Art by Evan Solano
Jeff Weiss is all too familiar with the West LA Fadeway.
To celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Grateful Dead, the restaurant attached to my San Francisco hotel is offering a limited time-only, commemorative, branded hot dog. According to Deadhead lore, this particular beef-tube slathered with bacon, chopped onions, and Gouda cheese was Jerry Garcia’s favorite meal, as prepared by the band’s personal chef, Chez Ray Sewell.
It’s the first weekend of August and I’m in the Bay for GD60, the trio of Golden Gate Park shows organized in honor of the Dead’s diamond jubilee. But the menu induces acid flashbacks as soon as I check in. About fifteen years ago, one of Sewell’s emissaries tried to wrangle me into collaborating with him on a Grateful Dead-themed cookbook. The negotiations were fruitless, but I was invited to a Further after-party in a warehouse district in Bayview, where the most no holds barred-tab that I’ve ever eaten, found me.
The details of that fiasco are too deranged and kaleidoscopic to fully unpack. But I do remember watching Ken Kesey’s son howl at the moon atop at the (second) Magic School bus, wearing a pointed court jester cap that made him look like a middle-aged werewolf at a Renaissance Faire. At no point did I meet the Chef. On the way home, I was briefly abducted by a cabal of depraved taxi drivers who were plotting to murder me – or so the acid led me to believe. I finished the night alone on a friend’s couch, tripping on a loop of angelic hymns from Alice Coltrane, watching the cubist face of God emerge in the gilded light consecrating the Hayes Valley at dawn.
Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders might have been my true vehicles for experiencing the divine, but without the Dead, the transmission may not have occurred. After all, it was Miles Davis and John Coltrane who sparked the Dead’s own liquidation of time and space, which in turn lured me into this cosmic slipstream. But like anything else in America, the cosmic slipstream will cost you. The Chez Ray hot dog alone is $17.50 before tax, health care surcharges, and tip. The Cherry Garcia shake costs about a dozen bucks extra, though its tagline promises that this “one’s for the dreamers, drifters and rock ‘n’ roll soul.” Delicious.
The Deadheads have descended. The late night ramen spots and Korean fried chicken shrines are awash in tie-die. Even the municipality itself is in on the act; the new mayor announced the festivities on Instagram. Such limited occupancy means that my decade-old-but-already-dated boutique hotel has doubled its usual rates. For $350-a-night, I get the privilege of walking past framed Grateful Dead vinyl in the hallway and bathroom wallpaper where the names of classic ‘60s bands are scrawled in a “groovy” font. In the lobby, electric guitars hang alongside a peace sign made of twigs and fake magnolias, and a blown-up black-and-white photo of a flower child in the lobby. She’s probably a retired real estate agent now in Sausalito.
Alas, good ol’ Chez Ray baked his last brioche bun seven years ago. To my knowledge, no cookbook ever came out. Jerry Garcia has rambled on the golden road since 1995, when a heart attack qualified him for canonization at just 53. The decades of drug abuse and hard living severely weakened him, but the bacon and cheese glizzy’s probably didn’t help.
In some sense, the current Dead story resembles most of the ones published in the last four decades. The question remains the same as ’85 or 2015: how is this still happening? Almost no one under 50 remembers any of their Haight-Ashbury coevals: Moby Grape, the Quicksilver Messenger Service, Country Joe and the Fish, or even Jefferson Airplane (apart from their two hits). In 2023, the “final” Dead and Company tour grossed $115 million and made them the summer’s hottest ticket apart from Beyoncé and Taylor Swift (whose combined ages equal Bob Weir’s). Last year’s 30-date Dead Forever run at the Sphere in Vegas grossed $131 million, good enough for the 10th most lucrative concert residency in history.
In March, I attended the first weekend of Sphere shows. All praise due to the fistful of LSD Tic-Tacs that helped me savor the mint-green cartoon bears dancing across the pyramids of Giza. Despite a valiant attempt, I never wrote about it, partially due to a bleak detour after the show, where I tried to catch Lil Wayne in a private equity casino called “Resort World.” But Wayne wasn’t supposed to go on until after 2, which meant that I was tripping in what felt like a hedge-fund-owned hospice in a Dubai super-mall.
