Gunfight at the Warfield

4/15/99, San Francisco, CA, Warfield Theater

SET 1: Hello Old Friend, Viola Lee Blues, Big Railroad Blues, Jack-a-Roe, Cosmic Charlie, Wolfman's Brother > Uncle John's Band

SET 2: Alabama Getaway, Sugaree, Like a Rolling Stone -> I Know You Rider, Row Jimmy, Shakedown Street > The Wheel > Not Fade Away

ENCORE: Mr. Tambourine Man

Listen on Relisten or watch on YouTube

Not long after the seal was broken in Virginia Beach, Phish – or at least half of them – got the official call-up to the Grateful Dead family. For his first shows with a shiny new liver, Phil Lesh revived his then seldom-used “and Friends” label with a cast of ringers: drummer John Molo of The Range, Frisco local legend Steve Kimock, and our pals, Trey and Page. Booked at the Warfield, it was an intimate setting for Phil’s return only four months after transplant surgery, but the momentous jamband summit elevated the stakes even higher.

On the surface, the three-night run was a celebration that Phil was still with us (and, miraculously, still is!) bookended by a getting-dusty-in-here opening of Phil and his kids singing “Hello Old Friend” and the first donor rap in the encore. But between those heart- and liver-warming moments, it’s improvisational, generational warfare. 

After the kids leave, he leads his crack pick-up band right into a half-hour Viola Lee Blues that sets up all the dynamics of the run. There’s Phil, a bandleader who gives his collaborators ample room to strut their stuff, and Molo and Page, the ego-less steady hands that keep this ramshackle arrangement from falling apart*. And that puts all the focus on the West Coast/East Coast conflict at the heart of this temporary band: Kimock, a Jerry acolyte who was drafted to fill his shoes in The Other Ones, and Trey, perennially avoiding any Garcia comparisons.

I have no inside dirt on the relationship between the two guitarists, just the evidence of my ears and eyes. But it’s only natural that two men used to being the lead guitarist and director of their respective projects would joust when forced to share the same stage. There’s rarely a song all night or all run where only one of them takes a solo, a format that swells track length without offering much in the way of transcendent improvisation. And it doesn’t help that Trey has an onstage ally in Page; immediately from the start of Viola Lee, they resume their decades-long musical conversation while Kimock flits around trying to get a word in.

One guitarist is trying to make eye contact, the other is…not.

As bandleader, Phil seems cool with this arrangement, even assigning the two unorthodox job titles in each night’s band intros: Kimock gets “rocket guitar,” “anti-gravity guitar” and “interstellar, superluminal guitar” while Trey gets “cosmic guitar,” “downright nasty dirty funk guitar,” and “magma-flaming lava volcano guitar” (a pretty accurate trio!). And in ensuing years, Phil & Friends lineups will usually pit two lead guitarists against each other, most famously Haynes and Jimmy Herring in “The Quintet” configuration. Phil might be a cop, but he likes a little domestic drama.

Eventually, it settles down to a weird compromise: Kimock will play the Jerry role, while Trey will alternate between Second Jerry and Bob, the latter being a job he is almost equally happy to play. And sometimes it works – the wide open spaces between verses of Sugaree allow for the dual leads to recreate the kind of interweaving full-band melodic spirals the Dead used to spin themselves, the pseudo China>Rider jam at the end of Like a Rolling Stone briefly captures the singular Jerry/Bob mutually beneficial chemistry.

Yet throughout, Kimock and his 27 guitars mostly sounds like Jerry – his solo on Jack-A-Roe is like JerryGPT – while Trey sounds like Trey, playing Dead songs. You can hear how excited Trey is to bust out all his late 90s pedals on funkier songs like Shakedown Street; meanwhile, Kimock is content to show off his meticulous Mu-Tron tone. Their push and pull boils down to: do you want to close your eyes and pretend you’re seeing the good ol’ Grateful Dead? Or does this music – and the Dead’s resolutely restless approach to playing it over three decades – provide room for fresh interpretation?

Trey defers to Phil as bandleader, of course, but when he does get to take the wheel – including, literally, in The Wheel – he tends to steer the band in brief detours that would be surprising on a Dead tape. By the end of the night, Trey is attacking Not Fade Away with savage rhythm guitar solos that sound like Lou Reed, an approach that neither Jerry or Bob would ever have thought to take. By contrast, Kimock’s most out-of-the-box contribution tonight is adding slide guitar to Wolfman’s, about which the less said, the better. 

No! No!!

The two guitarists’ rapport will get better over the run, but it will never exactly get good. And their differences will set up a tension that has clung to post-Dead projects up through the present day: the tug-of-war between the Jerry clones and the innovators. Kimock would seem to win the short-term battle after this run, sticking with Phil’s lineup through most of 1999 and returning to The Other Ones in 2000 (though Trey had other things to do, of course). And the various Dead legacy projects usually couldn’t resist selecting other soundalikes, most shamelessly with the run of Dark Star Orchestra guitarist John Kadlecik in Furthur**. 

But Trey, of course, would eventually win the long game, redrafted as lead guitarist for the massive Fare Thee Well run in 2015. Those FTW shows are a mixed bag, but I sincerely think Trey’s performance at them was a tour de force, a masterful chimera of his own style and Jerry’s that satisfied supporters and skeptics alike. Back in 1999, he’s much more headstrong; in the very thick of Phish’s imperial phase, there’s not much reason for him to compromise, giddy as he was at the opportunity to play with one of his idols. 

It’s that confidence and originality that made Trey the true heir to Garcia’s jamband throne, while Kimock, for all his talents, will forever be known to most outside of SF as a guy who existed on the periphery of the Grateful Dead for a while. And if the Dead’s legacy will endure past the point where any original members are still alive or able to play, that’s the way it will have to be – unlike most other bands of their generation, rote mimicry isn’t going to cut it when it comes to preserving the spirit of the Dead. Back in 1999, the battle lines were drawn on either side of Phil on the stage of the Warfield, and the ultimate result still feels unresolved today.

* - It’s pretty obvious that the Viola Lee Blues is that long because they’re rehearsing in front of an audience; the Dead, in any incarnation, have always taken an Allen Iverson philosophy about the whole “practice” thing.

** - He’s by no means my favorite, but the inclusion of John Mayer in Dead & Company was at least a promising step away from this reflex, given that he was an established artist with his own distinct sound…love it or hate it.

Hey, sorry to say we’re still on Substack…I left it too late to figure out where to migrate. But I’m still looking, and it appears that it’s fairly easy to bring a subscriber list over to a new service. So if you suddenly start getting these from a different site, it’s not a phishing attempt, it’s a…Phishing attempt (buh-dum-tsh). I’ll try to have it sorted by Summer Tour. Between now and then: two more Phil & Friends essays and likely some TAB posts too. Say hey if you’re going to the Sphere! -Rob