Latest news with #GratefulDead
San Francisco Chronicle
5 hours ago
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Dead & Company's drummer is playing two very different S.F. shows — here's why
Jay Lane, the veteran Bay Area drummer known for his deep local roots and genre-spanning versatility, is preparing for two vastly different performances in San Francisco — one in front of tens of thousands of devoted Deadheads at Golden Gate Park, the other a laid-back hometown set with his own band at Thrive City. This weekend, he returns to the spotlight as Dead & Company — featuring original Grateful Dead members Bob Weir and Mickey Hart, alongside John Mayer, Oteil Burbridge, Jeff Chimenti and Lane — headlines a three-night run at the Polo Field, Friday to Sunday, Aug. 1-3. Each show is expected to draw around 60,000 fans, making it one of the largest gatherings in the park since Outside Lands and last year's concert featuring System of a Down. But Lane is equally focused on something smaller. On Aug. 8, he'll lead his group, Jay Lane & the Mayhem, at Thrive City's Harmonic Jam, a free community concert outside Chase Center. 'It's just a few close friends of mine playing some music together,' Lane said. 'It's going to be free, and hopefully we'll just get them dancing. That's my mission.' He's eager to do more shows in San Francisco, where his career began in the early 1980s, playing in groups like the Uptones and the Freaky Executives. 'It'd be nice to play around here more,' he said. 'Lord knows we need more local people playing out.' Although Lane is now firmly embedded in the Grateful Dead orbit, he didn't grow up a fan. 'I wasn't really a Deadhead,' he said. 'I think that's why I got the gig with Bob Weir. He wanted people that didn't have their minds made up about how it was supposed to go. He wanted some fresh takes.' Lane's connection to Dead & Company traces back to his work with Weir's band RatDog in the early '90s. At the time, he admits he knew little about the Dead's expansive catalog. 'I knew 'Touch of Grey,' but that was about it,' he said. 'And then I started listening and I was like, oh man, this goes deep.' His appreciation for the music grew especially after discovering recordings from the band's famed Europe '72 tour. 'They were writing music together in real time,' Lane said. 'It wasn't about solos — it was like collective, improvised composition. That opened me up.' Outside the Dead universe, Lane's résumé spans a who's who of Bay Area acts — from Alphabet Soup and the Charlie Hunter Trio to Les Claypool's bands Sausage and Primus. That last connection resurfaced recently when Primus launched a global search for a new drummer. Lane, who was part of the band's early lineup, said he wasn't expecting a call from Claypool. 'Les knew better than to ask me,' Lane said. 'We'd been down that road before when the schedules conflicted between the two worlds. But he spoke pretty highly of me during the auditions. He kept mentioning my name as some sort of bar to meet — which is very humbling.' Still, Lane admits that the energy surrounding the Grateful Dead community is unlike anything else. 'It's wild,' he said. Asked if the Golden Gate Park shows are truly a farewell for Dead & Company, Lane offered a measured response. 'I wouldn't know, man,' he said. 'That might be it for this year. But you know, if they call, I'll pick up.' As for the Thrive City gig, Lane said it provides a refreshing change of pace. 'Last time, there was like 20 people there,' he said. But with anticipation high during the Dead's 60th anniversary summer, that number may rise dramatically. Wherever he ends up playing, Lane says he's just grateful to keep moving. 'Here's hoping for some more gigs,' he said. 'It sure is fun.'