The closest bar was Gatsby’s Cocktail Lounge, a hee-hawing fluorescent nightmare overrun with flashy pimps, depressive sex workers in fast fashion, and the type of desperate middle-aged ex-frat boys who still say “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” out loud. A human inferno that would have made Gatsby grateful for those bullets. I’m not sure if Wayne ever performed.
As for Dead Incorporated, the 3/21 Sphere show was one of the best that I’ve seen them do. A performance right up there with the New Year’s extravaganza at Chase Center in 2019 (where at the stroke of midnight, Bill Walton flew across the air in a biplane dressed as Father Time) Halloween at the Hollywood Bowl in 2021, anytime I ever saw them on MDMA in Boulder, and the last show at Oracle in 2023.
After the long goodbye in the Bay, I didn’t plan on writing anything anytime soon. I hit eight shows on that tour, which inspired 8,000 words on a band whose artistic peak arrived before I was born. Nor does that touch the longest article ever published on Noisey (RIP): 12,000 words about the Fare Thee Well shows in 2015. Even a decade ago, I was halfway convinced that it all needed to die. On the train to Soldier Field, one of my closest friends (a fan of the early records) gawked at the skull and roses deadenders with outright disdain. He screamed on the Red Line: “Why do these people think this is cool? Jerry Garcia is dead!” Since then, the scorekeeper has clipped Phil Lesh, the band’s lyricists Robert Hunter and John Barlow, and Walton, Father Time himself.
I misinterpreted the half-century celebration of ten summers ago. It initially seemed like a joyous wake. Bob Weir was pushing 70. Phil Lesh interrupted shows to plead for the merits of organ donation. One last fireworks explosion before the circus packed itself up and returned to the small but faithful network of solo projects, tribute acts, and Phish tours that had partially filled the void since Jerry departed. And when it was announced that John Mayer would play Jerry’s Ghost in something called Dead and Company, it felt like a farce. Pigpen spinning sideways in his unkempt grave.
After four years and fourteen trusted devotionals, I finally cast aside my skepticism. For all the caveats, I was back in the fold. I still can’t help but cackle at the tweet that popped up after the shows: “My weekend? Yeah man, it was awesome. I saw the 5th best member of the original Dead play a bunch of songs real slowly with the Your Body is a Wonderland dude.” But as with most things at the end of empire, enjoyment is about recalibrating your expectations. When the shadows are growing longer and darker by the day, minor miracles deserve to be cherished even more.
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In my time of dying, one thing that I’ll miss most about my misadventures on earth will be the beatific reassurance that I can only summon by driving down an empty highway on a sizzling desert afternoon in late summer. Windows unrolled to absorb the brutal purifying heat, volume cranked way up on an old Dead bootleg, probably something low down and dirty from the early ‘70s. Jerry’s faraway fallen angel lamentations of sheisty gamblers and vengeful sheriffs. An outlaw liturgy of felonious swings through the disintegrating ghost towns of the west. Each member of the band disappearing down their own baroque pathways only to reconnect in a familiar but surprising crescendo. What more do you need…
It’s here that I understand the Dead’s music as not just a weary affirmation of the old weird America, but as a native existentialism full of clear-eyed hallucinations and generational wisdom – one that directly contradicts our cracked screen dementia. A reminder that even if we’re rambling in the wrong direction, the long strange trip is never fully impossible.
It’s tempting and not entirely inaccurate to deride the Dead phenomenon as drug-enhanced escapism. And there are still enough foreclosed-brain spinners and nitrous zombies to understand why Tyler rapped “I don’t trust white people with dreadlocks.” But for the ecumenically devoted, it has always been nothing less than the creation of an alternative cosmology, a parallel universe where three hours of nightly therapy can offer a nepenthe from the soulless hustles and digital schizophrenia of our Stage Four world.
