John Kadlecik Band Lyrics Look Around Again
In laurels of Phil Lesh's 80th birthday on Sunday, we present this slice from our March 2011 effect.
Among the midnight spectacle that embellished Furthur'south recent New Year's Eve concert at the Bill Graham Borough Auditorium in San Francisco, a quieter milestone unfolded likewise. This occasion marked the 2d consecutive year that Bob Weir and Phil Lesh had welcomed Begetter Time and his multihued parade crew with the aforementioned total-time ring.
The pair's preceding comparable back-to-dorsum celebrations took identify in 1990 and 1991 during Grateful Expressionless galas at the Oakland Coliseum Arena. Later legendary promoter Bill Graham passed away in the fall of 1991, the grouping performed ane final New year's day's blowout in his laurels but so cleared the engagement from its tour itinerary. Jerry Garcia died in Baronial 1995 and for some time afterwards, Lesh and Weir converged only intermittently.
The summer of 1998 saw the pair return to the stage in The Other Ones, a group formed with Grateful Dead alum Mickey Hart (only not fellow Rhythm Devil Bill Kreutzmann), as well as Bruce Hornsby on keys, two guitarists (Mark Karan and Steve Kimock) and a sax player (Dave Ellis, who transposed many of Garcia'south signature guitar lines). However, past Baronial of 2000, when The Other Ones adjacent toured, Lesh was non a part of the line-up (though Kreutzmann had entered the fold), opting instead to focus on his new Phil & Friends project. Ii years later, at the Terrapin Station family unit reunion event in Wisconsin, the cadre four reconvened as The Others Ones with Jimmy Herring on guitar duty (eventually renaming the group The Dead in 2003). Warren Haynes joined the group first with 2004'due south "Moving ridge that Flag" summer bout.
During the adjacent v years, Weir ramped upwardly his grouping RatDog, while Lesh continued to rotate players into a fluid Phil & Friends roster. However, spurred by a collective call to raise funds for presidential candidate Barack Obama, The Expressionless'southward benefit performance gave way to an Countdown upshot, followed by a serial of spring dates, with Haynes as the solitary guitarist. (By so Herring was a fulltime fellow member of Widespread Panic.)
It was during this concluding stretch that Weir and Lesh reconnected, recommitted and ultimately decided to take things Furthur.
It all began with an electronic mail from the bass histrion to his longtime bandmates.
"Afterwards the tour I e-mailed him and said, 'Hey, that was actually fun, I really enjoyed playing with yous,' Lesh explains. "That's what I had brought abroad from it and information technology turned out he felt the aforementioned fashion. From in that location, we started talking and it seemed like we should go along to play together. We'd find some musicians and have it in our direction, in the direction nosotros wanted to take it."
That direction oriented them away from Hart and Kreutzmann who somewhen would re-activate The Rhythm Devils touring collective that they had debuted in 2006.
"Once y'all add Mickey and Baton to the mix – and this is more real than one might imagine – yous add a layer of expectation," Weir explains. "A lot of folks in the audition are looking for a walk downward retention lane and they're disappointed if they don't get that. That's cumbersome. So Phil and I decided to start fresh with the material and with an outfit that didn't carry those expectations."
The pair set out on a divergent musical path that necessitated a shift in personnel. The cardinal irony of this decision, given their objective to divine new bearings, is that a small but vocal subset of the Deadhead community – an absolutely picky lot – would censure their heroes for navigating all likewise familiar terrain.
Information technology's a criticism that Lesh dismisses with a shrug as he explains how far it diverges from his intent. "One of the reasons that Bob and I wanted to go ahead with this band was to bring fresh approaches to the tunes, like he was doing with RatDog and I did with Phil & Friends," he says assuredly. "Nosotros care for it as repertoire. In Grateful Expressionless terms, that means every performance can be different. All versions of the songs are truthful, just like a fairy tale."
And so Lesh and Weir then required some agreeing storytellers.
