Dead & Company Keeps the Dead Community Alive With Golden Gate Park 60th Anniversary Concerts

Perhaps Daniel Lurie put it best. “What you have all brought to our city over the last week, and here, tonight,” started the San Francisco mayor to tens of thousands of Deadheads as he introduced Dead & Company on Saturday night in Golden Gate Park, “you’ve brought joy, you’ve brought energy, you’ve brought love – it’s just what San Francisco needed.”

Six decades since the Grateful Dead’s debut, Deadheads have become as much a part of the City by The Bay’s fabric as sourdough bread and cable cars. But Dead & Company’s three-night Golden Gate Park run celebrating 60 years of Grateful Dead music wasn’t just what San Francisco needed – it was a necessary and overdue opportunity for Deadheads to congregate in the city with which the Dead is forever linked. Because while Dead & Company’s 48 shows at Las Vegas’ Sphere over the last year and change have been a technological marvel – not to mention big business, with close to $200 million grossed, according to Billboard Boxscore – they’ve still deviated from the large-scale, often outdoors shows that have defined the Dead and its various offshoots for decades.

“There’s nothing like a Grateful Dead show,” one popular Deadhead refrain, reprinted on official event merch for these shows, goes – and that proved particularly true in Golden Gate Park this weekend. Plenty has changed since the Dead, living in the nearby Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in the late ‘60s, staged frequent pop-up shows throughout the park; back then, they didn’t have delay towers or massive video screens, much less Grasslands, the designated cannabis marketplace and consumption area at this weekend’s Another Planet Entertainment-produced event. But even so, the three-show run by Dead & Company – the performing outfit featuring Grateful Dead founding members Bobby Weir and Mickey Hart, joined by singer-guitarist John Mayer, bassist Oteil Burbridge, keyboardist Jeff Chimenti and drummer Jay Lane – felt like a cosmic realignment, an affirmation of the continued significance of the Dead’s roots to Weir, Hart and the broader Grateful Dead tribe.

At Golden Gate Park, that scene swelled. For most of its touring career since its 2015 formation, Dead & Company frequented stadiums, amphitheaters and arenas, which in turn relegated Shakedown Street, the traveling marketplace of merchants that follows the Dead from city to city, to those facilities’ soulless parking lots. In San Francisco, Shakedown was given prime real estate on the John F. Kennedy Promenade that runs through Golden Gate Park, with fans taking in the bazaar’s sights and sounds as they strolled the forest-lined road en route to the event gates.

Inside, the multi-generational crowd united old-timers, who may well have been at some of the Dead’s first Golden Gate Park gigs decades ago with kids and young adults catching live Grateful Dead music for the first time. And promoter Another Planet Entertainment, which will stage its Outside Lands festival at the same site Aug. 8-10, smartly integrated the Dead into every aspect of its infrastructure – from devoted space for Participation Row, the assortment of non-profits and charitable organizations it hosts at many of its shows, to selling Garcia Hand Picked, the cannabis line that bears Jerry Garcia’s name, and Dogfish Head’s new Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale (it always seemed to be out).

(For the second straight year, Outside Lands has secured permits for shows surrounding Outside Lands on the calendar that use its infrastructure; Zach Bryan plays Aug. 15, and considering the level of care the promoter exhibited with Dead & Company, it seems likely these APE-promoted Golden Gate Park concerts will continue.)

The weekend’s billing also reflected the Dead’s broad and ever-widening influence. While the Dead often played with openers, even late in its career, Dead & Company has generally eschewed support acts – but at Golden Gate Park, Billy Strings, Sturgill Simpson (under his Johnny Blue Skies moniker) and Trey Anastasio Band kicked off the music on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, respectively. Each reflected different threads of the Dead’s eclectic musical tapestry: Strings, the bluegrass, folk and psychedelic music that defined Garcia in the ‘60s; Simpson, the ripping country-rock that was became the Dead’s bread and butter in the ‘70s; and with Phish frontman Trey Anastasio, the loose, soulful side-project energy of the Jerry Garcia Band.

Each opener brought a no-nonsense attitude to his set – “We got 75 minutes, I’m not gonna waste another second of it talking,” Simpson told the audience as he took the stage on Saturday – efficiently running through what amounted to greatest-hits sets from their respective catalogs. And plenty of the Deadheads in attendance seemed to fall in love with each in real-time, from Strings busting out the Garcia-favored traditional tune “Shady Grove” to Simpson weaving in snippets of Rage Against the Machine’s “Bulls on Parade” and Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” during his full-throttle set.

Anastasio provided the most poignant moment during the weekend’s opening sets. “I saw my first Dead show in 1981 at the New Haven Coliseum,” Anastasio said, “and fell in love with all of it. But I want to, at this moment, do a particularly heartfelt shoutout to Mr. Jerry Garcia, who we’re all here to celebrate. I look out at this crowd, and this guy came along, and here we all are all these years later.

“Wherever you are, standing up on your moon or whatever, Jerry, thank you for everything you gave us — it’s incomprehensible, the amount of joy,” Anastasio continued, before launching into a sublime and affecting rendition of “Mission in the Rain,” a song off Garcia’s third solo album and a Jerry Garcia Band staple.

