Grateful Dead live for the last time

The hugely influential rockers will play their last gig on Sunday, 50 years after they formed and 20 years after frontman Jerry Garcia died, says Richard Fitzpatrick

WHEN Jerry Garcia died on August 9, 1995, the flagpole at city hall in San Francisco carried a tie-dyed Grateful Dead flag at half-mast. Not every musician gets such civic acknowledgement, but Garcia and his Grateful Dead band ain’t ordinary musicians. They’ve left a huge footprint on music and on North American culture, since springing from San Francisco’s hippie neighbourhood, Haight-Ashbury, 50 years ago.

The band’s surviving members will play their final live concert at Chicago’s Soldier Field on Sunday night, 20 years after Garcia’s last gig with them at the same venue. It will be screened in Irish cinemas. Phish’s singer and guitarist, Trey Anastasio, will step in for Garcia. The band are also joined by Bruce Hornsby, who began playing live with them in 1988, and Jeff Cheminti, a member of post-Dead bands, The Dead, and Further.

“Not coming from a Grateful Dead background myself, I have certainly come to realise the immense impact they have had on American culture, and worldwide,” says Cheminti. “I have met folks who have come from all over to see shows. ‘Deadheads’ are everywhere and in all facets of life. It’s hard to fathom the amount of people, and lives, they have touched in a special way.”

Keep your eyes open in the Windy City this week.
We are Everywhere! http://t.co/w7fQxYwTyD #GratefulDead #GD50 pic.twitter.com/rLTzKvQFtj

— Grateful Dead (@GratefulDead) July 2, 2015

When the band got together in 1965, they fused an unusual mix of skills. Banjo-playing Garcia’s influences were bluegrass; Phil Lesh was classically trained and into avant-garde; the organist, Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan, was a blues singer, and they had two drummers.

They added a lot of LSD into the juice, too, and notably served as house band for Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters. According to a Mojo magazine interview with Lesh, earlier this year, acid provided useful fuel for the fire: “We found that while high we were able to go very far out musically, but still come back to some kind of recognisable space or sound structure. I knew instantly that this combination — acid and music — was the tool I’d been looking for.”

A co-operative spirit guided the band. In the early days, band members, roadies and administrative staff were all paid a weekly $25 wage, as part of “a partnership of equals, of companions in an odyssey.” For meetings with the Warner Brothers Records executive, Joe Smith, the band’s negotiating team often numbered 60 people, including moms, babies and a dog or two.

They made disastrous business decisions and nearly bankrupted themselves, but it was their live shows, and a revolutionary marketing model for the 1970s, which sustained them. Instead of worrying about studio albums, which they found unsatisfactory for harnessing the magic of their freewheeling experimental style, including songs like the 25-minute ‘Dark Star’, they embraced epic, stadium shows and focused on selling concert tickets and merchandise, including Grateful Dead-branded comics, golf-head covers and sandals.

Share a smile & a pic! We will be @ Adler Planetarium as well as The Field Museum -
4pm CDT!#GDtruckin #gratefuldead pic.twitter.com/7g3NbMaMEl

— Grateful Dead (@GratefulDead) July 1, 2015

At their gigs, audience members got to noodle-dance for three and four hours to long guitar riffs, and a special area was set aside for fans to tape the shows, which were later bootlegged for their growing mailing list of fans. It’s a model that the likes of U2, with their Apple stunt, and companies like Facebook, have been emulating since.

Three years after Garcia died of a heart attack, while in a drug treatment centre, the band made the The Guinness Book of Records because it had played more rock concerts to more people, approximately 25m, than any other act. It will be worth tuning into their last one.

Later in the year, Martin Scorsese will release a documentary about the band. The legend of Grateful Dead will live on, although Cheminti is careful to clear up one misconception.

“I think them being federal agents/and/or spies is the biggest myth out there about the band,” he said.

‘Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years of Grateful Dead’ will be screened via satellite in selected Irish cinemas, including Cork’s Omniplex, Monday, July 6. For more information, visit: www.cinemalive.com.