DEADwood & Friends

Deadwood & Friends is a Dead-centered collective from the North Fork of Long Island, built around drummer Joe Campisi of Southold. Campisi took the idea from Levon Helm's Midnight Rambles in Woodstock and from hearing local multi-instrumentalist Greg McMullen play pedal steel, and the first show at Treiber Farms in Peconic was bare-bones — a hand-painted Steal Your Face sign by the road and a hope that enough people would turn up to cover costs. A couple of hundred did, and by recent summers the crowd has run 400 to 500, enough that permits and parking plans are now part of the preparation. The repertoire is Dead-centered with Dylan, Tedeschi Trucks and other curveballs threaded in, and the lineup is deliberately elastic: Joe Ciampa on lead guitar, Sam Shaffery on mandolin, Greg McMullen on pedal steel, Joe Delia on keyboards, Sara Mundy on vocals, Doug Broder on bass, and Campisi and Mike Severino on drums. There are no tickets and no gate — the shows run on donations, with a barn, an American flag and no real boundary between band and audience.