Phil Lesh's son to host S.F. concert series to honor Grateful Dead's 60th anniversary
The three-night concert series called the Heart of Town is set to run July 31-Aug. 2 in honor of the influential jam band founded in the Bay Area in the 1960s. Fronted by Jerry Garcia, who died in 1995, the band was known for its improvisational style and became emblematic of the era's counterculture movement.
Organized by musical group Grahame Lesh & Friends, the event boasts special guests such as Taylor and Griffin Goldsmith of the Los Angeles folk rock band Dawes, Nashville country singer Daniel Donato, Salinas singer-songwriter Jackie Greene and longtime member of the Jerry Garcia Band, Melvin Seals.
Ticket presales begin at 10 a.m. Friday, June 27, with general sales starting at 10 a.m. on Monday, June 30.
Three-day and single-day passes will be available, as well as a Terrapin Station Experience VIP pass that includes a dedicated entry lane, viewing area, merchandise and more.
'I'm so thrilled to be among the countless Deadheads flocking to beautiful San Francisco to celebrate 60 years of the Grateful Dead,' Lesh said in a statement. 'I know that San Francisco will be filled with that music all weekend (and) I'm honored to contribute to that with all of my friends.'
The series will overlap with Dead & Company's sold-out three-show run at the Golden Gate Park Polo Fields, scheduled for Aug. 1-3. Those concerts will feature surviving Dead members, guitarist Bob Weir and drummer Mickey Hart, playing alongside John Mayer, Jeff Chimenti and other musicians of the spinoff band.
This will be the first local gig for Dead & Company since Lesh died in October 2024.
The Heart of Town's first show kicks off at 8 p.m., but subsequent concerts that coincide with Dead & Company's event will start at 11 p.m. to allow Deadheads coming from Golden Gate Park enough time to travel across town to Pier 48.
Other artists slated to appear at the Heart of Town shows include Louisville jazz musician John Medeski, Santa Ana saxophonist Karl Denson and New York indie rock singer Karina Rykman.
The event series is being presented by the San Francisco Giants and Relix Media Group, and produced by Terrapin Station Entertainment and Dayglo Presents.
'The Grateful Dead were birthed in San Francisco 60 years ago, and The Heart of Town is about honoring that legacy — bringing people together through music and the spirit of the city where it all began,' Dayglo Presents Founder Peter Shapiro said in a statement. 'Having Grahame leading the charge with so many incredible musicians makes it magic — it's the next generation carrying the torch and keeping the music alive.'
A portion of proceeds will support the Rex Foundation, a nonprofit established in 1983 by 'members of the Grateful Dead and friends' to provide community support to those in the arts, sciences and education.
This summer's Grateful Dead festivities commemorate the band's 1965 debut as the Warlocks.
Deadheads outside of the Bay Area can also celebrate the band's legacy in theaters, once the newly-announced remaster of the 'The Grateful Dead Movie' hits the big screen. The band's 1977 concert film is scheduled to make its IMAX debut on Aug. 13, with a wide release set for the following day.
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Rumors of a Satanic curse on the event skittered around the Haight, so early on the morning of the 14th, Ginsberg, Snyder, and Alan Watts conducted a pradakshina, a Buddhist purification rite. The poets — Lawrence Ferlinghetti, McClure, Lenore Kandel, Ginsberg, Snyder — kicked off the day with readings, Kandel realizing that the day was about genuine community, about trust, because she was surrounded with people 'that belonged to me and I belonged to them.' Rubin raged against the war. Leary burbled his advertising slogan. The Diggers passed out thousands of hits of Owsley Stanley's finest and served turkey sandwiches, which Stanley had also contributed. Strangely, the SFPD had apparently chosen to ignore the Chronicle, their entire presence that day consisting of two mounted policemen observing from a nearby hill. When a lady looking for a missing child approached them, they suggested she go to the stage and call for assistance: 'We can't go down there, lady, they're smoking pot.' 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In something approaching formal journalism, the Oracle in February gathered Timothy Leary, Gary Snyder, Alan Watts, and Allen Ginsberg at Watts's home on the Sausalito waterfront, the SS Vallejo, for what was intended as a serious conversation about where the burgeoning alternative society might go. On the whole, the conversation came down to a sane, sober, and practical Snyder challenging Leary's airy platitudes, which began and effectively ended with 'turn on, tune in, drop out.' A few years later, Snyder would offer the following quote to a speaker's bureau representing him: 'As poet I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the late Paleolithic: the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold history and wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.' Later still, in Earth House Hold, he summed up his stance as a faith in 'the ancient shamanistic-yogic-gnostic-socioeconomic view, that mankind's other is Nature and Nature should be tenderly respected; that man's life and destiny is growth and enlightenment in self-disciplined freedom; that the divine has been made flesh and that flesh is divine; that we not only should but do love one another.' Such views, suppressed by church and state, now seem 'almost biologically essential to the survival of humanity.' Peering through a roseate fog, Leary predicted that, through LSD, groups of youth would 'open one of those doors' and see 'the garden of Eden, which is this planet,' thus changing their consciousness. Snyder replied, 'But that garden of Eden is full of old rubber tires and tin cans right now, you know?' What was important, he argued, was that 'people learn the techniques which have been forgotten; that they learn new structures and new techniques. Like, you just can't go out and grow vegetables, man. You've got to learn how to do it.' If our culture was to change its relationship to the natural world, it had, he offered, a superb example at hand in Native American culture. Since the central problem of the exploitive modern capitalist society was consumption, Snyder also suggested group marriage as a way to lessen demand. His life had been an ongoing example of 'cutting down on your desires and cutting down on your needs to an absolute minimum, and it also meant don't be a bit fussy about how you work or what you do for a living.' Leary suggested that we 'dig a hole in the asphalt and plant a seed…do it on the highway so they then fix it and when they do we're getting to them. There'll be pictures in the paper' — publicity apparently being the solution to everything. He concluded, 'All right. We'll change the slogan. I'm competing with Marshall McLuhan. Everything I say is just a probe.' About the same time as the conversation, Snyder and Ginsberg created and carried out a ritual that they offered as a way of both showing gratitude to the planet and clarifying one's own mind — namely, a circumambulation of Mount Tamalpais, the guardian mountain that looks down on the San Francisco Bay Area. The legend of Tamalpais had been romanticized and appropriated by Anglos as 'the sleeping Indian maiden,' most notably in a 1921 Mountain Play (there is an amphitheater near the summit that hosts an annual play) called Tamalpa. The Beat response reclaimed the mountain as sacred. In 1965, Snyder and his friend Philip Whalen had designed a hike in the Japanese mountain monk (yamabushi) tradition that followed a route with stations where the pilgrims stopped to chant from various Zen and Tibetan Buddhist traditions, something not only Buddhist but shamanic. 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