Multi-instrumentalist Marc Muller, at right above, leads Dead On Live at the Count Basie Saturday night. Steve Miller, below, takes the stage Tuesday. (Photo by Brian Stratton. Click to enlarge.)
The sonic legacy of the San Francisco Bay area casts its still-potent spell over the famous stage of Red Bank’s Count Basie Theatre Friday night, sound-tracked by as dead-on a recreation of the Grateful Dead as you’ll find anywhere between Raceway Park and the Pyramids.
Multi-instrumentalist Marc Muller leads his grateful jam-mates in a Halloweekend edition of Dead On Live, Friday night at the Count Basie — while “The Price Is Right LIVE” summons in November’s sweeps-month with interactive high-energy style.
All who doubt that the Dead walk the earth during the season of the Great Pumpkin should consult the arcane and eldritch works of Professor Marc Muller for the last word on the subject — as the multi-instrumental master (and Monmouth University faculty member) summons the thing known as Dead On Live for a special Halloweekend concert, this Friday at the Count Basie Theatre.
Set to rise at 8 pm, it’s a special double-header installment of the project in which Muller and his ace musician friends explore the history of the Grateful Dead with setlist-intensive scholarship and spirited jamming. Featured on the Mischief Night program will be a “Dead On Live with Strings” set in which members of the Monmouth Symphony Orchestra join the band for orchestrally augmented arrangements of Dead favorites, climaxing with the epic “Terrapin Station” in its note-for-note entirety.
Multi-instrumentalist maestro Marc Muller (above right) leads his Dead On Live ensemble back to the Basie Friday night. Keyboard wiz Matt Wade (below) plays a concert for the Boys and Girls Club Saturday in Fair Haven. (Muller photo by Brian Stratton)
Friday, November 1:
RED BANK: While the greater Red Bank green doesn’t lack for savvy channelers of the Grateful Dead (see our own Jim Willis and his Dead Bank brethren, appearing Saturday at the Walt St. Pub), there exists an even deeper dimension of obsession, and it’s the bailiwick of Marc Muller — master multi-instrumentalist, sought-after session ace, adjunct professor at Monmouth University, and scoutmaster of the Count Basie Theatre‘s Rock the Basie band-camp program.
A flexibly floating lineup composed of Muller and a rotating roster of talented friends, the entity known as Dead On Live is “deadicated” to the comprehensive transcription (and note-for-note reproduction) of the Grateful Dead’s body of officially released recordings. And on Friday, Muller returns to the Basie boards for a Halloween Double Drumming Dance Party that combines psychedelic 60s’ classics (“St. Stephen,” “The Other One,” “Alligator”) with the epic trilogy from Blues for Allah and dual-drummer hits and set standards (“Shakedown Street,” “Touch of Gray,” “The Music Never Stopped”). Take it here for tickets ($19.50 – $45) — and here for our archived feature on Muller and his Dead On Live project.
Multi-instrumentalist, session ace and educator Marc Muller (right) leads the latest edition of the DEAD ON LIVE project back to the Count Basie Friday night. (Photo by Brian Stratton)
Call it a lifestyle choice, a fad or a fashion. Reject it as something immoral and unnatural. But someone close to you your niece or nephew, your letter carrier, the church elder, that soulmate you thought you knew so well is a Deadhead, or something very much like it.
Unlike the Grateful Dead themselves who just kind of improvised their way into one of the most enviable careers ever constructed of happy/sad accidents the fans, whether musicians themselves or laymen, are a detail-intensive bunch for sure. Contrary to the get-a-bath stereotype, they’re the folks who make the trains run on time; the entrepreneurs and visionaries, the doctors and district managers, and almost certainly the IT techs who make sense of that often inscrutable machinery we’re all plugged into these days.
Here on and around the greater Red Bank green, we’ve got access to any number of Grateful Dead tributes and tributaries working the regional circuit from projects like the borough-based Dead Bank and Mark Diomede’s venerable Juggling Suns, to Splintered Sunlightand Dark Star Orchestra, the well-traveled ensemble that dedicates each of its gigs to a specific recreation of a particular set from the Dead’s historical soundboard canon.
But if there exists an even more elevated plane of obsession, it’s the exclusive purview of Marc Muller master multi-instrumentalist, sought-after session ace, adjunct professor at Monmouth University and the man whose Rock the Basie band-camp program has become a firmly rooted feature of the Count Basie Theatre schedule.
On Black Friday a night when everyone from Santa to the Grinch is expected to be present and accounted for on the streets, stages and station stops of Red Bank the 10-year veteran of Shania Twain‘s band returns to the Basie boards (in the company of special guest Nicole Atkins) with the latest edition of a project about which he says, “I don’t know if ANYONE has done this to the extent that I have.”
Multi-instrumentalist Marc Muller, at right above, leads Dead On Live at the Count Basie Saturday night. Steve Miller, below, takes the stage Tuesday. (Photo by Brian Stratton. Click to enlarge.) 
Multi-instrumentalist, session ace and educator Marc Muller (right) leads the latest edition of the DEAD ON LIVE project back to the Count Basie Friday night. (Photo by Brian Stratton)