Fans of the Grateful Dead are pouring into San Francisco for three days of concerts and festivities marking the 60th anniversary of the scruffy jam band that came to embody a city where people wore flowers in their hair and made love, not war.
Dead & Company, featuring original Grateful Dead members Bob Weir and Mickey Hart, will play Golden Gate Park’s Polo Field starting Friday with an estimated 60,000 attendees each day. The last time the band played that part of the park was in 1991 — a free show following the death of concert promoter and longtime Deadhead Bill Graham.
Certainly, times have changed.
A general admissions ticket for all three days is $635 — a shock for many longtime fans who remember when a joint cost more than a Dead concert ticket.
But Deadhead David Aberdeen is thrilled anyway.
“This is the spiritual home of the Grateful Dead,” said Aberdeen, who works at Amoeba Music in the bohemian, flower-powered Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. “It seems very right to me that they celebrate it in this way.”
Formed in 1965, the Grateful Dead is synonymous with San Francisco and its counterculture. Members lived in a dirt-cheap Victorian in the Haight and later became a significant part of 1967’s Summer of Love.
That summer eventually soured into bad acid trips and police raids, and prompted the band’s move to Marin County on the other end of the Golden Gate Bridge. But new Deadheads kept cropping up — even after iconic guitarist and singer Jerry Garcia ’s 1995 death — aided by cover bands and offshoots like Dead & Company.
“There are 18-year-olds who were obviously not even a twinkle in somebody’s eyes when Jerry died, and these 18-year-olds get the values of Deadheads,” said former Grateful Dead publicist and author Dennis McNally.
Fitting in, feeling at home
Deadheads can reel off why and how, and the moment they fell in love with the music. Fans love that no two shows are the same; the band plays different songs each time. They also embrace the community that comes with a Dead show.
Sunshine Powers didn’t have friends until age 13, when she stepped off a city bus and into the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.
“I, all of a sudden, felt like I fit in. Or like I didn’t have to fit in,” says Powers, now 45 and the owner of tie-dye emporium Love on Haight. “I don’t know which one it was, but I know it was like, OK.”
Similarly, her friend Taylor Swope, 47, survived a tough freshman year at a new school with the help of a Grateful Dead mixtape. The owner of the Little Hippie gift shop is driving from Brooklyn, New York, to sell merchandise, reconnect with friends and see the shows.
“The sense of, ‘I found my people, I didn’t fit in anywhere else and then I found this, and I felt at home.’ So that’s a big part of it,” she said of the allure.
Magical live shows
Sometimes, becoming a Deadhead is a process.
Thor Cromer, 60, had attended several Dead shows, but was ambivalent about the hippies. That changed on March 15, 1990, in Landover, Maryland.
“That show, whatever it was, whatever magic hit,” he said, “it was injected right into my brain.”
Cromer, who worked for the U.S. Senate then, eventually took time off to follow the band on tour and saw an estimated 400 shows from spring 1990 until Garcia’s death.
Cromer now works in technology and is flying in from Boston to join scores of fellow “rail riders” who dance in the rows closest to the stage.
Aberdeen, 62, saw his first Dead show in 1984. As the only person in his college group with a driver’s license, he was tapped to drive a crowded VW Bug from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, to Syracuse, New York.
“I thought it was pretty weird,” he said. “But I liked it.”
He fell in love the following summer, when the Dead played a venue near his college.
Aberdeen remembers rain pouring down in the middle of the show and a giant rainbow appearing over the band when they returned for their second act. They played “Comes a Time,” a rarely played Garcia ballad.
“There is a lot of excitement, and there will be a lot of people here,” Aberdeen said. “Who knows when we’ll have an opportunity to get together like this again?”
Fans were able to see Dead & Company in Las Vegas earlier this year, but no new dates have been announced. Guitarist Bob Weir is 77, and drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann are 81 and 79, respectively. Besides Garcia, founding members Ron “Pigpen” McKernan on keyboards died in 1973 and bassist Phil Lesh died last year at age 84.
Multiple events planned for Dead’s 60th
Mayor Daniel Lurie, who is not a Deadhead but counts “Sugar Magnolia” as his favorite Dead song, is overjoyed at the economic boost as San Francisco recovers from pandemic-related hits to its tech and tourism sectors.
“They are the reason why so many people know and love San Francisco,” he said.
The weekend features parties, shows and celebrations throughout the city. Grahame Lesh & Friends will perform three nights starting Thursday. Lesh is the son of Phil Lesh.
On Friday, which would have been Garcia’s 83rd birthday, officials will rename a street after the San Francisco native. On Saturday, visitors can celebrate the city’s annual Jerry Day at the Jerry Garcia Amphitheater located in a park near Garcia’s childhood home.
