Circling In On Neal Casal

Neal Casal’s story with the Grateful Dead began in the mid 1980s with a funny story to which any Deadhead can relate. He can’t remember exactly how it happened or how he got it, but somehow somebody had given him a copy of Steal Your Face when he was around 11 years old.

“I really loved that record a lot,” he remembers, “even though it’s one of the least popular records in the catalog for Grateful Dead fans.” A young Neal Casal didn’t know any different. He thought it was awesome music with great lyrics and a particularly cool album cover.

So Neal gets into this middle school called Copeland for seventh and eighth-graders not long after discovering the Steal Your Face album and this is a big deal, because this means, Neal explains, “I am moving up in the world. This is the school where all the cool kids go. And like all kids that age, I am nervous as hell about my social situation. How cool I’m going to be? Who I’ll be hanging around with? And all that.”

Well, in a tragic scheduling mistake, Neal gets stuck in a textile class. He arrives and realizes this is basically a sewing class, and it’s all girls. He was frantic, “I went up to the teacher and said, ‘There has been a mistake. You have to let me out. I can’t be in this class. I’m the only boy in here!’”

Unfortunately, the teacher said it was too late and nothing could be done. So he had to stay in the class and sew with the girls. Too make matters worse, Neal says, “The coolest girl in the entire school – her name was Kim Elliot – was in that class and I sat right behind her. She wouldn’t talk to me. She wouldn’t look at me. I was so devastated and so embarrassed to be in this stupid class.”

After months of suffering through sewing, being the only boy in this weird class, and having Kim never speak to him, he had to do one big final project before he would be set free. Naturally, Neal’s final would be the cover to Steal Your Face. He had to sew it onto a grid, and he made this huge elaborate stealie, and got an A+. The best part though, Neal recalls, “Right before I went to turn it in, I had it sitting on my desk and Kim Elliot turned around, looked at it, and said, ‘That is really fucking cool!’”

From that exact moment forward, Neal and Kim became cool with one another, and Neal was invited into her group of friends. “So, basically my whole entire social situation changed because of Steal Your Face,” he laughs.

Neal became swept up in the whole scene, traveling to shows all around the tri-state area, catching shows at The Garden, Nassau Coliseum, and Giants Stadium among others. Back then, though, the thought of being involved with the Grateful Dead in anyway was completely ludicrous. He couldn’t have made it up.

Fast forward 30 years and Neal Casal is living a dream of sorts. He has become a off-and-on member of Phil Lesh & Friends and most recently had the experience of a lifetime by way of being asked to score over five hours of setbreak music for the Fare Thee Well – Celebrating 50 Years Of Grateful Dead shows.

The request came via Justin Kreutzmann – drummer Bill Kreutzmann’s son – a filmmaker who was tapped to create the psychedelic visuals for the concert intermissions and he in turn asked Casal and his friends to supply a soundtrack.

“It’s completely surreal to have something I’ve done be a tiny part of this legacy and to be close to this band I loved,” Neal explains. “I feel honored just to be some small part of this thing. I can’t let my mind run away and think too hard about it, because it’s almost too overwhelming.”

The resultant music created by Neal Casal, his Chris Robinson Brotherhood band mate Adam MacDougall (keys), Dan Horne (bass) and Mark Levy (drums) became a captivating cosmic palette of improvised music loosely influenced by the various sounds and styles of Grateful Dead jamming. The reception was uncanny from arguably the world’s most fickle audience. Normally, you can’t get two Deadheads to agree on anything – much less musical opinions – especially on the heels of the great guitarist debate of 2015 regarding Trey Anastasio’s inclusion as the Jerry Garcia replacement at the shows. Surprisingly though, everyone universally loved this music that has come to be known as Circles Around the Sun.

Every night at the shows, at live viewing parties, or on internet forums you’d see people’s minds being blown by this improvisation and different varieties of the same joke would arise, “Wow, this is better than the first set!” This unanimous reaction led to the easy decision for Rhino to release the full anthology of setbreak music from all five shows. In many cases, fans came up with their own elaborate theories about who was playing this killer improvised music: the most popular of the theories being Jerry Garcia himself in his Side Trips fusion collaboration with Howard Wales.

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The composition of this music was truly without a net. “None of the music was preplanned. Zero. Not one note,“ Neal explains. “Every single part of it was composed on the spot.”

The only element of premeditated planning was that the band had been given some very loose guidelines from Justin Kreutzmann along the lines of, “Make music that connects to the community and symbolizes the feeling of the Grateful Dead Experience.” That said, he didn’t want music that knocked off the Grateful Dead. As Neal puts it, “There was this fine line of trying to catch the essence of the Grateful Dead but without copping it.”

