Photo by Artie Raslich
The Grateful Dead played a legendary 2,318 live shows for their loyal fans over a thirty-year span from 1965 – 1995. On Saturday, April 12th, 2014, Dark Star Orchestra hit the same concert milestone, playing 2,318 live shows for their fans, but over a seventeen-year span from 1997 – 2014. Not a typical cover band by any stretch, DSO strives to bring the live experience and experiment of the Grateful Dead to its contemporary audience. A DSO show is as close as can come to a carbon copy of an entire show the Grateful Dead played, down to every detail, whether its one drummer in 1974 to Brent on keys in 1988 to Donna ripping vocals on “Playing in the Band” in 1972. DSO is Rob Eaton (rhythm guitar/vocals, Rob Barraco (keyboards/vocals), Lisa Mackey (vocals), Skip Vangelas (bass/vocals), Rob Koritz (drums/percussion), Dino English (drums/percussion), and Jeff Mattson (lead guitar/vocals).
DSO’s 2,318 show at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco was sold out, and cameras lurked through the crowd while filmmakers shot interviews and dancing footage for the upcoming documentary, Dead For Life. While DSO plays entire GD shows, this night consisted of an original setlist of Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Band favorites. Highlights were a smokin’ “Shakedown Street,” “Feel Like A Stranger,” “Terrapin Station” and “Midnight Moonlight.” I asked Dino, Rob, and Jeff some questions about this honorable notch in the belt for DSO.
Did you ever in your wildest dreams think DSO would hit this milestone of playing as many shows as the Grateful Dead?
Dino: We got up to 500 shows and we were kind of like, ‘wow, that went by fast.’ When we hit 1000, the joke was, ‘we’ve done it 1000 times.’ Around show 1500, I figured it’s official: we are road warriors. I can’t even remember where we were for 2000, but at that point I figured we had a shot at 2318. It’s really a band accomplishment rather than an accomplishment of any one band member because the band has changed over the years. We have everyone who’s ever played with the band to recognize as well. But at least half the current band has played well over 2000 shows, and crew too. Bryan Adcock, our lighting director, has performed the light show for well over 2000 DSO shows.
Rob: I never really thought much about it. I joined DSO well into its evolution. They’d already been a band for 9 or so years before I came along after the original keyboard player and the founder of the band passed away (Scott Larned). I just went a long with it, I was just helping them out in a way, and at that time I was still playing with Phil [Lesh]. I never thought I would join the band and as a matter of fact, I was adamantly opposed to playing with the band, but little by little I got what they were trying to do and I really thought it was genius and I saw the potential for it, if we kept at it.
One day, I emerged as a member of the band and the next thing I knew I was told, oh yeah, we were approaching 2000 shows and I was like, ‘crap, 2000 shows?’ I was like, wow, I can’t believe this band has played this many shows. It’s a testimony to these guys dedication to wanting to play, and remember its also making a living, so you have to rectify how if you play 135 shows a year, you make a good living, so that’s one aspect of it, though, on the other side of it though, is how much can I person put up with? Well, they have to have a lot of love and passion in order to continue to do this and each and every person in this band and organization has an amazing amount of passion for it. We just love to create this music and the beauty of DSO is that our motto is continuing the Grateful Dead live experience and what we’re doing is we’re taking the spirit of that music and we’re letting it take us wherever it would like to take us and because we do that, that’s the true spirit of this music, it’s the journey, it’s all about the journey. I’m really proud of the fact that were able to take people on a journey but first and foremost, we’re taking ourselves on a journey.
Jeff: Since I have only been with DSO for five years, and the band was well on its way to having performed a huge amount of shows, it certainly seemed quite possible to me that they would hit this milestone. I have been playing Grateful Dead music since the 1970s in bands such as The Zen Tricksters and the Donna Jean Godchaux Band, and although I have not kept count of the number of shows I have played in addition to five years of DSO touring, I am sure I personally have surpassed that Dead milestone. However, having said that, it’s just a number and nothing can compare to the incredible music the Dead made in that number of shows!
DSO has been playing together for 17 years, which is a long time, and the band has been through many changes. What do you think is the biggest factor in the band’s continued success? How has the band evolved with the changes?
