Billy & the Kids Brought the Spirit of the Dead to the Santa Barbara Bowl

I’ve never been much of a Deadhead, and with all due respect to the grandfathers of the jam band era, jam bands have never really been my jam either. So, with those caveats in mind, Thursday, November 2’s Day of the Dead performance of Billy & the Kids at the Santa Barbara Bowl was really quite fun. 

And that was despite the fact that less than hour before showtime, we got an email from Bill Kreutzmann (founding drummer of the Grateful Dead and bandleader of Billy & The Kids) saying that he and his wife both tested positive for COVID and he was going to be sitting this one out. 

In Kreutzmann’s words: “In show business, they say the show must go on. In the world of the Grateful Dead, that’s never even been a question. Our community knows how to take lemons and make tie-dye lemonade. We know how to improvise and we know how to jam. And we know how to come together as a community and dance our way through twists and turns while the music plays the bands … and remember that life is precious — any time that we get a chance to honor it by gathering and dancing and singing and reveling, we must do that.”

And so we did.

Chris Tomson from Vampire Weekend was there to jam on the drums and round out the band’s double-drummer combo with Jeff Franca, who is probably best known as the drummer for electronic music pioneers Thievery Corporation. And “the kids” — guitarist Tom Hamilton, keyboardist Aron Magner, and bassist Reed Mathis, who also rotate lead singer duties — were also all there to carry on the torch of the Grateful Dead’s spirit. A spirit that is very much alive and well in Santa Barbara, if the enthusiastic all-ages crowd was any indication. 

They danced and swayed and passed around a lot of “big old fatties” (gummies and vaping may be on the upswing, but not in this crowd) to a set list that had jams aplenty. Not just Grateful Dead covers, but also Marvin Gaye’s “Baby Don’t You Do It,” Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,“ Tampa Red’s “It Hurts Me Too,” Henry Thomas’s “Don’t Ease Me In,” and John Phillips’s “Me and My Uncle.” And of course there were plenty of Dead songs, from “Lazy River Road,” to “Eyes of the World,” “Help on the Way, Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo,” (a fabulous ragtime showcase for Magner’s piano chops) and “So Many Roads.” They played the Dead-adjacent Bob Weir–penned “Cassidy,” which my husband pointed out is the song that inspired the name of one of our favorite 20-somethings. They even did a fun rendition of the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus” and ultimately soldiered on to a fitting encore snippet from “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” 

As Kreutzmann put it, “Day of the Dead is about spirits, so may the spirit of the Grateful Dead ride with us tonight while the Kids they dance and shake their bones.” The gathering and dancing and reveling did indeed rule the night, and all in all, the Kids (with Billy there only in spirit) gave us a highly entertaining evening full of uplifting optimism that feels much-needed these days.