"And then nosotros carefully assembled a crew of guys," Weir recalls, "who were familiar enough with the material but came from disparate plenty backgrounds. That way, when we pull everybody together, the center is amorphous enough that it gives us the opportunity to take any arroyo to sometime material or new material that nosotros might want to adopt at a moment's whimsy."
Photo by Jay Blakesberg
The first two musicians that the duo enlisted were RatDog's keyboardist Jeff Chimenti and drummer Jay Lane. Chimenti had been a familiar face in Weir-Lesh collaborations always since Terrapin Station while Lane had fabricated some guest appearances with The Other Ones or The Dead. Furthur's architects envisioned moving him away from the kit and into the role of percussionist, coloring the palette differently than with their previous groups.
Lesh also approached longtime Phil & Friends drummer John Molo only to discover that Molo already had had made a long-term commitment to Moonalice. "So I started listening back to other people I'd played with and listening on Archive.org to different bands," Lesh recalls. "I remembered Joe Russo from the Jammys. [Lesh hosted the Jammy Awards in 2005 where he appeared with The Benevento-Russo Duo along with Les Claypool and Mike Gordon for "Dee's Diner" ]. "And from gigs we'd played together in separate bands. [In the summer of 2006, Benevento and Russo joined Gordon and Trey Anastasio for a series of dates on a co-pecker with Phil & Friends]. So I listened back to his playing and I told Bob we should try this guy out; we should accept him come up out and play with us."
Of all the musicians who would bring together the new band, Russo had the least familiarity with the Dead catalog but he certainly had the chops, which ultimately added to his appeal.
"It'due south fun considering he'south so game and brings then many drum styles and approaches," Lesh commends. "A lot of the time it was really cool to have him play the song his mode and it just gave a totally unlike flavor to it." "He's a phenomenal drummer," Weir echoes. "What he's doing at present is learning the ropes of playing in a larger ensemble and he's getting a pretty good grip on it. His big oeuvre when he came to us at that point had been a duo and the other guy in that duo [Marco Benevento] pretty much played quarter notes, if that. [Russo] was everything else, so he was clumsily busy. He's simmering downwards these days and that'south good for the music. There was a lot of cloth for him to get upwardly to speed on and Jay Lane was real helpful in that regard – he was basically a prepare of grooming wheels."
Yet earlier the band could hope to striking maximum velocity, it required an additional piston.
John Kadlecik began his training on the classical violin at age nine and didn't heed to stone radio until six years afterwards. He swiftly made up for lost time as he recalls, ravenously consuming what "they didn't call archetype rock yet, they called oldies: The Who, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd," he says. "I endured the ridicule of my violin playing peers for listening to the former stuff."
He soon gravitated toward the guitar. "From '84 to '87, I blasted through everything I could get my hands on, including some of the hard rock which was the technique-oriented stuff for guitar players," he says. He received a scholarship to Illinois' William Rainey Harper Higher and began studying music before dropping out to pursue the life of a working musician in the Chicago club and bar scene.
During the summer of 1988, at age 19, at the suggestion of a friend, he attended his first Grateful Dead show – or well-nigh and then – arriving at Alpine Valley Music Theatre on the band's day off during a run when performing four shows in five nights at the East Troy, Wis. amphitheater. "In that location were a lot of people camping in the parking lot," Kadlecik says. "So I went in and wandered around. It was the first time I saw a alive sitar, so I thought, 'That'southward a good sign.'"
He finally saw the grouping the next spring, caught the bug, and in 1997, while still appearing with a multifariousness of bands in multiple contexts, co-founded Nighttime Star Orchestra, which began every bit a collection of Dead-loving players from diverse groups who came together for a weekly slot at Martyrs' in Chicago. The band's modus operandi was to select a Grateful Expressionless setlist and then endeavour to perform it in the style of the Dead from the original era, with Kadlecik assuming the role of Jerry Garcia.