San Francisco Chronicle
7 hours ago
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Rare photos of Grateful Dead in S.F. by Jim Marshall showcased in new book
When an up-and-coming Peninsula band recently renamed the Grateful Dead moved to San Francisco in 1966, Jim Marshall was already an established national rock 'n' roll photographer whose fame exceeded theirs. That gave him immediate access to the band in their big Victorian at 710 Ashbury St. They welcomed him to drop by any time, with the two Leica cameras he wore around his neck, one loaded with Kodachrome color slides and the other black-and-white. He wound up making some 10,000 pictures of the band, at home and in concert in their home city — which often meant a stage quickly put up in Golden Gate Park or the connecting Panhandle. Marshall's images of the musicians at the park, in sunglasses or squinting in the daylight, are featured more than any other single venue in ' The Grateful Dead by Jim Marshall: Photos and Stories from the Formative Years, 1966–1977.' The coffee table issue, which weighs five pounds and costs $50, will be released nationally Aug. 5 by Chronicle Books, an independent publishing house. But bookstores Bay Area-wide are offering it early by special arrangement to coincide with the 60th anniversary weekend of shows by Dead & Company at the Polo Field in Golden Gate Park. The band's lead guitarist, Grammy-winning musician and songwriter John Mayer, wrote the afterword, having given Marshall full access to cover his solo career. The cover lettering is by Fez Moreno, who also designs concert posters for Dead & Company. 'This book is a tribute to the GratefuI Dead, Jim Marshall and San Francisco, in that order,' said Amelia Davis, who spent 13 years as Marshall's assistant, up until his death in 2010. 'It tells you a visual story about the relationship of Jim with his subjects in their environment, and documents an era of access that we are never going to see again.' Marshall was married and divorced twice but never had any children. He left his entire archive to Davis to reward her for loyalty and patience with a personality that was as complex and difficult as the rock stars he depicted. The book features some 265 pictures plus proof sheets that bring it to 900 images total, including candids and performance shots that were never printed and have never been seen. The totality, 288 pages with a psychedelic design, is an indicator that Marshall spent more time with the Dead than with any of the other subjects who gave him preferential treatment, including the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and the Jefferson Airplane, which was the biggest San Francisco band of that era. 'Jim used to say he never ate or drank anything when he was with the Grateful Dead, because they notoriously dosed everything with acid, and that wasn't his thing' said Davis. 'He considered the band to be family, and we want the readers to feel like family when they go through the book.' The book idea came from Oakland singer-songwriter and Grateful Dead authority David Gans, who pitched it to Davis as a 60th anniversary tribute long before the series of concerts in Golden Gate Park was announced. Marshall left behind a catalog of 3-by-5 notecards referencing every musical act and event he photographed. These corresponded to proof sheets and negatives, but they were not cross-referenced, so Davis had to search through the cards of every other act the band was known to play with and every venue it played at. There was no notecard for Golden Gate Park, but there were notecards for the Artists Liberation Front Free Fair in the Panhandle on Oct. 16, 1966, and the Human Be-In of Jan. 14, 1967, at the Polo Field, the same venue as the Dead & Company shows. There was also a notecard for an impromptu concert after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in 1968. Marshall got lots of shots of band members arguing with San Francisco police — and that's all he got, because that concert never happened due to a lack of permits. Marshall, who was known to be persuasive, somehow managed to get the members of the five major San Francisco bands — the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother & the Holding Company, Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Charlatans — to pose for a group photo in the Panhandle, as if they were a sports team. That image from the book is the ultimate proof of access. 'Jim was everywhere that mattered and he documented it with a photograph,' Davis said.
