Warren Haynes & Melvin Seals To Lead Third Set At Red Rocks To Honor Jerry Garcia’s Birthday

Yesterday word came down that Warren Haynes would play Jerry Garcia’s iconic Tiger guitar this coming Monday, August 1 at Red Rocks in Morrison, Colorado as part of the evening’s Jerry Garcia Symphonic Celebration. Haynes will be the first to play Tiger in public since the final Grateful Dead concert on July 9, 1995. The show will take place on what would have been the late Grateful Dead guitarist’s 74th birthday and if it wasn’t special enough, a third set has been added.

Warren Haynes and his core band of Jeff Sipe (drums), Lincoln Schleifer (bass), Jasmine Muhammad (vocals) and Jacklyn LaBranch (vocals) will start the evening by performing a pair of sets with the Colorado Symphony. Then, on this night only, the core band will be joined by organist Melvin Seals and a few other surprise guests for a full hour-plus third set of music featuring extended improvisations centered around classic Jerry Garcia Band material along with some Grateful Dead favorites. Seals is best known for his long tenure in the Jerry Garcia Band which spanned 1980 until Jerry’s passing. LaBranch was also a longtime members of the Jerry Garcia Band.

Haynes had this to say, “August 1st is shaping up to be a monumental evening. Any time you play Red Rocks, it’s a special occasion. And when we were able to book the Jerry Garcia Symphonic Celebration there on Jerry’s birthday, we knew the planets were aligning. We started thinking about ways to honor the occasion and who we’d like to have be a part of the celebration, and there really was no one who made more sense than Melvin. If all that wasn’t enough, having the opportunity to play Tiger for the very first time since Jerry played it at the last Dead show over 20 years ago, really is the cherry on top.”

Tickets for the Red Rocks symphonic celebration are available via AXS.com. If you can’t make it in person, SiriusXM’s Grateful Dead channel will broadcast a recording of the full performance on Wednesday, August 3 at 9 p.m. ET. Re-airings will follow a times and dates to be announced soon.