Ego Vs Id: A Pandora’s Box of Rock ’n’ Roll

Ego Vs Id: A Pandora’s Box of Rock ’n’ Roll
by Adam Perry for Boulder Weekly
11/18/2010

Near-fatal car crashes, naked arm wrestling, runaway girlfriends and drummers, and even the unfortunate deaths of two dear friends. That’s the short story of Ego Vs Id’s debut album, Taste (Abattoir Records), recorded next to a strip club in Boulder over the past two years. But to see outspoken young singer/guitarist Nate Cook lead his raucous Thursday night acoustic sets at the Speakeasy, you’d think being in one of Boulder’s most promising bands was all whiskey and roses.

“Performing acoustically for three-and-a-half hours, it’s kind of a playground,” Cook, 24, says of the weekly, off-the-cuff residency that began as a sort of solo rehearsal and now often features his bandmates and other special guests.

“Playing acoustic opens up the world of subtlety, which is something that we’re not necessarily known for,” Cook tells Boulder Weekly. And that’s an understatement.

In concert, Ego Vs Id has evolved into one the tightest, most professional-sounding rock groups in Colorado, the volatile Cook jumping all over the stage while EVI slashes its way through a brash, earnest and surprisingly original brand of countrified indie-rock and a few choice covers. In person, the band’s three core members — Cook, guitarist/ singer Robbie Steifel and bassist/singer Jesse Parmet — are the kind of frank, hard-partying guys you’d expect from their simultaneously heartfelt and decadent lyrics. But in the studio these past few years, Cook and Co. became somewhat work-obsessed, nearly to the point of destruction. At first, however, the work environment while recording and mixing their debut LP was a little too much of a playground.

“We were so green going into it that we made some pretty classic mistakes,” Cook says. “Especially in treating it like a party towards the beginning, and I wish we hadn’t done that. The next record will probably take a month and it’ll be raw and ‘balls to the wall,’ but this one — I’m glad we did it that way.”

“Spending so long in the studio as we did really wasn’t intentional,” Steifel adds. “I have a feeling that, looking back in 10 years, Taste will be the most produced of all our music … but I guess in the end we came out with a record that sonically and artistically rivals bands that are on major labels, and I think we can perhaps use that to our advantage.”

A Pandora’s box of rock ’n’ roll ambition, it’s impossible to describe Taste — which traverses mellow ballads, punk-influenced rock and poetic Southern rock — with blanket statements, although a few media outlets have already tried. “All American Love” and “Lenny Bruce,” two lyrically and musically vigorous tracks that previously appeared on a self-released EP, showcase Cook and Steifel’s individual talents for writing and playing mid-tempo rock that juxtaposes heavy subjects and mercurial music. Cook wrestles with the English language like James Joyce observing a modern hipster bar, while Steifel takes a more straightforward approach that has been compared to Springsteen and Tom Petty, only with a lot more drug references. Overall, Taste is a grab bag of intensity, pop satire, tongue-in-cheek beauty and self-loathing debauchery.

Taste has been called over-produced, and a few tunes certainly did lose the bombast that makes Ego Vs Id so entertaining in concert, but the majority of the album’s 13 tracks feature distinctly poignant moments that represent what Cook describes as “an amalgamation of our influences.”

“Our tastes are always evolving and changing,” he says. “Maybe some people think listening to Phoebe Snow and then listening to the Slits creates a lack of focus, but I think it just adds more dimension to the music.”

Ego Vs Id — and especially the layered harmonies and overdubs of Taste — are obviously not trying to impress Denver hipsters or earn the opening slot on Ani DiFranco’s next tour. Taste isn’t for everyone, and pleasing everybody was never a goal, according to Cook.

“We’re not really trying to be one thing,” Cook says. “We’re just trying to be a band that makes music we want to hear, and because we’re all involved in every song there’s kind of an implied continuity to it all. We always wanted to be a good band and make good music, so that didn’t change [in the recording process]. We lost some of the assholishness of thinking it all had to be recorded in-room and analog; we kind of came around on some of that stuff.”

