{"id":58805,"date":"2022-08-28T14:09:42","date_gmt":"2022-08-28T14:09:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/sacred-rose-opens-with-lesh-friends-and-dead-devoted-fans\/"},"modified":"2022-08-28T14:09:42","modified_gmt":"2022-08-28T14:09:42","slug":"sacred-rose-opens-with-lesh-friends-and-dead-devoted-fans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/sacred-rose-opens-with-lesh-friends-and-dead-devoted-fans\/","title":{"rendered":"Sacred Rose opens with Lesh & Friends and Dead-devoted fans"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

If Arjay Sutton of Asheville, North Carolina, is right, there will always be Grateful Dead.<\/p>\n

\u201cTheir music will be around forever,\u201d he said. There are five Grateful Dead cover bands in his hometown alone. \u201cThere’s a few here this weekend.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sutton and a few thousand of his fellow travelers were gathered outside SeatGeek Stadium in Bridgeview Friday for Sacred Rose, a new music fest running through Sunday with a mix of music including Americana, psych-rock, jam bands, soul, funk and bluegrass.<\/p>\n

Sacred Rose is produced by Chicago-based Collectiv Presents that also puts on the long-running North Coast Music Festival on the same site next weekend. Organizers say they took a chance on there being enough devotees of this kind of music \u2014 jam bands, eclectic, Grateful Dead-adjacent \u2014 to fill a festival.<\/p>\n

Michael Berg of Collectiv told the Tribune earlier this week they expected a turnout of some 50,000 people over three days.<\/p>\n

Biggest headliner on the bill was Friday: Phil Lesh & Friends, no cover band but a Grateful Dead direct descendant. Lesh was the bassist for the band (which played its final concert at Soldier Field in Chicago in either 1995, with lead singer Jerry Garcia, or in a reunion show in 2015, depending on whom you ask). He was joined at Sacred Rose by a stageful of musicians, including Jeff Tweedy and Nels Cline of Wilco, with Tweedy filling Garcia’s shoes.<\/p>\n

Asked why this music still has so many fans, why it has staying power, Sutton says it’s a spiritual thing.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s like going to church for me,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

At 55, Sutton looked the part, dressed in a tie-dye T-shirt with a faded Grateful Dead logo from a long-ago tour. He said he used to follow The Dead, traveling around to concerts in VW bus. How many concerts did he attend in those years?<\/p>\n

\u201cWith Jerry?\u201d he asked. \u201cMaybe 300.\u201d<\/p>\n

He still travels for music now, he said, \u201cbut I stay in hotels now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Plenty of concertgoers at Sacred Rose looked similar to Sutton, but not everyone. The festival was spread out over four stages on the stadium campus parking lot, with the stage areas themselves on artificial turf sports fields. Lines of vendors catered to the festival’s demographic \u2014 if you’re in need of crystals, hemp goods or a tapestries that glow under blacklight, this is your place.<\/p>\n

Pete and Anna Corsetto of Avondale were attending with friends from Indianapolis. All in their 30s, there wasn’t a tie-dye or tour shirt between them but they said they liked the kind of music the festival represented.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur parents led us in the right direction,\u201d Anna Corsetto said about her musical tastes. Her mom was n’t into Grateful Dead specifically, she said, \u201cmore like Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin.\u201d<\/p>\n

Husband Pete Corsetto was more directly a fan.<\/p>\n

\u201cLet’s just say, any time Phil Lesh comes within 250 miles of where I’m living, I’m going to be there,\u201d he said. He’s too young to have ever seen a Grateful Dead show himself. \u201cWe only had Further,\u201d he said, naming another reunion act that included Lesh. \u201cThat’s as close as we got.\u201d<\/p>\n

Friday’s lineup also included The War On Drugs and St. Paul & The Broken Bones, to be followed Saturday by the up-in-coming band Goose and Chicago jam favorite Umphrey’s McGee, closing Sunday with Khruangbin and Joe Russo’s Almost Dead.<\/p>\n

