String Theories, Inbox Edition
Dead & Co. At The Sphere, The Power of "Weird," FloydFest in VA, Visits With Kim Richey and Kyshona
A body in motion remains in motion. I’m just home from two nights in Las Vegas where I experienced the now famous residency of Dead & Co. at The Sphere. Before that, I ran up I-65 for an overnight in Lexington, KY to catch a show by alt-country icons the Old 97’s and an interview with their charming and erudite leader Rhett Miller. That followed a four-night van camping experience at FloydFest, where I finally redeemed a years-old invitation from my friend and co-organizer Brian to attend this 22-year-old Virginia institution. It was exceptional. I have feature stories below about Vegas and Virginia, while my Rhett Miller piece will be worked up for The String in coming weeks.
First though, I want to talk about the last three weeks in America for a second, because, wow.
My last newsletter, a rather depressed and depressing one, arrived just a few hours before Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race and endorsed Kamala Harris to be his replacement nominee. I had been pleading and praying for that very move, and while it took some determined pressure by Democratic insiders, Biden ultimately read the room and took the right path. I was not as surprised as some that the party rallied to Harris so fast. I thought if other contenders like Newsom, Shapiro, etc. planned to challenge her incumbent position as the front-runner that it would have leaked during the weeks after “the debate.” I figure Pelosi and Schumer and other leading Dems had taken their temperature and learned that they’d rather defer their personal ambitions and throw in behind Harris out of a need for unity in this year above all years. Harris’s popular surge on the other hand has been a massive relief, because that was harder to see coming, given her middling track record as a campaigner. But she rose to the moment, making her case for her candidacy crisply and passionately. And if anything, the rollout of Tim Walz in the VP slot went even better, winning the hearts of Dems, some centrist normies in the middle of the country, and thank god, the internet, where Walz is already a bit of a folk hero.
Part of Walz’s winning formula has been to lean on the word “weird” to tell a new kind of story about the Republican party. And this deserves some credit and some unpacking, because I believe that rhetoric is the most important force in democratic politics, and this is a brilliant, devious rhetorical strategy. Weird did two seemingly incompatible things - it seemed to deescalate the partisan discourse while leveling an all-new and insidious charge against the GOP ticket. After years of hyperbolic (if often accurate) claims against the MAGA movement - authoritarian!, racist!, fascist! - the country had grown numb, but along comes weird to cool our language inflation and outrage fatigue. Because it’s amusing and belittling, it struck a bunch of nerves over there on the right. They’re fighting a tired war of hyperbole and projection, so they were caught off guard by guile and cleverness. Weird has also had a longer shelf life than I thought it would. However there needs to be a new chapter in the story. I suggest naming names in the larger MAGA movement, because most Americans know these are strange, creepy people: Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Rudy Giulianni, Jim Jordan, Stephen Miller, etc. They could do a roll call of GOP weirdness at the DNC. Authoritarians do not do well in the face of mockery, and it’s something Joe Biden just couldn’t do, as serious as he was about protecting democracy. As the election gets closer, Walz and Harris can get more sober and clear about what they really mean by weird - that in the case of today’s GOP, it unmasks people who have shown over eight years that they are extremist, corrupt, misogynistic, and cruel.
So with all due caution about polls and October surprises, any democracy loving American has to like where we are, especially compared to a month ago. DJT is rattled so badly he’s making a string of unforced errors. He looks and sounds old, angry and losing what little connection to reality he had when he ran in 2020. His team is freaking out because they can’t get the boss to be a serious person who puts the party’s well being ahead of his own ego. (Shocking, I know.) This feels like the great MAGA comeuppance finally coming to pass, but let’s make sure of that and not get complacent. Let’s lean into this and do the work over the next three months to have a decisive victory at the ballot box.
Onward
Having A Ball at Dead & Co.
A few years ago I followed a fun Instagram account called Mini Wall Of Sound, which documented Connecticut-based cabinet builder, gear-head and Deadhead Anthony Coscia as he worked on his quixotic dream of building a working scale model of the Grateful Dead’s legendary “Wall of Sound” from the 1970s. The original Wall, with 600 speakers driven by 27,000 watts, was the most ambitious and foolhardy arena rock audio system of its age - and an inspiration for the high-tech line array systems of today. Coscia’s hand-crafted, hand-wired replicas are thus irresistible, especially when his band plays through them.
