Melvin Seals & JGB to return to Crystal Bay after 5 years

Melvin Seals & JGB play March 18, at the Crystal Bay Casino.

Melvin Seals’ cautious return to the stage includes an appearance on Friday, March 18, at the Crystal Bay Casino.

“I am peeking my head out the door, doing all I can to stay safe,” Seals told Tahoe Onstage.

Seals has hardly performed since March 2020 when his tour was canceled. Since then, the ex-keyboard player with the Jerry Garcia Band survived scrapes with Covid-19 and another potentially very serious condition, both what he described as “mild.”

The last time Melvin Seals and JGB performed in the Crown Room was nearly five years ago, July 15, 2017. He appeared with the supergroup Zero on Nov. 23, 2019.

The pandemic struck just after the group added guitarist John “K” Kadlecik, formerly of the Dark Star Orchestra. The rhythm section is John-Paul McLean on bass and Jeremy Hoenig on drums.

“I think I have the best band that I’ve ever had,” Seals said. “The puzzle is now put together quite well. When you have the right pieces, it fits, it works, it’s good. In music terms, it’s the best we’ve ever sounded.”

The ensemble doesn’t include backup singers. With a quartet, Seals said he can go to his library of 130 songs when he meticulously prepares a new setlist for each show. The longtime player with Jerry Garcia plays in the spirit of the Grateful Dead, but will only play a few of the band’s songs, and never any that are often covered by other groups.

The keyboardist who was most influential in Seals transition from church player to rock artist has been in the news lately with the release of a three-part, eight-hour documentary, “The Beatles: Get Back.” Billy Preston joins the Fab Four” midway though the filmed songwriting sessions and played so well he became an informal member. Nicknamed “The Fifth Beatle,” Preston played in the band’s last public concert (on the studio’s rooftop) and he contributed to the final two albums, “Abbey Road” and “Let It Be.”

“I knew him from the church and I know all that he did way before you saw him with Ray Charles and Nat King Cole and the secular pop side,” Seals said. “Here’s this guy with the same background that I have but was light years ahead of me. The stuff he was doing was only a dream for me. He was a highway, a road for me how to do it. Guys like Jimmy Smith and Jimmy McGriff and all those cats – that was too much of a change for the little church boy that I was.

“When I saw Billy, I thought. ‘I can do that. That makes sense.’ I understood how he approached rock and roll and pop music. He’s who I followed trying to find my own way in the world as a musician.”

Seals first professional work came with the band Gideon & Power. He vividly recalls flying to Phoenix for his first professional show, playing onstage, staying in hotel and getting paid.

“We made a couple of records that never went anywhere,” Seals said. “(Daniel) Gideon’s style was very strange.”

Gideon & Power was managed by Wally Amos, who later became “Famous Amos,” a chocolate chip cookie mogul. Seals said there were no cookies in the green room.

“Back then, he was just Wally Amos,” he said.

Gideon shared an apartment in San Francisco with Elvin Bishop, who invited Seals to join his band. Bishop was a bluesman who had relocated from Chicago. But he wrote a very non-bluesy song that became a huge hit: “Fooled Around and Fell in Love.” It was sung by Mickey Thomas. And for a few years, Thomas and Bishop shared lead vocals and the band was mainstream. Because it was on the Capricorn Records label out of Macon, Georgia, and maybe because Bishop has an Oklahoma drawl, it was called Southern rock. Thomas later joined the rock group Jefferson Starship and Bishop went back to playing straight-ahead blues.

“’Fooled Around’ launched that career for Elvin but he wasn’t really that guy. He was a blues guy,” Seals said. “But that made money and took him places. That put us on bills with Electric Light Orchestra, Marshall Tucker Band, Charlie Daniels Band. I was there that whole time from where he was, where he went and back to where he was.”

Seals played with the Jerry Garcia Band from 1980 to 1995, when Garcia died. Seals and bassist Johh Kahn planned to keep the band going, but then Kahn died. Seals has carried the torch ever since.

-Tim Parsons

Melvin Seals & JGB
When:
8 p.m. Friday, March 18
Where: Crystal Bay Casino Crown Room


Tickets: $25 in advance, $30 on the day of the show

Larry Sabo / Tahoe Onstage
Tahoe Onstage
Melvin Seals and JGB jam the Crystal Bay Casino’s Crown Room Stage on July 15, 2017. Tahoe Onstage photos by Larry Sabo
Zero rock the Crystal Bay Casino’s Crown Room on Nov. 23, 2019, the last time Melvin Seals performed at Lake Tahoe. Larry Sabo / Tahoe Onstage photos

ABOUT Tim Parsons

Tim Parsons
Tim Parsons is the editor of Tahoe Onstage who first moved to Lake Tahoe in 1992. Before starting Tahoe Onstage in 2013, he worked for 29 years at newspapers, including the Tahoe Daily Tribune, Eureka Times-Standard and Contra Costa Times. He was the recipient of the 2011 Keeping the Blues Alive award for Journalism.

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