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Submitted by Patrick Ward

There is a certain warmth to concerts featuring Grateful Dead music. From cover bands to the actual Grateful Dead to the latest iteration of post-Jerry Garcia bands, Furthur, featuring Grateful Dead founders, Phil Lesh and Bob Weir, the familiarity of the music, the camaraderie of the audience’s purpose, it all fits like an old sweater.

On Saturday in Broomfield CO, there was warmth beyond that anticipated metaphoric comfort. Saturday had been gorgeous. Early spring in Colorado makes blue, cloudless skies and draws you out of doors. Halfway through the Furthur show, the inaugural events at a new FirstBank Center in suburban Denver, the weather seemed an important point to consider. After a six week run on a east coast suffering through a long winter, that early spring Colorado sun was the first natural warmth the band had probably felt in over a month. And these are sun guys, raised on the West Coast in the golden, painterly bath of northern California. The concept of sunglasses and shorts must have been welcome.

And it showed. There was an alacrity throughout, as if the vitamin D of the day had fueled new energy in both the old guard approaching 45 years of playing together, and in the newer wave infusing original, respectful lines and synergy to this music. From “After Midnight” as an opener to “Samson and Delilah” as an encore, there was irony and double entendre in almost every song. But this music, even when improvised, isn’t self-propelled or created by chance, it requires leadership. That was embodied in the younger Jerry Garcia and demonstrably lacking in the older one. It seems clear that Bob Weir has taken much of that leadership outside the actual playing, but his role in the mix doesn’t really license leadership within the music. Phil Lesh’s bass lines certainly have the potential and occasional opportunity, but when it all shakes out, its the newest member of the group, lead guitarist John Kadlecik who sits in the driver’s seat of this band ostensibly named after Ken Kesey’s bus.

Kadlecik is unlike any other guitarist who has played with this group, perhaps in his playing, but absolutely in his education. First, Kadlecik most recently played his same role in Dark Star Orchestra, a sort of Grateful Dead cover band in the way the New York Philharmonic is a Mozart cover band. That band re-played (not re-created) specific Grateful Dead shows song for song. But there is one distinct difference. Unlike the Dead, DSO always knew what the next song was. The crescendos, codas and denouements that naturally exist for a listener 30 years after a Dead show, were created on the spot not pre-destrined or contrived. They may have had some vague idea of what was coming next, but the set list was as much an improvisation as the solos within each song. Kadlecik and his former band mates in DSO knew exactly where each set and concert was going and could build a deliberate path inside the music.

Kadelcik also has an encyclopedic knowledge of this music that is only matched by his current cohorts playing stage left. The other formidable players who have stood in his spot were all accomplished and certainly learned the necessary music, but they came from other traditions. Kadelcik, in his old job, needed to understand as many as five arrangements of each song, depending on what year’s show his former band had decided to replay on a given evening. That requires a fluency with the material that no lead guitarist in the Dead, The Other Ones, Phil and Friends or other iteration of Furthur can boast.

That education and his sensibility not to mimic but to honor this music, combined with a tendency to approach the concert as a collective body makes his playing as boundless as Garcia’s. He is not Garcia. Nor does he want to be. But is there another guitar player other than the late Garcia who could know the whole catalog as cold as Kadlecik? Even Garcia himself would have struggled if you asked him to pull out A “Golden Road”, a “Til the Morning Comes” and an “Alligator” in one show. But Kadlecik weaves through the show hinting here, leading there, building improvisational bridges between songs that have never been paired before. He is a consummate professional up there, and, man, he loves his job. He glances across the stage at Jeff Chimenti, the band’s equally talented keyboard player, taking musical cues and riffing off them, and in the foreground are two of the original composers of the music to which he has dedicated his career for the many years.

There were particular highlights. The Alligator into Dark Star into Pink Floyd’s Time into Dark Star into Morning Dew is worth listening to over and over again. The Morning Dew alone is as memorable to me as the Good Lovin I heard in Giant’s Stadium in September 1978 at age 15 and maybe more. But no song or string of songs was the most impressive aspect of this show. Grateful Dead shows can be relatively predictable in set list choices. If you know your history, you can hear three songs in a row and pretty much pick a show down to the season and the year, Spring ‘77, for instance. In the day at any show, Deadheads would play a parlor game of picking the next tune, and someone always won. But with this show, even after a goodly amount of time listening to most of the tour’s shows via online streaming, there was no way to predict where it would go next Someone remarked in the crowd after the pair of openers, “After Midnight” and “You Win Again,” ‘they’re gonna play all covers tonight.’ And they could have. That is as much a testament to Kadlecik’s education as it is to Weir and Lesh’s willingness to shed all convention and legacy from the music and truly try and invigorate it with new life.