The air is thick with the smell of incense and patchouli. Tie-dyed shirts and dreadlocks twirl in time with the music, as colored lights accent every note of “Franklin’s Tower” coming from the stage. Jerry Garcia, along with the rest of The Grateful Dead, is alive and well, at least for the night.

Such is the scene at a Dark Star Orchestra concert. Although most of the audience will eventually realize that it’s not actually The Grateful Dead on stage, but a bunch of amazing musicians that play and sing like them, it doesn’t seem to change the magic of the evening.

Dark Star Orchestra will present another magical evening of Grateful Dead music Friday at Simon Estes Amphitheater in Des Moines. The band will be the final act of this summer’s “Alive” concert series, presented by Ames-based People’s Productions.

This will be the second year that Dark Star Orchestra has closed the series, and People’s owner Tom Zmolek says he hopes to continue the tradition in future years.

“We brought in this killer light show for them, which we are doing again this year, and it just made for a perfect way to end the summer.”

The members of Dark Star Orchestra would cringe if you called them a tribute band, although the label is technically correct.

Even though Dark Star Orchestra does exclusively play music written by members of the Grateful Dead, it takes the gig more seriously than most cover bands.

Instead of just playing a random set of Dead songs, Dark Star Orchestra recreates entire Dead concerts, song for song, with fanatical attention to detail.

Cameron Blietz, who has been the sound engineer for the band since its birth, says they try to perform actual Dead set lists as accurately as possible, and pay attention to seemingly little things such as the placement of microphones and the types of amplifiers used, as well as the musical delivery of the Dead in a given time period.

“It’s all about the feel and the general blueprints that the time period gives us,” Blietz says.

“We’ve never done anything note for note, it’s been about capturing the same sort of tempos, the same sort of lyrical delivery, the same sort of harmonies, and details like that. Some people say that the music plays the band, and that’s what we’re shooting for night after night.”