Japan Today
8 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Japan Today
Fans toast Grateful Dead's 60th with concerts at San Francisco's Golden Gate Park
By JANIE HAR Fans of the Grateful Dead are pouring into San Francisco for three days of concerts and festivities marking the 60th anniversary of the scruffy jam band that came to embody a city where people wore flowers in their hair and made love, not war. Dead & Company, featuring original Grateful Dead members Bob Weir and Mickey Hart, will play Golden Gate Park's Polo Field starting Friday with an estimated 60,000 attendees each day. The last time the band played that part of the park was in 1991 — a free show following the death of concert promoter and longtime Deadhead Bill Graham. Certainly, times have changed. A general admissions ticket for all three days is $635 — a shock for many longtime fans who remember when a joint cost more than a Dead concert ticket. But Deadhead David Aberdeen is thrilled anyway. 'This is the spiritual home of the Grateful Dead,' said Aberdeen, who works at Amoeba Music in the bohemian, flower-powered Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. 'It seems very right to me that they celebrate it in this way.' Formed in 1965, the Grateful Dead is synonymous with San Francisco and its counterculture. Members lived in a dirt-cheap Victorian in the Haight and later became a significant part of 1967's Summer of Love. That summer eventually soured into bad acid trips and police raids, and prompted the band's move to Marin County on the other end of the Golden Gate Bridge. But new Deadheads kept cropping up — even after iconic guitarist and singer Jerry Garcia 's 1995 death — aided by cover bands and offshoots like Dead & Company. 'There are 18-year-olds who were obviously not even a twinkle in somebody's eyes when Jerry died, and these 18-year-olds get the values of Deadheads,' said former Grateful Dead publicist and author Dennis McNally. Deadheads can reel off why and how, and the moment they fell in love with the music. Fans love that no two shows are the same; the band plays different songs each time. They also embrace the community that comes with a Dead show. Sunshine Powers didn't have friends until age 13, when she stepped off a city bus and into the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. 'I, all of a sudden, felt like I fit in. Or like I didn't have to fit in,' says Powers, now 45 and the owner of tie-dye emporium Love on Haight. 'I don't know which one it was, but I know it was like, OK." Similarly, her friend Taylor Swope, 47, survived a tough freshman year at a new school with the help of a Grateful Dead mixtape. The owner of the Little Hippie gift shop is driving from Brooklyn, New York, to sell merchandise, reconnect with friends and see the shows. 'The sense of, 'I found my people, I didn't fit in anywhere else and then I found this, and I felt at home.' So that's a big part of it,' she said of the allure. Sometimes, becoming a Deadhead is a process. Thor Cromer, 60, had attended several Dead shows, but was ambivalent about the hippies. That changed on March 15, 1990, in Landover, Maryland. 'That show, whatever it was, whatever magic hit,' he said, 'it was injected right into my brain.' Cromer, who worked for the U.S. Senate then, eventually took time off to follow the band on tour and saw an estimated 400 shows from spring 1990 until Garcia's death. Cromer now works in technology and is flying in from Boston to join scores of fellow 'rail riders' who dance in the rows closest to the stage. Aberdeen, 62, saw his first Dead show in 1984. As the only person in his college group with a driver's license, he was tapped to drive a crowded VW Bug from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, to Syracuse, New York. 'I thought it was pretty weird,' he said. 'But I liked it.' He fell in love the following summer, when the Dead played a venue near his college. Aberdeen remembers rain pouring down in the middle of the show and a giant rainbow appearing over the band when they returned for their second act. They played 'Comes a Time,' a rarely played Garcia ballad. 'There is a lot of excitement, and there will be a lot of people here,' Aberdeen said. 'Who knows when we'll have an opportunity to get together like this again?' Fans were able to see Dead & Company in Las Vegas earlier this year, but no new dates have been announced. Guitarist Bob Weir is 77, and drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann are 81 and 79, respectively. Besides Garcia, founding members Ron 'Pigpen' McKernan on keyboards died in 1973 and bassist Phil Lesh died last year at age 84. Mayor Daniel Lurie, who is not a Deadhead but counts 'Sugar Magnolia' as his favorite Dead song, is overjoyed at the economic boost as San Francisco recovers from pandemic-related hits to its tech and tourism sectors. 'They are the reason why so many people know and love San Francisco,' he said. The weekend features parties, shows and celebrations throughout the city. Grahame Lesh & Friends will perform three nights starting Thursday. Lesh is the son of Phil Lesh. On Friday, which would have been Garcia's 83rd birthday, officials will rename a street after the San Francisco native. On Saturday, visitors can celebrate the city's annual Jerry Day at the Jerry Garcia Amphitheater located in a park near Garcia's childhood home. © Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Associated Press
