Pittsfield — Watkins Glen was the site of 1973’s Summer Jam, and it needs reviving because there are still walking among us an ancient few who attended the festival and witnessed the Allman Brothers Band, Grateful Dead, and The Band in performance at the Watkins Glen Summer Jam Festival—but who remember few of the details.
To remedy this, a tribute band called Dead Man’s Waltz will perform a three-set show at Bousquet Mountain on Saturday, August 5, covering repertoire from all three of those bands as a way of celebrating the Watkins Glen festival’s 50th anniversary. The band’s selection of songs is based on the original set lists from 1973, including the jam encore featuring members of all three bands on stage together
The Watkins Glen Summer Jam Festival was staged four years after Woodstock and, with 600,000 attendees, briefly held the Guinness Book of World Records entry for the largest audience at a pop festival. Of course, that means a legendary traffic jam ensued, but it was the onstage jam that bears repeating in 2023.
When musicians play notes they’ve made up on the spot, we call it improvising. When they improvise together as a group, we call it jamming. And when jamming is an ensemble’s primary mode of expression, we call it a jam band. (An example from modern times is Phish.)
The world’s first jam band, a group of bipedal apes pounding on hollow logs thousands of years ago, had more than hairiness in common with the Grateful Dead. For one thing, they vocalized. But the Grateful Dead eclipses all others. The most iconic jam band of multiple generations, this group mixed psychedelia with folk, blues, rock, and a little more psychedelia. And they did a lot of singing in the decades before Autotune was around to tweak recordings that really needed it, like “Uncle John’s Band.” Grateful Dead concerts were long, meandering affairs that endeared the band to fans and made them a global cultural phenomenon. The Dead were not the headliners at Summer Jam, but they were the root cause of it.
Bob Dylan’s backup group, The Band, was not a jam band, at least not in the same sense as The Dead and the Allman Brothers. They did play at Summer Jam, and they were known for their exceptional musicianship, but they were all about tightly arranged songs, carefully worked out instrumental parts, and well rehearsed vocal harmonies. Could they jam? You bet! (Especially organist Garth Hudson.) But The Band didn’t indulge in the long, free-form improvisational sessions that characterized the other two Summer Jam groups’ way of performing.
The headline act at Summer Jam was the band that practically defined Southern rock. The Allman Brothers Band played a three-hour set, then stuck around for a legendary one-hour, multi-band encore jam. Some of the group’s most successful radio songs (e.g., “Whipping Post”) were also famous jam numbers.
Dead Man’s Waltz identifies itself as an “all-star collective from the Northeast festival scene.” Which makes sense, since jam bands have long been staples of summer music festivals. The band’s Bousquet appearance on August 5 is not a one-off performance. It is the same show they give all over the Northeast, combining the classic songs and jams of the their three favorite bands. They use two drummers, mirroring both The Dead and The Allman Brothers, as well as later lineups of The Band.
Dead Man’s Waltz features the following personnel:
- Tor Krautter (Rev Tor Band) on guitar and vocals
- Tom Major (Entrain) on drums
- Andrew Costa (Stone Revival Band) on keys
- Jeremy Walz (Soul Sky) on guitar and vocals
- Jeff Prescott (Rasinhead) on drums and vocals
- Brian O’Connell (Uncle Sammy, Gordon Stone Band) on bass and vocals
See Dead Man’s Waltz at Bousquet Mountain on Saturday, August 5 in a performance celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Watkins Glen Summer Jam Festival. Gates open at 5 p.m.; music will be from 6 to 10:30 p.m. Tickets are available here.
