WIDESPREAD PANIC

WHILE few would deny the keen musicianship of Widespread Panic, the group was less than engaging at the first of its two-show Beacon Theater engagement Tuesday.

The six-man Georgia jam band wandered willy-nilly through a tedious set that was nearly four hours long.

During that lengthy program, there was plenty of time to wonder: Why don’t these guys ever move? Was the program just one very long song?

And was it still 2003?

The tedious nature of the band’s jams wasn’t a problem for the deeply devoted who filled the house. They treated the repetitious music as if the band were playing songs of the sirens.

They danced dervish twirls, losing themselves in a fog of cheap weed and the perfume of spilled Bud.

Panic’s followers are cult-like: They liken the band’s unrestrained improvisations to the Dead, its ability to delve into the contemporary pop cannon to Phish and its musical craftsmanship to the Allman Brothers.

But at the Beacon, Widespread Panic was sorry seconds on all counts.

This was the band’s first show since the group’s founder and guitarist, Michael Houser, lost his battle with cancer last year.

Though he was in the unenviable position of stepping into the shoes of such a loved figure, the new guy, guitarist George McConnell, did well.

Still, he could have done more to tighten and lighten up jams that just seemed self-indulgent.

The concert did get its rock ‘n’ roll nuts ‘n’ bolts tightened at the close of the show, when Allman Brothers axman Warren Haynes stepped out of the wings for an encore guest shot on “Superstition.”

Panic and Haynes made that Stevie Wonder cover sizzle with Southern-fried funk.

Though that end-show flurry of guitar power was memorable, it was already so late that it was hard not to want even that goodness to conclude.

Widespread Panic prides itself on never playing the same show twice. In the case of this Beacon opener, that’s a wise idea.