Deadhead lovefest: Shakedown Street rings in 60th anniversary at Golden Gate Park
The legendary Shakedown Street derives its name from the Grateful Dead's 1978 song of the same name, and refers to an informal fan-run marketplace that quickly became integral to Deadhead culture. It officially landed in San Francisco on Friday, Aug. 1, allowing Deadheads to shop everything from tie-dye apparel and vintage Grateful Dead merchandise to original artwork and collectible posters as part of the city's 60th anniversary celebration for the Bay Area jam band.
Elijah Lewerenz, 20, traveled to San Francisco from Iowa with his fiancé for the weekend, and said that they were hanging out at Shakedown Street to soak in the atmosphere and take advantage of their jetlag.
"A lot of people are here because they don't have family to belong to, and this is one where we accept pretty much anybody," he said. "As long as you're nice and you're kindhearted, you can find a home with the Grateful Dead community.'
The stretch of road was buzzing with excitement and a seemingly endless flow of fans by 1 p.m. on Friday. Some roamed the stalls which lined one side of the road while others lounged in the grass on the opposite side. Outfits ranged from casual jeans and T-shirts to neon paint-splattered labcoats, metallic astronaut costumes and '70s-inspired ensembles.
Strangers were striking up conversation left and right, swapping stories about old Dead shows they attended and complimenting their looks. The friendlier-than-normal Golden Gate Park crowd almost made it feel like you had escaped the digital age and landed in the '70s.
Many seemed to be stopping by the outdoor marketplace on their way to Dead & Company's concert, evidenced by their clear bags. Others were trying to score last minute tickets by holding one finger in the air.
There was a particularly large crowd around Naga, the giant Burning Man sea serpent that was installed in the pond at the base of Rainbow Falls last week.
'I was not expecting anywhere near this amount of people,' James Freeborn, 36, said. 'Everyone's so friendly and excited. The excitement in the city has been hard to ignore.'
The San Francisco resident has tickets for all three of Dead & Company's shows, but was also one of nearly 100 vendors on Shakedown Street, selling items from his men's fashion brand, Freeborn Designs.
'It's always been a dream of mine to vend in the park,' the longtime Deadhead said, adding that he also has a retail space in the Castro. 'Especially for an event like this, it's really monumental,' he said.
A few dozen stalls down, Atlanta resident Justin Roberts was just as astounded by the turnout.
'It's really packed,' he said. 'This has been nonstop since it opened at 10:30 this morning.'
Roberts, 47, was representing his wood art business, Om Grown Art, though he plans to attend Dead & Company's show on Saturday, Aug. 2.
'It's super communal,' he said of the Deadhead community. 'It's very peaceful, people look out for each other.'
Shakedown Street is situated about a mile from Polo Field. The effort was helmed by clothing designer Molly Henderson in partnership with Jay and Liora Soladay and Sunshine Powers, owner of Love on Haight.
'The whole scene (and) the cultural phenomenon is responsible for a lot of things,' Portland resident Travis Maurer, 50, declared while wearing rainbow tie-dye pants and a black T-shirt featuring the Dead's iconic rainbow dancing bears in a spiral pattern. 'You see it everywhere from Burning Man to the country fair in Portland, Oregon.'
The Dead's San Francisco takeover continues through the weekend, with Dead &Company shows scheduled for Friday-Sunday, Aug. 1-3.
Grahame Lesh, the son of the Grateful Dead's late founding bassist Phil Lesh, is hosting his own concert series at Pier 48. With his jam band, Grahame Lesh & Friends, he kicked off the Heart of Town series on Thursday, July 31. It is scheduled to continue through Saturday, Aug. 2. Though Thursday's show was scheduled to begin at 8 p.m., the final two concerts are set for 11 p.m. to allow fans to travel from the Dead & Company shows.
'It's nostalgic,' Maurer said of the weekend's festivities. 'I feel like the Grateful Dead is one of those bands that kind of spans generations and culture.'
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To choose the day, someone approached one of the Haight's resident astrologers, Gavin Arthur, who'd been a socialist and New Ager since the 1930s, a friend of Robinson Jeffers and also of Edward Carpenter, thus linking him to Walt Whitman and revealing a deep connection to American bohemianism. Roots. He chose wonderfully well; mid-January days in San Francisco are often miserably wet and raw, but this one was glorious. Jay Thelin, whose appearance was relatively conventional — a low bar in his circle — went to the city's Recreation and Parks Department to get a permit and found a brand-new person in charge, assistant supervisor of recreation Peter Ashe, a bearded Haight Street sympathizer. The hippies got their papers. On Jan. 6, the Barb headlined the beginnings of the human be-in… a gathering of the tribes. It would serve as a love feast that included both Berkeley and the Haight in a 'new and strong harmony.' Naturally, the Oracle went all out. The cover was literally purple: an Indian sadhu with three eyes designed by Bowen from a photo by Casey Sonnabend, a painter and sometime drummer for Ann Halprin, with decorations by Stanley 'Mouse' Miller. Allen Cohen agreed with the Barb: 'We emphasized the unity of political and transcendental ideals, and we had a preference for non-violence.' The roots, Cohen said — 'Beats, LSD, anti-materialist, idealistic, anarchistic, surreal, Dionysian and transcendental' — were held in common. One of the most perceptive of the Berkeley radicals, Michael Rossman, felt that 'the Movement had expanded beyond all political bounds and recognition, and was on some verge — perhaps premature, but real enough — of carrying us through deep transformation into a new human culture.' On Jan. 12, Snyder, Bowen, Jerry Rubin of Berkeley's Vietnam Day Committee, Cohen, and Jay Thelin held a press conference at the Print Mint poster shop on Haight Street to spread the word. 'The days of fear and separation are over.…All segments of the youthful revolutionary community will participate.' The night before the Be-In, the poets met at Michael McClure's home on Downey Street in the Upper Haight to plan the program. The main point of contention seemed to be identifying Timothy Leary as a poet (seven minutes) or a prophet (half an hour). It concluded when Allen Ginsberg quipped, 'If he starts to preach, Lenore can always belly-dance.' The bulk of the day would be musical, but the recognition of the Haight's roots in Beat poetry was essential. Coupled with psychedelics and rock and roll, the day would also stand for the shamanic and environmental vision represented by both McClure's biologically based mysticism and Snyder's profound connections to Indigenous culture and Buddhism. 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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There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum. We were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.' At least one Berkeley politico, ED Denson, would write that 'nothing happened at the Be-In, and the opportunity to gather all of those people was wasted.' Few attendees would have agreed. By now, Allen Cohen noted, the Oracle was not a newspaper but a 'journal of arts and letters for the expanded consciousness — a tribal messenger from the inner to the outer world.' Most importantly, the Oracle had switched to a new printer, which allowed them, said Cohen, to 'use the presses like a paint brush' by splitting 'the ink fountain of a web into three compartments with metal dividers and wooden blocks,' with a different color ink in each compartment. Now Cohen really had his rainbows. 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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