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https://relix.com/articles/detail/dark-star-orchestra-deadhead-adventure-travel/ On Nov. 11, 2022, Dark Star Orchestra performed at Chicago’s Vic Theatre to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their debut concert. The Grateful Dead tribute act returned to the city where they initially appeared at Martyrs on 11/11/97, with their signature approach, which involves interpreting specific setlists from the Dead’s history. While this was a momentous occasion, perhaps a more significant one took place over eight years earlier, on April 12, 2014, when DSO played their 2,318th show, equaling the total number of Grateful Dead performances. As of Dec. 31, 2023, Dark Star Orchestra has played 3,217 gigs, including multiple appearances at their own Jam in the Sand and Dark Star Jubilee festivals. This an extraordinary achievement that speaks to the enduring music of the Grateful Dead as well as DSO’s ability to interpret it. The group’s current roster includes guitarists Rob Eaton and Jeff Mattson, drummers Dino English and Rob Koritz, keyboardist Rob Barraco, bassist Skip Vangelas and vocalist Lisa Mackey. English, Eaton and Mattson, who joined DSO in 1999, 2001, and 2010, respectively, are all Deadheads who had previously performed the music of the Grateful Dead with other groups. Here, they share their perspectives not only on the Dark Star Orchestra, but also on the legacy of the good ol’ Grateful Dead. We’ve reached a point where I believe there are more Grateful Dead fans who never saw Jerry Garcia than those who did. What do you think accounts for this surging popularity and how do you view your role in it all? DINO ENGLISH: For a lot of kids, we’re their first experience with Grateful Dead music. It’s all about keeping the music alive and whatever part I can play in that feels good to me. I’m just doing my part in trying to keep the whole thing going and I feel privileged to be able to do so. By no means do I think that I’m essential, but I think I should be doing this. The music is still extremely relevant, and it will continue to be strong for a very long time. We all love it and we want to contribute to it. It’s like a living entity. You want see it prosper, continue on and do well. ROB EATON: I think the catalog speaks for itself. In my mind, the music has always been timeless. When you can hear the lyrics, they’re not telling you, “Oh, this is 1985 angst.” It doesn’t feel like a song is associated with the politics of a specific time period. It’s not yelling at you. It’s accessible to people. It’ll be accessible to people in 100 years, just as it was to us 50 years ago. I think it’s a testament to Robert Hunter’s lyrics and [John] Barlow’s lyrics and how they saw the place of music in society. It’s a big catalog. One of the things that I like about Dark Star is we have the whole catalog at our disposal at any particular time, which is something the Grateful Dead never really had. They picked up songs, dropped songs, picked up songs, dropped songs and so on and so forth. The music makes me feel good. The melodies are so rich and deep, and the lyrics are so deep, as well. We’re just Deadheads. We don’t really know any better. We’re just out there playing music how we like to hear it. Our spin on it is all the improvisation. You can play “Sugar Magnolia” seven nights in a row and it’s going to be different every time you play it. So that’s what keeps it interesting for people like me, after so many shows and so many years. You never really know where it’s going to go or what’s going to happen. It’s still an adventure. JEFF MATTSON: I never thought that this many years after Jerry’s passing, people would still be so hungry to hear Grateful Dead music. It’s a powerful force in the world. It also amazes me how many young people there are, particularly up on the rail. But it’s a wonderful thing and a testament to how great the Dead were and how great the songs are. Robert Hunter’s lyrics are nonspecific in a way that these songs continue to evolve my understanding of them—what they mean and how they relate to my own life. Those are kind of the best songs, in the sense that they will change with you. Words you’ve been singing for many years will take on new significance. I think that the best lyrics continue to reveal themselves. Now you have bands doing a bluegrass twist on Grateful Dead or a Latin twist or a jazz twist. I guess DSO’s niche is that we will give it to you the way that it was at the time. As you’ve noted, the songs themselves are a major part of the equation. That’s now part of the prevailing wisdom, but back when you were seeing the Grateful Dead, that aspect was often overlooked, especially when local