CONCERT REVIEW
Starship and Dead Offshoots bring the Fillmore to the Studio Bruce Cockburn
by Seth Rogovoy(PITTSFIELD, Mass., July 13, 1997) -- The clock was turned back about 30 years at the Studio on Friday night, as the downtown entertainment venue hosted a triple-bill of San Francisco-style, psychedelic rock of the sort that was a staple at the legendary Fillmore Auditorium, in a program that included a handful of veterans from that city's influential scene.
And a scene is what it was, then and now, more than strictly a musical event. Perhaps more than anywhere, the role of the audience at the Fillmore was equally as -- and perhaps at times even more -- important than what was happening on the stage.
The crowd at the Studio took its role seriously, arriving in resplendent tie-dye, both third-generation and vintage, depending on the age of the wearer, which seemingly ranged from toddlerhood to a few contemporaneous veterans of the original psychedelic scene.
The Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane were the alpha and omega of that scene, and the bands that performed at the Studio were in varying ways descendants of those original groups.
The evening's headliners were billed as Jefferson Starship, which was the successor group to the Airplane, and which in its current incarnation included Airplane founders Paul Kantner, Marty Balin and Jack Casady. The band played a selection of hits from both Airplane's and Starship's catalogs, as well as a few indistinguished new songs, all laden with the group's trademark bird and flight imagery, as well as countless appeals to "dreams" and "love."
New vocalist Diana Mangano played the role of Grace Slick, acquitting herself well vocally as she boasted Slick-like power and range on "Somebody to Love" and "White Rabbit," if lacking Slick's dark intensity. Balin's distinctive tenor showed signs of strain by the fourth song, "Count On Me," which if slinky and sinuous in its original version, was now awkward and clunky. Kantner was seemingly present strictly for the aura of integrity he imparts, while bassist Casady was the driving force behind the band, providing the essential underpinning to its sprawling anthems.
The other two bands on the bill were offshoots of the Grateful Dead. Vince Welnick's Missing Man Formation included Starship drummer Prairie Prince, who like Welnick was a founding member of the avant-garde San Francisco band the Tubes. Welnick, who played keyboards for the Dead in the earlier part of this decade, introduced his set promising an "ultimate groove factor," and he didn't disappoint. The group played Dead-style jam-rock, quoting Dead songs but mostly using them as jumping- off points for their jazzy improvisations. As this sort of thing goes, they were pretty adept -- tighter than the Dead ever were, and perhaps as a quartet more focused.
The eight-piece JGB also carried on the Dead's legacy -- and that of the group's founder, the late Jerry Garcia -- with a mix of Dead songs, including "Shake It Sugaree," and covers of tunes like the Beatles' "Dear Prudence" and a lounge-lizard version of Bob Dylan's "Simple Twist of Fate." The group's lead singer, Gordon Isaac, looked and sounded like a cross between Neil Diamond and Joe Cocker -- that is, when he wasn't consciously aping Garcia's lazy, nasal drawl. If you're wishing you'd have been there, take heart -- there were a handful of tapers in the audience with professional, digital setups like the ones that used to proliferate at Dead shows.
On Saturday night, with chairs lined up to the lip of the stage, the Studio was turned into a listening room, as political singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn performed a glistening program of his protest-rock. Backed only by a drummer and bassist, Cockburn the guitarist provided a rich array of colors and textures needed to support the heavy weight of his songs' hard-bitten pieties.
Dividing his two sets pretty evenly between older songs and material from his latest album, the gorgeously introspective "Charity of Night" (Rykodisc), Cockburn took listeners on a musical and thematic journey, touching down on the former in punk-rock, Middle Eastern, country-rock and jazz-noir territory, and on the latter with songs that variously addressed social, political and spiritual ills and means to redemption.
Cockburn straddles a fine line between sermonizing and sanctimony, and about halfway through his second set, as the clock struck midnight, he crossed over into the latter with the song, "Wise Users." Having happily tolerated preachy songs about human rights, the destruction of the rain forests and land mines, this listener fled for the exit after being browbeaten about recycling, only to discover that while Cockburn was singing about ecological disaster, his tour bus sat in the back parking lot with its engine running. Tsk, tsk.
[This review originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on July 16, 1997. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1997. All rights reserved.]
Seth Rogovoy
rogovoy@berkshire.net
music news, interviews, reviews, et al.
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