Review: No Song Left Unsung, Grateful Dead Plays Its Last

The three “Fare Thee Well” concerts featured the band’s improvisational strengths
in celebrating the moment but, in saying goodbye, a sense of its history as well.




"Evanescence and durability, side by side — that summed up the Grateful Dead’s ever-paradoxical mission. The three concerts I saw over the Fourth of July weekend at Soldier Field, billed as “Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years of the Grateful Dead,” also revived the band as an enterprise both quixotic and commercial, history-minded and fond of a tall tale, carefully plotted and forever in search of the happy accident. This briefly convened, decisively final incarnation of the Grateful Dead often managed to live up to the band’s name with songs that could turn intuitive, down-home, whimsical, haunted, elegant or euphoric.

The Grateful Dead’s American ideal always ran even deeper. Its music drew from urban and rural sources, from deep blues and Latin rhythms, from jazz and the avant-garde. And its performance, then and now, was about disparate individuals forging something together— e pluribus unum — in a participatory democracy in which each member’s choices affected all the others."
read review by Jon Pareles​

Review: No Song Left Unsung, Grateful Dead Plays Its Last - The New York Times: