April 27, 2009

Bring Out Your Dead


OK, so I was wrong. No not about the waterboarding!
About The Dead

What a show at Madison Square Garden Saturday nite. Warren Haynes ain't Jerry, but he's close enough for rock n roll.

The first set focused on the Garcia/Hunter ouerve- plus a Cassidy for another fallen icon.

The second set... all pre '73, with a real bias towards "Anthem Of The Sun". The Gimme Shelter was everything that you wouldn't expect it to be... it freakin' rocked.

Whatever you want to say about the aura, emotion and vibe that Garcia brought to the game has to be weighted against the lack of energy, imagination and creativity that the Grateful Dead also suffered throughout their last years.

There have been so many shows over the past 14 post-Jerry years that kicked the crap over the 90's GD.
The MSG was certainly one.

On to New Jersey!

3 comments:

Paticus said...

I didn't get to see them on this tour(the ticket prices AND them not playing near enough to me are 2 reasons why), but I have heard very good things about the tour.
I have been wondering, though, if maybe part of the energy stems from the fact that they are at a point where they CAN tour, but they don't NEED to. It seems that towards the end of the run in the 90's they needed to tour to pay for the rather bloated infrastructure they had built that was GDP, and that if they had been able to play a little less, Garcia might have been able to recharge a little bit(detox a little bit, too), and they may have had fewer, but better shows.
i hope you don't mind that i laid this out here. I came over from Zoooma's blog, and liked this post(amongst others),and it had me asking these questions, so I thought I'd see what you thought.
peace- pjb

Nazz Nomad said...

Hi Paticus-
Agreed- I think the remaining members look at the opp to tour as a prviledge at this point, rather than a financial obligation.
With the finish line getting closer every day, they'd be nuts not to take every chance they can to get their rocks off playing in front of the faithful.

Sven said...

Hey, I saw this show. You were dead-on (see what I did there?).
I gather from some of your other posts that you are perhaps a Nassau Countyite. Me too.
Thanks for the music!