Garcia's Chicago opens soon, a music venue and restaurant inspired by the Grateful Dead
Although Casa Garcia never materialized in the musician's lifetime, something very much like it is scheduled to open on March 21 at 1001 W. Washington Blvd. in the West Loop, in the building formerly occupied by the restaurant Wishbone.
Garcia's Chicago will be a 300-capacity concert venue and restaurant inspired by the legendary musician in its dining, décor, and musical entertainment. It's a collaboration between the Jerry Garcia family and Dayglo Presents, the live concert and media company headed by independent music veteran Peter Shapiro.
Shapiro's own immersion in all things Garcia happened in Chicago while attending his first Grateful Dead concert. Due to Deadheads' dead-ication to detailing online just about every concert the band ever played, one can pinpoint that concert. It was March 11, 1993, at Rosemont Horizon (now Allstate Arena), featuring Chicagoan and Word Jazz creator Ken Nordine. 'The show changed the trajectory of my life,' Shapiro said. 'It took me to another place. I had never seen anything like that.'
That summer, Shapiro, then an undergraduate at Northwestern University, followed the band with fellow Deadhead fans and made a film about the experience, 'And Miles To Go: On Tour with The Grateful Dead.' His film caught the attention of Larry Bloch, who owned a music venue in New York City called Wetlands Preserve. Wanting to retire, Bloch invited Shapiro to take over the place in 1996. That experience led Shapiro to operate other music venues, including the Capitol Theatre, one of Garcia's favorite places to perform, in Port Chester, New York. 'I've basically put on a show every night since 1996,' Shapiro said.
Transforming the Capitol Theatre's lobby bar into a general admission venue called Garcia's in 2013 was Shapiro's first foray into honoring the late musician with a themed music space. But he wanted to expand the concept along the lines of Jerry's vision for Casa Garcia — a seated entertainment site and restaurant with the intimacy of a jazz club, the countercultural character of a rock club, and the chill-out atmosphere of the jam scene.
Shapiro set his sights on Chicago for the first dedicated Garcia's. For anyone wondering why Chicago and not the Bay Area, where the Grateful Dead originated, he points to the important role Chicago played in the band's history. Garcia played his last gig with the band at Soldier Field in July 1995, a month before the guitarist and vocalist's death.
Twenty years later, Soldier Field hosted the last surviving members of the Dead performing together for a final time on a show Shapiro produced as the concert promoter, called Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years of the Grateful Dead. 'Jerry loved Chicago,' Shapiro said.
Not to say that it hasn't been, in Dead vernacular, 'a long strange trip' to this point. The ink was barely dry on the 2019 agreement Shapiro signed for the former Wishbone site when COVID closed the doors on live entertainment. Shapiro said he hung onto the building all this time because 'the space is very magical. There's nothing above it because it's also a parking lot. That's what helped it not become a multi-story hotel or condo. Because it supports no stories, it doesn't have columns. That means great sightlines to the stage.'
Tristam Steinberg, designer of Garcia's at the Capitol Theatre, also planned Garcia's Chicago, going for a comfortable, laidback blend of mid-century America, Haight-Asbury psychedelia, Spanish flourishes (a nod to Garcia's father's Spanish ancestry), and some New Orleans hoodoo. A colorful mural by artist Violet Oliphant shares space with Garcia memorabilia such as vintage music posters, records, rare family photos, and books.
Grateful Dead, at the end of the end
Lowder-Tascarella Hospitality Group is working with executive chef and Chicago native Ivy Carthen to craft a collection of culinary delights that reflect the adventuresome spirit of the venue's namesake. The menu will feature cuisine representing Northern California and Spain, as well as Garcia's favorite foods (yes, there will be milkshakes). Guests will enjoy Jerry-themed cocktails created by mixologist Chris Lowder.
'Garcia's Chicago is the setup of a classic jazz club,' Shapiro said, 'but we will do all types of music, including jazz, jam, New Orleans, soul, and funk.' Chicago music promoter Michael Berg of Deep Cut will handle the booking.
Just like a Grateful Dead jam session, improvisation and inspiration are driving final preparations leading up to the opening. 'Jerry's spirit of kindness and improvisational exploration musically is defining and leading us,' Shapiro said. 'But when it settles, the goal is for this to be one of the premier music venues in Chicago for many years to come. Chicago has so many great venues, but it doesn't quite have this.'