Phil Lesh famously sang, “this is all a dream we dreamed one afternoon long ago.” It happened about sixty years ago in that white Victorian in the Haight, which has since become a place of pilgrimage. As the counter-culture slowly morphed into a Silicon technocracy selling artificial portals and false panaceas, the Dead hold even more allure. This dream is a blissful respite, where you are surrounded by 60,000 fellow travelers seeking the answers to the ordinary mysteries at the core of life.
But the Dead’s original bassist inched his way into the other land last October. So his son Graham Lesh was tasked to croon “Box of Rain” on Friday night to pay tribute to the cerebral former trumpet player who insisted that Stockhausen and abstract jazz become integral parts of the Dead’s double helix. I couldn’t make the first night of the proceedings, but the consensus was that the initial show was middling. They needed to shake off six weeks of rust. And the bone marrow freeze of a San Francisco summer did few favors, especially in contrast to the climate-controlled vortex of the Sphere. I was told that I didn’t miss much, other than when opener Billy Strings joined the band for a second set “Wharf Rat,” which was unanimously declared “sick as hell.”
Shortly after this new incarnation became a multi-generational phenomenon, Weir spoke of an out-of-body vision where he glimpsed the younger members of Dead and Company, now entirely gray, sustaining the musical tradition long after his own demise. He was quoted saying: “there’s a chance now that they’ll be talking about us in years to come. So I find it incumbent on myself to think in those terms.” The Dead and Company gambit could never supplant the Old Testament, but it has functioned as one of the most successful apostolic projects in the history of popular music. To paraphrase Drakeo – which I think makes sense because of this photo – they have kept the truth alive.
Each GD60 opener acted as a different rightful heir to the Dead’s sprawling fusion. On Friday, the bluegrass prodigy Billy Strings reflected their roots in traditional mountain music. Saturday night was rolled out by the outlaw country anarchist Sturgill Simpson. The last night featured Trey Anastasio genuflecting at prog, funk, and double-barreled rock n’ roll.
The streets lining Golden Gate Park were filled with little kids hustling candy and soda, street pharmacists selling pre-rolls and shrooms laid out on folding tables, and portable bazaars of bootleg GD60 merch. If you squinted through the fog, you could almost become convinced that very little had changed.
With Outside Lands scheduled for the following weekend, the layout was basically identical to that festival, albeit with Dead-themed branding ($30 double tequila sodas at the Speedway Tavern). Security was lax. Levitational aides easy to smuggle. Though any substance within reason was fair game, I did hear about people getting their joints confiscated because they were selling legal weed in the “Grasslands” section of the festival. 2025 San Francisco.
All the usual suspects are here: hippie girls with beaded belts, long silk skirts and eye glitter, the 50-something software managers in Patagonia ,sipping Modelos and talking about Bitcoin policy in the UAE. Here came the bubble blowers, the ancient twirlin’ Merlins, the organic ex-hippies from the Emerald Triangle, the Bill Walton jersey-rockers, the bearded child psychiatrists so high that they look like they’re exploring the mountains of the moon,. A couple of mustachioed and slightly graying Mission dwellers wearing shirts like “Say Perhaps to Drugs,” “Let Trey Sing,” and “Sturgill For Mayer” t-shirts. Trucker hats that read “less talking more dancing” and “Althea Since ’79.” A 27-year old dressed up as Pigpen, who died in 1972 at 27.
Entering the park on Saturday night, the mood is hard to define. No trace of the high octane euphoria and stakes of Fare Thee Well or the final tour shows. Vegas is a different beast altogether: an adrenaline blast of pumped-in oxygen and outrageous color – the fulfillment of Owlsley’s most chimerical extra-sensory fantasias. Nor is this a regular Dead and Company show. Everyone silently knows that this could be the final anniversary with Weir and drummer Mickey Hart. The music may never stop, but something sacrosanct will be extinguished once the living originals join Jehovah’s favorite choir.
