Pop Break Live: Melvin Seals and JGB (Jerry Garcia Band) at The Tropicana in Atlantic City, NJ on Friday November 22, 2024
Written By Alex Biese
The spirit of the Jerry Garcia Band was alive and well at the Tropicana in Atlantic City
It’s not hard to hear music from the Grateful Dead orbit played exceptionally well pretty much any night of the week, thanks to the plethora of tributes, spinoffs, offshoots and legacy acts continuing the musical spirit of the jam band pioneers, each in their own way.
But Deadheads, from the most musically well-traveled to those who have just gotten on the proverbial bus, owe it to themselves to experience Melvin Seals and JGB live.
Seals, keyboardist extraordinaire, played with the Dead’s singer and guitarist Jerry Garcia in the crowd-pleasing Jerry Garcia Band from 1980 until Garcia’s death in 1995. What Seals and company are up to on the road these days is vital, carrying on a musical conversation that began nearly 45 years ago.
Despite its prominence in Garcia’s career for 20 years, the band that bears his name feels as if it is treated like an often-overlooked sidequest by many, as if it was an extracurricular activity Jerry used to pass the time while not exploring new musical horizons with the Dead proper.
But the Jerry Garcia Band was a road-tested touring powerhouse in its own right – for proof of their prowess, a fine place to start is the 2021 release Garcia Live Volume 16, featuring Seals, Garcia and their compatriots playing for a rapt Madison Square Garden audience in 1991. And in its current touring iteration, which played the Showroom at the Tropicana Atlantic City on Friday, November 22, JGB is playing with glorious purpose.
This ace quartet, anchored by the lush bedrock of Seals’ ringmaster keyboard work, is a perfectly fitting salute to the Garcia Band – part tribute, part continuation in its fun, joyous interpolation of the blues, R&B, soul and rock ’n’ roll into something gloriously singular, captivating, hypnotic and rapturous.
Seals is joined in the band by singer and guitarist John Kadlecik. In his previous work with Dark Star Orchestra and Furthur, Kadlecik showed he could ably follow Garcia’s footprints through the land of the Dead. But JGB requires a different skill set, leaning into Garcia’s soulful bandleader side, and Kadlecik seizes the opportunity with aplomb. From his commanding Set One blast through Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour,” you knew this was going to be a good time.
Kadlecik is also a perfect partner for Seals, his golden bell clear guitar work serving as an ideal counterpoint to Seals’ swirling and atmospheric underpinnings. That was possibly most evident on a suite that closed the first set with stately performances of Garcia’s “Cats Under the Stars” and “The Wheel” followed, after a spacey drum-centered interlude, by a reverent reading of Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry.”
Set Two was rich with highlights, from a righteously funky instrumental rendering of the Soul Survivors’ “Expressway to Your Heart” that recalled the Garcia Band’s out-there early days to a righteous gallop through Bob Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue.” The latter, possibly the night’s highlight, was the finest example of the lean versatility on display as the four players created a sound that was deep, rich and endlessly compelling, with a cosmic outro jam that saw Kadlecik and Seals dancing musical lines around each other while the rhythm section kept one foot on terra firma in a beautiful balancing act of land and sky.
The night ended with a handful of Dead staples played to the nines – “Althea” was appropriately hot, “Help on the Way” and “Slipknot!” were their punchy, slinky best and
“Shakedown Street” left the crowd at the Trop wanting even more. While these selections weren’t from the Garcia Band’s repertoire, in that band Jerry showed an enthusiastic and omnivorous approach to classic rock cover songs, delivering his own spins on classics by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley and others, so covering the Dead from a Garcia Band-style angle of approach seemed consistent with the spirit of the evening.
As a friend of mine told me before the start of the show, “It’s like going to church.” Or, to borrow a phrase from one of the night’s highlight numbers, it’s like a road leading home.
Melvin Seals and JGB currently have tour dates scheduled through early 2025. To see where they’ll be, visit melvinsealsandjgb.com.
