Photo: Josh Skolnik
On March 22, 2025, Grahame Lesh & Friends continued their run at Garcia’s Chicago after initiating their stand on Friday, with odes to the Grateful Dead and fellow jam pioneers, The Allman Brothers Band, the ensemble: Justin Mazer, Damian Calcagne, Adam Minkoff, Nathan Graham, Brian Rashap, and special guests Daniel Donato and Nicki Bluhm.
During Saturday’s concert, a musical oddity occurred when the band performed “Equinox,” a song initially written by the late Phil Lesh. According to whitegum.com, “It was written by Phil Lesh as a song to be sung by Jerry Garcia, but never issued on record and never played live. It is often called “Mercy of a Fool” in bootleg lyric lists, but it seems that ‘Equinox’ is the correct title.”
In a conversation with David Gans, Bobby Weir reportedly described “Equinox” as “One tune that took the longest to get was one that we didn’t use. Another of Phil’s originals. It was just too long, the song itself was too long to put on without crowding something else off the record. It was just very long and quite involved, and it was looking to require a good deal of work, and we only had so much time for what we could do on the record–you can only put about nineteen minutes per side on a record before you start losing fidelity. Phil’s tune was six minutes long or so, and it would have put both sides well over that, so we decided to axe it and bring it back some other time. We got a great basic on it.”
Notably, the spring equinox occurred on Thursday, March 20, bringing an added node of meaning to its first-time concert arrival. Outside of the first-time play, GLAF offered several Grateful Dead classics, intermixed with other offerings like Traffic’s “The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys.”
Saturday, March 23, featured a similar offering of Dead originals and associated covers. During the first set, they nodded to the venue’s namesake on the Jerry Garcia concert favorite, “I Second That Emotion.” The ensemble then pulled out another rarity, the Phil Lesh-penned “Wave to the Wind.” The song represented a first-time play from the band. Notably, from 1992-93, the Grateful Dead played the rarity on 21 occasions before shelving it.
Scroll down to view photos from Josh Skolnik.
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Sunday:
Content shared from relix.com.