Upon arriving in Las Vegas last Thursday for two nights of Dead & Co. at The Sphere, the 21st century’s no-expense-spared answer to the Wall of Sound, my first destination was the Venetian Hotel, the portal to The Sphere, where they’d assembled a two-story Dead Forever Experience. I was disoriented and put out with the hot scrum of humanity on the kiln-like Strip, but I made it to this little island of Dead vibe and started feeling better. Then I went upstairs and saw it - one of Coscia’s quarter-scale Walls of Sound, complete with scaffold, trusses, hoisting chains, and an American flag. I melted into the child-like state of wonder that’s part of any good Dead excursion. It was so cute and yet so grand. Grateful Dead recordings pulsed out of those tiny loudspeakers, promising something bigger. Way bigger.
The Sphere, in case this needs explaining, is likely the most technologically advanced permanent entertainment venue ever built - a $2.3 billion, 366-foot-high ball wrapped in a mind-boggling 54,000 square meters of LED display. Nested inside this planetoid digital billboard is a smaller (but not small) inner sphere that defines the concert space. It has seats on four tiers for 18,000 people plus open floor space for another 2,000. So on one hand it’s barely one third the size of a Taylor Swift arena show, yet somehow it feels like the largest space you’ve ever walked into, largely because of the soaring dome of a ceiling. This modern day Wall of Sound is invisible, with 167,000 individual speaker drivers (most no bigger than a donut) arrayed in spherical splendor behind the world’s largest video screen. Sphere takes “surround sound” to new extremes, with multiple speakers aimed at each concert-goer using beam-forming technology so direct that patrons can be sent nearly individual sonic signals.
I thought I’d seen the last of the Dead when I attended Dead & Co. at Wrigley Field in June of last year. That night was such a perfect combination of music, friends, and setting that I wrote a lengthy post about it here. It was a completely satisfying farewell to a band that: caught my imagination in college in the late 1980s; showed me a window into the roots and bluegrass I’ve cherished and cultivated ever since; connected me further with the jazz tradition of improvisation; taught me dozens of magical songs to play for myself and with others; and generally became an exemplar for all I value in music and spirited community. With only two original members of the Grateful Dead (singer/guitarist Bobby Weir and drummer Mickey Hart), Dead & Co. acted as a thread to the legacy by way of a very solid semi-cover band. And all things must pass, right?
Then out of retirement they came (yet again) for a residency at The Sphere, and this temptation - a couple more nights of That Sound coming from the world’s most exotic sound system - proved too tempting. The buzz about the venue and residency grew loud here in Nashville. So I found some friends who were going out for what proved to be the final weekend of shows and got myself to Vegas with some leftover Southwest points. With that, some notes about my ex-Sphere-ience.
Arrival gets an A. With the understanding that you will walk non-linear, pilgrimage-like distances to everything in Las Vegas, the path from the Venetian Hotel to the portal of The Sphere was wide, airy and comfortable. There were no choke points. Ticketing/security was swift. The lobby is dazzling in its scale and its sinuous design. Escalators as long as football fields loft you up as high as seven stories for the nosebleed venue tiers. That’s where I was on Thursday night - in the middle of the 400 section - to take advantage of the full sweep of the place. And to sit with my pals from NC.
With a semi spoiler ahead, I’ll say that the reveal of the video wall’s capabilities was clever, devious, and awe inspiring. The band opened with “Iko Iko” with the musicians projected to giant size in a rather conventional (though remarkably vivid) way. Then on “Eyes of the World” they let us have it with a sequence that’s common to every one of the Dead & Co. Sphere shows. It’s a slow pullback from San Francisco to planet Earth floating in space that tricked every synapse in my brain with its smoothness and realism. There aren’t enough “wows” and “oh my gods” to capture it, and the song, with its jams between lead guitarist John Mayer and keyboard player Jeff Chimenti, stretched to a magisterial 15 minutes that were all worthy of the intergalactic setting.
So, the sound. Let’s talk about it, because that’s truly what I was most curious about and what drove my investment in this splurge of a weekend. I asked myself to do some close, critical listening, because with such hype it’s easy to get carried away. But here’s the truth. The sound is excellent in its immersion and full body impact while arriving at a restrained and just about perfect volume level. But it was not the best live audio I’ve ever heard. Here are my pros and cons.
