152162 Berkeley 15:55
First verse at 1:28.
Main theme at 9:51, 12:10, and 13:09.
Second verse at 13:22.
Standalone version (encore).
This was a nice surprise for the crowd at the Greek, I imagine. Garcia gets right to business this time, floating above the band with grace. They hit a nice groove here, and Lesh is a bit more active out of the gate than he’s been on the last few versions, although that’s a low bar. Surprisingly, Jerry hits the verse in under a minute and a half. This might not be a bad thing, given that the second verse is back and place, and thus this clears out a nice space for improvising in the interim.
They repeat the intro lick and swing back into the groove; 18 seconds later Garcia kicks on a distortion effect. Mydland is more of a force here than he was in 1981, although he doesn’t lead or do anything to disrupt the groove. On the other hand, the interaction between Garcia and Lesh is more prominent than it has been, with the bass taking a more melodic role. The band sounds very comfortable and fluid throughout here.
At around 6:55 Garcia seems to be working toward some kind of peak, but he pulls back. What we get is a lot of dynamic motion, which is a bit more like they used to do it in 1969, where the band would swell and drop several times in a matter of minutes. There are lots of allusions and partial quotes of the main theme throughout.
Jerry works his way into a repeating figure that really gets going from around 8:54. Everyone latches on and the music swells, and Garcia tops it off with a quasi-Bright Star section from 9:20. He drops down into the theme at 9:51, at which point it seems like the second verse is coming; instead, Jerry heads off into a kind of Sputnik sequence. This is a nice passage, if a bit brief, and soon Jerry’s hinting at the theme again, but he takes them to another minor peak at around 11:30.
From there Garcia winds his way up to a high A at 12:07, which is a sufficiently clear cue to Brent that they some together to play a bit of the theme in unison. There’s a woozy two-chord stretch after this that takes us to the next verse. Weir plays a little subtle slide stuff here that is tasteful and good, believe it or not. After the second verse, they let it fizzle out for about a minute, and the concert is over.
The two drums again make the music a lot more static, and the band stays in a groove, which seems to be a marked trend (if we can talk of trends when Dark Stars are so thin on the ground). There is nothing very surprising here, aside from the fact that they played Dark Star at all, and played it as an encore. Having said that, the music is quite wonderful in a low key way.
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