Dead & Company Keep Musical Peaks Rampant At Philadelphia’s Citizens Bank Park (SHOW REVIEW)

Dead & Company stopped by Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia this past Sunday, July 10^th, to deliver a pair of standout sets that focused primarily on relatively early-era material from the Grateful Dead’s expansive catalog.

Marking only their second trip to the cavernous home of the Philadelphia Phillies since their 2015 formation – the group previously opted to play the somewhat more intimate BB&T Pavilion across the Delaware River in Camden, NJ – Dead & Co. kicked things off shortly after 7pm with a brief jazzy interlude before charging into their seminal travelogue “Truckin’”, featuring a goosebump-inducing moment of 40,000+ singing “What a long strange trip it’s been” in unison, before making a surprise segue into Dylan’s equally influential “All Along the Watchtower”. This was only the second time Dead & Co. have ever performed the song in their opening set, and featured John Mayer offering up some searing Jimi Hendrix-inspired guitar riffs.

The lead guitarist then took over vocal duties for “Here Comes Sunshine”, which contained a bit of foreshadowing thanks to some “China Cat Sunflower” teases from Mayer and keyboardist Jeff Chimenti, before a heartfelt rendition of Bob Weir’s lost-love saga “Looks Like Rain” which managed to reach a dramatic climax thanks to Weir’s emotional vocal outro.

The Garcia/Hunter gem “Brown Eyed Women” allowed Chimenti his first chance on the evening to shine thanks to some rollicking piano lines before another surprise, “Estimated Prophet”, which had also only once previously appeared in an opening set prior to this evening, and featured a typically psychedelic closing jam thanks to Mayer’s tactful use of his Mu-Tron envelope filter guitar pedal. The set came to a triumphant close with “Deal” that saw the entire band firing on all cylinders and elicited multiple raucous ovations from the capacity crowd.

The second set began with drummers Mickey Hart and ex-Primus & Ratdog member Jay Lane, who has been filling in for an ailing Billy Kreutzmann (Mr. Kreutzmann has not played with the band since June 29 due to Covid), pounding out the familiar rhythm to Reverend Gary Davis’s “Samson & Delilah” before Weir stepped up to the mic to deliver his traditional Sunday sermon with the timeless refrain, “If I had my way, I would burn this old building down!”.

An emphatic B Minor chord from Mayer signaled the start of the epic “Help on the Way/Slipknot” combo, the latter of which featured some dark atonal playing from Chimenti, before the band delivered another setlist-related curveball as the group surprisingly eschewed the typically placed “Franklin’s Tower” in lieu of the previously teased “China Cat Sunflower”.

While “China Cat” may have suffered slightly due to the slower tempo that many of Dead & Company’s detractors like to point to as the main source of their collective disappointment with the group, those moments were few & far between throughout the evening, especially on songs like the traditional “I Know You Rider” which possessed a hard-charging locomotive quality thanks to Lane’s noticeably more upbeat playing style. “Rider” also stands among the evening’s highlights thanks to Weir’s handling of the song’s “I wish I was a headlight on a northbound train” line, a lyric which often stood among Garcia’s most emotional moments, particularly during his later years.

The nightly “Drums/Space” segment, a tradition the Grateful Dead started in the late 70’s when they would often base their mid-second set extended free-form jams around themes such as “Reagan in China” and the “Qadaffi Death Squad”, allowed Lane, and Hart in particular, to employ the various musical gadgets and curiosities hidden among the massive drum kit in creating a mesmerizing soundscape that contained elements of house music and tribal influences.

While the initial “drums” portion is truly a spectacle that deserves the listener’s attention, the same cannot be said for the latter “space” segment which featured the remaining members returning to the stage for what amounted to mostly aimless noodling for several minutes until Mayer mercifully started to strum the familiar opening chords to the Dead’s bluegrass special “Cumberland Blues”, which ended up working the crowd into a frenzy with Mayer & Chimenti chasing each other with increasingly impressive musical runs.

A tear-jerking delivery from Weir on the latter-day Garcia/Hunter gem “Days Between” stunned the silenced crowd before closing the set with “Franklin’s Tower”, a clever nod to Benjamin Franklin and his lifelong Philadelphia residency.

A welcome double-encore was helmed by the mournful ballad “Brokedown Palace”, which saw Bobby & Mayer trading verses before a boisterous “Casey Jones” sent the Philly fanatics home on a high note.