newspapers would review the parking lot rather the show. JM: I think that a lot of music critics didn’t know what to make of the music. It was so different than everything else they were reviewing. So maybe they were being kind in a way. Rather than commenting on something they didn’t grok, they just talked about the social phenomenon. I cut the review out from my first show [9/8/73]. I think it was from Newsday. I’ll never forget that the reviewer said, “And they encored with a lovely song about a woman named Stella Green.” [Laughs.] They were selling out arenas for all those years, but they were kind of doing it under the radar. It had nothing to do with the popular culture at the time, I guess until ‘87 with “Touch of Grey” and then, all of a sudden, MTV discovered the Grateful Dead, this new phenomenon. But before that, we were just going to the shows, creating the tapes and nobody paid any attention—other than an occasional article about the crazy Deadheads traveling around the country or something like that. Dino, how did you come to join DSO? DE: In the ‘90s, I was performing original music in St. Louis with bands on the weekends and then, during the weekdays, I started playing in one of the bands that was covering Grateful Dead to make some extra money and have a good time. In 1995, after we lost Jerry, it kind of hit me, though—“I need to do whatever I can to keep this music alive.” So we started taking it much more seriously, touring regionally and doing weekend runs. I was playing with Rob Koritz, doing the double drum thing—my first exposure to that was Genesis— and I was having a good time playing with him. Eventually ‘97 rolls around and I started hearing all this buzz about this band Dark Star Orchestra. Then one time, we were playing in Chicago and Dark Star Orchestra was playing earlier, so we ran over there and checked the show out. I was able to catch some of the first set and I thought, “Oh, these guys are all right.” They were in a much bigger venue than we were, with 1,000 people in there, and after I saw them that first time, I decided I was going to drop out of the whole thing because they had the ball. I felt like they’d taken care of the thing, and I could go back to original music. So that’s what I did. Then one day, our band needed a website, and Dark Star had a really advanced website for the time. So as I was showing it to the other singer, all of a sudden there was a pop-up window saying that Dark Star Orchestra was looking for a drummer. I mulled it over for a few days because I had already switched gears, but I decided to send an email. It went to Scott Larned [the band’s co-founder, who died of heart attack in 2005]. He contacted me, and when they were in Columbia, Mo., I met them there and gave him a tape of my playing. From there, they had me come out to play a show and then they asked me to join. It turned out they were also looking for another drummer, so I mentioned Rob Koritz. Rob, how did you connect with Dark Star? RE: We were doing a Dick’s Picks release party at Wetlands over the course of a weekend. The Zen Tricksters [Jeff Mattson and Rob Barraco’s band] played one day and Border Legion [Rob’s band] played the next. David Gans was the host and Dick was there being Dick. Later on, Scott Larned asked Gans if he knew of a guitar player and Gans mentioned me because he had seen me at Wetlands. So I got a call from Dark Star because of David. It’s all David’s fault. [Laughs.] I went out to do five shows with them in Chicago. This was December of ‘99, but I didn’t do it full-time right away. I would go into the studio and work for two months. [Eaton maintained an active career as a studio engineer with three Grammys and multiple platinum records to his name.] Then I’d go on tour with Dark Star, before I’d go back into the studio and do another record. I did that for about a year before I joined full-time in early 2001. When Jeff later joined in 2010 [after John Kadlecik departed to perform with Furthur], that expanded the range of DSO and you began dipping into 1969 material. RE: One of things that Jeff could do very well was the old stuff. He had to learn a lot of the later Garcia and Weir stuff, but the old stuff he knew off the top of his head. So we had to learn some of the old stuff to keep up with Jeff and Jeff had to learn some of the new stuff to keep up with us. It expanded the repertoire in a good way. Jeff’s approach to it is very free, and especially talking about the old stuff, his way of approaching music is kind of like Garcia’s in the sense that he’s just playing from the heart— whatever he feels—and that’s the most important thing. The fact that we can go out and do a ‘69 show one day, an ‘87 show the next day and then our own