Bob Weir played his only announced Midwest performance of 2017 last night, with his reunited Campfire Band for the MusicNOW Festival at the Aronoff Center in Cincinnati, Ohio. Featuring Aaron Dessner, Scott Devendorf, and Bryan Devendorf of The National, as well as Josh Kaufman, Weir brought his acoustically-oriented band to perform a mixture of tunes from the 2016 album Blue Mountain as well as an array of covers and Grateful Dead classics.
It was an almost-identical cast that joined Weir on a brief Campfire Tour last October, with the exception of Aaron Dessner. Dessner was an original member of the Campfire Boys band, but a family emergency forced him to miss the tour and he was replaced by Steve Kimock and Jon Shaw. This show marked his live return to the band, at the Bryce Dessner-curated event.
In addition to their originals, Bob Weir and the Campfire Boys played through Grateful Dead classics, including “Dark Star” (during the first and second set), “Eyes of the World”, and “Ripple”, along with covers of Bob Dylan, Son House, Little Feat, Buddy Holly, Kris Kristofferson, The Crickets, and more. They even welcomed vocalist Lisa Hannigan to the stage to perform “Lay My Lilly Down.”
Thanks to Amy Vanaman, you can watch 13 minutes of Bob Weir and the Campfire Band in the video below, performing “Walkin’ Blues” by Son House and “Easy To Slip” By Little Feat: