https://relix.com/articles/detail/dark-star-orchestra-deadhead-adventure-travel/
On Nov. 11, 2022, Dark Star Orchestra performed at Chicagoâs 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 Deadâs 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 DSOâs ability to interpret it. The groupâs 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 olâ Grateful Dead.
Weâve 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, weâre their first experience with Grateful Dead music. Itâs all about keeping the music alive and whatever part I can play in that feels good to me. Iâm 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 Iâm 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. Itâs 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, theyâre not telling you, âOh, this is 1985 angst.â It doesnât feel like a song is associated with the politics of a specific time period. Itâs not yelling at you. Itâs accessible to people. Itâll be accessible to people in 100 years, just as it was to us 50 years ago. I think itâs a testament to Robert Hunterâs lyrics and [John] Barlowâs lyrics and how they saw the place of music in society.
Itâs 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.
Weâre just Deadheads. We donât really know any better. Weâre just out there playing music how we like to hear it. Our spin on it is all the improvisation. You can play âSugar Magnoliaâ seven nights in a row and itâs going to be different every time you play it. So thatâs what keeps it interesting for people like me, after so many shows and so many years. You never really know where itâs going to go or whatâs going to happen. Itâs still an adventure.
JEFF MATTSON: I never thought that this many years after Jerryâs passing, people would still be so hungry to hear Grateful Dead music. Itâs a powerful force in the world. It also amazes me how many young people there are, particularly up on the rail. But itâs a wonderful thing and a testament to how great the Dead were and how great the songs are.
Robert Hunterâs lyrics are nonspecific in a way that these songs continue to evolve my understanding of themâwhat 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 youâve 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 DSOâs niche is that we will give it to you the way that it was at the time.
As youâve noted, the songs themselves are a major part of the equation. Thatâs 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 didnât 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 didnât 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. Iâll never forget that the reviewer said, âAnd they encored with a lovely song about a woman named Stella Green.â [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 â87 with âTouch of Greyâ 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 attentionâother 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 â90s, 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, thoughââI need to do whatever I can to keep this music alive.â So we started taking it much more seriously, touring regionally and doing weekend runs. I was playing with Rob Koritz, doing the double drum thingâmy first exposure to that was Genesisâ and I was having a good time playing with him.
Eventually â97 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, âOh, these guys are all right.â 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 theyâd taken care of the thing, and I could go back to original music. So thatâs 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 bandâs 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 Dickâs Picks release party at Wetlands over the course of a weekend. The Zen Tricksters [Jeff Mattson and Rob Barracoâs band] played one day and Border Legion [Robâs 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. Itâs all Davidâs fault. [Laughs.]
I went out to do five shows with them in Chicago. This was December of â99, but I didnât 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 Iâd go on tour with Dark Star, before Iâd 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. Jeffâs approach to it is very free, and especially talking about the old stuff, his way of approaching music is kind of like Garciaâs in the sense that heâs just playing from the heartâ whatever he feelsâand thatâs the most important thing.
The fact that we can go out and do a â69 show one day, an â87 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 â69 show. We probably only do one a tour, if that. So itâs a novelty to a degree. We donât do it all the time, but when we do it, itâs usually pretty fierce because that musicâs pretty fierce.
DE: Itâs the really ravenous fan that loves the â69 stuff. Itâs a little bit harder to digest sometimesâ itâs just so raw and psychedelic. Itâs intense. Cotter [Michaels], our longtime soundman loves that stuff. Itâs one of his favorite time periods. When I first joined the band, I liked the â80s stuff because thatâs mostly what I listened to. Of course, Europe â72 was pretty instrumental in getting me into everything, but I wasnât 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 thereâs any era of the band I think we do best, itâs probably the mid-â70s because weâre firing on all cylinders and weâve 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 Deadâs shows down to the errors, which didnât make sense to me. It didnât seem feasible and that sort of approach also would run counter to the ethos of the Grateful Dead.
JM: Thatâs a very common misconception about Dark Star Orchestra. I hear a lot that people say, âOh, they even copy the mistakes.â No, we really donât. We make our own mistakes, but anything that smells of an error, we leave that out. If itâs a really fortuitous thing that happens, we might pay tribute to it in some way, but we certainly donât copy mistakes.
RE: You couldnât 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 Iâm not sure I could. But why would you even want to do it? The whole point of this music is that itâs improvisation. If youâre copying, then youâre not improvising. If youâre thinking, youâre not playing.