If Jerry was a messianic figure of gentle magic and unremitting light, Weir projects the Sinai authority of the Old Testament God – the last rampart protecting our society from descending into pagan free-fall. The baby-faced rhythm guitarist once nicknamed “The Kid” turns 78 this fall. His Lorax mustache and bushy white whiskers give him a wild and immortal look. Ace in the no-bullshit Stetson, straight out of a black and white Western, a dead-ringer for the last honorable sheriff in a depraved and sinister county. And in what must be the greatest heat check in music history, he is the only person to ever look cool in cutoff capris.
On Saturday, Weir kicks things off with Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour,” an intermittent setlist staple since ’66 – only one year after the Detroit soul inferno first laid it down at Stax Studios. The band segues into a smooth “Bertha” and a crisp “Jack Straw.” Weir exudes alluvial gravity; Mayer climbs Jacob’s ladder on lead guitar. Oteil couldn’t be cooler. If night one was the warm up, now, they’re gathering momentum as “Dear Mr. Fantasy” bleeds into a joyous sing-a-long of “Hey Jude.”
The first real peak of the night arrives at “Brown Eyed Woman.” Quietly brilliant keyboardist Jeff Chimenti plays a Jelly Roll Morton-at-the-OK Corral piano solo, and you can practically taste the red grenadine. This is what we’re waiting for: the moments where it unlocks a multi-dimensional wormhole. The flashing light on the horizon where the parallel lines converge.
Sturgill Simpson steals the end of the set with a plaintive pick-up truck rendition of “Morning Dew,” the silver-toned folk ballad of nuclear apocalypse. If this dirge originally belonged to Jerry, it’s become one of the most profound moments of a Dead and Company Show, courtesy of Weir’s death-shrouded interpretation. Here, Simpson sings it with an Appalachian twang and a steeliness that stops time for a few seconds, long enough.
At the set break, the big screens are filled with old clips of the band talking about how much the creative ferment of San Francisco meant to them – and Bob reminding interviewers that it all actually began in the guitar stores and Beatnik coffee houses of pre-acid Palo Alto. I watched the first half from an elevated patch of grass near the VIP. A big mistake. On a field that size, with a band this age, the power directly correlates to your proximity to the stage. The spells don’t work unless you get close enough.
After the interlude, they come out strong. The blue jean folk of “Uncle John’s Band” lopes into the prog-psych gyre of “Help/Slipknot/Franklin’s.” Graham Lesh re-appears for a liquid mercury “St. Stephen,” which splits open the cold San Francisco night.
“Days Between” is an otherworldly communion. Weir bellows the lyrics of Garcia and Hunter’s last collaboration, a liminal portent of Garcia’s death just two years later (“the days between/summer flies and August dies/and the world grows dark and mean). In Dead parlance, the Days Between is now known as the shiva stretching from Garcia’s August 1st birthday to his death on August 9th. And in this deep and fragile rendering, you become acutely aware of how easily a renaissance can birth a religion.
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There are no rules, but there are patterns. If the first show is decent and the second show is pretty good, the third figures to be one for the vault. These are true veterans, practitioners of the Kawhi Leonard school of load management. The train high on cocaine has long been retired to the station yard. We are in the era where Weir’s social media manager posts his Gymming routines on TikTok. He’s wise enough to know what he needs to keep in reserve.
On the third afternoon, the sky is sunny and cloudless for the first time all weekend. It’s one of those Bay Area days that you envision in a Kodachrome reel of second-hand memory. I bypass Shakedown because my friends have told me that it’s not particularly exceptional, especially compared to the psychedelic Agora built near the ballpark at the end of the 2023 ride.
Sunday’s opener, The Trey Anastasio Band, largely sticks to Phish originals. Backed by a horn section, the Phish lead singer trots out the classics: “Sand,” “Wolfman’s Brother,” “Ghost.” But it’s clear why they’re here. Before lighting into an elegiac cover of “Mission in the Rain,” Trey sums it all up: [Jerry] came along and here we are all these years later singing this song to express our love for him…wherever you are, standing up on your moon, it’s incomprehensible the level of joy you gave us.”
No room for false starts. The intensity is amplified. The crowd is way more packed than previous days. On the far left, the spinners barely have room to spin and “Let the Good Times Roll” starts so slow that it almost seems chopped and screwed. But a ”China Cat Sunflower/I Know You Rider” is a badlands ripper, complete with long and electric jam interludes.
