Home For the Holidays featured a stacked lineup of top-of-the-line musicians in the Dead community including Melvin Seals, Oteil Burbridge, Tom Hamilton, Duane Trucks, Jacklyn LaBranch, and Lady Chi.
They played Jerry Garcia Band staples like “Tore Up Over You,” “My Sisters and Brothers,” and “Reuben and Cherise.” The first set started with “How Sweet It Is” and also featured “Shakedown Street,” “Eyes Of the World,” and an electric “Dancing In the Streets.”
Hamilton and Oteil had great chemistry on stage, working off each other’s grooves. Tom was listing vigilantly to where Oteil was going but always checked in to see where Melvin was at. And when it was time to peak, Melvin was really letting it ring!
The second set opened up with “Stop That Train” followed by “Money Honey” and a crowd favorite, “Tore Up Over You.” “My Sisters and Brothers” was touching and full of soul, it is a song about peace and brotherhood after all. The set ended with “Reuben and Cherise” and they encored by getting the whole theatre to sing along to “Shining Star.”
Following Dead and Company’s Halloween performances at Madison Square Garden on October 31 and November 1, Jerry Dance Party will take place at ZeroSpace, giving Deadheads a chance to keep the dancin late into the night.
“This is a rare opportunity to bring one of the most inspiring musicians of all-time into New York’s newest, visionary venue on the most creative holiday of year,” said event creator DJ JerrBrother. “Past will meet future when the music of Jerry Garcia plays at ZeroSpace!”
Inspired by psychedelic late-nights at the LOCKN’, The Jerry Dance Party will take place at New York’s Burning Man-inspired art-tech space ZeroSpace and include thousands of square feet of multi-sensory video mapping, projection and lasers.
Each Jerry Party room at ZeroSpace will be dedicated to a specific decade of The Dead, providing unique experiences that stretch into the early morning hours. For those Rhythm Devil fans, there will also be a 3D mapped, 30-foot geodesic dome synchronized to “Drums & Space” all night long.
ZeroSpace is located at 136 W. 33rd St, just steps away from Madison Square Garden. It features custom projections, interactive LED screens, projection mapped floors, synchronized illuminations, the largest augmented reality sandbox in the world and more, all tuned to the magical sounds of The Dead for this exclusive two-night event.
Tickets for the post-Dead & Company Halloween Jerry Dance Party are $25 and on sale now. This event is 18+. Visit Relix for more information.
Famed rock photographer Jay Blakesberg has announced the release of his latest photographic endeavor, JERRY GARCIA: Secret Space of Dreams – a fine art, hardcover photography book of Jerry Garcia, beginning from the middle of his career with the Grateful Dead and covering the last third of his life.
In early September 1977, the Grateful Dead performed four Labor Day weekend concerts along the east coast and at the legendary September 3rd Englishtown, NJ show where Blakesberg’s connection with the Grateful Dead was born. A year later, on September 2, 1978 at Giants Stadium, Blakesberg’s father, an amateur shutterbug himself, loaned his 16-year-old son his Pentax camera, a couple of lenses and a few rolls of film to photograph the Grateful Dead for the very first time. A photograph of Jerry Garcia from this show begins the chronological display of photographs that spans the following decades of Garcia’s life in JERRY GARCIA: Secret Space of Dreams.
The book’s Foreword is written by Grammy-award winning musician and guitar master John Mayer, who has been touring with the surviving members of the Grateful Dead as Dead & Company’s lead guitarist and vocalist since 2015. Providing the unique perspective of re-interpreting the lead guitar slot once held by Jerry Garcia, Mayer explores the magic and distinction of Garcia’s playing and the profound and lasting impact of his music on the world.
“I’ve always said that musicians play like they are, and in the case of Garcia, his performances serve as a detailed map of a man, his intentions, his desires, and his impressions of the world around him,“ Mayer writes. “And going by that map, Garcia was a lovely, mighty soul. I never met him and will never understand the loss of those who did, but the vast archive of his music amounts to the makings of a starry night sky that turns listeners into explorers.”
John Mayer
The introduction, by journalist, musician, radio host and Grateful Dead historian David Gans, dives deep into the character and charisma of the mythical non-frontman, frontman – and Blakesberg’s innate ability to capture Garcia’s magic on film. In the book’s 208 pages, Blakesberg shares 139 photographs of Garcia spanning nearly 20 years––September 2nd, 1978 (at Giants Stadium) through the April 1995 making of the “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” music video. With an essay by Garcia’s daughter Trixie and quotes from the likes of Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello, David Crosby, Jim James, Carlos Santana, Trey Anastasio, Robert Hunter, Jackie Greene, Jorma Kaukonen, Country Joe McDonald, David Grisman, the “core four” members of the Grateful Dead––Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart– and more, Blakesberg leads us on a visual journey of Garcia’s life, both on and off the stage.
In the afterword, Widespread Panic founding member, author, and producer Dave Schools muses on the man, myth and legend portrayed in the pages of the photographic biography. Schools thoughtfully reflects on Garcia’s ability to “display his own frailty in the service of the song,” and to connect with the audience as participants in the performance.
“These are just some of the attributes of a human being who led without leading, who conveyed his own truth better through his music than he was able to do through the spoken word…and who lived the majority of his life onstage being part of a performance troupe that went far beyond the sum of its parts,” he writes. “And luckily for those of us who want and need to remember such experiences we have a vast recorded archive of music, millions of words both scholarly and lay, and in our hands now these magnificently telling photographs by Jay Blakesberg so that we can always queue up the memories of our shared experiences with a rare human being known as Jerry Garcia and his equally rare cohorts.”
Dave Schools
The release of JERRY GARCIA: Secret Space of Dreams comes on the heels of Blakesberg’s recent photography books FARE THEE WELL: Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Grateful Dead (December 1, 2015) and Eyes of the World – Grateful Dead Photography 1965-1995, (October 23, 2017). FARE THEE WELL is a vibrant visual record of the Grateful Dead’s 50th anniversary “Fare Thee Well” concerts, gathering iconic images from all five performances, plus two rehearsal days, as well as band portraits, a few archival images, written tributes and setlists from the historic shows. Eyes of the World celebrates The Grateful Dead with photographs spanning their entire career from the likes of Jim Marshall, Annie Leibovitz, Herb Greene, Peter Simon (60 different photographers) and Blakesberg, who has the most photos in the book from any single photographer.
Signed copies of JERRY GARCIA: Secret Space of Dreams are available now for pre-order. Pre-orders will begin shipping September 23.