setlist the next day keeps it interesting for us and for the fan base. Some people chase the ‘69 show. We probably only do one a tour, if that. So it’s a novelty to a degree. We don’t do it all the time, but when we do it, it’s usually pretty fierce because that music’s pretty fierce. DE: It’s the really ravenous fan that loves the ‘69 stuff. It’s a little bit harder to digest sometimes— it’s just so raw and psychedelic. It’s intense. Cotter [Michaels], our longtime soundman loves that stuff. It’s one of his favorite time periods. When I first joined the band, I liked the ‘80s stuff because that’s mostly what I listened to. Of course, Europe ‘72 was pretty instrumental in getting me into everything, but I wasn’t really familiar with Live/ Dead that much. Also, all the bootlegs that came from that time period were not really good quality, and I was interested in hearing quality recordings. But the thing about playing this music and being in this band is that when I did dive into it, I really learned to love it, just like I learned to love all the different decades. If there’s any era of the band I think we do best, it’s probably the mid-‘70s because we’re firing on all cylinders and we’ve got the whole band up there. When I first heard about Dark Star Orchestra many years ago, I was told that you would replicate the Dead’s shows down to the errors, which didn’t make sense to me. It didn’t seem feasible and that sort of approach also would run counter to the ethos of the Grateful Dead. JM: That’s a very common misconception about Dark Star Orchestra. I hear a lot that people say, “Oh, they even copy the mistakes.” No, we really don’t. We make our own mistakes, but anything that smells of an error, we leave that out. If it’s a really fortuitous thing that happens, we might pay tribute to it in some way, but we certainly don’t copy mistakes. RE: You couldn’t replicate a show note for note. It would take me a lifetime to learn a show note for note, even if I could do that, which I’m not sure I could. But why would you even want to do it? The whole point of this music is that it’s improvisation. If you’re copying, then you’re not improvising. If you’re thinking, you’re not playing. I’ve had this conversation many times with people, and this music is based on improvisation. The analogy I often give is that we’re painters and we’ve got this canvas. The frame of this canvas is the year, the setlist, maybe the arrangements of the songs and tonally what’s happening. Then everything that gets splattered on the canvas over the course of the evening is all the improvisations. The only restrictions are the arrangements from that time period and the order of the songs in the setlist. It was a common misconception because people say, “Recreating Grateful Dead shows.” Well, you can’t recreate a Grateful Dead show. You can play a setlist. So we go out there and play as we know how to play and let it fall where it falls. It’s really quite simple. Frankly, because we’ve been doing it for so long, I think we’re playing this stuff freer than we ever have. It’s definitely morphed into something a little bit different in the last couple of years than it was 15 years ago. What is the process of selecting a setlist? DE: Scott Larned was the person who would pick the shows when I first got in the band. The idea was to not play a lot of repeats from night to night, just like the Dead. We also mix it up and try to do different time periods each time we go to the same venue or the same area, so that people aren’t getting 1988 over and over again. It’s quite a jigsaw puzzle, and after Scott passed on, Rob Eaton did it for a long time. Then he wanted to step away from that, so it was kind of voted that I would be the right person to do it. It’s extremely time consuming and it’s something you do during your time at home. So many different aspects come into play. Something that people might not realize is that stage size matters as well because we can’t do an ‘80s show on a lot of stages—they won’t fit all of our stuff. It’s definitely a chore, but it’s also a fun challenge. Eventually, I met someone who offered to put together a database that allows me to search out a show that doesn’t have any repeats of a given night. That helps me narrow down the shows a lot easier, although I still have all the other factors I mentioned. I also might look for anniversary dates, which is a fun thing to throw in when possible, especially when it’s the same date in the same city. That just happened on the last tour in Chicago. We happened to be there on November 18 this year, which is when the Dead had played there, right across the street. All things being equal, do you prefer staying in the same era for a few nights or would you