God Street Wednesdays: The NY Times

Everything I’ve been reading seems to hint at the New York Times putting all of their old content behind a pay wall soon, so I wanted to take this chance to look at a watershed mark in the band’s development. During the summer of 1993 the band played – and sold out – a show at Irving Plaza in New York City and in the crowd was NY Times’ scribe Jon Pareles.

Pareles pretty much referenced the Grateful Dead in every sentence of his review but other than that he seemed to give the band props for their performance…

God Street Wine’s fans came to dance on Thursday night at Irving Plaza, wearing their hippie clothes (plus a backward baseball cap here and there) and moving with the free-form psychedelic sway and flail. The band, a New York club staple, is part of the wave of Grateful Dead disciples that thrives on the college circuit, along with better-known groups like the Spin Doctors, Blues Traveler and Phish. God Street Wine’s lineup almost mimics the Dead’s, with two guitars, keyboards, bass and drums, and its arrangements use the Dead as a touchstone for brisk, bluegrassy rhythms and shimmering major chords.

God Street Wine has customized its jams. Around its Dead center, it uses twin-guitar riffs out of the Allman Brothers and jazzy chords by way of Steely Dan; for a more current touch, there’s some rapping. And while the songs do stretch out for solos and group doodling, they usually have more prearranged landmarks than the Dead’s repertory. There are key changes, parallel lines for guitars and keyboard and gentle shifts of meter.

CLICK HERE to read the rest of the review. This review gave the band more publicity than any article up to that point as it put the name God Street Wine in front of hundreds of thousands of eyeballs. Three years later, the paper ran an article about tourheads and God Street fans were the first band’s fans discussed. Currently, you can read both Times articles for free.