After wrapping up their spring tour, Joe Russo’s Almost Dead has been picking up a smattering of one-off shows, with the most recent being yesterday’s performance at Candler Park Music and Food Festival in Atlanta, Georgia. The festival peformance followed the ensemble’s “Friends With Benefits” performance at New York’s Brooklyn Bowl on Wednesday for the auction of Jerry Garcia’s Wolf guitar, which saw a rotating crew of musicians join drummer Joe Russo and Almost Dead regulars Tom Hamilton, Dave Dreiwitz, and Scott Metzger, including John Scofield, Nels Cline, Neal Casal, Billy Martin, Cass McCombs, Dave Harrington, Delicate Steve, Jon Shaw, Erik Deutsch, Alecia Chakour, Eric D Johnson, Jonathan Goldberger, and Cochemea Gastelum.
For their one-off performance at Candler Park Music Festival, Joe Russo’s Almost Dead put on a crowd-pleasing festival set that clocked in at just over two hours in length. After opening with “Jack Straw,” the group moved through a number of upbeat Grateful Dead classics, such as “Truckin'” and “Tennessee Jed.” After the slower, soulful “Black Throated Wind,” Almost Dead picked up the pace of the show, with a full-out sprint to the end starting with the jam through to “Bertha.” “Music Never Stopped” led into “Dancin’ In The Streets,” an appropriate number for the large-scale festival in the city’s park. Following this, the ensemble jammed out the rest of the songs left in their set, with a non-stop sequence of songs kicked off with the classic combination of “Help On The Way” into “Slipknot!.” One of the most notable and standout moments of the show was “Slipknot!,” which housed a jam focused on the Allman Brothers Band’s “In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed,” a fitting tribute for the late Gregg Allman who was buried earlier that day two hours south in Macon, Georgia. After returning to “Slipknot!,” the group closed out their set with “Throwing Stones,” finishing a minute ahead of their hard time curfew at 11 p.m.
You can listen to the full show, courtesy of taper Dillon Fries, as well as check out videos from last night (including the jam out of “In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed”, courtesy of Youtube user J T, below.
Setlist: Joe Russo’s Almost Dead | Candler Park Music Festival | Atlanta, GA | 6/3/2017
[Photo: Stephen Olker]
Jack Straw
Bertha
Elizabeth Reed > Slipknot