But while the openers generated tremendous interest – despite music starting in the 4:00 p.m. hour each day, the grounds were packed when Strings, Sturgill and Anastasio began playing – it paled in comparison to the energy when Dead & Company took the stage. At first, the band didn’t quite reciprocate, as it shook off its non-Sphere-show cobwebs and adjusted to an outdoor gig with a larger audience and a drastically different audio-visual format. But by the time it closed its first set Friday with a rollicking version of Johnny Cash’s “Big River” and the fan favorite “Althea,” it had started to lock in; in the second set, “Playing in the Band” melted into a deep, dense jam that verged on jazz fusion as it segued into the mystical prog of Weir’s “Estimated Prophet.”

Grahame Lesh — the son of late Grateful Dead founding bassist Phil Lesh, who died in 2024 — joined Dead & Company on Mission Control, a classic Phil bass, for “Playing,” and returned to the stage with the band on both Saturday and Sunday for songs where his father played a particularly significant role. (Grahame also hosted the “Heart of Town” after-shows at San Francisco’s Pier 48 over the weekend, which featured a who’s who of esteemed players from the jam-band world.) The representation of Lesh made the absence of Grateful Dead founding member Bill Kreutzmann – who co-founded Dead & Company and played with it until 2022, and who, other than Weir and Hart, is the only surviving founding member of the Dead – that much more noticeable; “What an incredible gift that we can still all come together, even if we can’t all be there in person, for this special anniversary,” Kreutzmann wrote in a social media post thanking Deadheads on Monday.

With its wide-ranging impact, the Dead could have had any number of guests perform with it in Golden Gate Park. But by only inviting Lesh, and each of the show’s openers, to the stage, it acted with an admirable selectiveness and intentionality that elevated these sit-ins beyond the slapdash affairs such appearances at concerts often become. Each opener’s appearance with Dead & Company – Strings for Garcia’s stirring ballad “Wharf Rat,” Simpson for the apocalyptic folk of “Morning Dew,” Anastasio for the soaring pairing of “Scarlet Begonias” and “Fire on the Mountain” – was a standout moment from its respective show, and a bucket-list-level happening for the jam-band fans in attendance. Strings, who normally shreds on acoustic guitar, switched to electric for a towering “Wharf Rat” performance, while Simpson pushed “Morning Dew” in subtly exploratory directions – and elicited some of Weir’s sharpest rhythm guitar of the weekend.

And Anastasio, who filled Garcia’s lead guitar role when Weir, Hart, Lesh and Kreutzmann played five 50th anniversary shows together in 2015, helped Dead & Company take “Scarlet” > “Fire” to new heights to begin the band’s second set on the run’s final night. The Phish frontman’s improvisation pushed Mayer’s own soloing in unusual ways for a sterling rendition of the classic combo that honored its history while building on it.

Because while Dead & Company is the most popular purveyor of Grateful Dead music today, it’s more than (as some detractors like to call it) a “Grateful Dead cover band.” Mayer can deliver rousing renditions of classic Dead rockers like “Bertha” and “Deal” with one hand behind his back, but he’s at his best – often feeding off the keyboardist, Chimenti – when the band taps into the types of jazzy, psychedelic pockets that it did on “Playing,” or on Saturday’s second-set opening sequence of “Uncle John’s Band,” “Help On The Way,” “Slipknot!” and “Franklin’s Tower.” Meanwhile, Hart’s immersive experiments for the nightly “Drums” > “Space” late-show interlude continue to evolve, and Weir consistently brings a wizened worldliness to late-era Garcia ballads like “Standing on the Moon.”

But at this point, how Dead & Company plays isn’t what makes a weekend like this August’s in Golden Gate Park possible – it’s the strength of the Dead’s unparalleled songbook, and the passion of the Deadhead community.

As far as what any of this means for the future of Weir and Hart, or the future of Dead & Company, or the future of the Grateful Dead’s music in general, the question remains open. In 2023, Dead & Company embarked on its final tour, and has accordingly stayed off the road, only playing Sphere and these three Golden Gate Park shows. But the appetite for live Grateful Dead music is seemingly as high as it has ever been – just ask any of the fans at Golden Gate Park who were attending their first Dead show this weekend. The 77-year-old Weir seems uninterested in hanging it up – “What great musician ever retires?” he posed to Billboard in December – and even when the day eventually arrives where he’s off the road, there’s a rising cadre of Gen X and Millennial musicians, among them Mayer, Simpson and Strings, who are prepared to carry the music forward, should they want to.

But this weekend, Weir reiterated to fans that they can still expect plenty more from him. During a set break on Saturday, pre-recorded videos played, featuring interview clips of Weir, Hart, Kreutzmann, Lesh and Garcia talking about the Dead’s origins, community and influence. Weir, sitting in a lotus pose with a guitar perched next to him, explained his wishes for this monumental 60th anniversary: “What do I hope for the 60th? Add another 10 years. I got nothing better to do.”

Legions of Deadheads feel exactly the same way.