Perhaps most interesting, however, is how glaring an irony it is that after almost two years in a professional recording studio, using some of eTown’s priceless guitars, Ego Vs Id struck gold with the lovely “National Disaster,” the only song on Taste entirely recorded live. It’s a sure-fire radio hit a la U2 and Wilco — if the band can get it out to the right people — and also the track the band spent by far the least amount of time on.

Whether the album would’ve been better as a whole if such a minimalist recording technique was used on its other 12 songs will always be a mystery, but Cook says he wouldn’t change a thing.

“We’re known as a raw live band and we wanted to kind of round out what we were doing and even see for ourselves if we were capable of doing it,” Cook says. “The only real goal was to make the best music we can and that’s what we did. You can make a great record in three weeks, and we’ll probably make the next record in three weeks, but primarily we were just trying to make the best record we could, and something like that takes time.”

Over-production arguments aside, for some it will take significant time just to process Ego Vs Id lyrics such as “bombastic plastic men carry guns of fantastic calibers / made by native sons and gentlemen giving pearly dreams to all the girls / who wait all day on iron trains playing doctor and familiar games / and everyone wakes up or they don’t.”

It’s not too much of a stretch to call those Cook-penned lines slightly Dylanesque — “you used to ride on a chrome horse with your diplomat / who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat,” anyone? — But in a town where 3OH!3 is the only real breakout band of late, one wonders if the simultaneously P.C. and dance-party-obsessed Boulder is the right place for Ego Vs Id.

“I’m completely baffled by 3OH!3 and that’s the honest truth,” Cook says. “People like it; they can dance to it; it has that appeal to the ‘tween’ market, [but] our music is kind of heady in a way; it’s not simply love songs or songs about just getting pussy or whatever. I do my best to find the worst parts of myself and try to explain them to myself, you know?” “We thought the hipsters were going to be our fanbase,” Cook says, “but we’re a rock ’n’ roll band. Trying to be cool sucks.”

Having your music called “boring as fuck” indie-rock that “treads water and ends up nowhere” by Westword must also suck, but for now Cook tries to take the criticisms and compliments equally un-seriously.

“We don’t have to pull a cat’s tail, add some fuckin’ reverb, play it in reverse and then sing over it to make interesting music. And we’re not in it to make friends,” Cook says. “My mom always said, ‘It takes a carpenter to build a barn and it takes a jackass to knock it down.’”

Seattle Squeal: Moondoggies

Seattle Squeal: Moondoggies
by Adam Perry for Westword, 11/15/10

Lately, Seattle is known for lush folk-rock in the vein of Fleet Foxes or hammer-headed Band of Horses-style dreamscapes that caress the soul but punish the ears with shimmering noise. The Emerald City’s Moondoggies, however, certainly looks the lumberjack part but hit the bluesy guilty pleasure spot with chugging lo-fi A.M. rock equally Joe Walsh and CSNY. Composed in part with singer-guitarist Kevin Murphy’s calming recent Alaska trip in mind, Moondoggies’ sophomore LP Tidelands, just out on Hardly Art, is spooky Southern Rock with a Northwestern twist—and without the sometimes overwhelming verdure of Fleet Foxes or the quixotic bend of Blitzen Trapper. Deeply held Northwestern affections are in the very blood of Moondoggies’ music, from older Harvest-esque tracks like “Down the River” and “Fly Mama Fly” to Tidelands’ dreamy “Uncertain,” but the aforementioned unwieldy bar rock is what defines this scruffy quartet. Like Mudhoney—with actual harmonies—covering Walsh-era Eagles, Moondoggies is just right for the Hi-Dive, if you bring earplugs.

Moondoggies plays the Hi-Dive in Denver tonight with Dawes and The Romany Rye.

Katie Hagar: NASCAR Girls Rule

Katie Hagar and the Need for Speed
by Adam Perry for Portland Magazine, October 2010

Just as Black Entertainment Television (BET) dares to challenge redneck clichés by running a reality show about NASCAR drivers, Katie Hagar–a 24-year-old Damariscotta native–defies the auto-racing stereotype that says good ‘ol Southern boys rule the tracks.

