April 2011

Furthur @ Hampton Coliseum, April 1

Words: Mike Ross

Hampton Coliseum, known by many as “The Mothership,” is impressive from the outside, but looking around from our nosebleed seats on the outer edge of the bowl before the lights went down I couldn’t help but feel incredulous that this giant cavernous place doesn’t suck out the energy of anybody trying to emit anything from that stage. It’s almost self-defeating alienating in it’s sheer hugeness – alienation being precisely the thing that people are trying to escape in coming to a public event, perhaps especially a Grateful Dead-related one.

For the first set of Furthur’s April Fools’ Day performance, I was feeling like maybe I was right. The band seemed a little tired. Maggie’s Farm came up and I found myself wondering, Why do they bother with songs like this anymore? Is there any life left in these songs for this band? The Grateful Dead as a band was a finite entity with a beginning and an end, and doing songs like Maggie’s Farm in the first set was part of their natural progression. When Furthur convened 15 years later, they had the option of picking from the cream of the crop, starting fresh and interpreting the Grateful Dead ethos in a way that would be satisfying to them and their fans – so why play first-set filler? Why not fill both sets with awesome?

Of course, my wrongheaded thinking would be spun on its ass by the time the show was over. Furthur gave me the gentle reminder that, just like in the Grateful Dead before it, the magic either happens, or it doesn’t – and it doesn’t much matter where. It can come and go, and it can be prodded and some pretty good stuff can happen in the meantime – these are professionals, after all – but in the end you can’t really force it. This was proven in a second-set Black Peter – usually a bit of a snore-fest for me – that just ripped. It also showed another facet of the progenitors of this music: liftoff can come from any member or members of the band; in the case of this Black Peter it was the Pehrson-Sunshine-Chimenti show. Those thick organ swirls and those harmonies (“See here how everything / lead up to this day”) elevated the whole stage by about five feet, and before anyone knew what was happening, the Mothership was hovering in place somewhere above Hampton. READ ON for more on Friday night’s Furthur show…

This week’s Stormy Monday is a spring mix to get the season started right, opening up appropriately enough with Rain by The Beatles. Following that is The Mother Hips with

Robbie Robertson will make his first television appearances in 10 years this week with visits to David Letterman (Tuesday) and The View (Wednesday). Robertson will perform the single He Don’t