Furthur at Bank of America Pavilion, Boston, July 17, 2013

Furthur

Jerry Garcia wasn't kidding when he spoke of the "X factor" that turned Grateful Dead concerts transcendent. The joke at the time, of course, was that it wasn't the X, but three other letters responsible for the madhouse revelry available for the taking at a Dead concert.

But since Garcia's death in 1995, the remaining members of the Grateful Dead have never really taken the band's music into the places it once did_ especially into those bittersweet spaces of simultaneous gain and loss Garcia so beautifully articulated with his playing and singing on pieces such as "Birdsong," "Sugaree," and "He's Gone."

Two of those songs_ "Sugaree" and "He's Gone"_ plus a whole lot more Garcia-identified material filled the set list when Furthur opened a two-night stand at the Bank of America Pavilion in Boston on Wednesday, July 17 (the band is back on the 18th).

Recap for you all keeping score: Furthur is the band that guitarist Bob Weir and bassist Phil Lesh, both of the Grateful Dead, put together in 2009. By that point, there had been several iterations of post-Jerry bands involving various original members. The last time all four survivors_ drummers Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart plus Lesh and Weir_ threw down was a 2008 tour that had Warren Haynes playing lead guitar. Those shows were tentative affairs, as if the Dead was not sure what direction to head. Furthur settled the question by hiring John Kadlecik, who played the part of Jerry in Dark Star Orchestra, a Grateful Dead cover band.

In taking the preservationist route, Furthur is a consistently pleasing band, though one less likely to peer over the edge. Song selections are drawn up in advance to create concerts with a discernible flow, whereas the original Grateful Dead made it up as the shows went along; sometimes you ended up in paradise, sometimes you ended up beneath a tangled heap of busted notes.

That being said, Furthur is still an old-school band more in service to the music than to a showbiz ideal and is as apt to have off nights as it is stellar ones _ a true sign of what you'd call "real music."

Thursday was an on night for the troupe. Weir seemed to be the leader on this occasion, taking a lot of the lead vocals and showcasing his signature tunes. After warming up the first set with "Passenger" and "Crazy Fingers," Weir triggered a nice, flowing sequence of shuffling shuck and jive with "I Need a Miracle" that bled  into the Willie Dixon-Howlin' Wolf signature "Wang Dang Doodle" and ended up at "Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo."

Kadlecik did his job picking the Jerry parts and soloing in Garcia mode, but the most memorable leads and solos of the night came from keyboard player Jeff Chimenti, a veteran of Weir's band Ratdog.

The only clunker in the first set came when Lesh sang Ryan Adam's "Let it Ride." The rest of the band gingerly worked through the arrangement as Lesh bleated out the lyrics. Weir salvaged the set with a lovely take on Garcia's "Sugaree" that tweaked the vocal arrangement in a manner that let him work his way into the tune's emotional core without having to retrace Garcia's original path.

The second set was a relaxed, sprawling web. Weir again stepped up, opening the set with his epic "Weather Report Suite." One of the nice things about Furthur is its willingness to perform songs the Dead did not play when Garcia was alive. With Garcia, the band would usually only play "Let it Grow," otherwise known as "Part II" of the suite. Furthur does the whole thing, starting with the pastoral prelude.

The entire second set focused on vintage Grateful Dead, no songs past 1973. Weir stayed heavy in the mix even through Kadlecik's turns on "He's Gone" and "New Speedway Boogie," the latter setting a blues tone that would thicken on Weir's reading of "Black Peter" toward the end of the concert.

"Uncle John's Band" served as a mid-set anthem, with the gang vocals swelling the song's sense of idealism.

After working in lush grooves for nearly two hours, the band rocked out the finale with a version of "Not Fade Away" that sandwiched "Going Down the Road Feeling Bad," a sequence that had  drummer Joe Russo making crafty rhythm shifts.

For its encore, Furthur played "Ripple," a pretty bow for a nicely put-together package.