Animal Collective, an anticipated act Friday afternoon, canceled before their set. A message projected alongside The Vega stage said that band lead Avey Tare had lost his voice and was unable to perform.<\/p>\n

In its inaugural year, Sacred Rose wasn’t without its hiccups. Aside from the music, here were two things that worked and two that worked less:<\/p>\n

The venue:<\/b> The SeatGeek campus is a great place to put on a music fest. Though expanses of asphalt may sound like a drag, there’s no mud, no parched summertime grass ground into dust, and Collectiv Presents did a lot to turn the grounds into a welcoming environment.<\/p>\n

The artwork: <\/b>Much of that environment had to do with colorful art installations everywhere \u2014 if by art we mean the kind of weird and playful sculptures you might associate with Burning Man. A wide passageway outside the Canopy mainstage was hung with a rainbow of feathers that was lit after dusk and evoked nothing so much as the neon Terminal 1 tunnel at O’Hare Airport. The Canopy itself was framed with a huge metal pergola of tapestries and vines. Outside The Vega, a 30-foot cabin cruiser was high and dry and painted like Dr. Teeth’s school bus from the \u201cMuppet Movie,\u201d accessible for climbing by a stairway. (We could have done without the acrid flames that were lit at night under the geodesic jungle gyms, however.)<\/p>\n

The dome: <\/b>Sacred Rose boasts four stages but perhaps it’s more like three; the Laser Dome is a sports field enclosed by an inflated dome. The air conditioning would have been a draw had the weather not been late-summer perfect. Inside is a DJ stage and the ceiling is lit by laser projections. But to keep the inflation, concert-goes must enter and exit by a single, crowded revolving door (emergency exits are available).<\/p>\n

Only occasionally, the sound: <\/b>The Vega and Dreamfield stages are right alongside each other, so sound bleed between the two, always a challenge at music fests, was at times particularly evident. Conversely, when Phil Lesh & Friends first opened, the amplification was so muffled and dim that a crowd at stage right began chanting \u201cturn it up! turn it up!\u201d (The festival posted on social media Saturday it was taking steps \u201cto minimize competing audio\u201d by adjusting set times, and was adding speakers to The Canopy.)<\/p>\n

A little after 9 pm, that Lesh & Friends opening number was \u201cDire Wolf,\u201d with Tweedy taking the lead as a more than worthy stand-in for Garcia. \u201cHe’s doing great,\u201d was the crowd consensus around me when it wasn’t chanting for more volume.<\/p>\n

They played seven songs over the next hour for their first set, concluding with a joyful singalong for \u201cNot Fade Away.\u201d The second set kicked off with \u201cShakedown Street\u201d and ran through seven more songs, sandwiching in the Wilco song \u201cVia Chicago.\u201d They closed at midnight with \u201cRipple.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sacred Rose runs through Sunday at SeatGeek Stadium, 7000 S. Harlem Ave., Bridgeview. Hours are noon to midnight Saturday, noon to 11 pm Sunday. Tickets and information at <\/i>sacredrosefest.com<\/i><\/p>\n

dgeorge@chicagotribune.com<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If Arjay Sutton of Asheville, North Carolina, is right, there will always be Grateful Dead. \u201cTheir music will be around forever,\u201d he said. There are five Grateful Dead cover bands in his hometown alone. \u201cThere’s a few here this weekend.\u201d Sutton and a few thousand of his fellow travelers were gathered outside SeatGeek Stadium in …<\/p>\n

Sacred Rose opens with Lesh & Friends and Dead-devoted fans<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":46754,"url":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/grateful-dead-co-founder-plays-epic-set-at-sfs-stern-grove\/","url_meta":{"origin":58805,"position":0},"title":"Grateful Dead co-founder plays epic set at SF’s Stern Grove","date":"August 16, 2022","format":false,"excerpt":"Like watching an extra-inning game at Candlestick or driving across the Bay Bridge in less than 30 minutes, seeing the Grateful Dead for free feels like a San Francisco experience lost to time. 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