. Mayer complimented the group nicely, accompanying some of the greats with attention and admiration. Seeing Weir front the band was like seeing an old sailor man a ship. He knew every inch of the music. 

“Not Fade Away” proved that in order to understand Dead and Company, you have to surrender yourself to the rhythm section, which for the occasion included drummer Jay Lane instead of Kreutzmann, who bowed out of the final tour at the last minute. It’s a current that you have to jump into and stay in once you’re there, like a lazy river. Keyboardist Jeff Chimenti looked like a wizard with long, silver hair as poured himself over the Rhodes, letting the notes sing out.

Two drum kits sat towards the back of the stage, Hart on one kit, Lane on the other, both of them powering the band like rolling thunder in the distance. Jam band legend Oteil Burbridge matched their energy on bass, rocking back and forth in the thick of it. Mayer watched Weir for all of his moves, soloing softly and freely when it was time. As Weir stood in the center, long gray mustache and beard flowing, the undercurrent of Dead and Company took you. The music consumed us, and it was like time traveling. It was in these moments that the bare feet standers in the mud pit seemed a little bit right: there is nothing like the Grateful Dead, and Dead and Company captured that aura in a bottle.

Dead and Co’s last song fell to the iron fist of the Jazz Fest closing time at 7 p.m. The sound cut off while they were entering the heart of a jam, and even though the people around me had been hearing different iterations of the same thing for hours, their hearts nearly broke when they saw Weir strumming an electric guitar with no sound coming out of it. This didn’t phase the band. They looked at each other knowingly, as if they were always planning to play until the sound got cut off. Dead and Co gently put down their instruments, all moving to the center of the stage to bow and take a picture together. The hands of people, both old and young, rose up into the air, making a giant forest of the fairgrounds. A blue sky opened up above us, as if Dead and Company had been slowly pushing away those clouds all along.

Updated May 11 at 9:45 a.m.

The spelling of keyboard player Jeff Chimenti has been corrected. It was correct in her draft, but we didn’t notice that it was autocorrected into a spelling mistake.