Weir’s voice becomes a barbed wire prairie roar about wishing he was a catfish (or a head light on a night bound train). For those of us assembled amidst the modern mess of confused allegories and cryptic symbols, it’s hard not to believe that this might be as good as it gets these days – especially when Mayer delivers a searing solo that temporarily clears away the smokestack nausea of the world outside.
For now, there is “Shakedown Street,” a slippery funky wah-wah workout that goes hard enough to where a girl next to me shouts “turn up.” The set winds down with a rollicking but slightly too buttery “Deal.” Flashing playing cards flutter across the jumbotron screens.
To open the second set, Trey joins for “Scarlet Begonias/Fire on the Mountain.” You wouldn’t be getting this far in the article if you didn’t know what that means. For Anastasio, this was a moment of redemption for the lackluster GD50 reviews. For those with tattoos of the Stealie, this was like the diner scene faceoff between De Niro and Pacino in Heat. Mayer doing flashy Stevie Ray Vaughn blues licks and rock star poses; Trey almost stationary, save for the occasional knee dip, locked into a wide-eyed ecstatic astral jam, playing underneath the melody, acutely aware of the power of the notes that you don’t play. It was a long time coming and executed gracefully.
No one needs to evaluate Mickey’s rapping on “Fire on the Mountain.” No one needs to chomp about “Drums/Space” unless you are one of those people who lives for “Drums/Space.” A Dead show should always be a Dead show. They don’t give you what you want, they give you what you need. But who knows for how much longer. This entire enterprise was founded on borrowed time. No more tour dates are scheduled, and everyone knows that all of our tickets are all eventually punched. And this concept is illuminated clearly when you watch the 77-year old Weir sing “Standing On The Moon” like it was a goodbye to planet earth.
It’s nearing 10 p.m. Time for only a few more songs, and there is a tendency to read the setlists as tea leaves. On the first two nights, the evenings ended laying wreaths at the tomb, the audience fighting back tears while “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” and “Brokedown Palace” offered their elysian morphine drip. Tonight will be more of an affirmation.
There is no best Grateful Dead song, but if you selected “Sugar Magnolia” you wouldn’t be wrong. It’s one of the few Weir/Hunter originals and about as straightforward and pure of a love song as exists in the band’s catalogue. There is no death, heartbreak, or abstruse symbolism. It sounds like falling in love right at the first bloom of spring. That’s to say, it’ll sound perfect and timeless until all of our flowers are grown in a lab and all romance must be mediated through a licensed learning interface. And the band play it with enough warmth and devotion to counterbalance the gusts of wind slicing through the field.
If it was really over, they would probably light into “Attics of My Life” or “Ripple.’ But if there is still more on the horizon, “Touch of Grey” was the only fitting finale. The band’s lone Top 10 smash arrived in 1987, two decades deep into the odyssey. The song that introduced the Dead to MTV, and the hordes of frat boys and sorority girls that followed in the wake of the flood. No one would have guessed that the skeletons would still be dancing all these years later to the song that some believed killed the Grateful Dead.
If “Touch of Grey” began as a novelty hit, it has become an anthem old enough to gray at the temples. For all of its transparent catchiness, it shares the undercurrent of mortality that categorizes almost all of the music from a band with death in its name. And so all of us on the field suddenly retreat into the haze of memory, reciting the hook of the song as if it were a protective incantation. “I will get by, I will survive” as a catechism, a collective vow shouted alongside 60,000, a stubborn refusal to accept defeat.
Bob’s voice has begun to fray a bit. The words are not as crisply enunciated as they were a few years ago. But nonetheless, he remains one of the last of the best, carrying this entire tribe’s prayers for one more summer, or at least a few more Saturday nights. No one has any illusions that they are getting younger or their hair is getting darker. There is only one way this all ends. But for this moment, we are here, celebrating the wonder of remaining vertical for at least a little while longer, enjoying every hot dog.
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