What stood out was the clarity and detail of guitars, keyboards and voices, which is to say the middle range of the frequency spectrum. This was truly uncanny stuff. What I’ll always remember are Mayer’s and Weir’s guitars, which went beyond merely sounding hyper-accurate. There was a tactile quality to the fingers on strings (aided by frequent closeups of the musician’s hands) that triggered the brain parts that fire when I’m playing electric guitar. The friction of skin on wire, the little buzzes at the edge of frets, the angle of attack of the guitar pick - all were audible and believable to not just my ears but my body. Also thrilling were the subsonic, body-shaking low bass tones evoked during “Space” by Mickey and his droning, low-strung “beam” instrument, which he played with both fingers and a bow. Here, and during the “Drums” feature that preceded it, they finally made use of the spatial 3D quality of the system, throwing sounds around the cavernous chamber for psychedelic effect. The rest of the show’s mix was conventional - instruments distinctly arrayed in a vivid soundstage. And that was the right way to go. It’s a concert on a stage after all, not Laser Floyd at the Planetarium.
Less awe inspiring was the low-mid register where bass player Oteil Burbridge’s instrument was trying to do most of its work. We could hear that he was playing low notes but not the notes themselves. When he played up the neck, his pitch became more true. When he played normal root note Cs and As and Es on his low strings, it was mushy and indistinct. In fairness, it was a bit better on my second night with seats closer to the band, and bass is hard in any room, certainly a spherical one. It may just be a tradeoff of physics.
At the other end of the spectrum, I craved more treble. I could barely hear the drummers play their high-hats. Cymbals all sounded rather alike, when we know that all cymbals sound different. The pitches and resonance of Mickey’s different tom toms were indistinct. I saw second drummer Jay Lane whacking on a ride cymbal that was inaudible to me in the mix. And finally, I had a bit of trouble with the in-seat haptics that I’d heard so much about. They turned on during “Drums” and “Space” but I found their shaking out of time with the thunderous tympanic drums played by Hart, Lane and Burbridge. The ensemble soloing was awesome, but I enjoyed it better when I stood and felt the natural reverberation come through the floor.
And to be clear, it didn’t sound bad at all. I had a fantastic sonic experience. I’m being detail-minded because I had high expectations. Thing cost $2.3 billion after all.
One missed opportunity show-wise was a dearth of Jerry Garcia special content on Aug. 9, which was the 24th anniversary of his death at age 53. They flashed some historic photos of him late in the show on both nights, but it seemed like possibly the last-ever chance to really spotlight his legacy on such an occasion, and I was hoping for a deeper Jerry moment. There was some discussion in recent weeks about whether Jerry would have appreciated The Sphere. On one hand, he was a progressive when it came to novel sound and visual displays at live shows. Where he might have balked were the trappings that come with any Vegas residency. It was branded The Dead Forever, which felt awkward. The exhibit at the hotel had wonderful photography, art by Mickey Hart, and the wee Wall o’ Sound, but it also had a distinct Exit-Through-The-Gift-Shop quality, and the merch lines at the venue were always roaring. Beers cost $21. Concert goers were a mix of old Heads, mid-lifers like me who got on the bus in the 1990s, and quite a few folks in recently acquired tie-dye who looked like they’d be just as comfortable at next month’s Eagles Sphere residency. What happens in Vegas will always taste and feel like Vegas, which is pretty much the polar opposite of what the Dead and its culture have been about. In my barely 48 hours in the city, I was reminded that I hate that charmless, entirely paved maze of consumer branding and deliberate spatial and temporal disorientation. Vegas, you’re dead to me.
The Sphere was thus a cocoon where the air was cool, the vibe was sweet, the visual displays dazzling and imaginative. And of course, the reason we were there - the songs. Night one featured a fantastic “Brown Eyed Women,” “St. Stephen” into “Uncle John’s Band,” and a super fun “Casey Jones” as the single-song encore. Night two was overall a better show, aided by my closer proximity to the band. They opened with “Cassidy,” one of my earliest favorites, into “Truckin’” (whose absence would have led to riots I think). Then in set two I witnessed my first and I guess only “Dark Star,” the cosmic jam vehicle that was a staple of the late 60s and 70s golden age, with a truly wild visual that reminded me of the planet from the Three Body Problem. “Scarlet Begonias” into “Fire On The Mountain” made for another Dead staple. “Dear Prudence” dragged, but they made a fine comeback with “Sugaree” and “Morning Dew” and wrapped with Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away.”
That was an appropriate benediction. I’m pretty sure those were my last Dead shows with Bobby and Mickey, and that’s sad. But the repertoire, their countless recordings, and the approach to music making they cultivated? Yes then, Dead Forever it is.
RECENT WORK
As usual, click on the story art to be taken to the story at WMOT.org.
MEMES OF THE MONTH
My biggest concern with Harris and the DNC is the push for abortion. As a born again Believer my goal is not 'MAGA' but sanctity of life. I simply can't get behind a party that pushes 'reproductive rights.' Honestly? I hate that term... Let's call it what it is - abortion - ending a life. I call it murder.