"I had this idea the first time I saw DeadBase," the guitarist says in reference to the compendium of Grateful Dead setlists. "I idea this would exist a groovy way to create a curriculum of study for a really aggressive Deadhead band to do a Grateful Dead tribute and not make sacrifices for the yuppies that merely want to hear the Tiptop 40 hits. Nosotros would expect at each song and listen to iii or iv versions of that vocal from the aforementioned year and endeavor to interpolate them. Information technology was never a annotation for note thing – it was almost trying to larn where the edges of stretching could get within that aesthetic of taste.
Photo by Jay Blakesberg
"There'southward a misperception that DSO played jams annotation for note," he continues. "The best transcribers in the world of guitar music would still have months to [transcribe] i show. Function of my drive in doing the setlist thing was an excuse to do 'drums and space' every night – to practise that kind of unstructured improvisation and have information technology exist different every time."
Inside a year, Dark Star Orchestra had morphed from a weekly practise in a Chicago lodge for musicians on their night off from other gigs into a nationally-touring, total-time venture. In 2006, Weir himself sat in with DSO for the get-go of a couple appearances with the band. (Of Weir's guitar style, Kadlecik offers, "My favorite metaphor is that he did for Jerry what John McLaughlin did for Miles Davis – as an aggressive, intelligent, innovative support and foil." )
After Lesh listened to some Dark Star Orchestra shows, Weir'southward managing director Matt Busch east-mailed Kadlecik to inquire about his upcoming plans. That e-mail service sat in Kadlecik's spam folder for a little while, until the guitarist was cleaning it out one day. He before long found himself flying west with his gear for an audition that took place on a mid-summer twenty-four hour period in 2009, with the other future DSO members who would join the nascent group.
Weir acknowledges that some of Kadlecik'south vocal intonations and guitar tones "were to me at least, a little uncomfortably reminiscent of Jerry." However, he was soon won over.
"We had done some looking around and a lot of listening," he confides. "Nosotros were going to audition a bunch of guys but John came in and we got to playing with him and Phil and I decided, 'Why bother shopping around, this guy's slap-up.' His approach is open-ended. He studied the scales that Jerry studied and he has the power to play with a fluid tonic. If you're in the key of A, the tonic is A. The way the Grateful Expressionless played, the tonic could change in a jam and that's kind of unusual. Most jambands, if they're going to jam, they selection a fundamental and stick with it. "If a musician is really good at listening and tin can hear a shift in the harmonic content of what's going on and push it in another direction, the jam can find its way into another central – information technology can attune. Not all that many musicians are gifted with that ability. We're non looking to recreate the old days by any ways simply John'southward power to go with the music trumped what I considered to be the downside – that he tended to sound like Jerry."
During the course of 1700 Dark Star Orchestra shows, Kadlecik had come to refine his methodology and style of improvisation. "The one matter I struggled with early, as a jamming improviser with different bands, is how practise y'all continue all the jams sounding dissimilar? How practise you avoid recycling the same licks?" the guitarist says. "I'm a believer in the idea that the instrumental melodic components that come with a song take a DNA relationship with that song. Sometimes it's of import to throw that out for spontaneity's sake or only to rattle cages as it were but there'due south nonetheless a fractal formula for each song that informs the jam. Even if you throw it out, it'southward deliberately not the DNA of that song. And so information technology'south nonetheless kind of anti-informing the jam but notwithstanding giving information technology its own unique relationship to that vocal in that moment in the evening."
It was this approach, in part, that ultimately endeared him to Weir and Lesh. But rather than viewing him equally a vehicle to recreate the part of Jerry Garcia, the 2 realized that his deep noesis of Garcia's playing gave him the tools and the vision to assistance carry the Grateful Expressionless's music in an original direction.
