Greatest Moments From Evening 1

San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, and the adjoining Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, are hallowed floor within the Grateful Useless’s historical past — and for Deadheads. The realm was the epicenter of the Nineteen Sixties counterculture motion, and together with a cadre of different bands together with Huge Brother and the Holding Firm, Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Useless supplied the home music. In its early years, the band usually performed exhibits all through the park and town blocks surrounding it; in 1991, the Useless staged an enormous live performance on the park’s Polo Subject to honor the passing of its longtime promoter and Bay Space live performance royalty, Invoice Graham.

Many years later, the Haight’s streets have been alive on Friday with distributors, buskers and Deadheads, who trickled down Golden Gate Park’s JFK Promenade — the place Shakedown Road, the tailgate-meets-street-fair that pops up at each Useless present, lined the street — to the Polo Subject, the place the present happened. Underneath an appropriately grey and funky San Francisco summer season sky, Useless & Firm would take the stage with greater than a half-century of historical past hanging within the air.

Over the past a number of years, 32-year-old Billy Strings has emerged as certainly one of — if not essentially the most — lauded musicians within the broader jam band ecosystem, enjoying with revered artists, together with Willie Nelson, Phish and Grateful Useless founding members Bobby Weir and Invoice Kreutzmann. Strings performs jamgrass, a closely psychedelic and improvised iteration of bluegrass, and was a becoming opener for the primary of those three Useless exhibits.

Early in his profession, Garcia taught banjo and performed in folks teams and jug bands; even because the Useless’s reputation swelled int he early ’70s, he fashioned the short-lived bluegrass band Outdated and In The Approach. In fact, concurrently, Garcia was shredding psychedelic blues-rock with the Useless at acid assessments — and Strings embodied this duality in his set, deftly integrating deep jams (a 10-minute jam on his personal “Away From the Mire”) with shorter numbers like his breakout single “Mud in a Baggie,” his Grammy-nominated Willie Nelson collaboration “California Sober,” and the normal “Shady Grove,” a late-career favourite of Garcia’s. And in a particular flip, Strings closed his set with “Thunder,” a music he wrote to accompany unused lyrics by the late Useless lyricist Robert Hunter.

In October, Grateful Useless founding member Phil Lesh died at age 84. Lesh’s son, Grahame, often carried out together with his father, and has continued to play Useless music for the reason that elder Lesh’s passing; this weekend, he’s led the “Heart of Town” after shows at San Francisco’s Pier 48 that includes a who’s who of gamers from the jam world. On Friday, Useless & Firm kicked off its second set with “Field of Rain” — a uncommon Phil-written and Phil-sung Useless tune — and invited Grahame to the stage to sing it. The youthful Lesh’s impassioned vocals have been excellent, however so was the bass slung over his shoulder: Mission Management, the instantly recognizable instrument that Phil performed because the Useless carried out a few of its most exploratory music within the early ’70s.

Lesh stayed within the fold for “Taking part in within the Band,” which on Friday channeled its historical past as one of many Useless’s most dependable improvisational autos. For this “Taking part in,” Useless & Firm stretched out in a method it hadn’t within the present’s first set, venturing to the cosmos with a dense, propulsive jam that landed in a primordial jazz fusion swirl because the band segued into the Weir-written stalwart “Estimated Prophet.” It was the night’s headiest second, and an indication of promising issues to come back musically later within the weekend.

Amongst Useless & Firm’s 4 gamers who weren’t within the Grateful Useless, the platinum-selling, Grammy-winning, arena-headlining Mayer naturally will get essentially the most consideration. However Chimenti, a longtime inventive accomplice of Weir’s and Burbridge, who earlier than Useless & Firm performed within the Allman Brothers Band, supplied important rhythmic and melodic underpinning. Useless & Firm segued from “Estimated” to fan favourite “Eyes of the World” — a basic pairing relationship to the Useless’s beloved late ’70s period — and Chimenti and Burbridge each delivered intricate, prolonged solos that reaffirmed their vital roles within the band.

The Garcia-Hunter composition a couple of drunken sailor reckoning with the alternatives he’s made is among the many most profound within the Useless’s intensive songbook. All through his profession, Strings has lined many Useless songs — however maybe none as movingly as “Wharf Rat.” Deep in Friday’s second set, he joined Useless & Firm for a mammoth model of the music, delivering astounding vocals and buying and selling in his customary acoustic guitar for an electrical one. Because the jam peaked, Strings and Mayer’s guitars locked into Allman Brothers-styles harmonies — a second that demonstrated that, so far as the jam world’s subsequent era is worried, the youngsters are alright.

Like each present of Grateful Useless music since Jerry Garcia’s 1995 demise, the late Useless bandleader’s spirit hung over the Golden Gate Park viewers on Friday evening — however doubly so given the auspicious date: what would have been his 83rd birthday. To mark the event, Useless & Firm encored with one of many Useless’s perennial Bob Dylan covers, “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door,” as screens on both aspect of the stage displayed images of Garcia to roaring viewers applause. Mayer and Weir traded heartfelt verses as band concluded Friday’s present on a poignant observe.