Role Players

4/16/99, San Francisco, CA, Warfield Theater

SET 1: Help on the Way > Slipknot! > Franklin's Tower, Wish You Were Here > Tennessee Jed, Stella Blue, Alligator

SET 2: Bertha > Prince Caspian, St. Stephen -> The Eleven > Unbroken Chain, Chalk Dust Torture > Mountains of the Moon > Scarlet Begonias -> Fire on the Mountain

ENCORE: Ripple

Listen on Relisten or Watch on YouTube

Night two at the Warfield brought a surprise guest to the already star-studded run: the mighty Donna Jean Godchaux. It’s funny to imagine them breaking emergency glass and flying her in when everyone realized just how ragged a Phil/Trey/Page vocal ensemble sounded on the first night. But I’m sure it was planned ahead – Donna had dropped in for a random Further Festival set with The Other Ones in 1998, putting her back in the Dead’s rolodex for the first time in two decades*. 

Those invites felt like a much bolder decision at the time than it would today. In 1999, Donna was still the butt of a thousand Playing in the Band scream jokes, and her sweetening contributions to the band’s 70s heyday went largely unappreciated. Thankfully, misogyny has retreated among Deadheads today, and I think most – not all – fans are now on the pro-Donna side of the ledger. 

You could probably treat these shows as something of a turning point in that opinion, as it’s not hard to feel the joyful pop in the room as soon as she chimes in on the chorus of Bertha. Her slightly off-mic “woo!” in the middle of Trey’s solo even makes her a convenient audience surrogate in the midst of all these musical heavyweights. Tonight’s second set – probably the best of the run’s six – caters to her strengths, also giving her a chance to join in on a Scarlet > Fire and Ripple, the latter for what I think is the first time ever? It’s a lovely bit of cease fire at a time when the Dead family was full of internal squabbling**.

Donna’s triumphant return also comes appropriately while the dude sitting to two spots to her right does a quiet, masterful tribute to her late ex-husband. For all the distractions of tracking the high-stakes duel taking place between the two lead guitarists all run, Page just quietly works his way to the MVP title of this whole three-nights-only band. These shows are, at times, a rickety operation, teetering on the edge of collapse – look no further than the end of tonight’s Slipknot – but Page keeps a steady hand throughout, an island of creative calm amidst the chaos. 

Playing keys with a Dead-related project presents a different sort of challenge; instead of filling the very idiosyncratic shoes of one of the core members, a keyboardist has both the freedom and the pressure of picking from disparate eras and approaches. It’s hard to imagine a more diverse roster of players than Pigpen, TC, Keith, Brent, Hornsby, and Vince, and the different sounds that they brought to the Dead did a lot to define the band in the years in which they played. So that leaves today’s Dead interpreters with a full wardrobe of choices: do you want to do minimal garage rock organ? Avant-garde explorations? Subtle piano color? Michelob rock B3? Or for the real sickos: MIDI chipwave? I suppose an especially talented impressionist could do all of the above, but just the gear costs alone would make it difficult. 

By 1999, Page has the rig to pull that trick off. But he keeps it simple, drawing largely from the mid-70s sound of Keith Godchaux. He sticks to the piano for a good 90% of these shows, and it’s a good choice given the swing of drummer John Molo and the complicated rainbow of guitar tones coming out of Steve Kimock and Trey. And like Keith at his best, Page knows how to pick his spots, finding the space between the busy lines of Trey, Phil, and Kimock while remaining ready to pounce when Phil gives him the wave (though Kimock steps on his solo in Bertha, argh).

It’s very hard to find a screenshot of Page in these videos, which proves my point.

This strategy really shines on night two, when the band plays a heavy setlist of song suites and some of the Dead’s proggiest material. Help > Slip > Frank alone is nearly 40 minutes, and Page does his best to keep it from flying apart at the seams while also taking a rare solo vocal (despite having the lineup’s best non-Donna voice) on Franklin’s Tower. He’s there to friskily comp Trey’s joyous solo in Bertha, but also adds tasteful accents to Kimock’s slide guitar showcase on the instrumental Stella Blue, the run’s most interesting rearrangement. Again and again, he’s the ego-free accompanist that everyone else in the band refuses to be, adding cohesion to lengthy jams that could easily have devolved into note-filled fistfights.

And unlike Keith, Page isn’t allergic to non-piano keyboards. He’s happy to rip a Brent organ solo when needed and add more percussive Hammond to The Wheel and Not Fade Away, and he’ll even dust off the clavinet for the thickest parts of the Shakedown Street jam on night one. I wish he’d been a bit more experimental in parts – like Trey, he keeps most of his 98/99 ambient tricks packed away – but that’s not his job in this outfit, and he understands the assignment. 

None of this really came as a surprise to Phish fans, who are used to Page being the dependable teammate in his day job. But it affirmed that Page’s secret-ingredient talents work in a different context, an experiment that remains rare even to this day. While Trey has come back again and again to play with Dead alums, it’s crazy that there’s only one Page appearance as a Phil Friend after this run, a sit-in with Fishman at Lockn’ 2016. 

My hunch is that’s because, not long after these shows, the various post-Dead projects found their own Page: Jeff Chimenti, a similarly versatile and modest keyboardist who is content to sit on the edge of the spotlight (and who doesn’t have his own lucrative main gig). As a result, the long-term novelty of this run for Phish fans isn’t so much hearing Trey do the Dead, but to see in a new light just how much Page contributes.

* - Though apparently not 17 years later, when she was conspicuously and shamefully absent from Fare Thee Well!

** - We haven’t even talked yet about how there’s not a single Weir song in this entire run, which is hilarious shade.