Deadheads mixed with bigwigs Friday night at the annual MusiCares Persons of the Year gala, where the members of the Grateful Dead were honored by the Recording Academy for their philanthropy and cultural impact 60 years after the iconic jam band formed in 1965.
“Longevity was never a major concern of ours,” the Dead’s Bobby Weir said to laughs in the audience as he accepted the award. “Lighting folks up and spreading joy through the music was all we ever really had in mind, and we got plenty of that done.”
Held at the Los Angeles Convention Center, the Grammy-weekend charity event — dress code: “colorful black tie” — raised more than $5 million for music professionals affected by the wildfires that devastated much of L.A. last month. As guests munched rainbow grilled cheese sandwiches, host Andy Cohen roamed the well-heeled crowd looking for celebrities to chat up on camera; at one point he buttonholed his old friend John Mayer, whom he asked to name the horniest Grateful Dead song. (“Looks Like Rain,” which imagines “the sound of street cats making love,” was Mayer’s answer.)
Though it never really was in danger, the Dead’s extremely durable legacy got a major boost last year when Dead & Company — in which 77-year-old Weir and 81-year-old Mickey Hart perform music from the Dead’s catalog with Mayer, Jeff Chimenti, Jay Lane and Oteil Burbridge — set up at Sphere in Las Vegas for a hot-ticket summer residency that seemed to go viral every weekend on TikTok. Here, youngsters and oldsters alike turned up to pay tribute to the band.
Vampire Weekend offered a taut “Scarlet Begonias” and Maren Morris a stirring “They Love Each Other.” Noah Kahan and Béla Fleck were folky yet precise in “Friend of the Devil,” while Norah Jones glided smoothly through “Ripple.” The War and Treaty did a typically fiery “Samson and Delilah” with help from a pair of dueling drummers: Fleetwood Mac’s Mick Fleetwood and Stewart Copeland of the Police. Dwight Yoakam brought a hard country edge to “Truckin’”; the War on Drugs found a wistful drive for “Box of Rain.”
Wynonna Judd was the night’s musical and emotional high point: Describing Weir as her “family of choice,” she thanked the whiskery guitarist for singing at the funeral of her mother, Naomi, in 2022, then brought the audience to its feet with a rollicking “Ramble on Rose.” Other performers included Zac Brown, Billy Strings, Sammy Hagar, Bruce Hornsby, My Morning Jacket and the duo of Sierra Ferrell and Lukas Nelson, who teamed up for “It Must Have Been the Roses.”
The night’s excellent backing band was led by Don Was and featured guitarists Rick Mitarotonda (of the ascendant jam band Goose) and Grahame Lesh, son of the Dead’s founding bassist, Phil Lesh, who died last year at 84, just days after the announcement of the MusiCares honor. The Dead’s late mastermind, Jerry Garcia, was represented by his daughter Trixie; Bill Kreutzmann, the band’s founding drummer, sent a video message along with his son Justin.
“The road is a rough existence,” Weir said in his speech, “as plainly evidenced by the simple fact that there aren’t all that many of my old bandmates here tonight to receive this recognition.” After Weir and Hart’s remarks — actor Woody Harrelson also spoke at some length about having done a vast assortment of drugs with Garcia — the two stalwart musicians joined the rest of Dead & Company for a mini-set of classics that climaxed, warmly if inevitably, with the Dead’s improbable late-’80s pop hit, “Touch of Grey.”
“I will get by,” they sang with help from the crowd, “I will survive.”
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