“Growing up in Maine, I was a true and passionate athlete,” Hagar tells us the morning after racing in North Carolina’s 34th annual Bobby Isaac Memorial 150. “I wasn’t worried if others thought that it was odd or not. The car doesn’t know your gender, and that’s all that matters.”

Hagar, who resides in Mooresville, North Carolina, doesn’t let the hard-edged, male-dominated world of car racing faze her (“They don’t dare make [sexist comments] to my face…”) and has been racking up top-five finishes since going pro a few years ago.

“The happiest 30 seconds of my life behind the wheel happened when I was racing in California in the NASCAR Drive for Diversity program at Stockton 99 Speedway, breaking the track record my fourth time ever being at that track.”

Energetic and sprightly, with a flashy smile and long blonde hair, Hagar is a perfect fit for Changing Lanes, BET’s new NASCAR “one-hour competition docu-series” which highlights minority and female drivers–the latter comprising a gender which now represents nearly half of all NASCAR fans.

As a woman striving for success in auto racing, Hagar says the legendary female drag racer Shirley Muldowney’s “strategic way of thinking” is a big inspiration. Hagar also stresses that Damariscotta–“always home to me”–continues to positively shape her as a person.

“Maine is the one place I go to if I need to get away,” she says. “All my family is there, and it’s true when they say ‘home is where the heart is.’ When I come home, it’s to re-ground myself, whether I’m just relaxing, picking out horse stalls, eating seafood, or visiting local beaches.

“After being away from home, I notice that it’s the small things I miss the most: how pure and fresh the air smells, how clean the waters are, how quiet and relaxing it is fishing and hearing the loons and owls at night, the privilege of having your privacy. Those are the things that made me me, and every day I am thankful for that.”

Not that she ducks the adrenaline rush of her present circumstances: “I don’t dream of crashing. I dream of winning.”

INTERVIEW: Medeski, Martin & Wood

Medeski, Martin & Wood: Separate Parts of The Singularity
by Adam Perry for Jambands.com
11/10/10

Growing up as music lovers on the East Coast—especially if you’ve had any contact with the jamband scene here—it’s safe to say most of us had a girlfriend in college who uttered the words “Medeski, Martin and Wood changed my life.” The trio, formed in New York City almost 20 years ago, has long had a knack for luring young String Cheese Incident or Phish fans into small, sweaty clubs and quaint theaters and blowing their minds with virtuosic jazz-based madness that can subsequently make much of what passes for jamband music permanently laughable in comparison.

Still, can one band change a person’s life? Personally, you’d have to ask me about the Clash to get a “yes” on that one, but what’s absolutely certain is that the idea of playing in a band with zero boundaries changed the lives of three well-trained musicians named John Medeski, Billy Martin and Chris Wood—originally an acoustic jazz trio introduced to each other by Martin’s drum teacher Bob Moses—when they formed MMW in 1991.

I recently spoke with all three members of MMW individually on subjects ranging from the improvisation-heavy group’s seemingly never-ending connection with each other to their impending hiatus. For a band that has released over a dozen albums together—plus two with guitarist John Scofield—and enjoyed equal attention from respected jazz institutions like Downbeat and noted hippie magazines such as Relix, MMW’s trio of passionate instrumentalists sure doesn’t seem tired of describing what brought them together in the first place.

“There is no leader and no formula,” bassist Wood says. “We’re never really sure what we’re going to do or how it will turn out. Things have always come about in an organic way for us…often it’s the music that shows us what direction to take. No one person is in control.”

Both Medeski and Martin told me that what has kept the band together so long is not only how much they still enjoy playing together but also the amount of music knowledge each of the diversely talented musicians glean from jamming with outside players.

“What keeps us coming back or going on together is what we bring back to share from the outside,” says drummer/percussionist Martin. “That infuses a new excitement about developing new repertoire and energy. It is like a marriage and we have to share things but also enjoy the separate parts of our singularity.”

