Goldenvoice/AEG Live presents Jackie Greene with Phil Lesh
2016-11-26
the Warfield
982 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94102-4012 USA
8:00 PM, Saturday, November 26, 2016
Back to the previous event! ☸ Up to the 2016 yearbox! ☸ Up to the 2016 event list! ☸ On to the next event!
[8:29 PM lights down,, band out]
[9:39 PM lights down, Jackie on mandolin, harmonica; Bob Weir on acoustic guitar; + band]
[10:17 PM lights down, band out + Weir + Alex Nelson: piano]
I've enjoyed going to past celebrations of Jackie's Birthday, and this party rose to my expectations. Figuring on a tough crowd, Ting and I headed over extra-early to do some line duty, grab our tickets from will-call, then claim a spot on the first drink rail up from the floor – my favorite section for GA shows at the Warfield, even with all the distractions that entails.
The first set was solidly excellent, and I would have been perfectly happy to hear Jackie and his pals continue to run the boards with assorted favorites from outside the Grateful Dead canon, but instead, the night continued with a brief acoustic set, centered around tunes from Bob Weir's new album, Blue Mountain, followed by an electric set focused almost exclusively on Grateful Dead covers.
Of course, most everyone has their own take on what it means to cover the Dead, and Jackie's take is generally pretty interesting. I really liked the inclusion of Eddie Hazel's extremely funky classic, Shakey Ground – all the better to get down and groovy on a Saturday night! The abrupt, Weir-style transition from Scarlet Begonias into Fire on the Mountain appeared to me to have been instigated by Jackie – hard to tell if he jumped the gun on that one or if it was a well-planned swerve. Maybe someday the show will be up on the live music archive for further study!
I'm curious to know the genesis of Jackie's Shakedown/Another Brick mash-up – Youtube shows a couple relatively coarse versions posted by amateur musicians as far back as 2011 – seems like a chocolate/peanut butter pair to me! China » Rider was an excellent way to close the third set, and while I was mildly bummed to have the gig wrapped up by midnight, that made it much easier for us to get home, since we still had a couple BART trains to go before they shut down the system for the night.
Interested in another point of view? Here’s Joshua Zucker’s review for SFGate.
Back to the previous event! ☸ Up to the 2016 yearbox! ☸ Up to the 2016 event list! ☸ On to the next event!