Over the past nearly 36 years, I’ve seen the Grateful Dead and its various offshoots in concert more than 70 times. For seven years, beginning in the fall of 1987 at The Spectrum in Philadelphia, I journeyed up and down the East Coast from the Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland, to Madison Square Garden in New York City and Nassau Coliseum on Long Island. I’ve since seen them play in Chicago, Michigan, Pittsburgh, Dallas, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Jose, and even Mexico.
This weekend I’ll be joining more than 100,000 others in San Francisco for the final three shows of the final tour of the band’s most recent iteration, Dead & Company.
To the non-Deadheads among you, this three-decade-long devotion is likely difficult to fathom. How can a band formed when Lyndon Johnson sat in the Oval Office still captivate so many music fans, across generational, demographic and political divides?
A 2015 poll found that Republicans were just as likely as Democrats to count themselves as Deadheads
Every Dead fan has their own answer, of course. But what keeps me coming back is summed up best by the Dead’s late guitarist, Jerry Garcia: “Maybe we’re just one of the last adventures in America.”
The most important word in that quote, of course, is “adventure.” Garcia’s personal journey tragically ended in 1995 when he died of a heart attack at just 53. But even though Garcia held such a rarefied space in the imagination of Deadheads (and his fellow bandmates), the desire for adventure could not be so easily quashed.
For some, it transferred to the other jam bands, like Phish, that sought to capture the Dead’s musical aesthetic. For others, it was the series of Dead spin-offs with former band members — Furthur, Other Ones, Phil and Friends, and The Dead. Some like me couldn’t imagine seeing a Dead show without Garcia, until I was dragged back to see their 50th-anniversary shows in Chicago, and I forgot what I had been missing.
The spirit of adventure rekindled, I’ve traveled nearly three dozen times over the past eight years to see Dead & Company. For most of its shows, this band has featured three of the Dead’s former members: rhythm guitarist and lead singer Bob Weir, and drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzman (the latter is sitting out the current tour). They’ve been joined by pop heartthrob and lead guitarist John Mayer, which made little sense to long-time Dead fans until they listened to him play in a style that both honored Garcia’s distinct musical voice and expanded upon it.
That Mayer, who is trained in the blues and produces easily digestible pop music, fit so seamlessly into Garcia’s role speaks volumes about his talents, but also the Dead’s quintessentially American sound. The band has, since its earliest days, weaved together varied and seemingly discordant elements of American popular music: folk, rock, country, the blues, rockabilly, psychedelia, bluegrass, jazz, and even disco and funk have all been part of the Dead’s canon.
And their long, improvisational jams explored the musical possibilities inside even the most basic three chord songs (and for better or worse, created an entire musical genre: the jam band). Few other bands could take a classic tune like Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away,” the traditional folk song “I Know You Rider” or the Motown number “Dancin’ In the Street” and turn them into musical explorations. Their influence on two generations of musicians — from Bob Dylan and Elvis Costello to the National and Dawes — is too vast to calculate.
The band’s lyrics always spoke to a particular strain of American individualism — cowboys, mystics, toiling workers, reprobates, gamblers, loners, lovers, drunks, and, of course, railroad drivers were all at the core of the band’s songs. But they were also firmly planted in a particular element of American mythology: freedom, exploration, and the search for identity and discovery. As Garcia once said, the key thing in life is “the pursuit of happiness. That’s the basic, ultimate freedom.”
What’s more American than that?
Within the past year, the band not only won its first Grammy, but saw its best week of record sales since the 1980s.
It’s why for me, the greatest lyric in the Dead canon comes from “Truckin’” and it’s not “what a long strange trip it’s been.” Rather, it is “together, more or less in line.” No six words come close to capturing the ad hoc, make-it-up-as-we-go, live in the moment, yet still communal ethos of the band and its fans.
And while the Dead emerged out of the 60’s hippie counterculture, politics and social activism was never really their bag. The Dead were primarily about joy.
By allowing their audience to tape their concerts for free, they redefined the relationship between artists and fans, creating a community of followers that bypassed gender, generational divides and even political orientation. Indeed, for all of the Dead’s aforementioned hippie, counterculture past, a 2015 poll found that Republicans were just as likely as Democrats to count themselves as Deadheads. And within the past year, the band not only won its first Grammy, but saw its best week of record sales since the 1980s.
Their constant touring — and selling mail-order tickets directly to fans — created loyalty unlike any other in the history of popular music. When the Dead finally had their first top 10 single, “Touch of Grey” in 1987, they soon became one of the country’s highest grossing musical acts (and also the best sounding, because decades on the road helped them figure out how to produce the most compelling possible sound from cavernous outdoor musical venues). And their followers were as entrepreneurial as the band, selling band merchandise, artwork, the world’s best-grilled cheese sandwiches and “other products” at their shows. To walk outside a Dead & Company show in 2023 is to see dozens, if not hundreds, of vendors selling Dead-related products at the affectionately named “Shakedown Street” (the band’s brief foray into disco and one of their funkiest jams). The scene and the feeling of community are for many fans what ties them to the Dead and the jamband subculture that the band helped launch. At a recent congressional hearing, Democratic Rep. Wiley Nickel of North Carolina, 47, asked Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, a Donald Trump appointee, about his attendance at a June Dead & Company show in Virginia. Powell, 70, happily admitted to being a fan of the Dead for more than 50 years, to which Nickel responded that he has found one universal truth about the band and its fans: “I like people who like the Grateful Dead.” I couldn’t agree more. Even if I traveled solo to a show I always knew that I could find at least one kindred soul. But for me at least musical adventure has always been at the core of the Dead’s appeal. It would be a stretch to argue that the Dead always put on a great concert. When you play 2,300 concerts over 30 years you are going to have a few off nights. In the 90s, when I predominantly saw them, there were as many bad shows as good ones. But you never quite knew what you were going to get — and that’s made it unique and special. No set list was ever the same, no song was played the exact same way and the band relied on a repertoire of literally hundreds of songs. Maybe you’d get a breakout tune that they rarely played. Maybe you’d hear a song you’d seen in concert plenty of times but simply a better and more energetic version. Maybe there’d be pure music magic on stage, a jam so rich and layered that it would take you to a place you’d never been before. Or maybe you’d hear a lame tune that led you out to the concession stand to get a drink. It was a crap shoot, but not knowing — and the possibility of hearing something that blew my mind — kept me coming back. Because when the band was on, Jerry was in a good mood, Phil Lesh, the band’s bass player, was dropping bombs, and the crowd was roaring … nothing was better. A few years after Garcia died, I was with some friends and someone asked if you could travel in time and see any band in concert who would it be. Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones or Aretha Franklin in their primes would be obvious picks. Me, I said right after the lights went down and the Dead ambled on stage to tune-up. Why? Because at that moment, all the possibilities of a Dead show awaited us. Today, when I see a concert, even a band I love, I have a pretty good sense of exactly what I’m going to get. With the Dead, I never knew — and that’s still true today. In an era of lowest common denominator pop culture and highly choreographed musical experiences, where else in America today can you get that opportunity? It’s why I’ll be in San Francisco this weekend with my fellow Deadheads — continuing the adventure. And it’s why the music of the Dead will endure.
Michael A. Cohen is a political writer and a fellow with the Eurasia Group Foundation. 