“I’m not sure where our career is going, but I know that the only reason we have stayed together is because of the music,” pianist and keyboardist Medeski adds. “We still have fun and get a lot out of creating together, and doing all sorts of other projects keeps us growing as individuals, which feeds what we do when we get together. Not one of us is defined solely by MMW. Plus, we haven’t had that big hit we have to play every night that we hate. In terms of why we haven’t become sick of each other, we’re family, so we are way past the getting sick of each other part. It’s much deeper.”

Radiolarians, a three-part series of albums released between September 2008 and August of last year, injected a plethora of new inspiration and excitement—not to mention many new tunes—into a band that had perhaps begun to paint itself into a corner by attracting more and more of the sort of jamband-oriented fans who generally crave funky beats and “phatty” solos. Conversely, Radiolarians I alone features spacey Eno/Hassell experimental music, hard-charging jazz-funk along the lines of the Beastie Boys’ The In Sound From Way Out, dusty Latin acoustic-guitar-led cinematic dirges and classy, complex piano-focused jazz romps that fall somewhere between Art Tatum and “I Turn My Camera On”-era Spoon.

Ironically, the idea for creating three full albums in one year came not from listening to or playing music but from a science book. Actually, two books.

“The [Radiolarians] idea came from reading a book about intelligence in nature,” Medeski says. “It talked about a species of bird that returns every year with a new song for the year and never repeats itself in its lifetime. Sounded like our dream [as a band]. So we transposed the idea to writing a night’s worth of new material every time we went on tour that year, never to play it again. We would write it, explore it on the road and record it after the tour. Of course, we threw the theory of never playing the songs again out the back door. We’re not as hip as that bird.”

Martin’s version of the story is the same…but different.

“John suggested seasonal tours: writing sessions, rehearsing, [then] tour, record. From that we had a seed of an idea. I found a book with Ernst Haeckel’s images of ocean life when we were in Tel Aviv and suggested these images could be used in the series of seasonal recordings. Then that developed into what our music tries to do as an image and conceptually: evolve, and [include] lots of variety.”

Wood narrowed it down to practicality.

“We needed to create a structure for us to write a lot of new material. It felt like it was time to reinvent ourselves, so this idea developed to do a series of three tours where we would write a couple sets’ worth of new music before going out on the road. Then we would go on tour and develop the music in front of live audiences for a couple of weeks. After the tour we went into the studio and recorded it.”

All three LPs in the Radiolarians series are bursting with fresh musical ideas, phrases and stimuli, from the exploration of disparate genres to the very instruments MMW chose for each track. What I find most amazing about the three albums, which are now collected in The Evolutionary Set, is that no track consists only of two musicians simply vamping for a remaining soloist. Each instrument seems bound to the others, in conversation and support, and each album’s journey through musical styles and themes feels as natural as the changing of seasons.

“Broken Mirror” and “Gwyra Mi,” two darkly themed compositions that traverse slow-burning Friends of Dean Martinez-style Western swing and fuzzed-out drum-centric reggae, respectively, finish Radiolarians III in an ominous manner. Although MMW – currently touring as usual – plans to take some time off in 2011, Wood says the sinister-sounding conclusion to the Radiolarians set doesn’t signal anything other than bright possibilities ahead.

“There are a lot of ideas floating around,” he says. “Some are collaborations with other people; some have to do with music education. Still trying to figure that out. Often decisions about what to do next come from knowing what we don’t want to do. ”

According to the jovial Medeski, MMW has only one person to turn to when it comes to planning its next move.

“We consult a man who lives alone, deep in the woods, in a place we can’t name,” he says. “Like an oracle. He’s around 100 years old at this point, but looks in his fifties, except for his teeth.”

In all seriousness, the fact that an instrumental band such as Medeski, Martin and Wood have derived inspiration for their music so often from the written word may seem stranger to some than a 100-year-old oracle serving as the band’s manager. MMW’s first album, 1992’s Notes from the Underground, was named after the classic Dostoyevsky novel, and the literary references have kept coming ever since.

