Dead & Company live recordings recently landed on streaming services such as Spotify. The band featuring Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir and drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, along with guitarist John Mayer, bassist Oteil Burbridge and keyboardist Jeff Chimenti prepared a continuously updated Spotify Playlist of recordings “compiling the best performances throughout each tour.”
The “Best Of: Live Shows” playlist currently features tracks from the seven Dead & Company shows currently available on Spotify. Selections come from the band’s three shows at the 2018 Playing In The Sand destination event in Riviera Maya, Mexico. There are also four D&C 2017 Fall Tour shows represented via recordings from: November 16 in Philadelphia; November 22 in Hartford, Connecticut; November 24 in Detroit and November 25 in Columbus, Ohio. The playlist description promises newly added content each week.
The “Iko Iko” opener from Hartford currently opens the playlist. Burbridge shines instrumentally on the 17-minute “Eyes Of The World” from Philly and vocally on “China Doll” from Hartford. Dead & Company’s live debuts of “Deep Elem Blues” on November 24 and the Burbridge-sung “If I Had The World To Give” on November 25 also made the playlist. “Cumberland Blues” from Columbus and Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” from Detroit were chosen from those two shows as well. The rest of the collection comes from last year’s inaugural Playing In The Sand. Jammed-out versions of “Bird Song,” “Playing In The Band,” “Estimated Prophet,” “They Love Each Other” and “Althea” were some of the performances deemed “best of.” The band’s signature nightly rhythmic free-form improvisation of “Drums”/”Space” from Mexico comes toward the end of the playlist, mimicking its mid-second set placement at shows.
Follow the playlist to keep track of weekly updates and stream the live set below:
