Albany Times-Union
August 21, 2006
by Alan Wechsler
DUANESBURG -- The music began around noon Friday and pretty much didn't let up.
That's how it is at jam-band festivals. One song melts into another, one band ends their set and another begins before the last notes of the wah-wah stop echoing.
The three-day Gathering of the Vibes music festival at the Indian Lookout Country Club in Mariaville started Friday, although most of the concertgoers had already been there a day or so. A $135 to $150 ticket got them four days of camping, three days of music and contact with well over 12,000 hard-core jam-band music fans.
[...]
Day 2 Saturday at the Gathering of the Vibes was a good day to be Bob Weir.
The former guitarist and singer for the Grateful Dead was BMAJ (Big Man At Jamfest) during the second day of the weekend music festival. He sat in with no less than three bands before headlining with his own, Ratdog, for a two-hour finale punctuated by pouring rain around 1:30 a.m.
It was a good day to be a Deadhead as well. Besides Weir, former Dead singer Donna Jean Godchaux-MacKay joined the Grateful Dead cover band Zen Tricksters, and stopped by to sing with several other bands. And then there was the Rhythm Devils, a new incarnation of a band formed in the '70s by former Dead drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann.
Zen Tricksters started the show off before noon, with Godchaux-MacKay joining them for the first of many guest appearances. They were followed by G Love and Special Sauce.
Guitar virtuoso Keller Williams dazzled the crowd with a sound that was a lot fuller than one would expect from a single performer.
Weir joined Hot Tuna as well, sitting in with acoustic blues veterans Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Cassady, plus mandolin virtuoso Barry Mitterhoff, to play "Walkin' Blues."
But the Rhythm Devils were the highlight of the night. First created as a chance for Hart and Kreutzmann to create a percussion soundtrack to the movie "Apocalypse Now," the duo was joined by former Phish bassist Mike Gordon and guitar ace Steve Kimmock, plus a half-dozen others.
Ratdog, by contrast, offered a more predictable set of Dead songs and originals. Weir began with the classic "Jack Straw," turning it into a reggae song before bringing it back again. "Little Red Rooster" followed, with a strong sax solo by Kenny Brooks.
Some of Weir's Ratdog songs sounded a bit generic, as if they were hastily patched together from bits of Dead remnants. But they were just filler between the stuff the crowd wanted -- songs like the Dead's edgy "Victim or the Crime" and a stellar acoustic rendition of "Friend of the Devil."