Iâve had this conversation many times with people, and this music is based on improvisation. The analogy I often give is that weâre painters and weâve got this canvas. The frame of this canvas is the year, the setlist, maybe the arrangements of the songs and tonally whatâs 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, âRecreating Grateful Dead shows.â Well, you canât 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. Itâs really quite simple. Frankly, because weâve been doing it for so long, I think weâre playing this stuff freer than we ever have. Itâs 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 arenât getting 1988 over and over again. Itâs 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.
Itâs extremely time consuming and itâs 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 canât do an â80s show on a lot of stagesâthey wonât fit all of our stuff.
Itâs definitely a chore, but itâs also a fun challenge. Eventually, I met someone who offered to put together a database that allows me to search out a show that doesnât 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 itâs 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 â72 shows. We were repeating a lot of the same stuff every night. I think I played âTruckinââ 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. Itâs 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.
Itâs often modernizing the earlier stuff. For instance, weâll play âAlligatorâ and Jeff will do it on his woolly mammoth guitar. [Mattson has a guitar that was built in the style of Garciaâs Rosebud guitar from 1990.]
RE: The elective shows for me are by far the most satisfying and fulfilling for multiple reasons. One is thereâs no roadmap, thereâs no frame, thereâs no order and thereâs no arrangements. All those things go out the window and you can piece together a song from â69 into a song from â79. Thatâs 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. âLet It Growâ is a prime example. There are all sorts of different ways that Weir looked at âLet It Growâ from â73 on. So I took different parts of all those versions and made one version of it. Thatâs the one we play during electives because the Dead never had it arranged that way. So if we do âLet It Growâ in an elective set, then we all know itâs going to be that particular version, which has elements of â73, â76 and â87.
JM: The elective setlists are written by me and Rob Eaton because we sing the lionâs 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. Itâs also a great opportunity to play some songs that donât get played very often in the show, like âIf I Had the World to Give,â which they only played three times. So when the ballad comes around, we might put that in or âVisions of Johannaâ 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 âHelp on the Wayâ > âSlipknotâ and instead of going into âFranklinâs Towerâ going into âFoolish Heart,â âFeel Like a Strangerâ or something else people arenât expecting.
We have to be careful that we donât fill the show up with esoterica, though. I remember one time we were doing an elective set for Jerryâs 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 didnât 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 weâd have to get pretty creative with how to get our stuff in. I did everything, including strapping a deck underneath a girlâs long skirt. The cables were wrapped around my waist and Iâd 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 personâs 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. Heâd come from work with his briefcase and the briefcase held all his taping stuff.
Sometimes youâd grease the guy at the doorâ20 bucks just to get your stuff in. It was an adventure, and once you were in there, it didnât mean you could stay in there if there was hardass securityâlike in Hartford, which gave us a tougher time than anywhere else.
You wanted to be one of the first ones in, so youâre waiting in front of a doorâusually one of the side doors, not the main ones. Youâd try different doors, and if you didnât get it in, youâd just put it in your car and then go in to watch the show. There wasnât a scene outside back in the â70s or even the early â80s. 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: Itâs someoneâs hobby. Thereâs no right or wrong to anything. Someone enjoys going out and taping and putting it on their shelf and labeling it. Thatâs great. Itâs 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 didnât matter who it was. They just liked documenting something that they were at. Itâs a hobbyâsetting 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 didnât 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 upâone of his sit-in ampsâand his guitar showed up, too. We were like, âWow, this is looking like itâs going to actually happen.â Iâd 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 Iâd seen so many times before. Then he looked straight at me, like âAre you ready?â 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 heâs played with us five different times. Philâs 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, Weirâs like, âWeâre going to bring out Rob Eaton.â Then Rob gets up there, so itâs the two of âem, and Weir goes, âWhat you have here is too much of a good thing.â [Laughs.]
Youâve 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. Weâve kept it small because we donât 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. Itâs a way for our fans to connect with each other and go to a festival where they feel like itâs their own. Our fans have seen us grow up right in front of their eyesâtheyâve seen us go from playing little bars to playing theaters. They were around for a lot of it, and they feel like weâre a part of their lives as much as theyâre a part of ours.
There was an agreement in principle (nothing contractual) to develop the project after killers of the flower moon was completed. According in IMBD, Scorsese has 9 projects in active pre-production which suggests the biopic is inactive or DOA. Probably for the best given the degree of difficulty
