Dan Alford

HT’s Dan Alford continues his look back at the Phil Lesh Quintet in which the Grateful Dead bassist was joined by John Molo, Rob Barraco, Warren Haynes and Jimmy Herring. Part One looked at the unit’s start in 2000, Part Two looked at the group’s rise in 2001, Part Three looked at the peak of 2002, while today’s finale looks at the group’s final days…

In the fall of 2002, Phil, Bobby, Billy and Mickey joined forces for another incarnation The Other Ones – featuring Jimmy Herring, Rob Barraco, Jeff Chimenti and Susan Tedeschi on backing vocals, playing arena-sized venues with some excellent results, but they were just getting started.

In the late spring of the following year, the group resurfaced with a new vocalist, a new name and a new confidence with the material. Joan Osborne may have seemed an odd choice initially, but in fact she was a denizen of The Wetlands in the early nineties, a road warrior in her own right and Americana soul singer of the first order. Plus, she didn’t hesitate for a second, jumping right into the fray and leaving a mark on the music; like others before and after, Sugaree became her show piece, and her Joan Moan became a staple of the spacey interludes.

• Phil Lesh Quintet: Year One, Year Two, Year Three

The group churned out plenty of killer music on its summer tour, including an especially great gig in Hartford, a slew of Dylan sit-ins across the Midwest, and a pair of nights at Jones Beach that boasted acoustic sets. But the band also kept the PLQ off the road until the fall of 2003 when the group returned for its final 20 dates. READ ON for more on the Phil Lesh Quintet ’03…

HT’s Dan Alford continues his look back at the Phil Lesh Quintet in which the Grateful Dead bassist was joined by John Molo, Rob Barraco, Warren Haynes and Jimmy Herring. Part One looked at the unit’s start in 2000, Part Two looked at the group’s rise in 2001 bringing us to 2002…

By 2002, The Q had become a mainstay of jamnation, reliable like no other band for night after night of marathon sets and mind-bending improvisation. The chemistry was profound: Warren Haynes’s effect-laden guitar serving up wicked, fiery leads and funky rhythm (not to mention his growling, soulful voice); Jimmy Herring’s lightning fast barrages of a thousand notes at a time, or slower, searing solos (his solo on the new outro jam to Unbroken Chain could knock you to your knees); Rob Barraco’s absolutely fearless piano (few keyboard plays could plunge into such a thick stew with such expressive voice and effect); John Molo’s insane elasticity, equal parts slick subtlety and propulsive fervor; and of course Phil himself, the grand conductor, with his bouncy, shifting bass lines and playful shuffle step that started every show.

Each element alone was worth the price of a ticket, but put them together and something truly otherly happened. Thrilling, jaw dropping performances drawn for the best possible songbook. And just as the performances matured from 2000 to 2001 so did they again in 2002, becoming more stylish, the jamlets even more distinct, the ideas pushed to more extreme ends; the drama of some shows, even single songs, was almost overwhelming (Check out the I Am the Walrus > Millennium Jam from Charlie Miller’s recording of 3/30/02, only the second date of the year. Whew!)

• Phil Lesh Quintet: Year One, Year Two

The year began with a series of West Coast dates, The Warfield followed by a run in the Rockies, with the band continuing a trend it had begun in 2001, unveiling new, original material, material that would become There and Back Again, a strong album, if a little unbalanced. Warren’s material is certainly the strongest, whether written alone (The Real Thing, Welcome to the Underground) or in collaboration (Night of a Thousand Stars), but everything has merit. Columbia Records, however, didn’t get behind the promotion in the same way it did for Jorma Kaukonen’s (admittedly entirely stunning) Blue Country Heart released at the same time, and the album, whose title is a reference to Tolkien’s The Hobbit, fell from consciousness. The songs stayed around however, growing and blossoming like everything else the band played, so that by the summer, they were staples buried deep in the heart of jams or closing sets in uproarious fashion.

READ ON for more on the Phil Lesh Quintet in 2002…

Not long after its ferocious East Coast debut in the fall of 2000, the Haynes, Herring, Barraco and Molo line-up of Phil and Friends returned to the road for a series of West Coast dates, including a pair in Denver, a pair in Portland and a set of four in San Francisco in 2001. And immediately the band was even better than before. They took all the raw power and excitement of those initial shows and harnessed it in the way only a collective of truly masterful musicians could, cultivating it to produce longer, far more textured and subtle music that truly traveled to new and wondrous places.

The increased length was crucial, allowing the ensemble to explore in a profoundly open-ended manner, to follow flights of fancy or darker urges or both plus any number of other moods. Many of the opening jams and segues, not to mention internal jams in tunes like Bird Song, featured two, three, even four distinct themes, creating a shifting psychedelic tide that made every night even more unique, profoundly individual, than just a varied set list.

