Day of the (Almost) Dead

If you didn’t know better, you’d think it was a Grateful Dead concert.

Aging hippies mingled with twentysomething poseurs Thursday evening as vendors hawked hash pipes and handmade trinkets. Bare-chested men with matted dreads shimmied next to women with bare feet who whirled to endless percussive jams, almost falling out of their halter tops.

“The scene is the same,” pronounced John Crawford, hanging back on the periphery of Atlanta’s Lakewood Amphitheatre as 15,000 sweating, mostly tie-dyed fans wallowed in a recaptured ‘60s mood of heavy mellowosity.

It wasn’t the Grateful Dead, but the spirit lives on.

Twenty-six-year-old Jason Weeks agreed. The Toronto native said he has no idea how many Dead shows he’s seen. “I used to take off and catch three or four different shows at a time on the East Coast--Buffalo, Maine, Massachusetts. I’d take two weeks off from college and follow them. . . . No matter what show you go to, no matter in what city, it’s always the same--you see the same people, you hear the same music, the same feeling, everything.”

So what’s his verdict on the Further Festival, the 32-city tour headlined by former members of the Dead that kicked off Thursday in Atlanta?

“If you walked around in the parking lot here,” Weeks said, “it was the same scene.”

With one big difference. Jerry Garcia is dead.

Members of the band have played together, or on the same bill, at least twice since Garcia died last Aug. 9. Percussionist Mickey Hart, bassist Phil Lesh, guitarist Bob Weir and keyboardist Vince Welnick played together last weekend with the San Francisco Symphony.

But the Further Festival marks the first time that the surviving members of the Dead have gotten together to jam in a happening that seeks to re-create the atmosphere of the Dead’s old performances.

Old-time fans said they missed the gentle Buddha-like presence of Garcia, whom one aging fan called “just a great, cool, fat soul.” For them, the Further Festival was a way of affirming that the community endures.

“Change is always there,” said Gary Yarnell, 42, who added that hearing of Garcia’s death “was like when I had my heart attack; I didn’t want to believe it. It was a shock.”

But, he said, you get by the best you can after something like that happens. You adjust. You move on.

Some wags are calling this tour the Return of the Living Dead. From the glazed eyes and gnarled, gray-bearded faces of many of the fans, there may have been actual zombies in attendance. (The tour will play Aug. 1 at the Ventura County Fairgrounds and Aug. 2 at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre.)

Former Dead members Weir and Hart are headlining with their new bands, Ratdog and Mystery Box, respectively. They are joined by others, including sometimes Dead pianist Bruce Hornsby. Friends like Los Lobos, Hot Tuna and John Wesley Harding are also on the bill.

“I think it’s cool that they’re not calling it the Grateful Dead,” Crawford said. “That’s good. It’s just the band members getting together and making music.”

During the seven-hour festival, the individual bands played. Then, at the end, everyone got together to perform “Not Fade Away” and “Johnny B. Goode.”

Although they played a number of Dead concert staples, it was not the Dead. But nobody seemed to mind.

“I try not to have expectations,” said Jeffrey Lerner, who drove to the festival from his home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina with friends.

He said he’d attended “a handful” of Dead concerts. He pronounced the Further Festival “good” but “different.”

“I haven’t heard any drums yet,” he said, as he sat in front of the amphitheater after midnight, as the overwhelming majority of attendees rushed to their cars, mindful of having to go to work the next morning. Usually, there’s lots of impromptu drumming at Dead get-togethers, Lerner said, his own drum at rest by his side.

“It’s just a lot of family getting together with drums,” he said. “A coming-together.”

Aaron Fields, a chiropractic student in Atlanta, tried to explain the appeal of the Dead and the scene that accompanied them, which he agreed lives on with the Further Festival.

“It takes people back to simple times,” he said. “People are wearing simple clothes, doing simple things, having simple pleasures.”

“Everybody trades,” Crawford said, speaking of the bazaar that inevitably forms in the parking lot of Dead concerts. “Everybody gives and gets what they need. Food, water and music--that’s all you need. And if you want booze and sex and drugs, you can have that too. That’s what makes it good.”