Music Bowl Brings Good Vibes Back To Westville

After 41 years, music is back in the Westville Flats.

It’s socially distanced, for now, with ticket holders at the Westville Bowl sitting in ​“pods” with their friends, far away from other concert-going units.

I got to the new venue’s first show this past Friday’ 20 minutes past its 7 o’clock start time, only to find that Gov’t Mule was in full swing. The encore — the band’s cover of the Marshall Tucker Band’s ​“Can’t You See” — danced us out the door by 10.

The average age of a jam-band concertgoer has gone up since the Grateful Dead played here in 1971. I’m sure at least a few in Friday’s crowd for Gov’t Mule were at that 1971 Dead show. The drugs, which you can still whiff in the air, are legal now … almost.

It’ll cost you over $10 for cocktails like a Westville Lemonade, which includes a shot of Tito’s vodka. But after shows were canceled last summer, the only important news is, quite simply, that there is music in the air.

Westville hosted pops concerts as far back as the 1950s, but the era of rock began in 1963, when Ray Charles played the Yale Bowl. Peter, Paul & Mary played the following year, but the venue didn’t really take off until 1970 — and then the flood came. Call it Fillmore by the Merritt: Three Dog Night played July 18, Chicago on August 8, Led Zeppelin a week later. The next summer, Yes played a show with Grand Funk Railroad, with the Dead coming to town the next Saturday (shows were mostly on Saturdays).

But trouble followed in their wake. ​“The two remaining rock concerts at the Yale Bowl, featuring ​‘The Who’ and ​‘Chicago,’ have been canceled because of disturbances at earlier concerts,” the Associated Press reported on Aug. 4, 1971.

What a time it was. Our boys were dying in Nam. Love Story had just ended its run atop the box office charts. Newspapers, apparently, put rock-band names in quotation marks. ​“Chicago,” a band as lite as the Tab its fans drank, inspired fears of melees.

It was a crazy world. But at least there was live music — serious, big-time live music — in Westville. And people were willing to fight to hear it.

“Police chief Biagio DiLieto announced the cancellations Monday following a four-hour meeting between police, city officials and the New Haven Jaycees, sponsors of the summer concert series,” the AP story continued. ​“An estimated 80 young persons were arrested Saturday night after hundreds of would-be gate crashers, some of them hurling rocks and bottles, clashed with police outside the bowl during a performance by ​‘The Grateful Dead’ … A similar disturbance occurred the week before when an estimated 1,000 young persons tried to force their way into the bowl to hear a concert by ​‘Grand Funk Railroad.’”

Concerts were sporadic thereafter. The Beach Boys and Eric Clapton came through in the summer of ​’74, the Cars in ​’79. The next summer would see the end, but what a finale: Summer Fest ​’80, an all-day concert with the Little River Band, Heart, and The Eagles, drew 67,000 to the Bowl. Promoters told the crowd it was the largest concert in the country that year; it was definitely the biggest concert crowd in Connecticut history.

Then the lights dimmed. The Eagles played Joe Walsh’s ​“All Night Long” on June 14, 1980, and then there was music only once in a blue moon, amid sparsely attended football games and occasional tennis tournaments.

Until last Friday night. That’s when Gov’t Mule took the stage at the Westville Music Bowl, the repurposed Connecticut Tennis Center space.

And the music was pretty terrific. Gov’t Mule is the project of Warren Haynes, longtime guitarist with the Allman Brothers and a frequent post-Dead associate of Dead bassist Phil Lesh. Haynes’s guitar and vocal styles exist at the crossroads, or the crowded, jammed-up intersection, of Southern rock, jamband-ism, and Americana country.

Gov’t Mule is squarely in the middle camp, but with more respect for its fans’ time, and bedtime, than the Dead or Phish ever had. Jams go 10 minutes, maybe 15, tops.

Set list obsessives can learn more on the web, but for my purposes the songs were beside the point. The Westville Music Bowl, which is being booked by the shrewd team behind College Street Music Hall, is getting the big things right: quality acts, amplified by a good sound system; tasteful lighting; perimeter food stands that won’t break the bank (or not break it beyond repair); and security people who don’t pat you down too carefully, or police your mask situation after dark. If the stage is bizarrely oversized for the space, more football-stadium than tennis-center, that can perhaps be put down to oversized ambition.

In the future, I hope that ambition extends to the booking. In this truncated, frustrated season — with many bands still unwilling to hit the road — the WesMuBo (coined it!) has surely done the best it can, with a schedule heavy on the post-Dead jam diaspora and its sons and godsons. I am excited for Greensky Bluegrass, doing two nights later this month, and I can’t wait to see Lake Street Dive, in June, for the fourth time; their jazzy originals are nearly as good as their renovations of pop classics.

But even on the nights when I don’t make it over to center court/WesMuBo, I’ll take pleasure from the street scene. The second night of Gov’t Mule, I was sitting on my front porch at about five o’clock when a quartet of happily altered concertgoers walked past me, having parked a good half mile from the show. Unlike Chicago fans in ​’71, they weren’t looking to destroy anything much, or crash any gates. They looked vaccinated and happy, and ready to dance.