Music of the Dead Comes Alive: Joe Russo’s Almost Dead Announces Annual Colorado Dates

Content sponsored by AEG Presents Rocky Mountains.

Joe Russo’s Almost Dead — or JRAD — returns this summer to Colorado for its annual concerts to commune with dedicated audiences. JRAD is a Grateful Dead tribute band that includes legendary musicians in the jam scene who share their love of the Dead’s repertoire and the freewheeling improvisational spirit of the original.

This year, fans can catch JRAD on two nights in Colorado: Friday, May 31, at Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater in Vail (VERY limited tickets still available) and Saturday, June 1, at Red Rocks Amphitheatre.

The Red Rocks shows are special events for both JRAD and its audience, and even though nearly 10,000 Deadheads fill the amphitheater, the band makes each year’s performance feel more and more intimate for Colorado fans. It’s the same intimacy that the original Grateful Dead generated when playing Red Rocks. It was one of the band’s favorite venues, and the Dead played there twenty times.

The Grateful Dead can lay claim to the title of most influential band in the history of rock and roll. The Dead inspired a social movement that started with the late-1960s San Francisco hippie scene from which it emerged and continues today, with audiences made up of former hippies and young hipsters alike. The band blurred musical genres from folk to blues and added improvisational layers that inspired generations of musicians that followed.

Although iconic founding singer, songwriter and guitarist Jerry Garcia died in 1995, a fluid group of surviving members and other musicians have carried on under names like Furthur and Dead & Company, touring and releasing recordings.

And to prove the Grateful Dead’s impact on culture, several tribute bands have also kept the music of the Dead alive, with Joe Russo’s Almost Dead among the most revered.
JRAD isn’t just a “cover band”; the group plays Dead classics but adds its own energy. It was founded in 2013 by drummer Joe Russo, who had performed with original Dead members Bob Weir and Phil Lesh in Furthur. He assembled some friends to fill a last-minute slot for the annual Freaks Ball in New York in January 2013, and played a set of Grateful Dead songs.

That impromptu performance grew into a long-term career as JRAD, and has made the group a perennial favorite on Colorado’s touring circuit.

JRAD features Russo on drums, Marco Benevento (Garage A Trois) on keyboards, Dave Dreiwitz (Ween) on bass, Tom Hamilton (Billy & the Kids, Ghost Light, Electron, American Babies) on guitar, and Scott Metzger (Phil Lesh & Friends, American Babies) on guitar. The group is set to satisfy new fans as well as the generation that became Deadheads from the 1960s through the 1990s, long before many current fans got to see the original Grateful Dead.

This year’s JRAD stops in Colorado promise to introduce the legacy of the Grateful Dead to fresh audiences and help create JRAD’s own legacy.