“Words—written or spoken, serious or humorous—have had an impact,” says Medeski. “Friday Afternoon in the Universe comes from the first line of a Kerouac poem; Combustication was coined by science professor Dr. Julius Sumner Miller, Uninvisible by Shackman Carl Green. But I don’t know if I can say how these words influence the music. It’s really on an instinctual level. Every art form we’ve experienced, or anything that ever happens in our lives, influences our music.”

Again, Wood agrees, if matter-of-factly.

“I think we’re influenced by pretty much anything and everything, but words don’t necessarily inspire specific musical gestures,” he says. “At least not directly.”

Over the past 19 years, MMW has made a direct mark on the landscape of American music by advocating freedom and experimentation but also hard work and expertise, two things that are often missing in conjunction with improvisation. Without a hit record or the Phish-like ability to pack sports arenas, all three musicians live comfortably—and are revered by their peers—but literally sweat to earn their pay just as they did in the beginning. Not that they’re complaining.

“It’s a perfect world for me in the sense that I can have a life outside of the musical career,” Martin says of not being an A-list celebrity.

“I thinks it’s great not being recognized the way huge stars are,” says Medeski. “That looks like a drag. I’m not sure how respected we are, but we do what we do and try not to worry about all that. Some people listen, some don’t. Sure would be nice to get a huge star’s paycheck, though—maybe we should sing…”

“I think we’re lucky to be able to make a living by playing music,” Wood concludes. “Being a household name, it seems to me, would create a lot of pressure and expectation that could be distracting to what you want to do. It’s nice to be somewhere in the middle.”

As for celebrating their 20th anniversary of playing music together next year, Medeski joked about retirement; in truth, MMW has more treats planned for its fans.

“20 singles next year to celebrate our 20 years together,” an excited-sounding Martin says. “Maybe record some new improvisations, go into the archives and mix a live record with John Scofield and then probably take a break. Anything can influence our next idea.”

Summing up two decades of touring and recording as MMW, Wood was able to rationalize the group’s ongoing forward momentum—something that’s tough to maintain for so long in any industry—with one sentence:

“We still surprise each other.”

And we’re still listening.

REVIEW: The Grateful Dead – Formerly the Warlocks

CD Review: The Grateful Dead’s Formerly the Warlocks Boxed Set
by Adam Perry for Jambands.com
11/3/2010

Not so long ago, music journalism had considerably more perks, from press junkets to backstage passes to armloads of posters, vinyl records, t-shirts and other band-related swag. Today, virtually all record labels try to save money by limiting their “kindness” to writers to free albums and complimentary concert tickets—which are really the two basic tools, along with interviews, necessary to do labels the favor of covering their artists in the first place. Most record companies now go further still in their quest for frugality, demanding that writers download free mp3s of new albums rather than request hard copies, which would incur shipping costs. Music writers never really lived luxurious lives, but now rather than sit at the back of the bus, we’re not even on the bus.

Rhino, however, is still doing at least an adequate job of helping writers hitchhike their way toward writing reviews with pleasure. Just the other day, I received a review copy of what has to be the most beautifully packaged set of music produced in recent memory, the Grateful Dead’s long-awaited Formerly the Warlocks boxed set.

As the story goes, by the late 1980s the Dead’s traveling fanbase had grown so immense that the group had two options as a touring band: play massive 70,000-capacity football stadiums or perform multiple nights at 20,000-seat hockey arenas. Otherwise, the thousands of Deadheads who followed the ’60s holdovers around from town to town as a way of life would combine with hard-partying local weekend warriors to create a sincerely dangerous scene—and the band would be banned from yet another town or venue.

Another option would’ve been to take a year or two off from performing together at all, which the Grateful Dead never did in 30 years together between 1965-1995. This would’ve not encouraged the religiously hardcore Dead Heads slip into some kind of normal life and pushed the band’s management to develop safe and successful ways for the Grateful Dead and its fans to enjoy more intimate concerts. It also would’ve most likely saved heroin-addicted frontman Jerry Garcia’s life.

