Umphrey’s McGee takes Meijer Gardens, fans to wondrous new places with intensity, face-ripping riffs and The Groove

Sunday’s rare alignment of planets: One of Meijer Gardens’ best shows yet with one of Umphrey’s McGee’s best Grand Rapids shows ever, dazzling even newbies with mind-blowing chops and groovy lighting.

 

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It happened that the weekend I’d endeavored to review Umphrey’s McGee’s show at Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, I’d also begun reading Nathan Rabin’s 2013 book, “You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me: Phish, Insane Clown Posse, And My Misadventures With Two of Music’s Most Maligned Tribes.”

The author, known mostly for his prolific work with The Onion’s AV Club, embeds himself into rap-rock and jam-band subcultures in order to make sense of why the larger musical world denigrates and ghettoizes art that manages to build communities and succeed outside the channels we’ve come to accept.

It’s a sobering, entertaining and vital read for anybody who tends to position themselves above what they don’t make an effort understand. (Raises hand in shame.)

I’d seen Umphrey’s McGee — the six-piece band that is firmly Midwestern-rooted and tours relentlessly — once before, recognized that it might not be My Thing, and didn’t give the group much more thought. But after Sunday’s sold-out show, the band’s third at Meijer Gardens since 2010, I might just be a convert. These guys shred mightily.

By way of establishing my jam-band outsider status, I’ll present the following meager credentials: I went to Electric Forest the two times it was still called Rothbury, long enough ago that the drug slang is probably all different now. One of those years, I got a bunch of Widespread Panic fans Internet-angry at me for writing that they were the Aerosmith of the jam-band genre, which I didn’t totally mean as an insult and can’t recall the logic behind.

VERSATILITY, HEAVY JAMS AND ‘REAL MUSICAL CHOPS’

Also, a band I was in during college played a party and we covered a Phish song, from one of its more radio-friendly, not-beloved-by-real-fans records. A good visual analogy for my attempt to emulate Trey Anastasio’s guitar soloing is the woman who occasionally shows up in the background of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” to swing a cat against a wall.

So to explain things to me, I brought my friend Mehgan, whose only complaint about attending her 15th Umphrey’s concert was that she wasn’t at her 57th Phish concert. (That band was performing all weekend at Alpine Valley in Wisconsin.) The consensus among Mehgan and other even more intense Umphrey’s fans to whom I was introduced was that this was a top-notch performance, and as a layperson, I raise horns in respectful agreement.

Umphrey’s took the stage at 6:30 p.m. with no opening act and opened with an instrumental song called “Mullet Over.” The show was split into two sets, the first of which lasted 80 minutes and spanned nine songs, which would have been hard to determine if the band didn’t tweet its setlist in real time. The songs — “No Diablo,” “Phil’s Farm,” and a cover of Crosby, Stills & Nash’s “Southern Cross” were early highlights — digressed and bled into one another, frequently detouring at the whims of singer/guitarist Brendan Bayliss and fellow guitarist Jake Cinninger before returning to a recognizable melody.

There was ample jamming, but it always seemed in service of the songs or deep grooves — as in the fairly straightforward crunch of “Resolution” — rather than for its own sake. Umphrey’s plays heavier music than most of its jam-band peers and is as indebted to Dream Theater and Iron Maiden as the Grateful Dead, demonstrating versatility as it fluidly moved through the variety of musical traditions in its palette.

The show built in intensity after the band returned from a break for a second 80-minute set. Nightfall allowed for what must have been one the most memorable visual presentations at Meijer Gardens: There were smoke machines that helpfully obscured various audience-sourced smoke and a light show that was elaborate by the venue’s standards. The two-guitar attack was particularly arresting when Bayliss and Cinninger toyed with dynamics, segueing from delicately entwined palm-muted passages into face-ripping crescendos on second-set songs such as “Remind Me,” “Gents” and the excellently titled “Miami Virtue.”

The cynicism pummeled out of me, I stopped doing usual snarky things like cataloging absurd pants and eye-rolling at all the subpar dancing, and I surrendered to The Groove.

It takes real musical chops for a band to equally dazzle a newbie at his second show or a veteran well into their second hundred, but Umphrey’s chops hard. No matter your musical pedigree, see these dudes when they come back. Their summer vibes are invincible.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Sunday night’s show drew perhaps the most unique audience in Meijer Gardens history, as ebullient, tie-dyed Umphrey’s McGee fans literally took over the amphitheater, giving it a groovy, upbeat festival milieu. And unlike previous Umphrey’s appearances at the amphitheater, security guards and police took a mostly hands-off attitude regarding certain, uh, rules violations and even greatly expanded the official smoking section near the entrance. As a result, the overall mood of the evening was upbeat and celebratory. Bravo.

PHOTO GALLERY: UMPHREY’S MCGEE AT MEIJER GARDENS (Aug. 9, 2015)
Photos by Anna Sink, Local Spins

VIDEO: Umphrey’s McGee at Meijer Gardens

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