prefer to jump around from show to show? RE: I like jumping around, but what was really interesting is what happened when we went to Europe the September before last and we did nine shows that were all Europe ‘72 shows. We were repeating a lot of the same stuff every night. I think I played “Truckin’” every night, and there were at least seven or eight other songs that we played every night. I saw how the Dead progressed so quickly, how they moved through material and how the material changed. Just in playing something nine shows in a row, every night I was trying to play it a little differently than the night before, adding something different or approaching it differently. I could see from the first show in London to the last show in Rome, how I was looking at it differently, and that was only a two-and-a-half week span. So I think of the Dead when they were over in Europe for five, six weeks and how that material really morphed and changed from the first show to the last show. I understood how that happened because I had to play all those shows in a row. How do you approach the elective shows where you create your own setlists? DE: We do custom elective sets about one third of the time, maybe even a little bit more. It’s somewhat like what most Grateful Dead bands do, but we do it in the sense that we are familiar with all these different approaches to each song. It’s often modernizing the earlier stuff. For instance, we’ll play “Alligator” and Jeff will do it on his woolly mammoth guitar. [Mattson has a guitar that was built in the style of Garcia’s Rosebud guitar from 1990.] RE: The elective shows for me are by far the most satisfying and fulfilling for multiple reasons. One is there’s no roadmap, there’s no frame, there’s no order and there’s no arrangements. All those things go out the window and you can piece together a song from ‘69 into a song from ‘79. That’s something the Dead never did. So it opens up another way of looking at the music and constructing setlists with the freedom that we have. We take everything we know about all these different versions of the songs and make them our own to a certain degree. I have some arrangements of songs that we only do in an elective format. “Let It Grow” is a prime example. There are all sorts of different ways that Weir looked at “Let It Grow” from ‘73 on. So I took different parts of all those versions and made one version of it. That’s the one we play during electives because the Dead never had it arranged that way. So if we do “Let It Grow” in an elective set, then we all know it’s going to be that particular version, which has elements of ‘73, ‘76 and ‘87. JM: The elective setlists are written by me and Rob Eaton because we sing the lion’s share of the songs. Sometimes we might imagine what it would have sounded like if the Dead had brought back a certain song in 1989. It’s also a great opportunity to play some songs that don’t get played very often in the show, like “If I Had the World to Give,” which they only played three times. So when the ballad comes around, we might put that in or “Visions of Johanna” or something like that. You can do things like play something from one era that never got played with another song because they were from two different eras. You can also play things from the same era that the Dead never put together, like “Help on the Way” > “Slipknot” and instead of going into “Franklin’s Tower” going into “Foolish Heart,” “Feel Like a Stranger” or something else people aren’t expecting. We have to be careful that we don’t fill the show up with esoterica, though. I remember one time we were doing an elective set for Jerry’s birthday, and we wanted to celebrate with all this different interesting stuff that Jerry liked to sing. Unfortunately, some people in the audience were appalled because they didn’t know half the songs we played. So we try to avoid that. [Laughs.] Rob, you were a Dead taper back in the day, before the creation of a designated section. What are your recollections of taping during that era? RE: It was venue to venue, but we’d have to get pretty creative with how to get our stuff in. I did everything, including strapping a deck underneath a girl’s long skirt. The cables were wrapped around my waist and I’d make crutches out of mic stand pieces, then reassemble it all when I was inside. I also rented a wheelchair and had somebody sit on the tape decks. The cables were wrapped around that person’s waist and the stand was part of the wheelchair. Barry Glassberg, who was a dear friend of mine and a taper back in the day, looked like an accountant. He had his suit on. He’d come from work with his briefcase and the briefcase held all his taping stuff. Sometimes you’d grease the guy at the door—20 