Regardless, the Grateful Dead never did take a real break from touring, other than a good part of 1975. Packing mega-venues like Soldier Field and Oakland Coliseum was the ironically lyric-heavy jamband’s career until Garcia’s death in 1995, despite the troubled singer-guitarist’s complaints in business meetings that playing stadiums was a drag. But a couple times in their latter years, the Dead and its management found two ways to leave its traveling legion of hippies, with which they had a love/hate relationship, in the rear-view mirror: book concerts well out of driving range from each other or, in the case of the two Hampton concerts in 1989, perform under another band name.

Yup, in October 1989 the marquee outside Hampton Coliseum read—above “Oct. 10-15: Walt Disney’s World On Ice”—“Oct. 8-9: The Warlocks.” Back in the mid-’60s, when the Grateful Dead made its start serving as house band for writer/fugitive Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests, the San Francisco psychedelic blues band had been known as the Warlocks. So for their October 1989 concerts in Virginia, the Dead booked Hampton Coliseum as the Warlocks and did its best to only sell tickets to residents of Hampton and a few lucky insiders. Sure, word got out and a good number of traveling Dead Heads came to town, but the chaos that would’ve been associated with the Dead, in the height of its popularity, playing such a small town was averted. And those able to get in enjoyed some unforgettable treats the band planned just for Hampton.

For starters, the band broke from tradition by actually rehearsing together, which, on October 8, produced a refined version of “Help On the Way > Slipknot! > Franklin’s Tower,” a dynamic suite (from the 1975 album Blues For Allah) which had not been performed in four years. The first high-energy Hampton concert culminated in “Morning Dew,” a poignant nuclear-war ballad included on the Dead’s eponymous 1967 debut LP, and it was as good a version of “Morning Dew” as the band played in its final decade together. For a bunch of guys approaching their 50s, the Dead was on in Hampton.

Still, despite the excitement that still surrounds these stealth shows to this day, only a few selections from each night stand up to 21 years of perspective. Like virtually every other Dead show from the polarizing group’s last 20 or so years together, both Hampton concerts followed a formula: Start the first set with a rocker; continue with some slow blues, a couple of rollicking country songs, maybe a Dylan cover, and an old-timey Dead classic such as “Row Jimmy”; finish the set with an bright and exciting (but not too exciting) psychedelic burst like “Bird Song,” which foreshadows the heavier improvisation in the second set. Then, start the second set with a big classic like “Playin’ in the Band,” eventually delve into total free-form instrumental mayhem in the middle of the second set, return the audience to its senses with a morality tale, maybe “Stella Blue” or “Wharf Rat,” and then finish with a show-stopper like “Lovelight” or “Good Lovin’.”

As legend has it, the Dead played formulaic concerts to coincide with the emotional progression of LSD trips, originally taken by everyone involved—from band and its stage crew to the audience—and, later, mostly the audience. That’s at least moderately understandable. But I’ve never taken LSD while listening to the Grateful Dead. And as a lover of improvisational music, and someone who initially was attracted to the Grateful Dead because of the oft-heard statement “no two Dead shows are alike,” I’ve come to generally skip listening to the first sets of their recorded concerts entirely, sink my proverbial teeth into the meat of the band’s more musically powerful second sets, skip the cheesy oldie-finales and listen to exceptional encores when they exist.

In the case of October 9, 1989, the meat of the seamless second set happens to contain some of the most memorable music the Grateful Dead ever performed. From a solid “Playin’ in the Band” to a gorgeous “Uncle John’s Band” and back to the coda of “Playin’,” the Dead played capably, and even mightily, as a unit—something that was hard to come by in the aging group’s latter years, when each band member literally had his own tour bus and “jamming” most often meant six musicians soloing at the same time, their individual noodling rarely taking into account the presence of the five other men on stage.

