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The OTHER Watkins Glen Festival

The loose nature of the night was best represented by the free flowing twenty minute jam dropped in the middle of the second set. Starting out of some Phil and Jerry noodling, but it quickly picks up into a stunning theme. This is a quintessential 1973 jam. Jerry is playing soaring leads, Phil keeps a melodic counterpart, the rhythm section is tight, and odds are high that there might be a keyboard player in the mix somewhere. It combined beauty and energy and does so effortlessly, as though they could keep playing like this for hours. There’s a reason why the Grateful Dead compilation So Many Roads included this jam. If the entire rest of the festival had been canceled, attendees would have had their $10 worth just from this creation.

Eventually tests end, even ones as long as this one. July 28 came around and the real concert began. The Grateful Dead opened the show with a three-hour two set performance. The highlight of the first set is an exploratory “Playin’ in the Band” that tries to pick up where the previous night’s jam left off. The feel of the jam is different; instead of the loose nature of the soundcheck, this stays closer to a typical Grateful Dead moment. It doesn’t soar quite as high but for about two minutes they manage to channel the spirit. After a peak where Jerry was playing so fast that the melody almost became a white noise, it dropped into a pretty, albeit mellow, section. A patient build into the reprise finally ended the jam and the set.

The second set started out with a high energy “Around and Around” before meandering a bit. “Truckin’” brought things back up with its fun “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” jam in it. Things had loosened up by then, leading to a delicate “China>Rider” and a long “Eyes of the World.” It’s hard to let yourself go when playing to a crowd that large, but eventually The Dead were able to do it.

The Band followed, drawing the booby prize time slot. It poured so hard in the middle of their set that they had to shut things down after “Endless Highway” (with some amusing teases of Eric Clapton’s “Let It Rain” in the intro), forcing keyboardist Garth Hudson to play a solo piece while the rest of the band stayed dry. Sure they played hits such as “The Weight,” “Stage Fright,” and, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” but it was “Slippin’ and a Slidin’” that described the scene best as people stumbled around in the mud.

Much like The Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers Band focused a lot of their set around improvisation, but instead of free flowing loose jams, they kept things going with a high energy blues based themes. This technique worked better on the shorter songs—“Blue Sky” got an especially nice mid-song break to the obvious delight of the crowd. Their new song “Ramblin’ Man” also was able to take advantage of the contrast between the pop song roots and the energy of the jam to create a powerful performance.

The set closer was the 24-minute tour de force of “Whipping Post.” Perhaps the highlight of the entire festival, the jam builds and ebbs, going down to almost nothing around 12 minutes in until a stunning theme is discovered a few minutes later. They build on this, bringing it up to a peak built out of blues intensity before slamming back into the main “Whipping Post” theme. With no way to go further up, the song ends with soulful singing from Gregg reminding us one last time that sometimes he feels like he’s dying. Even with the mediocre sound quality, the show is worth tracking down for this.

After eight hours of music from the three bands, the encore had everyone come on stage for a trio of “Not Fade Away,” “Mountain Jam,” “Johnny B. Goode.” It’s hard to avoid sloppiness with that many musicians on stage, but this isn’t about precision, it’s about fun and celebrating that they managed to pull off a concert this massive and chaotic with very few mishaps; the unfortunate death of Willard Smith in a skydiving stunt mishap – he was carrying flares and one set his clothes on fire – was the one tragedy of the event.

Summer Jam is a difficult act to follow but there are lessons that it can pass on to Super Ball IX. There are virtues in musical patience. Chaos can lead to beauty. Sometimes at the end of the night it can be fun to just get onstage with some friends and see what happens. And most of all, if you’re going to play “Whipping Post” at Watkins Glen, you had best bring it.