From ‘1 Night Only’ To 10 Years Later: Joe Russo’s Almost Dead’s Origin Story

Joe Russo’s Almost Dead performed for the first time on January 26, 2013, at Brooklyn Bowl in New York City. The supposed one-off concert was part of the 13th annual Freaks Ball event, a yearly event put on by members of the NYC-Freaks List, a group of impassioned live music fans in the New York City area.

Aaron “Neddy” Stein, JamBase contributor and founder of the NYC-Freaks List, looks back at the fateful events from a decade ago on the 10th anniversary of the first JRAD show that occurred on this date in 2013.

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I can’t imagine how many worthless emails there are collecting dust in my Gmail account. To be sure, there are a few gems from over the decades, but mostly junk that should have been deleted long ago. Today I went searching and found at least one email chain that might be categorized as historic.

Back in January 2013, after a weeks-long struggle to find an act for the 13th annual Freaks Ball event at the Brooklyn Bowl, one in which Mickey “Dean Ween” Melchiondo had already canceled on us and a range of ever-increasingly pie-in-the-sky options were tossed around, the email in question came in on January 5, from then production manager at the Bowl, Peter Costello. Under the subject: “Freaks Ball Answers” it was the first time I saw the words “Joe Russo’s Almost Dead” written out, with no other explanation other than “featuring Marco Benevento, Dave Dreiwitz, Tom Hamilton & Scott Metzger” all of that highlighted in bright yellow in case anyone missed it.

For the NYC Freaks, those were our guys, dudes who had played, in some configuration, the Freaks Ball (which began in 2001) many times between them. But as “known quantity” as the players were, the sheer I-understand-all-those-words-separately mystery of the band’s name was enough to build some serious question-mark-heavy buzz.

Hard to imagine, but barely three weeks later, all the questions were (mostly) answered, all those question marks turned into exclamation points, every word in “Joe Russo’s Almost Dead” proving its worth in the one-night-only band’s name. From the get-go, the moment the quintet took the stage at the Bowl in front of a packed house, this was clearly Joe Russo’s outfit.

The next day, in the afterglow, Costello would talk about how Joe wanted to show how much muscle and rock was lying dormant in the Grateful Dead’s music, and the opening “Bertha,” “Althea,” “Jack Straw,” “Deal” section made no mistake about this truth. No one had quite realized it yet, but in those opening songs on January 26, 2013, Joe Russo may have taken effective ownership of the Grateful Dead catalog.

Of course, there’s that tongue-in-cheek “Almost” in there. One reading would have you believe they were shooting to recreate the Dead and fell just short. Going back and listening to this show 10 years later, it does feel to be played quite straight compared to what some of the highly inventive takes Almost Dead would eventually (and continue to) take. But even back at show #1, the band was taking their own approach to the well-worn material, Metzger, Hamilton, Benevento, and Dreiwitz sounding like themselves playing the Grateful Dead with everything that went with it.

A little context: January 26, 2013, was the second night of a two-night Freaks Ball, the previous evening featured Bustle In Your Hedgerow the Benevento/Russo/Metzger/Dreiwitz Led Zeppelin cover jam band. To say JRAD was to the Dead’s repertoire what Bustle was to the Zep is a bit too easy, but it’s not that far off either. The “Almost” signals that this band was doing their thing, in close proximity to the source material, for sure, but in a place that was all their own. Even on that first night, they found space to explore in the Dead canon that had perhaps never been explored in the previous five decades.

That being said, the “Dead” in that name is unmistakably the Grateful God Damn Dead and the joy of seeing Joe Russo’s Almost Dead in 2013, just as it is in 2023, was seeing these songs played with vitality that they deserve. Nothing wrong with a little nostalgia, and whether you were remembering Dead shows you had been to or just tapes you had listened to over and over, if you were at Brooklyn Bowl that night, there was an energy of what-it-was-like-in-the-day. And the band leaned into it on that night, feeding the audience classic material with a silver spoon.

As the second set got going, I remember dancing next to my friend Zucker to “Estimated Prophet” and leaning over and saying “if they go into Eyes, I’m going to lose it!” A couple of minutes later they transitioned perfectly into (a quite remarkable) “Eyes of the World,” and, reader, let me tell you, I lost it.

With pairings like “China”/”Rider,” “Estimated”/”Eyes,” “Help”/”Slip”/”Franklin’s” and even “St. Stephen”/”The Eleven,” JRAD showed as much love and respect for the source material as the crowd had.

It’s tempting to say that by the time the “U.S. Blues” encore had come to a close 10 years ago, and the wild-eyed audience snapped back to reality, that the rest was “history.” In that January 5, 2013, email Costello even coined the “JRAD” acronym, surely it was meant to be. But nothing’s that simple, of course.

That night and for the following months it wasn’t clear that Joe Russo’s Almost Dead wasn’t destined for almost greatness, the possibility of a one-time what-could’ve-been a very real one. Of course, they played again, at The Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York almost a year later in December, and liked it enough to book shows out of town, then tours, festivals, another Freaks Ball or two, and beyond.

If you’re reading this, you know JRAD, you know the pretzel knots they’ve tied with the Grateful Dead’s music, salty, satisfying, and delicious. Hard to believe Joe and Marco and Scott, Dave, and Tom would be able to keep things as fascinating as they did back that night at the Bowl, for a full decade with no signs of letting up.

It could have just been one email of thousands of them, indistinguishable and mostly unremarkable. Instead, it was history.

Full Show Video (via TimeZoner)

Soundboard matrix audio (via Pete Costello, Justin Ripley and Justin Marinoff)

Setlist

Set One: Bertha, Althea, Jack Straw, Deal > Mr. Charlie, Brown-Eyed Women, Tennessee Jed > Shakedown Street > China Cat Sunflower > I Know You Rider

Set Two: Estimated Prophet > Eyes of the World > Help On The Way > Slipknot! > Franklin’s Tower, St. Stephen > The Eleven > The Other One > Viola Lee Blues

Encore: U.S. Blues