11 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
Join Rising Phoenix Entheogenic Temple For A Week Of Grateful Dead Celebrations In San Francisco
07/30/2025, San Francisco, CA // PRODIGY: Feature Story // Rising Phoenix Entheogenic Temple, a magic mushroom religious facility located in San Francisco, today announced a week of celebrations to honor the Grateful Dead who are scheduled to perform 3 historic concerts at the legendary Golden Gate Park on August 1, 2 and 3, 2025. Founded in 2024 in San Francisco, Rising Phoenix Entheogenic Temple follows the religion of Entheoism and provides clean, tested, and trusted psilocybin to its members from its two San Francisco Temple locations in Russian Hill and Lower Haight. The Temple on Haight Street is located less than a mile from the historic Grateful Dead House where the band lived and wrote music between 1966 and 1968. The Grateful Dead have been a cultural icon for decades. Celebrated for their distinctive fusion of rock, folk, and blues, along with their improvisational approach and dedicated fan community, their music has been synonymous with psychedelics for 60 years. Jerry Garcia was an especially strong proponent for curating an atmosphere conducive to spiritual psychedelic transformations at Dead shows through the years. The upcoming Dead & Company concerts promise to deliver an unforgettable experience for enthusiasts, and Rising Phoenix Entheogenic Temple will celebrate this occasion with an array of exciting psilocybin offerings aimed at elevating its members spiritual and religious connections. Throughout the week, Rising Phoenix will be holding a raffle for one lucky member to win a Dead and Company show experience and psychedelic explorer pack valued at nearly $1,000. Concertgoers that show their Ticket as they make a donation for their sacrament at the Temple can also secure samples as a bonus. Temple locations (Lower Haight and Russian Hill) are open daily in San Francisco from 10am to 8pm to all sincere believers and members. About Rising Phoenix Entheogenic Temple The Rising Phoenix Entheogenic Temple is conveniently located on the historic Haight Street (corner Fillmore) in San Francisco, one of the city's most vibrant and colorful neighborhoods. By becoming a member you can access sacred sacrament, join our events, get self-learning materials, and connect with our community. Membership to the Rising Phoenix Entheogenic Temple is complimentary. You can join at or learn more about the Temple at Media Contact Information Jason Stevens 510-766-6052 [email protected] Source published by Submit Press Release >> Join Rising Phoenix Entheogenic Temple For A Week Of Grateful Dead Celebrations In San Francisco
Yahoo
11 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Timothy Andrés Pabon Wins AudioFile Earphones Award for Cultural History Audiobook
FREDERICK, Md., July 30, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Award-winning voice actor and director Timothy Andrés Pabon has been honored with a 2025 AudioFile Earphones Award for his narration of " The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties" by Dennis McNally, published by Hachette Audio. The recognition highlights Pabon's ability to bring historical depth and vocal nuance to this sweeping account of America's mid-century countercultural movement. "Receiving this award is incredibly humbling," said Pabon. "This project meant a great deal to me because it was not just about recounting history—it was about embodying a cultural moment. I wanted listeners to hear the heartbeat of a generation through my performance." The audiobook explores the cultural and political rise of the Grateful Dead in the context of the 1950s and 1960s American counterculture. AudioFile Magazine praised Pabon's performance for elevating McNally's dense research into a vivid narrative experience: "Pabon deftly manages long lists of names, deep scholarship, and stories of bohemian life… Sounding at times like a newscaster, at other times like a fan, and occasionally like a participant, Pabon ensures that the great cultural and political counterculture of the mid-20th century is even more fascinating." "To prepare, I immersed myself in period broadcasts, poetry readings, and oral histories to capture the voices and energy of the era," Pabon added. "The performance was built on understanding not just what people said—but how they said it, and why it mattered." The audiobook is available through major retailers and audiobook platforms. Purchase on Amazon: About Timothy Andrés Pabon Timothy Andrés Pabon is a Frederick, Maryland–based voice actor, director, and performance coach with more than 500 audiobook narrations to his name. Known for his versatility, preparation, and vocal authenticity, he collaborates with major publishers and serves as a mentor to aspiring narrators and authors through personalized coaching and group workshops. For more information, visit View original content to download multimedia: SOURCE Timothy Andrés Pabon Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