The Jam > Bird Song that opens only the second date of 2001 clocks in at 30 minutes (although to be fair, Derek Trucks was in the mix that night, and he’s always quick to push the envelope). But that kind of number quickly became common place; the expansiveness was simply the way the band did business. In Portland there’s a 45 minute Jam > Scarlet Begonias > Uncle John’s Band and a 20 plus minute Passenger, not to mention an hour and ten minute Dark Star > Eyes > Dark Star > Low Spark the next night.

• Stormy Mondays: Phil Lesh Quintet, Year 1

READ ON for more from Dan on Year Two of the PLQ…

2010 has been a year of big anniversaries: it’s been 15 years since Jerry Garcia graced the planet and ten years since Allen Woody’s ugly mug and gentle soul stood on a stage. Thankfully there are also some happy celebrations to be had, most importantly the birth of the greatest band that ever was, The Phil Lesh Quintet, featuring guitar giants Warren Haynes and Jimmy Herring, walking Grateful Dead encyclopedia and fearless pianist Rob Barraco, master drummer John Molo and one of the great band leaders of the last decade (even aside from the Q), Phil Lesh; and it’s no mystery all three events are closely intertwined.

While Bob Weir spent the years directly after Jerry Garcia’s death on the road with Ratdog, doing his best to keep the spirit alive, Phil Lesh hosted only a small number of Phil and Friends gigs throughout the late 1990’s, and those stayed in the Bay Area, including those Norcal characters one might assume; there was good music, but the shows were very much a family affair, intimate and loose. Prairie Prince and Steve Kimock were regulars, as were members of the David Nelson Band, but the truly noteworthy three night stand that shifted the whole balance of the improv rock world was of course the legendary Phil and Phriends Warfield run featuring Trey Anastasio and Page McConnell.

This meeting of musical minds broke down any barriers, real or imagined, between the two camps that occupied opposite aesthetic ends of the field of live music masters. The old guard was forced to admit the prowess and power of the still underground (despite their massive following) gurus of glowstick wielding masses, and those very figureheads were finally free to admit the influence and their love of Grateful Dead music, something they had been avoiding for 15 years in order to the constant and sloppy moniker of the inheritors of the Grateful Dead’s ethos. “Everything I do to get the title, but when they use it on me, I’ll reject it,” Trey had so often sung, but now he sang Robert Hunter’s lyrics too.

READ ON for more of this week’s Stormy Mondays…

Brian Blade and the Fellowship Band, or as they’re newly known, only The Fellowship Band, just finished a week’s worth of shows at the Village Vanguard in NYC, the first

Moving into the end weeks of summer, we need to be sure to get the funk out one more time with a pair of funk essentials. The first is Parliament

It was fifteen years ago when I awoke a bit haggard and bleary but pleased, having caught The Band – in its final incarnation – the night before in Central Park with a very young RatDog opening along with From Good Homes. At the time Bobby’s stalwart band, which was billed as RatDog for the first time at that show, was really just an extension of Bob and Rob, or Scaring the Children, playing stripped down versions of blues standards and a few GD tunes with the aid of Jay Lane and Matt Kelly.

It was a bright morning and being at the end of my college years, I was getting ready to travel to the other side of the planet in just a few days. My mind was a mix of journeys and music when my brother called to ask how I was doing. Fine, I told him. He was no big Dead fan, but we had logged a ton of Phish shows together so I started to recount the previous evening when he interrupted me.

“You don’t know, do you?”

“Know what?”

“Jerry. Turn on the radio.”

I yelled, “Hey, turn on the radio!” Shakedown Street was playing.

“Jerry died.”

I began switching channels. Playing in the Band. Uncle John’s Band. Ripple.

What followed was a day of tears and pacing and concerned phone calls, a trip to Strawberry Fields that was too much and too little and too awkward to bear. That evening I hopped a train back upstate to my folks’ place and had a long weird interaction with a guy who hadn’t been to a show in years, but was having struggles with his family and told me how Black Muddy River was on his daughter’s bedtime mix tape. It was entirely surreal, only in passing a conversation about Jerry, but certainly one about sadness and loss.

Everyone of a certain age has a story about that day: being woken up or called out of a meeting for an important message, being given the night off by the boss without having to say a word, all the lines on the telephone lighting up simultaneously, gathering outside Hampton Beach Casino where they set up an outdoor speaker system while Bob and Rob played Knocking on Heaven’s Door. READ ON for more of this week’s Stormy Mondays…

Now that we’re deep in the heart of the summer, here’s a mix from my personal soundtrack — just stuff I’m listening to, some old, some new. First up is

This week’s Stormy Mondays features a full performance by Bob Marley and the Wailers in London from 1973. Not too long before Peter Tosh left the band, the gig has

Camp Bisco took place this past weekend in upstate New York, and to mark the passing of the event this week’s Stormy Mondays features a single track of old school