The Music Never Stopped …
Deadheads and fellow travelers, get ready to party … Grateful Dead tribute band, Dark Star Orchestra is coming to town. The band will play their 3224th show (yes, they keep track) and their first show ever at the Providence Performing Arts Center on Wednesday, March 12 at 7:30. They surpassed the original Grateful Dead, who only played 2314 shows over a 30 year period, years ago.
The band is known for re-creating entire dead shows song by song in concert, thrilling fans on any given night. They’ll bring a ton of energy to the Providence show next week – tickets are still available here.
I spoke to keyboardist Rob Barraco, who has been with DSO for almost 20 years, earlier this week by phone. Before joining the band Barraco had toured with original Grateful Dead bass player Phil Lesh, who passed away in 2024. He also played with post-Garcia Grateful Dead iteration, The Dead, and played the Further Festival.
“When I became a Deadhead as a teenager and heard them for the first time, especially when I saw them live, Phil was always who I gravitated toward,” said Barraco. “His whole approach to music was so skewed compared to any other bass player I’d ever heard. The bass player’s role in the band is usually to be in the rhythm section along with the drums, basically to keep the time and the bottom end together.”
“But Phil’s creating lines of music, along with the two guitar players, Bob Weir and Jerry Garcia,” he continued. “So they’re dancing around each other, and he’s not just interested in keeping the bottom end together. He’s propelling the music. It kind of even changed the way I approach playing the keyboard, the way he plays, his rhythmic approach.”
The Grateful Dead more or less invented the “jam band” genre, a style that continues to evolve. Barraco emphasized the improvisational nature of the format.
“Everything that this band does is interpreting,” he said. “From note one of any show we’re improvising, we happen to know everything really well at this point; we know exactly how to set up our stage instruments and use them to get that sound, to navigate in the jams and the structure of the song because all the time the structure of the song is changing.”
Barraco began his career as a jazz artist, and those skills certainly translate to the world of improvisation. “I was sucked into the jazz world,” he explained. “I got into avant-garde jazz. That’s really what my focus was. It wasn’t until I joined DSO that I really listened to that body of work. It ends up that the audience gets to go on the trip with us, so they don’t know where we’re going either.”
“I grew up as a Beatles freak, and I grew up with strong melodies,” he continued. “That’s always a big, big component of my playing and writing. And here’s this band where every song tells a story. (Grateful Dead songwriter) Robert Hunter was brilliant. His incredible landscapes, they become part of a tapestry of your life.”
“We’re very excited to play this new venue. I’ve heard great accolades about it. We have a sound engineer genius who’s our front of house engineer Carter Michaels and he’s going to make it sound like a cathedral. We are always really excited to play every night!”
Click here for tickets to the Dark Star Orchestra at PPAC.