Last night, Greensky Bluegrass tore up their performance at Millennium Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, putting on a rare Grateful Dead set as part of the band’s “Casual Wednesday” series. Starting a few years ago, Greensky introduced the concept of “Casual Wednesday,” using their mid-week shows as a means to step outside the box and perform all-cover sets and invite out special guests for extended collaborations. For this past Grateful Dead-themed “Casual Wednesday,” the bluegrass juggernauts laid out ten Grateful Dead covers during the band’s second set of the evening.

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During the first set of the show, Greensky Bluegrass hit a number of well-loved originals, opening with “Windshield” off 2014’s If Sorrow Swims, before moving through “Into The Rafters” and landing in two tunes off their latest album, Shouted, Written Down, & Quoted, “Living Over” and “Room Without A Roof”. The first set also saw a well-built combination of “Just To Lie” into “Kerosene”, as well as a set-closing “Worried About The Weather”, which teased what was to come in the second set with teases of “Shakedown Street” built-in throughout.

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Coming back after set break, the band’s dobro player Anders Beck gave a speech about how underrated Wednesdays are (“We here at Greensky Bluegrass, we celebrate Wednesdays”) while the rest of the band played the set-opening tune “Casual Wednesday”. From there the band launched into their Grateful Dead cover set, hitting standalone renditions of “Eyes of the World”, “Black Muddy River”, “Mr. Charlie”, and “Friend Of The Devil” before performing the beloved and classic combo of “China Cat Sunflower” into “I Know You Rider”. To close out the special “Casual Wednesday” set, Greensky finished with a massive “Cassidy” sandwich, which housed “Cryptical Envelopment” and “The Other One” within it. Returning to the teases during the first-set closer “Worried About The Weather”, for an encore, Greensky ended the show in full with a jubilant rendition of “Shakedown Street”.

Setlist: Greensky Bluegrass | Millennium Center | Winston-Salem, NC | 10/25/2017

Set One: Windshield, Into The Rafters, Living Over, Room Without A Roof, Just To Lie > Kerosene, Miss September, Tied Down, While Waiting, Worried About The Weather (1)

Set Two: Casual Wednesday, Eyes of the World, Black Muddy River, Mr. Charlie, Friend Of The Devil, China Cat Sunflower > I Know You Rider, Cassidy (2) > Cryptical Envelopment > The Other One > Cassidy

Encore: Shakedown Street

Notes: (1) Shakedown Teases; (2) Dark Star and various other Dead teases to start

You can listen to audio of Greensky Bluegrass’s Grateful Dead-themed second set and encore below, courtesy of Marisa Muldoon.

[Photo: Sam Watson]