The best Grateful Dead tribute band thrills fans on Jerry Garcia’s birthday

The birth of Jerome John Garcia was celebrated all around the Bay Area on Saturday, as fans and admirers gathered in Berkeley, San Francisco and other spots to show their respect and admiration for the man that most Deadheads simply refer to as “Jerry.”

Chalk it up as further evidence of the connection that millions of people still feel with Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead co-founder/vocalist-guitarist who was born on Aug. 1, 1942 and died at the age of 53 on Aug. 9, 1995.

Garcia was certainly on the minds of the 2,600 Deadheads — including a number of whom who aren’t actually old enough to have ever seen Garcia or the Grateful Dead in concert — who filled the beautiful Quarry Amphitheater in Santa Cruz to capacity on Saturday.

They had come to hear the very best of the (roughly) 714,865 Grateful Dead tribute acts in existence:

Joe Russo’s Almost Dead (aka, JRAD).

Taking the stage just before 7 p.m. at this gem of a venue often referred to as “Red Rocks in the Redwoods,” JRAD — led by drummer Joe Russo and featuring bassist Dave Dreiwitz, keyboardist and vocalists-guitarists Scott Metzger and Tom Hamilton Jr. — was in a noodly mood to start the show, strutting through space for a good five minutes before latching onto the melody of “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo.”

The song moved at a leisurely pace for most of its run, much like what one hears on the version that kicks off the Grateful Dead’s sixth album, 1973’s “Wake the Flood.” Then suddenly — as if someone flipped the speed on the turntable from 33 1/3 to 45 rpm — the tune just went into massive overdrive, sounding like nothing you would have ever heard from the Dead. The group rode that high-speed rollercoaster right out of ‘Mississippi” and into a strong version of “Cassidy” (a number that made its debut on Bob Weir’s first solo record, 1972’s “Ace’) — with the segue, once again, coming across as something you would not have heard from Jerry and co. back in the day.

But, really, that’s what makes JRAD stand out from the very crowded field of Dead tributes out there. The thrill in this chase comes from the fact that the group can indeed play the songs pretty much note-for-note — and, at times, performs passages/songs that are very faithful to what the Dead created — but the musicians usually go their own route and deliver high-octane, highly improvised reinterpretations of the material instead.

It’s the Dead songbook, covered with a more Phish-like brand of energy and playfulness, so it’s really no wonder that JRAD has built such a connection with younger jam-loving listeners.

The band is led by Russo, a longtime jazz/jam-rock player who finally found his commercial niche with the music of the Grateful Dead. Yet, most of the attention goes to the twin towers of vocal delight and fretboard frenzy — Metzger and Hamilton. They nicely trade off on vocals, with the former handling the Weir tunes and latter going the Garcia route, but it’s what they accomplish on their co-lead-guitar roles that really keeps pushing the crowd “furthur.”

I’d reckon that more than half of the 13 songs played during the course of two sets and three-plus hours of music contained true head-turning guitar spots, with Metzger flexing his might early on with “Cassidy” and Hamilton following up with an artsy, experimental lead on a shotgun blast through the Dead classic “St. Stephen.”

Indeed, it’s hard to think of any current band that has a better pair of alternating lead guitarists in it then JRAD. And that point was driven home once again as Hamilton helped bring Set 1 to a close with an explosive, whirlwind of a solo during a showstopper take on another first-tier Dead classic “Jack Straw.”

Hamilton picked up right where he left off in the nightcap, delivering more big guitar moments in the otherwise fairly straight-ahead take on “Eyes of the World” — another “Wake of the Flood” favorite — that opened the second set.

Then it was Metzger’s time to shine, leading the way in turning the old Link Wray tune “Fire and Brimstone” — a number that has no deep connection with the Grateful Dead — into a full-throttle rocker that was seemed oddly reminiscent of Eric Clapton’s hit version of the J.J. Cale classic “After Midnight.” And then in one of those weird musical moments — which seem to happen more often in shows built from the Grateful Dead tradition than anywhere else — the band actually jammed right into “After Midnight.”

The group followed with “It Must Have Been the Roses” — a version played slow enough to, indeed, give one time to stop and smell the roses — and then waltzed over to the other side of the dancefloor for an experimental, jammed-out “Let It Grow.” The quintet closed the second set with a terrific run through “Fire on the Mountain.”

Benevento, a wonderful keyboardist who brought so much to the table throughout the entire show, would finally get his turn at the microphone during the encore as the band turned from the Grateful Dead songbook to that of the great Warren Zevon for “Werewolves of London.”

And Jerry most definitely would have approved of that selection, given that it’s one that he made himself on several occasions with both the Grateful Dead and the Jerry Garcia Band.

Setlist:

Set 1:
1) “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo”
2) “Cassidy”
3) “St. Stephen”
4) “Lazy Lightning”
5) “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again”
6) “Jack Straw”
Set 2:
7) “Eyes of the World”
8) “Fire and Brimstone”
9) “After Midnight”
10) “It Must Have Been the Roses”
11) “Let It Grow”
12) “Fire on the Mountain”
Encore:
13) “Werewolves of London”