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.

I Have Ignored Bob Dylan For Too Long... At My Own Peril

"I ain't no false prophet..."

The night of Nov. 5, 1999, was a magical, mystical moment in the musical journey that my life had become at that point in my late teens.

It was the night I saw Bob Dylan perform live for the first time, after hearing his records for literally my entire life via my Dad's record collection. It was one of the first times where I found it almost difficult to believe what I was seeing, this guy who loomed larger than life over at least 30% of the music I grew up listening to. I'd seen Bruce Springsteen, and this was Bruce's idol.

The other thing that made it magical: it was also the night that started me on a Challenger-Deep-level dive into the Grateful Dead. Phil Lesh & Friends were the opening band, with Steve Kimock and Derek F***ing Trucks on twin lead guitar. Before we'd even gotten to Dylan, I had my mind blown by these guys I'd never heard of who started playing and didn't stop for almost two hours. I'd go on to see Phil & Friends as often as possible. (the main incarnation of that group with Lesh, Haynes, Herring, Baracco and Molo is the most ass-kicking band I've ever seen live, they could do anything)

But while that turned out to be a great discovery, I was there for Dylan... and he didn't disappoint. 

This show came in the midst of his tour supporting Time Out of Mind, the '98 or '99 record produced by Daniel Lanois that is one of his best, in my opinion — a beautiful, dusty, bluesy collection of songs that had several tunes ("Not Dark Yet," "Cold Irons Bound") that hinted at the balladeer he would become starting around 2010.

He opened with a rocked-up version of the old Stanley Brothers tune, "Roving Gambler," which is now one of the songs my own bluegrass band covers the most... and we do the Dylan arrangement. I could never find a recording of that show, but I did find a 2001 bootleg from Japan where they opened with the same tune.

The setlist was awesome, and included "Desolation Row," "Cocaine Blues," "Tangled Up in Blue," "Shelter from the Storm," "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere," "Highway 61 Revisited" and a high-energy "Not Fade Away" closer. The only minor disappointment for me was I'd hoped to hear more live versions of the Time Out of Mind tracks — I only got one, "Love Sick," but that was Dylan. He's gonna play what he wants, and I was plenty happy with what I got.

I saw him again almost exactly three years later, a Nov. 8, 2002, show in the A.J. Palumbo Center at my alma mater, Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. I was crazy excited. It was great — a three-minute stroll from my dorm room to go see the Master again, and this time with my Dad, who'd introduced me to Dylan in the first place. 

Dylan had released Love & Theft the previous year, another record I thought was really great, if not exactly groundbreaking. Look, some people are bothered by the fact that a whole lot of Dylan tunes are just various iterations of 1-4-5 blues, and I get it. Doesn't bug me at all. A lot of his music is a backdrop for the lyrics. If you're going to a Dylan show strictly for the music.... I dunno what to tell you. Some people dislike his penchant for re-arranging his greatest hits when he performs them live. Not a problem for me. When I go to a show, I wanna hear something I've never heard before. 

The 2002 setlist was, again, a BANGER. In addition to a bunch of my favorite tunes from Love & Theft, he broke out "Tombstone Blues," "It's Alright Ma," "Masters of War," "All Along the Watchtower," I mean DAMN. 

But.... this was also around the time he'd started playing most of the set from behind the keyboard. And I was just not into it. I remember thinking how glad I was to have seen him in '99. 

He released several more records, I bought a few, and they were each decent in their own way. Modern Times had a little more energy than some previous efforts, and I'm never gonna get mad at having Los Lobos as your studio band (Together Through Life). He released an album of old pop standards, and that was okay. For me, it was mostly notable because of the new melodic quality Dylan had discovered when a song was paced properly. He still talked his way through a lot of the verses, but it was more of a back-porch-storyteller situation, and not just a guy kind of yelling rhymes. None of it, however, convinced me that I wanted to go see him live again.

That was probably a dumb idea. And once again, I had to go all the way to Japan to find what I was looking for.

I recently discovered that Dylan released a 2020 record, Rough & Rowdy Ways, and it's real good. In addition, I also stumbled across a bootleg of an April 20, 2023, show from Nagoya, Japan. And it's just sooooo goooooooood.

This is, I believe, a completely different band than the Larry-Campbell-led group that was with Dylan for a good while — it's Doug Lancio and Bob Britt on guitar (not Dylan, not at all, strictly piano), Donnie Herron on mandolin, violin and steel guitar, Tony Garnier on bass and Jerry Pentecost on drums. And they're fine.

But it's the way that Dylan seems to have settled into more of an old-school mode that really caught my attention. His piano acumen has certainly improved since I last heard him tinkle the keys, but it was the way he eased into almost every tune. It was very reminiscent of guys like Ray Charles or Isaac Hayes on the Live from the Sahara album... most every song starts with Dylan teasing the chords on piano while he mumbles the opening lyrics and the band slowly creeps in behind. He usually gets through a verse and then the band kicks the song proper. 

•••

•••

Most of the songs on Rough & Rowdy Ways are pretty laidback, and you can just as easily imagine much of the Nagoya setlist happening in a dark nightclub as opposed to a venue that seats thousands. But then the band launches into a cover of the Grateful Dead's "Truckin'," and everyone's reminded that this is indeed a rock concert.

Is it a good cover? From the band's perspective, sure, they sound great. From a lyrical-performance perspective? Again, opinions have alway differed on Dylan's delivery. To me it doesn't matter. If I'm Bob Weir, I'm ecstatic that The Man is covering one of my tunes. If anything, it's even more of a tribute to the Dead that Dylan flubs several of the lyrics. It makes little difference that the song is mostly out of his vocal range. It's a touchstone in the New Great American Songbook, and worthy of inclusion in the repertoire of one of the artists whose tunes make up that book's early pages.

So, in a very long and rambling roundabout way, this is my apology to Bob Dylan. Plenty people have doubted you along the way in what is now a vastly successful career spanning more than a half-century. I was briefly one of them, but in what should be common practice (and all-too-frequently isn't), convincing concrete evidence has shown me otherwise. 

In the immortal words of Jeffrey Lebowski, "New sh*t has come to light."