Dino: No doubt about it. It’s a testament to the power of the music. The love for this music is what binds us together. We are all here to serve the music and we know it’s really not about us as individuals. We are just a means for the music to do its thing. We are simply doing what the music tells us to do. The music is in charge. We are not.
Rob: Each evolution has heightened what we do. Losing John [Kadlecik] was a huge blow, but getting Jeff was a huge coup, because Jeff has other deeper levels to him that he brings to this music. When John was in the band I mean the band was really good but our forte was doing the later 70s-80s stuff. When Jeff joining the band not only could we do that stuff but we could delve way back to that raw genesis of the music. Jeff knows how to go to these psychedelic places that are so necessary in order to recreate that and I love it because I always wanted to play in a band that could play that kind of music and I’ve hardly ever found anybody that understands. Each evolution has enhanced the band and our newest evolution is that we have a new bass player and he is a force of nature, and he is the first bass player besides Phil that gets it the way he does, in my eyes. I’ve played with a lot of bass players and Kevin, our original bass player, was a really fine player, but Skip [Vangelas] gets it on a level that tickles me pink every night when I play with him. He’s driving the train. With this kind of music, you think about Phil Lesh, one of the most aggressive bass players that lived in rock, and you have to have that kind of force in order for this music to continue and evolve and go forward. We have all the pieces in place now and Skip has been in the band 6 months and it really has taken off.
Jeff: As I said, I am only in DSO for the last five years, but I would certainly attribute the band’s continued and growing success to it being comprised of seven incredibly talented Deadhead musicians who love what they do and all get along really well with each other. And DSO has the best crew in the business!
DSO has been responsible for turning on many Heads that were not even old enough to have seen Jerry. As the band has evolved, have you seen your fan base evolve? Do you see younger heads coming to your shows?
Dino: Yes, the audience has evolved. Probably most notably with the change of the lead guitar player slot. I think with the addition of Jeff Mattson in 2009, our crowd actually got to be older in general as Jeff has been playing professionally for so long and he has many devoted fans from way back. I think prior to that we were turning on a lot of kids to the music. A lot of those kids understandably jumped on the Furthur bandwagon with (DSO founding guitarist John Kadlecik) JK when he went to play with them, as it was exciting to see uniting of two of the original guys with John. But the kids are rediscovering us with Jeff Mattson. They are feeling how much depth and experience Jeff brings to the plate. They also like the aggressive approach Jeff plays when the music calls for it. Our crowds are now are bigger than they have ever been.
Rob: A lot of the younger heads jumped on the Furthur bandwagon and rightly so, because Phil and Bob are living legends and I think the kids wanted to be part of that big scene that they heard so much about over time. It’s like lore, it’s fabled and all of a sudden, they have a chance to jump on that train and they did. But, they weren’t getting the music quite the way when they were listening to let’s say, tapes or cd’s of past shows. Furthur had their way of doing this music and it was fine and dandy, but DSO gets more into the primal thing.
I think we’ve got it now to the point that these young kids that are coming and we are seeing an increasing amount now that Furthur is off the road, we’re seeing a lot more younger kids and they’re really getting it. They’re getting a taste of that late 60s, early 70s, mid 70s thing, or even the 80s thing. These were kids that were born in the 90s, they were in diapers when Jerry passed away or they weren’t even born yet. And there’s also a lot of Heads that only saw the very tail end of the Dead, like the early 90s until Jerry died, and they never had a chance to witness that real primal LSD jam thing and they’re finally getting a chance to do that. I get more and more of those kind of people coming up to me and going “Wow, all I’m used to is seeing the Dead in the 90s and this is the real shit right here.” I’m proud of that. I know we have our detractors that say we’re living off this legacy, but we don’t look at it that way. We truly love to play. The songs themselves are sacred to me. The lyrics and the melodies are timeless and need be played no matter what and you would never fault a symphony orchestra for playing Bach and Beethoven, nor would you fault a jazz player for playing standards, so I don’t understand why people can tear on us for playing the most amazing music written in the 20th century.
