In Praise of Phil & Friends, the Most Ass-Kicking Band I've Ever Seen in Person

This poster has been burned into my medulla oblongata since 2001...

I was a late arrival to the Grateful Dead. Despite immediately recognizing the cover of Workingman's Dead from my Dad's record collection when I saw it, it would be generous to say that I was barely aware of their status as live legends.

But in the fall of '99, my freshman year of college, I went to the Civic Arena in Pittsburgh — soon to be the Mellon Arena, and soon after that, a pile of rubble — with the sole purpose of seeing Bob Dylan for the first time. I couldn't wait, and you can read all about that in the post below, should you desire. 

This post is about the opener, identified on my yellow Ticketmaster ticket as "Phil Lesh & Friends." Like I said, I was there to see Dylan. 

But then this opening band started to play. 

As a big jazz fan already by this time — and particularly having recently fallen in love with the skronky funky gumbo that is Miles Davis' Bitches Brew — I was immediately down with the all-electric version that this band was churning up as they jammed for TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES BEFORE ANYONE SANG ANYTHING.

That's not a complaint. The opposite, actually.

My completely-sober brain was leaking out my ears. Who were these guys? They were very, very good. And for an opener, they certainly had the place going. Indeed, it seemed like a lot of the crowd was here for them. 

You heard me earlier pleading ignorance to 99% of Dead knowledge in my late teens, and I stand by that. I had no clue that a number of incarnations of the Grateful Dead were drawing small-arena crowds all over the country. 

I had no clue that one of the two lead guitarists was Warren Haynes, who, oh, you know, filled the Duane Allman role in the f***ing Allman Bros. Band. 

I had no clue the other lead guitarist playing what I could only describe as "anti-gravity jam-jazz" was Steve Kimock, who I would see live several more times and also briefly share the stage with during one of theCAUSE's D-Jam benefit shows. 

I had no clue why everyone was going nuts in the middle of what I thought was just a jam, not realizing that this crowd could tell the next song coming as soon as someone hit a certain guitar figure.

If I had been a full-on Deadhead at the time, I would've been ecstatic too. The show opened with a 25-minute instrumental jam that skronked its way into "Dark Star" and "Dear Mr. Fantasy" before truly blowing my mind.

Like I said, I was a big jazz fan. Weird time signatures and little two-beat tags on the end of a musical phrase are things I was used to hearing. But when the band launched into the big instrumental section of "Unbroken Chain" — an 11-count jam followed by a 15-count jam split into seven- and eight-beat measures — I couldn't handle what was happening in my ears. 

That song smoothed back out into its ending, and before I knew what was going on, Kimock and Haynes had both cranked up the distortion on their guitars and we were detouring back into "Dark Star" by way of the Allman Brothers, all big fat bluesy licks and GOOD F***ING GOD MAN WHO IS THIS DRUMMER, THEY ONLY HAVE ONE BUT IT SOUNDS LIKE THERE'S TWO OCTOPUSES' WORTH OF ARMS ON PERCUSSION WTF IS GOING ON?!?!??

Here's the best part of this tale — this isn't even the best version of this band.

During most of the '99 Phil & Friends tour, it was sort of a who's-available-this-month kind of situation, at least in the guitar department. Warren Haynes was around a lot, but there are shows where Kimock's gone and Derek Trucks is around.... there's the Warfield run of shows where's it's basically Phil Lesh & Phish. And all those shows are really good.

But for the majority of 2000-'03, Phil & Friends was a single, world-destroying lineup: Lesh, Haynes, Rob Baracco from the Zen Tricksters on keys, Jimmy Herring (another occasional Allman Bros. alum) from Aquarium Rescue Unit and Widespread Panic on second lead guitar (no one really played rhythm guitar in this band), and the "Mighty White Cloud," John Molo, on drums.

When I say that this is the most ass-kicking band I've ever seen live, it's just my opinion, but damn, they really could do just about anything. Forget sets where they start playing and don't stop 'til it's over, because that was every single show. That was the low bar, generally speakin... moving effortlessly from one tune to the next, changing rhythms, meters and keys on the fly during jams... playing a Miles Davis tune from out of nowhere, and not just something vampy and modal, friggin' "Milestones," a full-on jazz standard.

My college roommate and I went to see them in the spring of 2001 at our school's basketball arena, and it remains to this day the greatest concert I've seen. They jammed "Cumberland Blues" and "Friend of the Devil" for a good 35 minutes, tore through "Shakedown Street," "Eyes of the World," covered Howlin' Wolf's "Smokestack Lightning" and served up "Like a Rolling Stone" to open the late set... they played one or two songs I didn't know but enjoyed immensely, turned my entire head to mush closing with "Scarlet Begonias" and I was so out of my mind at the end that I told my roommate we needed to walk down to the stage so we could meet Phil.

Needless to say, that did not happen. Many other things happened that night which, in fact, did not happen.... damn you, Spiderman..... I think we're wandering off course here........

Phil & Friends took all of the things I already liked about the Grateful Dead — the writing and the songs, the head-spinning jams, the lengthy no-pause second sets — and cranked them up into a Deadhead's Dream Setlist every night. They shied away from Bobby songs, but they also dove deep into stuff the Dead rarely ever brought out in concert. They truly took on the ethos of "The Music Never Stopped," both in terms of carrying on the Dead's catalog as well as rarely pausing during either set.

There are several later versions of this band, starting in 2004 with a really weird lineup fronted by, of all people, Chris Robinson from the Black Crowes. I'm not real big on most of them, although I've gotten into a lot of the bands Lesh has fronted at his Terrapin Crossroads club in San Rafael.

In the same way that the Dead could occasionally catch lightning in a bottle and roll out a rip-roaring show from top to bottom, for a brief three-year period, this jamband ably continued the Dead's original mission of lighting out for unknown musical territory.

There's a ton of tapes on Archive.org. They're great.