Brokedown Palace: Things To Come

Phil Lesh & Friends head out on a mammoth fall tour a week from Saturday with a new, lower budget lineup. Hey, let’s get real for a second here. Just you and me. Take emotional attachment out of it. The incredibly complementary John Molo remains Phil’s drummer of choice, and that’s a good thing, but is it really possible to get off-the-chain excited about Particle’s Steve Molitz, the talented but charisma-less Larry “Peter Gallagher” Campbell and unproven youngster Jackie Greene?

But the future appears brighter than we thought. The more I look into the career resume of Greene, the more I’d like to see what he can do with Phil — I’m picturing Marty McFly wowing unsuspecting crowds that underestimate the cherubic face. Seriously, check out his self-assured performance on Conan last year and his Bonnaroo appearance (at which he issued tickets to the Guns Show) and tell me he doesn’t at least have pretty crazy chops as a frontman as a 26-year-old.

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Well Mr. Lesh’s son yesterday posted onto The YouTube a private rehearsal involving Phil and Greene in Lesh’s house, the duo playing an acoustic Brokedown Palace. Everyone will react differently, the video likely falling somewhere along the spectrum between “That was fucking sweet!” and “Jerry had more talent in the finger he was missing.” But at the end of the day most of us will still pay $60 a ducat to catch that whiff of nostalgia, and this video gives me hope that it’ll be much more than that.

Some part of me thinks Phil’s hiring Young Jackie Greene may have been born from Billy Beane-style purse decisions, but another part of me is growing increasingly excited to see what someone about my age — with inexplicably more talent — can bring to the interpretations of the Dead’s catalog. Maybe they’ll even play some new shit. Eh, count me in.