Music calendar at Garcia's Chicago
March 21-23: Grahame Lesh and Friends with Daniel Donato
March 30: Blind Boys of Alabama
April 4-5: LaMP
April 8: Dave & Dave of Trampled by Turtles
April 10-11: Keller Williams
April 12-13: Krasno Moore Project
April 19: Octave Cat
April 24: Intimate Evening with Grace Potter
April 25: The Grateful String Band
April 29: Joey Alexander
May 2: Sam Grisman Project
May 3: Dave Bruzza of Greensky Bluegrass
May 8: HARTLISS (Brendan Bayliss of Umphrey's McGee and Jennifer Hartswick of Trey Anastasio Band)
May 9: Brendan Bayliss and Jake Cinninger
May 10: Tom Hamilton
May 11: Artemis
May 15: Benmont Tench
May 16-17: BALTHVS
May 22: Cris Jacobs Band with Luther Dickinson
May 23: Frank Catalano Band
May 25: Hot Buttered Rum with Allie Krall
May 30-31: Holly Bowling
June 4: Drayton Farley
June 6-7: Matteo Mancuso
June 14: Phoffman of Greensky Bluegrass
June 19-21: Preservation Hall Jazz Band
June 25: Mikaela Davis
June 29: Town Mountain
July 18-20: Phish after-parties
July 26: The Travelin' McCourys
Aug. 31: JoJo Hermann
Sept. 5-6: George Porter Jr. and Runnin' Pardners
Sept. 12-13: God Street Wine
Sept. 18: Susto
Oct. 25: Dezron Douglas Quartet
Nov. 6-20: Dogs in a Pile
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Washington Post
19 hours ago
- Washington Post
Kennedy Center drops family that made Honors medallions for 47 years
For more than 47 years, a D.C.-area family has made the medals for the Kennedy Center Honors — gold-plated medallions outfitted with satin ribbons in rainbow colors and presented to luminaries including Al Pacino, Johnny Cash, Oprah Winfrey, Bruce Springsteen and the Grateful Dead.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Mickey Hart on Dead's 60th Anniversary Shows: ‘I Saw Jerry and Phil and Pigpen Hovering'
Following Dead & Company's epic weekend at San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, Mickey Hart shared a poignant reflection of the 60th anniversary shows. 'This weekend was 3 days of coming home and in those final moments of the weekend, it was truly profound,' he wrote on Instagram. 'I saw 60,000 people sparking light, in love, entrained big time and coming our way. Different than applause after a song, it sounded more like an ahhhhhh. All the peace and love in proximity generated a collective energy that was shared by all. Very rare stuff indeed.' More from Rolling Stone The World's Hardest Grateful Dead Quiz 'An Affirmation, Not a Protest': How the First Be-In Changed the World Listen to Dead & Company's San Francisco Concerts to Celebrate the Grateful Dead's 60th Anniversary Hart then took a moment to mention late members of the Dead, including Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh, plus lyricist Robert Hunter and longtime roadie Ramrod (Laurence Shurtliff). 'I saw Jerry and Phil and Pigpen hovering over the crowd smiling like Cheshire cats,' he said. 'I saw Hunter and Ramrod through the beauty of the fog and lights.' He added: 'In the final moments of the weekend standing right next to Bob [Weir] and feeling the raw emotion coming our way from our fans, I felt Bob's heartbeat, along with mine, and the deep connection we have with all of you. All the years combine. They melt into a dream.' The Dead & Company shows featured special guest appearances from Trey Anastasio ('Scarlet Begonias' and 'Fire on the Mountain'), Sturgill Simpson ('Morning Dew'), Grahame Lesh (several songs, including his dad's 'Box of Rain' on Friday), and Billy Strings ('Wharf Rat'). 'No matter how many shows we play as a band, I will always be a guest in this musical world, and I'll never lose sight of what is the great honor of my life,' John Mayer said, following the three-night run. Next up, Deadheads can look forward to seeing 1977's The Grateful Dead Movie in IMAX this month, while a 50th anniversary deluxe edition of Blues for Allah arrives in September. 'If you hang in there long enough, people start paying attention to you,' Weir told us earlier this year. 'I guess if I ever have grandkids, they'll probably take me a bit more seriously. But really, I'm the same guy. I still have to get out of bed in the morning, and my back's cranky. Nothing much has changed.' Best of Rolling Stone Sly and the Family Stone: 20 Essential Songs The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
‘An Affirmation, Not a Protest': How the First Be-In Changed the World
