Max Creek

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Max Creek is an American rock band that started in 1971 as a country rock group. Then when LSD "happened" to them, they began playing Grateful Dead songs and writing original music. The band has a loyal following, and puts on a camping festival in upstate New York each year. The festival, dubbed Camp Creek, is one of the longest running festivals on the East Coast.

Max Creek was perhaps the first jam band outside of the San Francisco Bay Area, with many groups imitating their style, in particular Phish, whose bassist Mike Gordon was a fan in the 1980s. On January 5, 2008, Gordon played with Max Creek's Scott Murawski, as well as the Grateful Dead's Bill Kreutzmann, at a benefit concert in Costa Rica.^[1] Live shows are the bands forte, often lasting three hours or more. The Creek, as they are known, peaked in popularity in the late 1980s, when they would play more than 200 shows a year. They decided to cut back drastically on touring in the early 1990s to concentrate on family, and today play only a handful of shows a year. The loss of the Crystal Clear sound system in the early 1990s was a devastating blow for Creek and their fans, as was the decision to stop touring at the time that the jam band scene was heating up.

The band has been working on a box set to be called Maxology, however they have been "working" on it for close to 10 years. Max Creek put out several albums in the 1970s which are now out of print. The 1985 album Windows is available on CD, and has a few outstanding tracks ("Double Dare", "Windows"), and there are also two live albums, which are currently available at live shows. In addition, a number of the band's live performances are available for download from Archive.org^[2].