It’s a Sunday night in San Francisco, and My Morning Jacket’s Jim James is taking it all in. “I have been in a deep Grateful Dead period of my life,” he confesses to Rolling Stone. “Ever since Bobby [Weir] passed away, a portal opened and I stepped through,
into the land of the Grateful Dead. It’s such a beautiful place to be, and I spend quite a lot of time here!”
Indeed, that very evening marked the final of a seven-night run at the original Fillmore, and sharing the stage with the spirit of the band comes in multiple vessels. Sure, the Grateful Dead played there, but it was also about showcasing a generation of artists faithful to the sound and essence of the Dead.
The residency was revealed seven months ago, when My Morning Jacket used rainbow-themed artwork to unveil the dates scheduled for the nation’s preeminent rock palace. The band only disclosed that the seven shows would be color-coded to correspond to each of the seven colors of the rainbow, and that back-to-back shows would be without repeats.
It was implied that the residency would draw upon multiple bonds that the band has built with the venue, the city, and the surrounding Bay Area fanbase over the years. A message on MMJ’s socials stated: “We look forward to laughing, dancing, and singing together while celebrating every color of the rainbow and all of the beauty, diversity, and magic in this wild, wonderful world!”
Somewhere along the way, the Jacket decided to focus the run’s narrative arc on a celebration of the Grateful Dead, connecting the Dead’s dots between the bands, the venue, and the city in ways that ranged from subtle nods to overt testimony.
“Jim has been going through his ‘Grateful Dead moment’ recently, and feeling emotionally connected to the music,” keyboardist Bo Koster explains to Rolling Stone. “So he picked a bunch of songs that we could do that he was connecting to. The idea was to do one per night to honor the city and its cultural legacy.”
There were additional lines to be dotted, including a couple of covers from the late Bay Area legend Sly Stone (“Everyday People,” “Thank You”), and Marvin Gaye’s “Baby Don’t You Do It”; the Band’s famous live version of that song was recorded just down the street from the Fillmore, at the Winterland Ballroom, for inclusion in The Last Waltz. (The Who also released a live version … recorded in San Francisco.)
MMJ even pulled a Grateful Dead-style prank when they debuted the Dead’s “Scarlet Begonias” on Green Night, and then played “Fire on the Mountain” at the following show. That sequence, albeit spread out over two nights, represented the traditional segue that the Dead used to connect the two songs, always performing them together as a musical suite.
Throughout the residency, covers new and old (which also included selections from Dolly Parton, Fleetwood Mac, the Beatles, and AC/DC) were often paired with special guests who had their own connection to the Jacket, the Dead, the venue, the city, or all of the above. The special-guest list included Molly Tuttle, Tyler Ballgame, Karina Rykman, Mikaela Davis, Grace Cummings, and Grahame Lesh, respectively.
It was guest bassist Karina Rykman’s first time playing on the Fillmore stage, even though she had seen Los Lobos there a decade before. She flew in for one night, during a two-night break in her own tour, to play on MMJ’s debut of “Franklin’s Tower” (and on Radiohead’s “National Anthem”). “The history of the room is not lost on me,” she texted Rolling Stone from somewhere back on the road with her own tour.
After all, the Fillmore was, in many ways, ground zero for the Grateful Dead. They performed 51 shows there between 1965 and 1969, and it’s where drummers Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart first met, during a Count Basie concert in 1967. My Morning Jacket has now earned their own history in the room, with a total of 18 shows played and slayed.
On the fifth night of the rainbow residency, Blue Night, they ran through the entire track list of Okonokos (Disc One), their lauded live album which was recorded at the Fillmore 26 years ago, right there on the very same stage, in front of some of the very same fans.
One of the fans in attendance that night in 2005 was Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh’s son, Grahame Lesh. “It was a truly epic experience to see that show,” Lesh tells Rolling Stone. “I still have the poster and everything.”
To close their residency with a Grateful Dead appropriate bookmark, MMJ brought Lesh onstage to play his dad’s bass on the Dead’s “Sugar Magnolia” (and George Harrison’s “Isn’t It a Pity”). Lesh returned for the encore to perform his dad’s song “Box of Rain,” while James played the Martin acoustic guitar that Jerry Garcia used during the recording of American Beauty.
During the residency’s final two nights, James also got to bring out Garcia’s “Alligator” and Weir’s “Black Knife” guitars — but it was the American Beauty instrument that had the biggest emotional impact.
“It was so mind-melting to ‘Ripple’ for everyone on that guitar,” James says. “To hear all of us singing together, especially at the end of the song, and know it was that guitar that we hear every time we hear the studio recording was truly a transcendent moment for me, where I felt like I was just a vessel for the music to pass through.“
While MMJ might be slowly catching up to the Dead in terms of their Fillmore history, the run wasn’t a passing of the torch so much as a hug and a handshake acknowledging the linear nature of music. It was an attempt to add seven more stories for the Fillmore walls to tell, should they ever talk.
Adds James: “That’s the beauty of the Grateful Dead. They carried the music in such an egoless, pure way, and that music carries us through life. And the music never stops or dies, so then we also carry the music forward.”
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