Even better, before the final notes of “Playin’ in the Band” had even been given a chance to ring out, Garcia giddily strummed the opening notes to “Dark Star,” the Grateful Dead’s signature tune—and one that hadn’t been performed live in over five years. Soon the entire band kicks in, at which point “Dark Star” is met with the most enthused audience response I’ve ever heard on record. And it’s a startlingly crisp, confident and beautiful “Dark Star.” Gradually, the music seems to not just recall the Dead’s previous musical peak (the 1969-70 Live/Dead period) but also impressively find itself updated to incorporate Pat Metheny-style ’80s fusion and tastefully nefarious use of MIDI technology. Whereas on Live/Dead we hear a young, virtuosic and acid-washed Garcia blessing the Fillmore with an incredible succession of fresh ideas within the form of “Dark Star” with just a stock Gibson SG, on Formerly the Warlocks MIDI allows the guitarist to improvise melodies as a trumpet, bassoon, kalimba, or whatever.

“Reason tatters / the forces tear loose from the axis,” Garcia sang at the second Hampton show before the Dead descended into 30 minutes of truly dark and demented Sonic Youth-esque instrumental madness out of “Dark Star.” After the instrumental terror subsided—and, here in 2010, I had taken our infant daughter out of the room to protect her budding sanity—Garcia speak-sang “Death don’t have no mercy in this land.” So much for the Dead being a happy, rainbow-eyed bunch of hippies. If you’re a young neo-hippie and can get through the Hampton “Dark Star” set alive, I highly suggest checking out “Expressway to Yr. Skull” and “Diamond Sea,” Sonic Youth’s own platforms for enlightened psychedelic guitar-horror, because the happy-go-lucky banality of supposed Dead-successors like the String Cheese Incident just doesn’t delve this deep emotionally or sonically.

In the end, however, despite the experimental burst “Dark Star” brilliance and the inclusion of other long-unplayed classics like “Attics of My Life,” the Hampton concerts were memorable but, in all, not so musically exceptional. In several very rudimentary rock ’n’ roll songs, including “Throwing Stones” and “Good Lovin’,” the group’s two drummers quite amateurishly lose the beat entirely and then pick it up at a different pace. And “jamming” songs together generally means that Garcia begins playing an introductory line from a different song regardless of what key it’s in or whether the rest of the band is aware of his intent.

At times, when performing wedding-band standards like “Gimme Some Lovin’” and “Good Lovin’”—oldies Richard Simmons would gladly sweat to—the Dead just sounds over the hill. That the group would play together for six more years repeatedly seems impossible on these six discs, especially now that we know that keyboardist/vocalist Brent Mydland—the relatively youthful talent behind the Dead’s late-’80s musical renaissance—would be dead of a drug overdose less than a year after the “Formerly the Warlocks” shows

Most important, scattered (but sustained) moments from this new collection highlight a very successful yet very troubled group of middle-aged musicians jelling in a way they rarely did in their final years together. A disc or two from these six might adequately represent the best live music of the Dead’s final 15 years together, but I surely don’t possess the kind of encyclopedic knowledge of the Grateful Dead’s performances to know for sure.

What I do know is that Formerly the Warlocks contains some incredible music in an utterly gorgeous package. Inside a wooden box with a Warlocks logo burned onto it includes six discs, a ticket from each show, a Blair Jackson essay spanning six photo postcards from the show, a Hampton Coliseum postcard with the first night’s setlist on the back, an original Charlotte Observer newspaper article from 1989, a Halloween-themed button from the shows, and an informational 1989 handout from the management to Dead Heads, explaining that “if you do not have a ticket, you will not be allowed in the parking lot” and pitching tents and vending outside the concerts would “jeopardize their ability to play in the future.”

Kudos, Rhino. And thank you.

The only question I have is: When does the Grateful Dead effectively go out of business? The group’s mostly mediocre studio albums don’t really sell and, as the Dead broke up 15 years ago, there are only so many great live recordings that can be released. Plus, in time the number of people who can even say they knew someone who saw the Dead perform will dwindle to zero. One has to wonder if ours will someday be a world without new Grateful Dead releases and/or a world without Dead Heads.