Ever the bearer of bad news, I’d like to alert BPB readers to another rock ‘n roll fatality: This time it’s Merl Saunders, who passed away last Friday at the age of 74. Complications from a stroke sidelined him in 2002, effectively ending a remarkable career that included luminous collaborations with Miles Davis, B.B. King, Mike Bloomfield, and Jerry Garcia. His keyboard stylings combined an earthy rhythm-and-blues approach with a jazz aesthetic and, in the early 90s, a surprisingly unregrettable foray into New Age-style fusion.

For anyone interested in the remarkable, decades-long, “let’s make David Grisman jealous” collaboration between Saunders and Garcia, check out the Legion of Mary sessions and the Keystone concerts. Of special note: Saunders’ fat, swirly Hammond on Dylan’s “Positively Fourth Street” (below, from the Keystone). Troppo largo, perhaps, but a textural improvement over the already lovely Kooper-era original.

I wanted to avoid making anyone at the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall feel like a spectacle, so I ducked into the gift shop to jot down a few notes. In the lobby, mostly middle-aged Baltimore Symphony Orchestra patrons milled about in tie-dye t-shirts, teashades, and sunflower dresses. At 7:14 p.m. I had detected my first (and, sadly, only) whiff of marijuana, emanating from a group of youngish gentlemen hovering by a close-up photo of John and Yoko. Now a man was performing some kind of chi remedy on a guy with a broken wrist, cupping his hands and sending waves of healing energy through the afflicted’s arm. Carolyn Garcia—you may know her as Mountain Girl—chatted with folks, many of whom sheepishly asked her to sign their T-shirts. One of the T-shirts read “Deadheads for Obama,” and approximately two out of every three conversations included the phrase, “When I saw them back in 1977…” Meanwhile, a jester pranced around with a handful of flowers. “Every lady gets a flower,” he chanted. “Every pretty lady.” One such lady ingeniously converted her cleavage into a vase.

I surveyed the gift shop. A large woman with a hairnet and a dancing-bear muumuu was browsing. This was the world premiere performance of Lee Johnson’s Dead Symphony No. 6, “An Orchestral Tribute to the Music of the Grateful Dead”—not to mention Jerry Garcia’s 66th birthday—and the store’s silly musical trinkets and pretentious classical recordings seemed ill-suited to the evening’s proceedings. That is, except for one small novelty book, an edition of the “Wisdom from our Elders” series entitled Age Doesn’t Matter Unless You’re a Cheese.

Steve Harq–a short, smiling, gray-bearded man in purple tie-dye who was a beacon of ebullience as he bounced around the lobby–proudly embodied that philosophy. “Jerry’s what brought me here,” he said. “That was the best chapter of my life, 25 years on Dead tour. I think it’s great that someone took that spirit–the spirit of Jerry and Robert Hunter—and is using it, which is what Jerry would’ve liked. He was so diverse in his music. He—I’m sure he’s smiling and saying, ‘That’s fucking cool!’”

More on the concert, plus audio tracks, after the jump.

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