On July 4, the Grateful Dead Show Pride in Being an American Band

Photo
Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead performing at Soldier Field in Chicago on Saturday.Credit Jay Blakesberg/Invision

CHICAGO — On this Fourth of July, Grateful Dead fans came prepared. They arrived at Soldier Field for the second “Fare Thee Well” concert wearing Uncle Sam hats, stars-and-stripes-patterned clothes and the band’s red, white and blue skull-and-lightning-bolt logo. And when the Dead played the night’s inevitable encore, “U.S. Blues,” fans had little American flags ready for the chorus: “Wave that flag/Wave it wide and high.” Images of the Empire State Building, lighted in a tribute to the Dead, showed on the video screen.

A beloved band doesn’t schedule its last three concerts on a Fourth of July weekend by happenstance. The Grateful Dead took conscious pride in being an American band. Its career and song catalog over the band’s initial three decades — until the death in 1995 of Jerry Garcia, its unofficial leader — offer plenty of thoughts about an America of freedom, possibility, diversity and communal purpose.

The Dead started as an improbable coalition — a folkie steeped in bluegrass, an avant-gardist, a blues-loving organist –and made it a mission to pull together disparate American styles and to psychedelicize American myths. Its method was, like jazz, a kind of participatory democracy; each band member nudged the music in his own direction while reacting to all the others.

Trey Anastasio, from Phish, is in Mr. Garcia’s spot for these 50th-year Grateful Dead shows, a choice that brought wildly partisan reactions from Grateful Dead fans. But in Chicago, even more than in the Grateful Dead’s California shows at the end of June, he has joined that participatory democracy, echoing what he learned from Mr. Garcia but stirring up the music with his own sound and attack.

Saturday night’s first set and much of the second were openly thematic: songs full of American locales, archetypal characters (particularly outlaws on the run) and thoughts on American identity.

These were the set lists. Set 1: “Shakedown Street,” “Liberty,” “Standing on the Moon,” “Me and My Uncle,” “Tennessee Jed,” “Cumberland Blues,” “Little Red Rooster,” “Friend of the Devil,” “Deal.”

Set 2: “Bird Song,” “The Golden Road (to Unlimited Devotion),” “Lost Sailor,” “Saint of Circumstance,” “West L.A. Fadeaway,” “Foolish Heart,” “Drums/Space,” “Stella Blue,” “One More Saturday Night” and the encore, “U.S. Blues.”

The first set was rootsy and concise, the second determined to explore. In its tall tales of the South and West, the band leaned toward country (along with the obligatory blues, “Little Red Rooster”). It was nimble in “Cumberland Blues” and “Me and My Uncle,” loping and rolling and pouncing on the chorus in “Tennessee Jed,” more nonchalant than cautionary in “Deal” and, surprisingly, a little tangled in “Friend of the Devil.” Bruce Hornsby’s two-fisted piano nudged “Liberty” — a cheerfully cranky assertion of the freedom to be left alone — toward a New Orleans beat, and the funk groove of “Shakedown Street” let the band toy with wrong-note chords while it kept the rhythm percolating.

But the second set reached further and more widely. “Bird Song” drifted into the ether and then rematerialized. “The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion),” which could easily remain a rock and roll party song, used its momentum to splinter into staccato notes bounced around the band and to realign as a Minimalistic pattern before returning to the party.

Two songs from the 1980 album “Go To Heaven” that are in very few Dead fans’ Top 20, “Lost Sailor” and “Saint of Circumstance,” gave the band room to create a heaving, tolling seascape and a chiming, ultimately triumphal prog-rock march. “West L.A. Fadeaway” (another American place name) made its funk deeper, bluesier and more stinging than “Shakedown Street” had been. And “Stella Blue,” despite its deliberately glacial pace and the obvious creaks in Bob Weir’s lead vocal, took on a heroic sweep from Mr. Anastasio’s guitar solos. With “One More Saturday Night” — one last Saturday night, 50 years after the band formed, that the Grateful Dead would play the song — the music was back to the Chuck Berry basics, as all-American as a band could be.