Search - Phil Lesh & Friends :: Palace Theatre: Louisville Ky 7/18/06 (Dig)

True heirs to the classic Grateful Dead

Mark Luebker | Gilbert, AZ | 10/14/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I've been lamenting the passing of Jerry Garcia for years, figuring without him, the Grateful Dead pretty much had slipped into history. I haven't been particularly impressed by recordings by The Other Ones or The Dead, and Ratdog just doesn't do it for me. But one of my old pals told me that Phil Lesh & Friends sounded pretty good and had been putting on some terrific concerts a couple of years back.



I never paid much attention to Phil: great bass player, but he always kinda hung back, and the one solo album of his I'd heard--"Seastones" from back in the early seventies--left me cold. So I mentally filed the info and forgot about it. Then one day I heard a killer version of "Brown-Eyed Women" on Pandora Radio. I looked, and it was Phil Lesh, playing with a band of folks whose names I'd never heard before. They sounded like a bluesier version of the classic "Europe '72" version of the band, so I checked the "Like" box and Pandora served up more Phil and Friends tracks.



After about two weeks of hearing wonderful interpretations of one classic Grateful Dead track after another (from some of the earliest stuff to some of the most recent), I picked out a couple of the "Instant Live" sets that seemed to stand out above the others and ordered them up--this one and the show from Holmdel, NJ on 07-01-06.



But hey, don't take my word for it. Go on over to Pandora, create a station and ask it to play you some Phil & Friends. You'll be back here ordering some sets soon enough. I know I'm not done!"