"The kickoff song we played together was 'Playing in the Band,'" Kadlecik remembers. "So, right away, we jumped into information technology to see where nosotros could take things. It was consciousness altering, leave it at that. I had no idea what Bob and Phil had in listen though. I thought it might be a benefit show. I had no thought they were planning a new band together. After the 2d mean solar day of audition/rehearsal, [Weir and Lesh] pulled the 4 Js [Jeff Chimenti, Jay Lane, Joe Russo and John Kadlecik] into a room and told u.s., 'We think we have a band, do you want to do information technology? Can you lot clear your schedule for 2010?'"
All they needed was a name.
"We were calling it PB and Js for a while," Lesh laughs. "Then one day nosotros were sitting on my patio and Bob and Natasha [Weir] were over, along with my kids and some other folks. Information technology'southward well-nigh uncanny. I said something like, 'Oh, we need a proper noun,' and Bob says, 'We take a name – Furthur.' Boom that was information technology. It was just like Jerry and 'How nigh the Grateful Dead?' It was uncanny. It was too perfect. I had to say, ' This is a moment.'" "The expert transport Furthur is sort of large in our iconic history," Weir adds. The name, equally many likely recall, comes from the International Harvester schoolhouse charabanc that carried Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters around the country, as chronicled past Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Photograph by Jay Blakesberg
By the time that Furthur took the stage for the first time at Oakland, Calif.'southward Play a joke on Theatre on September eighteen, 2009, the music was already advancing toward a zone that befits the band'southward moniker. Furthur debuted with an declaratory jam, which then segued into "The Other One," "The Wheel" and and then "Jack Harbinger" – a sequence that demonstrated the new group'due south facility for dense improvisation balanced by an analogousness to lock into a more than playful groove.
"On whatever given nighttime, we make a ferocious amount of music," Weir explains. "Nosotros have lot of firepower in this band and everybody listens as hard as they play. My biggest criticism is that from fourth dimension to fourth dimension people tin can get likewise busy – a footling too notey – although that'due south to exist expected from a band of guys with the kind of facility that we have. But I don't think that'due south going to go you to heaven. The songs are going to get you lot to heaven, non the playing."
To this terminate, the Flim-flam Theatre run besides offered something that the preceding Expressionless tour had not: a new Phil Lesh composition, "Welcome to the Trip the light fantastic."
"I think it says something that right abroad in our first 3 shows, we were already playing original material," Kadlecik observes. "At this point, we have almost an album's worth of cloth nosotros are playing in the first year of the band'due south history and it doesn't evidence whatsoever sign of letting up."
Lesh affirms, "I'm trying to bring in new originals as fast as I can and Bob is likewise. I don't work very fast unfortunately but we're both committed to it. I'm also searching out some cool covers."
1 contempo songwriting collaborator is someone Lesh has known for quite some time – his younger son Brian (currently a Princeton undergrad and fronting his ain group, Bluish Light River). "Brian'south lyrics have always struck me as being unusually mature and thoughtful," says the elder Lesh. "There was this one tune I was having trouble finalizing, so I made a piffling demo recording of it and asked if maybe he could call back upward some lyrics for information technology and mayhap change the sequence of events around it a little bit. And so he took that on and it came out beautifully [ "The Mount Song" which tin can exist heard on this issue'southward CD sampler]. He also wrote some lyrics for an arrangement of an Ola Belle Reed melody chosen 'High on a Mountain.'"
The bassist also speaks with reverence of a performance this past summer at ane of Levon Captain's Midnight Rambles, where Brian and his elder son Grahame, a recent Stanford grad with his own grouping, Maiden Lane, joined him. "It was the well-nigh crawly feeling," says the proud father. "I recollect the nearly moving part of it was singing together considering siblings have familial voices that alloy actually neatly. It was always in the back of my mind that maybe it could happen but now that it is happening, information technology'south better than I could imagine. Information technology virtually seemed like that could be the future."
Every bit for the hereafter of Phil & Friends, Lesh acknowledges that Furthur's development hasn't precluded it but "I'm having such a fun time touring with Furthur and playing with those guys that I haven't given information technology a lot of idea. There are some intriguing options that are starting to present themselves but I'one thousand always one for assuasive things to happen in an organic, natural way rather than trying to push them in any direction. So I'chiliad just waiting to run into what'south going to come up."
