Philly EDGE correspondent Michael Lello took in Bruce Hornsby, Bob Weir and Ratdog Tuesday night at the Mann Center. His review follows...
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PHILADELPHIA — You can call it another stop on the long, strange trip that’s been bending minds since the Grateful Dead came alive in 1965, you can call the Mann Center that “lazy summer home” from the song “Eyes Of The World” and muse to yourself, like in “Eyes,” that “the heart has its seasons, its evening and songs of its own.”
Heck, you could even make up your own lyric-driven cliché, but the fact is that a lot of wonderfully weird stuff went down Tuesday night when Bruce Hornsby and the Noisemakers and Bob Weir and Ratdog — the former a one-time Dead touring member, the latter a founding Dead man — shared a bill at the quaint concert shed in Fairmount Park.
The evening was eccentric and enjoyable: the smell of weed wafting paired with the sight of hippies noodle-dancing to the crisp piano of Hornsby, who despite his improvisational aesthetic is always more Gershwin than Garcia; Weir, sitting in on guitar as Hornsby transitioned from the children’s tune “Teddy Bear’s Picnic” to the hip-hop classic “No Diggity”; Weir and his always-improving, tight, funky and harmonious Ratdog mates getting a visit from a guest saxophone player - and Weir, after the show, admitting he doesn’t know the guy’s name.
The music was innovative and nostalgia-tinged at the same time. The crowd loved Hornsby’s take on Pink Floyd’s decades-old “Comfortably Numb,” but also took to his lively renditions of original tunes he wrote in the past 10 years.
It’s all in there, as it was Tuesday night, from Ratdog’s teases of the Steve Miller Band’s “Fly Like An Eagle” and spot-on rendering of the Beatles’ “Come Together” and the aforementioned “Eyes” to Hornsby’s bluegrassy, accordion-driven cover of pal Huey Lewis’ “Jacob’s Ladder” (a song Hornsby wrote before he signed his own record deal). It all culminated with Ratdog’s ballsy, triumphant, jackhammer rendition of the Weir-penned Dead showstopper “Sugar Magnolia” that capped the evening and helped nudge the calendar from summer to fall.
Who wrote what song and when is nearly irrelevant.
Call it cliché, but sometimes the songs that we hear are just songs of our own.

Michael Lello
Philly EDGE

Tags: philadelphia music gratefuldead brucehornsby bobweir ratdog