bucks just to get your stuff in. It was an adventure, and once you were in there, it didn’t mean you could stay in there if there was hardass security—like in Hartford, which gave us a tougher time than anywhere else. You wanted to be one of the first ones in, so you’re waiting in front of a door—usually one of the side doors, not the main ones. You’d try different doors, and if you didn’t get it in, you’d just put it in your car and then go in to watch the show. There wasn’t a scene outside back in the ‘70s or even the early ‘80s. Once the show was going on, it was empty outside. There were no Shakedown Streets and stuff like that. Is it an odd experience watching people tape your shows? RE: It’s someone’s hobby. There’s no right or wrong to anything. Someone enjoys going out and taping and putting it on their shelf and labeling it. That’s great. It’s what I used to do all the time, right? I did it mostly for the Dead, but I know people who used to go to all the clubs in New York and record every chance they got. It didn’t matter who it was. They just liked documenting something that they were at. It’s a hobby—setting up your gear and looking at the meters and all the other stuff. The members of the Grateful Dead have sat in with DSO over the years. Is there a particular moment that stands out? DE: The first time Weir sat in with us because he was the first of the Core Four that came in, and we didn’t really know that it was actually going to happen. It was at the Warfield in San Francisco for a Rex Benefit [on 4/13/02], and we had heard the possibility that it might happen. Then that afternoon, this amp shows up—one of his sit-in amps—and his guitar showed up, too. We were like, “Wow, this is looking like it’s going to actually happen.” I’d been in the band for maybe a couple of years at that point, so this was quite a big deal. When he strolled up onstage and started tuning up his guitar, it was like what I’d seen so many times before. Then he looked straight at me, like “Are you ready?” I gave him a nod and it was goosebumps. It was definitely a profound moment for me. Bob has always been very gracious, and I think he’s played with us five different times. Phil’s played with us twice, and the first time at the Fillmore was special. That was one where Phil turned and gave me the look in the eye. That was something. One time at the Great American, Weir was up there and Rob stepped off to let him do it. But before the very last song, Weir’s like, “We’re going to bring out Rob Eaton.” Then Rob gets up there, so it’s the two of ‘em, and Weir goes, “What you have here is too much of a good thing.” [Laughs.] You’ve been hosting your Dark Star Jubilee event ever since 2012. What does that represent to you? RE: The Jubilee was created as a family-friendly festival where you bring your own beer, recycle, respect one another. We’ve kept it small because we don’t want it to be this giant thing. If more people are there, then you get the nitrous mafia, then you get people stealing from tents while others are at the show. The Jubilee is our way of giving back to our community. It’s a way for our fans to connect with each other and go to a festival where they feel like it’s their own. Our fans have seen us grow up right in front of their eyes—they’ve seen us go from playing little bars to playing theaters. They were around for a lot of it, and they feel like we’re a part of their lives as much as they’re a part of ours.

Challenge to the band: play an elective show the way the Dead played every show. No setlist and everything happens on the fly. 😆

Great interview. Every time I hear Dino tell a story, it’s pretty much the exact way as the last. For me so many details change over time. I even had an argument with Chris about him being at jubilee when he said he wasn’t that year(he was). Note eatons mention of the nitrous mafia as I couldn’t find the old post where Eaton talked about it destroying the scene and how you’d become persona non grata if you had a tank at any show. Think someone was asking about bringing a tank to jubilee and I said that’s about the only thing besides fighting or stealing that will get you booted in a second from jubilee. There was one year pretty early on at jubilee that we heard a tank going and a swarm of security went on the hunt. but don’t forget the Ticketmaster reviewer who said the dead quit playing those songs for a reason!! From an interview Jerry said he quit playing the eleven b/c it was too hard and they had to practice it too much to keep it in rotation. Maybe Tea can talk to Dso like he did hyryder and have them pull out a 67 show with a fast surfer style cold rain lol.

"some people chase the '69 show" made me chuckle. Only took 23 years. Praise DSO.