Photo by Jay Blakesberg
Meanwhile, Weir explains that when it comes to RatDog, "that certainly hasn't run its form but I but have and then much time and energy. I've got a lot of other projects on my plate correct now, as well." These include a May performance with California's Marin Symphony Orchestra and a solo acoustic gig at the Sundance Film Festival, which may inspire a bout. In addition, he is close to completing a studio that he has been edifice for the purpose of Internet broadcast.
"One of the shows I desire to do [in the studio] is RatDog," Weir confirms. "I want to get all or at least most of the guys who are still alive who played with RatDog and do a retrospective. In doing so, nosotros'll probably make a DVD and a record. I've got unfinished business with that outfit."
Weir likewise mentions that he can imagine another band coming back together. "I actually expect that The Expressionless will reconvene at some point, simply that'll be a walk down memory lane," he says. "It volition exist for those folks who want that, merely we can't live in that location."
For at present, Furhur is pulling Weir into deeper realms. The personnel has shifted slightly since the band'southward premiere, with Jay Lane departing in the spring of 2010 to join his friend Les Claypool in a reconstituted Primus. "Nosotros had a feeling it was going to boil down to 1 drummer," Weir asserts. "The two drummer business organization is kind of cumbersome. Even a drummer and percussionist is a bit cumbersome, so it all happened sort of serendipitously." In addition, backup singers Sunshine Becker and Jeff Pehrson have come on board to sweeten the vocal harmonies and assistance carry the music somewhere new. In the process, Furthur is playing to a swelling, enthusiastic fan base of longtime Weir and Lesh fans along with many fresh faces who have never shared in the Grateful Dead live experience.
As for fans' waning all the same not altogether abated criticism of Kadlecik, Weir responds: "I think you'll detect over the past year and some, John's playing and delivery has drifted a scrap from sounding that much like Jerry. That'south what we expected; that's what we're getting and we're happy with information technology. At the same time, we're making skilful music and information technology satisfies united states. Information technology keeps usa hopping because John is on his toes. When a new opportunity arrives harmonically, rhythmically – whatever – he's there. He can hear us and we tin hear him and he just fits. Only if you lot want it to sound completely new, be patient, information technology will – soon."
Lesh agrees: "I recall John has gained an enormous corporeality of confidence and most important to me, he doesn't accept any trouble existence himself anymore. "He's evolved to the point where he doesn't feel like he has to channel Jerry. He can merely relax and play, so that the context of the moment determines how much of Jerry he channels."
What is undeniable is that Kadlecik and his bandmates have invigorated Weir and Lesh – infusing them with a spirit that has yielded new creative output, while drawing them back to the stage on a consistent ground, equally evidenced by the consecutive New year's Eve shows. It's even led the bassist to revisit his contempo performances, listening back to live recordings, "generally to run into how I can improve simply also sometimes while we're playing, I'll notice that in that location's some little organization that we didn't quite go right and if I listen dorsum I'll know to bring it up in rehearsal," Lesh says.
From Kadlecik's perspective: "Musically, they both seem on fire with their passion. Every day, I see the aforementioned energy as a five twelvemonth old on Christmas morning with a new toy."
Lesh, who will plough 71 in March, reflects, "Music is infinite. At that place's no finish to it and y'all can never stop growing with it because information technology won't let y'all. Every musical organism – and that's what bands are – has a life and a heed of its own. Musical organisms grow over time considering it takes time to larn each other's trivial idiosyncrasies and that's a human matter. Nothing is perfect out of the box and music is never perfect. Striving toward that goal is an evolving procedure. Information technology only gets improve and improve and that's what I love nigh it."
This commodity originally appeared in the pages of Relix. For more than features, interviews, anthology reviews and more than subscribe beneath.
Source: https://relix.com/articles/detail/furthur-origin-story-dead-behind-furthur-ahead-relix-revisited/
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