My Morning Jacket Closes Seven Nights at the Fillmore With a Grateful Dead Thread

My Morning Jacket finished a seven-night run at the Fillmore on Sunday, closing a residency announced seven months earlier with rainbow-themed artwork and a simple structural promise: each show assigned a color, no repeats across consecutive nights.

What the band did not advertise was a narrative. As the run developed, it became a tribute to the Grateful Dead and, by extension, to the San Francisco room and city that shaped them. Keyboardist Bo Koster told Rolling Stone that Jim James picked a set of Dead songs he felt personally drawn to, with the plan to play one per night as an acknowledgment of the city’s musical lineage. James described the period in his own listening life in similar terms, framing it as a portal he had walked through.

The Dead songs were only part of the connective tissue. The band also covered Sly Stone, the Bay Area figure who died last year, and Marvin Gaye’s “Baby Don’t You Do It,” a song whose best-known live reading by the Band was cut at the Winterland Ballroom a few blocks from the Fillmore for The Last Waltz. On Green Night they debuted “Scarlet Begonias,” then followed with “Fire on the Mountain” the next evening, splitting a segue the Dead always played as a single suite.

Seven nights in one room is an unusual commitment now. My Morning Jacket used it less as a victory lap than as an argument about lineage, made in the building where the argument holds most weight.