Author and historian Dennis McNally has written extensively on the Grateful Dead, including the 2002 authorized biography 'A Long Strange Trip.' In his new book, 'The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties,' McNally (who also served as the Dead's publicist in the 1980s and 1990s) looks at the larger cultural moment that the band was part of. This excerpt looks at the story of the first Be-In, which featured a performance by the Dead for an audience full of counterculture luminaries. At 1 p.m. on Jan. 14, 1967, Gary Snyder blew into a conch shell to begin the Gathering of the Tribes, the Great Human Be-In, fulfilling what Kenneth Rexroth and Robert Duncan had begun 25 years before. It was a moment — in all senses — of high optimism and joy, an essentially spiritual event to celebrate life and community, not at all Western in its purposelessness. More from Rolling Stone Mickey Hart on Dead's 60th Anniversary Shows: 'I Saw Jerry and Phil and Pigpen Hovering' Listen to Dead & Company's San Francisco Concerts to Celebrate the Grateful Dead's 60th Anniversary John Mayer Celebrates Grateful Dead's 60 Years With Emotional Post: 'Great Honor' It was also the beginning of the end of the Haight as a functional neighborhood. At least 30,000 people sat in front of Snyder on the Polo Field in Golden Gate Park, and what had been only modestly noticed to that point would now pass into legend via an astonishing media scrum. Although Michael Bowen was perhaps the first to talk it up, the notion of a large celebration was a complete natural for a neighborhood that was itself an ongoing celebration. The phrase 'Be-In' came from the USCO artist Steve Durkee (or, one authority wrote, Gerd Stern), who passed it to Richard Alpert, who shared it with Bowen. 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.' Ralph Gleason estimated the crowd at 20,000; other guesses ranged quite a bit higher. Every tribe that felt connected to the Haight had shown up, from Big Sur and Carmel in the south, to the gold country east of San Francisco, to Sonoma and much farther north. Persuaded by his students, the abbot of San Francisco Zen Center, Suzuki Roshi, attended and sat by the stage smiling and holding a flower. Dizzy Gillespie was there. Two unknown actors named Gerome Ragni and James Rado would channel the day into writing a play called Hair. The queen of groupies, a visiting Pamela Des Barres, was disturbed by the split ends of hair she saw around her but was able to see the obvious: 'Everyone was smiling and glad to be alive on the planet… knowing the world could be saved if we loved one another.' There was trouble with the power source at some point, and the Hells Angels guarded the line and felt useful. Quicksilver Messenger Service played, and 'Girl' Freiberg felt the same as Des Barres: 'This is just like a really big family.' The Grateful Dead kicked off their set, which would also include Charles Lloyd on flute, with 'Dancing in the Streets,' and Dizzy Gillespie pronounced them 'swinging.' A parachutist landed on the field. Sprawled out on blankets, people blew bubbles, shared oranges, lit incense, and gave one another small presents of bells and mirrors. They looked around astonished at the sheer number of people who were part of the gathered tribes. Ginsberg, who had whispered to Ferlinghetti when sitting on the stage, 'What if we're all wrong?' ended the day by urging everyone to practice kitchen yoga and clean up — and they did so, leaving the field immaculate. 'No fights. No drunks. No troubles,' reported Gleason. 'An affirmation, not a protest. A statement of life, not of death, and a promise of good, not evil.' 'My day was full,' said the Dead's co-manager Danny Rifkin, smiling. Though the police had essentially ignored the gathering, they managed to make up for their kindliness by gratuitously arresting around 100 youth on Haight Street for 'blocking traffic' as they drifted home. The hip response would be HALO, the Haight-Ashbury Legal Organization formed by Brian Rohan and Michael Stepanian, young members of Vincent Hallinan's law firm, who would get all charges dropped. McClure would declare that 'the Be-in was a blossom. It was a flower. It was out in the weather. It didn't have all of its petals. There were worms in the rose. It was perfect in its imperfections. It was what it was — and there had never been anything like it before.' Even a black-belt cynic like the writer Hunter Thompson responded to the day. 'There was a…sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. 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. In the wake of the Be-In, they led their first public circumambulation on Feb. 10, 1967. Snyder's poem, 'The Circumambulation of Mt. Tamalpais,' would become the centerpiece of his late-life masterwork, the fruit of 40 years of writing, Mountains and Rivers Without End. After taking tea with the artist Saburo Hasegawa at the American Academy of Asian Studies on April 8, 1956, he vowed to write a long and serious poem, and he completed it four decades later. It is a meditation on a classic Chinese landscape painting, something meant to be an invitation to mindfulness in Zen much as a thangka is in Tibetan Buddhism. The poem is a spiritual autobiography, a depiction of ecosystems, and a series of snapshots, all of which reflect one another. It might well be one of the most important artistic consequences of the Be-In and the Haight-Ashbury scene. Excerpted from the book 'The Last Great Dream' by Dennis McNally. Copyright © 2025 by Dennis McNally. Reprinted with Permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved. Best of Rolling Stone Sly and the Family Stone: 20 Essential Songs The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked Solve the daily Crossword
