TWBS No. 10: One more time in 94
Finding the good in every show
Not much was going well for the Dead in 1994, and the band closed the year with a pair of four-night runs in California - one in Oakland and one in Los Angeles.
The tenth performance of That Would Be Something showed up on night two of the Oakland run, and the evening proved once again that even when this band wasn’t doing great, they could still conjure up something special every now and then.
So it was that, after a largely forgettable first set - minus a solid Music Never Stopped - the Dead opened the second frame with Scarlet>Fire. They were joined by Sikiru Adepoju, and maybe that added some juice, or maybe things just clicked; either way, it came together.
Never mind Vince and his weird steel drum synth that just sounds out of tune. Jerry is playing well here, and while his solo during Scarlet kind of lags, the jam into Fire is good stuff. At one point in the transition, Jerry and Phil seem to disagree about whether they should be on the B chord or the A chord; in what seems to be a remarkable bit of awareness, Jerry is the one who concedes and switches to Phil’s choice of chord.
You don’t find that in every show.
The Fire track ends up being 18 minutes, and it’s just great. It’s the Grateful Dead being the Grateful Dead. There’s a point nine or 10 minutes when Jerry drops out - maybe he broke a string? - and the rest of the band keeps humming along. That’s part of what kills me about this era: the band isn’t playing half-bad. Vince can be a bummer at times, but when the other four non-Jerry members get it together, they can really make some good things happen.
They just need Jerry to be there. Because when he’s not on, there isn’t much the rest of them can do. But when he’s there, they can make some pretty good music.
And that’s what happens in this Scarlet>Fire.
After that, though, there’s not a lot to write home about. Way to Go Home leads into Truckin, which is where TWBS comes in. It’s fine; nothing to write home about, and ditto for He’s Gone and everything else in this set - which isn’t much, since they go He’s Gone>Drums>Space>Box of Rain and that ends the set.
That’s how it goes in 94. You can find some good stuff, but it will be here and there, with very rare full-set or even majority-set consistency.
But the good stuff is still the good stuff.