The goal for Casal and MacDougall was to find a way to contribute something new to the conversation while avoiding something that felt tired or stagnant. They had some sense going in how to approach the music having played with Lesh and a bit with Bob Weir, so they were well-versed in what makes a Grateful Dead tune and more importantly how the Grateful Dead jam, but they both respectively had to think a lot about how to approach it. The balance of making a reverent nod to the past while making it feel like it was moving things forward was of utmost importance.

“That’s the spirit of the whole thing, much like it is with Phil who is always mixing up the musicians and trying new things with the music to keep it moving forward,” Neal says. So the band brought that certain level of familiarity, but made sure not to be a carbon copy or a cover band. “Justin would say, ‘Gimme a little bit of “The Wheel “or a little bit of “Playin,’”’ but all of it was done on the spot,” Neal explains. The band would talk briefly about a progression, riff on it for a while, talk through a change or two, and the rest would be improvisation.

The approach sounds quite cyclical in its description. “Someone follows someone else into a theme, and the next guy follows, until the next thing you know you’re 10 minutes into a jam. Then finally somebody brings it back to the original theme.” Neal explains, “We went into some long adventures.”

He compares the jam sessions to the 1972 through 1974 era of the band and cites the impressive degree of patience the Dead showed in their improvisation in those days. “You want to talk about patience man? They would play for 15 minutes and it never felt like they were in a rush. They were truly exploring, and that is really what we tried to do. That is the message. It’s not the tie dye. It’s the musical message, which is the patience.”

Unbelievably, the music really had no post-production other than mixing the audio. There were no overdubs on anything with the exception of the “Mountains on the Moon” cover that comes in the Fare the Well Box Set, which was from a previous 7-inch Casal recorded with MacDougall.

“In terms of the actual sessions for the Fare Thee Well Shows, there is not one single overdub: it was all played completely live,” Neal says passionately, clearly wanting to stay true to the Dead’s embodiment of improvisation. This is a protean feat of musicianship to think these guys recorded over five hours of warts-and-all jamming without any major flubs or miscues. Quite the contrary, the jams take on lives of their own to the point where as a listener you have to wonder what it would be like to see this band in the live setting if they could make music like this so effortlessly.

What speaks the most volumes about the success of the Circles Around the Sun project is the number of ears this music reached and the variety of media releasing the music. The band had entirely limited expectations going into this project. “We thought nobody was going to hear this and that it was going to be like Muzak during the breaks,” Neal jokes. Nobody bargained for the sheer volume of people who would hear this on the live concert streams at home. They also didn’t bargain for the music being included in the Fare Thee Well Box Set. And they certainly didn’t bargain for Circles Around the Sun being pressed as a double vinyl album and released with 5,000 copies.

In terms of the jams themselves, Neal tends to favor “Hallucinate a Solution” and “Gilbert’s Groove” as favorites. The title for “Hallucinate a Solution” comes from a comical quote by Phil Lesh that Neal got a kick out of when Phil was describing how to maneuver a complicated segue, whereby he simply stated, “Just hallucinate a solution.”

“Gilbert’s Groove” is a bit of a “Shakedown Street” reboot (originally titled “Fakedown Street”) with the late-1970s Mutron sound on guitar and teases on the “Shakedown” theme. The title is a nod to Gilbert Shelton who created the cover art for Shakedown Street (of Fabulous Furry Freak Brother fame). Asked if he caught Mutron fever like every other guitarist on the planet this summer, Casal says, “Yeah, I did. I used a Proton by 3Leaf which is a very small pedal but it’s very nice sounding.”

With this whirlwind of success, is there a future for the Circles Around the Sun project?

Neal responds, “We are all in bands and we are all on tour, so while we have talked about doing some shows, nothing is concrete. Chris Robinson Brotherhood is my first priority.” That said, the band is certainly open to the idea. “It’s not out of the question,” Neal retorts, “We could maybe get together for one show and see what happens.”

To the guys in the band, the experiment seems like it would be hard to replicate, because there are no real songs. “It’s a little scary to put something so loose in front of people,” he says, while leaving the option open, “but on the other hand, what the fuck? Part of me wants to just let the mystery just be what it is and just leave it alone, but another part of me wonders what it could be like if we did it live.”

In closing, Neal ends with this final thought, “The Circles Around the Sun thing has been a really beautiful accident, and I feel like we were all touched by a little bit of the GD magic. I feel like that rainbow that arched across the sky at that first show in Santa Clara maybe made a little place in its wake for us.”