Nights of the living Dead

Only sports teams have played the Spectrum more than the Grateful Dead. Back before Jerry Garcia died in 1995, the prototypical jam band sold out the now-slated-for-demolition arena a whopping 53 times, then did two more shows in its post-Garcia incarnation as the Other Ones in 2002.

On Friday, the band now known as the Dead, who re-formed for an Obama benefit in State College last fall, opened another two-night, sold-out stand in South Philadelphia. Frosty-haired frontman Bob Weir kicked off the three-hour show with "Playing in the Band," which is pretty much what the 61-year-old, mellow-voiced singer has been doing since he met Garcia on a fateful New Year's Eve in Palo Alto, Calif., in 1963.

Along with Weir, the current Dead lineup includes core members Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann on drums, and bassist Phil Lesh, who sang his "Box of Rain" as an encore, and was the only band member to utter an unsung word. Lesh, the beneficiary of a 1998 liver transplant, urged audience members to become organ donors and told the Spectrum crowd: "I forgot how intense it was here."

The legendarily cursed role of the Dead's keyboard player - where four musicians have died - is played this go-round by Ratdog's Jeff Chimenti. And more crucial to the Dead's success than any of them, in a way, is the band's sixth man, Gov't Mule and Allman Brothers guitarist Warren Haynes, who stands stage left, gamely taking on the impossible role of replacing Garcia.

The Dead, of course, have been a pop-cultural phenomenon for decades, and since they haven't toured since 2004, the Spectrum shows are a rare opportunity for a gathering of the tribe.

And that tribe also marked a sharp contrast with the audience assembled for the Bruce Springsteen shows at the Spectrum last week. The multigenerational Dead crowd was similarly almost exclusively white, while being younger and crustier, and more wasted. (The only fight I saw was at Springsteen on Tuesday night - the Dead crowd seemed far too relaxed, chemically or otherwise, to indulge in any altercations.)

But while Dead fans wouldn't miss the opportunity to commune with other Dead fans, that doesn't mean they're under the false impression that the bland - I mean, band - they're seeing is the actual Grateful Dead. "As long as Jerry Garcia is dead, no band is the Grateful Dead," said my friend Jake, who should know, since he's seen more than 300 shows. Still, he came to this one - in a Disney-meets-the-Dead "Keep On Grumpin' " tie-dyed T-shirt, no less - while expressing his preference, at this point, for seeing a Grateful Dead cover band like Dark Star Orchestra.

Wisely, Haynes, a muscular guitarist and vocalist whose style bears little resemblance to Garcia's, never slavishly attempts to imitate the countercultural icon. Instead, he tries, with some success, to delicately balance the art of putting his own stamp on the band's repertoire without imposing himself too strongly on Garcia's legacy.

In the first set, he enlivened "New Speedway Boogie" with beefy, staccato riffing, and in the second, he played weeping, sorrowful lines in "Comes A Time," a Garcia/Robert Hunter composition, not the Neil Young song. Vocally, Haynes recalled not Garcia, but the first doomed Dead keyboard player, the gruff-voiced Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, who died in 1973, and whose version of Otis Redding's "Hard To Handle" was Haynes' starting point on Friday night.

The Dead have always mixed blues, folk, bluegrass, and other strands of Americana into a careworn rock sound that rolls along effortlessly - and often endlessly. Among the jammy highlights Friday was "Alligator," with a loping gait that kept accelerating, while Lesh played a contrapuntal bass line straight out of a spy movie.

The tighter, more effective moments included a spry "Friend of the Devil," with Weir, Haynes, and Lesh taking turns on verses, as well as the one-two punch of the traditional "Cold Rain and Snow" and Weir's "Sugar Magnolia," which roused the crowd to stand up and sing and clap along nearly three hours into a show that got snappier as it came to a close.

What made those songs work so well was the discipline with which they were delivered. But economy of expression is not the Dead's strong point, nor its goal. The nightly second-set interludes known as "Drums" and "Space" are more like it, and both were enervating on Friday.

It's a given that those two interludes will function almost like a second intermission at a Dead show. If you time your drugs right, it's a trip; if not, it's a good time to check your e-mail or update your Facebook status. More dismaying were the formless jams of the first set, such as "Shakedown Street," which was pointlessly stretched out on an improvisational journey that went nowhere before petering out on the side of the road.