Jeff: Yes, absolutely. The older Deadheads keep coming but there has been a huge influx of much younger kids who love this music. I think that what they are experiencing seeing DSO shows is kind of similar to what I experienced as a 14 year old going to my first Grateful Dead show. For the older folks, seeing a DSO show is a way to relive some of the great Dead shows from their past. For the younger people, it is a chance to see what it might have been like.
Photo by Artie Raslich
How do you choose the setlist for the show? What’s the criteria? Can you walk me through it?
Dino: The idea is to play a different style show than what we played the last time we were in the same area and to play different eras from night to night with as little repeats as possible. It’s quite a Rubik’s Cube to figure out and it does take some planning. Rob Eaton plans out the sets before the tour starts and he does a great job of doing it. The sets we put together ourselves are decided the day of the performance.
Rob: It’s a very complex process that is in the charge of our rhythm guitarist Robbie Eaton. Rob started doing this many years ago and what he did was he built a database along with a friend of ours from Chicago and it has every show the band has ever played in every city. He’ll look at one city. So, let’s say in this tour, we’re going to play in L.A. He looks back at the last 3-4 years that we played in L.A., the shows we played and the setlists and then chooses something different. Maybe the last time we were in L.A. we did an ’87 show, so this time he may be looking to do a ’74 show, a one-drummer show. He picks a ’74 show, he looks at the setlist and now he goes to the next night. The next night we’re playing in Agoura Hills, which is not that far from L.A. so he looks into the database and sees what Agoura Hills had, and the last time we were in Agoura Hills we did a ’78 show. Okay, so what does he want to do this time, okay, size of the stage will not allow us to do a full blown ’80 show so maybe we do a ’91 show, a Bruce Hornsby show where we can actually fit everything on the stage. And then he looks at the setlist of shows in ’91 and finds a setlist that doesn’t repeat any of the songs from the night before or maybe just one song repeated. This is how he works and he works forwards and backwards from the one show he picks and then sometimes he has to readjust the L.A. show because it’s just not working. Too many songs repeated, too many eras repeated, not enough variation from the different cities for the different years we played there. It takes him about two to two and a half weeks to fine tune it and hone it and then he comes up with the perfect mix of all kinds of different eras for us. He keeps it real interesting to us. It keeps us on our toes; it keeps me on my toes, especially because I have to wear the most hats in the band because they had so many keyboard players and different singing styles. I’m in charge of doing the Tom Constanten, Pigpen stuff to Keith Godchaux, Brett Mydland, Bruce Hornsby and Vince Welnick.
I’ll get the setlists for the shows a few days before tour and I’ll sit, down, I have a hardrive that has almost every Dead show on it, and I’ll find the shows. I’ll download them, and then I’ll listen for reference just to see, because you know different songs morphed over their time. A good example is “Bird Song.” In its inception in 1971, it was in a different key, it had whole different parts to it and then by the time Brent joined the band they really had honed it into a fine tuned machine. I want to make sure that I’m getting the correct arrangements to the song, the keys to the songs, the tempos. These are the things that DSO pays strict attention to. Once we have a blueprint, it becomes a free for all, if anybody gets where this music will go. But we understand the limitations to each of these eras and we play within the confines of that, and it works. We’re so injected and at this point, after this many shows, it’s a no brainer, but everybody still likes to use the shows as reference just to get an idea.
Jeff: Rob Eaton is the one to be given the credit for all the hard work he puts into choosing shows based on what the band played in this venue and/or area the year before, what the band played the night before and will play the night after, whether to perform an actual show or write an original set list, etc. When we do original shows, I write the set lists with Rob Eaton and we try to get some of the songs that have fallen through the cracks onto our set lists and also put songs into segue combinations that may have never been tried before. We enjoy doing that very much.
What is your favorite Grateful Dead song to play and why?
Dino: My favorite song changes from night to night depending on how well the audience and we are connecting with the music. It’s usually whatever tune that gives me the feeling that we have brought that room of people to a different place from the room they entered earlier.
Rob: I can’t even answer that question honestly, there are so many. I love so many of the songs. I’m a huge “Dark Star” fan but my philosophy about “Dark Star” is that every song is actually “Dark Star.” Every song has the ability to be opened up and expanded. It was a huge philosophy we had when I was playing with Phil and Jimmy Herring and Warren Haynes were in the band. We’d take songs like “Cumberland Blues” and we’d open that thing up with a can opener and bring things out of that I don’t think anybody ever dreamed we’d bring out of it.
