Culture
Don Was and the Pan-Detroit Ensemble bring ‘Blues for Allah’ to Stuart’s Opera House
By: Emily Votaw
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ATHENS, Ohio (WOUB) – I spotted the compact navy blue suitcase a little before 9 a.m. Saturday, when I came into the WOUB AM studio to start my own Radio Free Athens shift, still exasperated from the long but ultimately successful hunt for parking in Uptown Athens on Ohio University’s Homecoming weekend. Later that night, Don Was (born Don Fagenson in Detroit) would lead his Pan-Detroit Ensemble through the Grateful Dead’s Blues for Allah at Stuart’s Opera House in Nelsonville, in a show presented by Fur Peace Productions, and I was assigned to cover it.
But first, the suitcase.
Radio Free Athens is WOUB AM’s largely volunteer-run weekly format free program, and it airs every Saturday. “Format free” here basically means you can play whatever you want, as long as it doesn’t meet the FCC’s criteria for obscenity.
That also means hauling around a lot of physical media. CDs are heavy. LPs are heavier.
A wheeled suitcase is a total game changer, and I picked up the trick from “Big” John Matthews, so I knew right away the bag was his. He had made his three-hour drive to Athens even earlier than usual to beat the homecoming traffic. Of course he had.
Big John makes that drive on many Saturdays. Usually he’s on for three hours. More often than you’d think, and with completely sincere enthusiasm, he does six. Tune in, and you might hear the Temptations’ “I Can’t Get Next to You” and Arrested Development’s “Tennessee,” then a little later King Crimson’s “Frame by Frame” rolling into Radiohead’s “Optimistic.”
Don’t mistake that range for randomness. Big John has an impressive professional pedigree, with more years in radio than I’ve been alive, many of them in formats far more demanding than any I’ve worked in. Like every other Radio Free Athens volunteer, he does it without pay. It’s a real public service, right down to letting listeners know if it’s going to rain that afternoon.
So that morning I asked him about Blues for Allah. I had just learned the ensemble would perform the 1975 album in its entirety. I can talk at length about the discographies of plenty of artists, including a few I don’t even like. The Dead have never been one of them.
Big John will never lie to you about how he feels about music. Bring up something he isn’t keen on, and he folds his arms and goes pensive. This time his arms were wide open. “Blues for Allah” was a good one for me to hear, he said, because it’s something of a “rock album.”
I’d never been able to hide my hand, and my confusion was all over my face. He made his case.
“To me, the Grateful Dead is a very important group of the improvisational variety, and especially at times they are incredibly psychedelic,” he said. Then, gently but firmly, he went for my heartstrings. “And I know you love psychedelia.”
He had evidence. I play all kinds of wacky stuff on my show. The bigger exhibit is our fellow DJ Michael T., who sometimes dedicates weirdo ’60s psychedelic tracks to me on the air. I return the favor, especially when I get bold and give people what they really need: the Incredible String Band. This is the same guy who gave me a CD copy of the Small Faces’ Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake just a few months into my time at the station. Few albums are odder, more psychedelic, or closer to my heart than that one. It’s also built out of the most familiar things imaginable. One whole side is a fairy tale. The cover mimics the Victorian lettering on an old tin of Ogden’s Nut-brown Flake tobacco. Somehow it all adds up to a specific way I experience the world, and apparently the way the Small Faces did, too.
With that in mind, I headed to Nelsonville feeling a little more prepared.
The ensemble opened with a few tracks from its latest album, the excellent Groove in the Face of Adversity. Then they did exactly what they promised and started with Blues for Allah from the top.
Before diving in, Was made a point of telling the crowd that guitarist Wayne Gerard had played with the MC5. This was good news. The MC5 are one of God’s perfect rock groups and one of the most important bands of all time, so maybe this was the evidence I needed to truly expect an evening of “rock.”
Was also took a moment to acknowledge the Deadheads in the room, an audience he knows well. Since 2018, he has toured the world with Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros, the group he co-founded with Dead guitarist Bob Weir. Grateful Dead fans may be the most passionate audience any band has ever had. They celebrate every incarnation of the band, across every era, with an allegiance you could call religious without much hesitation.
As I’ve explained at length, I don’t know the Dead well enough to compare the ensemble’s renditions to the originals, which I only got to know this weekend while preparing for the show. What I can say is that the band played those songs as they meant them, and the room clearly felt it. A brief and deservedly applauded appearance from Jorma Kaukonen didn’t hurt.
Vocalist Steffanie Christi’an is wildly charismatic, and that would be my verdict even if she hadn’t been wearing incredible high heels that somehow caught the stage lights just so as she swung around the mic stand. Was built the Pan-Detroit Ensemble out of his hometown’s jazz community, and it shows. His longtime collaborator, Dave McMurray, plays saxophone. Keyboardist Luis Resto won an Oscar for his work with Eminem. Vincent Chandler on trombone and John Douglas on trumpet round out the horns, and Jeff Canaday on drums and Mahindi Masai on percussion keep it moving.
“There’s a unique sound and feel to Detroit that permeates the music in a way that resonates all over the globe,” Was has said of the project.
He would know. Over five decades, Was has produced records for the Rolling Stones, Bonnie Raitt, Bob Dylan, and Willie Nelson, among many others, and has spent years running Blue Note Records. A résumé that world-class wouldn’t, on its own, guarantee anything but a stiff, reverent tribute night.
I know Was best from Was (Not Was), the band he founded in Detroit in 1979 with David Weiss, also known as David Was. Their records are outrageously infectious and, frankly, genius in how they take genres you think you already know, like disco and R&B, and twist them ever so slightly askew. On the surface, they couldn’t be further from Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake. Spiritually, they might not be so far off.
Someone who made those records was never going to settle for anything less than completely alive. The Pan-Detroit Ensemble has more than enough credentials to rest on, and on Saturday it showed no interest in resting. It played like one of the tightest working bands around, out of a city that takes its music seriously, tearing into an album it clearly loves.
Big John was right. That’s what you get from a radio veteran who still drives six hours round trip, Homecoming traffic and all, to do the job right for whoever takes the time to tune in.