It shocked some of the audiences we played for sometimes that we took it to such extremes, but we were just so into making everything so open ended. Again, that’s part of the journey, now in DSO we don’t have the luxury of doing that but I still like to explore the spaces in every song, try to mine something different out of it. That’s one of the reasons I think that people are really enamored with the band.
Jeff: It changes from night to night. I have a particular affinity for the Jerry ballads. But if I had to pick one song I guess it would be Dark Star because it’s always so different.
What is your favorite memory in your time with DSO? Most memorable show with DSO?
Dino: It’s hard to pick out a favorite memory as we are making new favorite memories from night to night. I really feel good about the band as it is now and feel like we are playing well and getting better all the time. That being said, it’s always a kick to play with the original members. Those nights stick in your head. The first time Bob Weir strolled onto stage, tuned up and then looked up at me with that ‘ready to do this?!’ The first time Donna joined us for “Music Never Stopped” and ripped out “There’s a band out on the highway” line. The first time Phil stepped up with us and he made that puckered up lip face while we laid into the bridge of “Playing In The Band” together (that made me smile) and the monstrous “Morning Dew” to end the set. I have to thank my lucky stars all the time and pinch myself to make sure I’m not dreaming…which I may actually be.
Rob: Last year we played the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, such an amazing space, the place speaks to you. We did a 1970 recreation and it was our bass player’s first show with us and I had finally gotten the nerve to get off the keyboard and just stand in the middle of the stage and do the Pigpen thing. We were doing “King Bee” and I just remember standing there and it hit me: “I didn’t want to think about it too much but this is probably the same place Pigpen stood and sang this tune in this theater so many times.” It was just thrilling and the energy just threw me, and I was like, “Whoa.” I’ve had moments like that in a lot of different shows. One of my first Dead shows with these guys, we did a ’77 recreation in NY, it was my very first tour helping them out when their keyboard player died. It was in the middle of the show, that’s when it hit me like a ton of bricks the genius of what they were doing. I felt like I was in the Grateful Dead in 1977, it was the eeriest thing and I never ever felt that way all the times I played with Phil and I played The Dead, I never felt that way. This was the first time in my life, that I was like, this is it was probably like. It was cool.
Jeff: I think one of my favorite memories was playing at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival where we played in a field at Golden Gate Park for 30,000 people recreating a show the Dead played only a few hundred feet away in Golden Gate Park in 1975.
Photo by Artie Raslich
SPEED DATING WITH Dino & Rob
Phil Zone or Jerry side?
Dino: Jerry
Rob: Phil
What’s your spiritual animal?
Dino: Owl
Rob: Cat
Coffee or orange juice?
Dino: Both
Rob: Coffee
East Coast or West Coast?
Dino: Love them both
Rob: East Coast
1971 or 1977?
Dino: 1977
Rob: 1971
Favorite GD show you went to?
Dino: Sandstone, June 25, 1991. “Comes A Time” sent me over the edge.
Rob: 5/9/77
Favorite GD show of all time?
Dino: Impossible to choose
Rob: 9/27/72
*Favorite color?
Dino: Blue
Rob: Purple
Sativa or Indica?
Dino: Kick me down your latest sample and I’ll let you know.
Rob: Sativa
Beer or Wine?
Dino: Beer
Rob: Wine
If wine, Napa or Sonoma?
Dino: Bordeaux
Rob: Sonoma
Miles or Coltrane?
Dino: Coltrane but Miles rules too! I read the Miles autobiography years ago and a lot of that has stuck with me. One of those things was how he very rarely smiled on stage. To paraphrase, basically he said he wasn’t going to put on faces for anybody. I am sometimes asked why I don’t smile more if I’m having such a good time (which I am). I do smile from time to time, but the truth of the matter is I’m too blissed out by the music to put on a face. If I have to think about smiling, that is taking me away from and out of the music. I know people like to look up and see a smiling face on stage and I do smile when I feel like doing so. But, I’m not going to do it because I’m supposed to. Please, just take for granted that I’m really enjoying.
Rob: Coltrane
