“She lost her sparkle, you know she isn’t the same.”

That well-known lyric from the Grateful Dead song “Truckin’” was on my mind this weekend. “She” might refer to America’s most iconic band. “She” might be a Deadhead who was born before Jerry Garcia took his first breath – or a Deadhead who never heard a lick of Dead music until after Garcia died. “She” might be San Francisco, the city that reluctantly birthed the psychedelic movement and its most famous rock band in the tumultuous 60s. Or “she” could be that same city in its current incarnation, the city that welcomed Dead & Company with open arms for a 60th birthday celebration this past weekend.

But whichever “she” you choose, the lyric is wrong. She ain’t lost her sparkle at all. That sparkle is alive, glimmering, and sparklier than ever!

Dead & Company (D&C) isn’t the Grateful Dead, but they do boast two original members* and fill more stadium seats than any other group playing Grateful Dead music these days. (* Yes, I know Mickey Hart isn’t technically an original member, so please don’t send those letters and postcards.) Sure, we could waste our time arguing all the fun stuff about D&C:

• Are they just a “cover band”? An “offshoot”? A “legacy ensemble”?
• Why did Bill Kreutzmann leave D&C?
• Where’s Donna Jean Godchaux?
• And don’t forget Tom Constanten!
• Why does Bob Weir dress like an extra on the set of a B movie about Sonoran banditos?

None of that overshadows the sparkle of 60,000 Deadheads all grooving to the same tunes in the same place at the same time.

As it turned out, D&C’s three concerts in Golden Gate Park – which were billed as “Celebrating 60 Years of the Grateful Dead’s Music” – were just the centerpiece in San Francisco for an extended weekend of fun, music, and festivities. Lengthy opening sets each day by Billy Strings (Friday), Sturgill Simpson (Saturday), and Trey Anastasio Band (Sunday) added to the excitement, but it was Grateful Dead music that brought tens of thousands of tourists and locals together.

The celebration was everywhere. There was the annual Jerry Day celebration in McClaren Park, this year featuring Melvin Seals & JGB among others. There was the unveiling of a street sign in the Mission marking Garcia’s childhood home. You could find cover bands (or “tribute bands,” I don’t care what you call them) playing in clubs throughout the Bay Area. And everywhere you looked, Deadheads, Deadheads, and more Deadheads.

Like my mother-in-law Linda said the one and only time she saw Phil Lesh (which, to be honest, was an extremely unlikely event): “The music is not the show. The people are the show!”

Sparkly people.

On the eve of the D&C show announcements this spring, Grateful Dead social media circles were abuzz with rumor and debate. Would it (should it) be a free show? Would Billy be there? How about Donna? Will it be safe to eat the brown acid? Spoiler alert: the answers turned out to be no, no, and probably not.

Would it be an overhyped hippie hoedown or heavenly hedonistic happening?
 

Following the official announcement, the debate centered on prices. Was the $245 daily general admission price commensurate with other shows, or was it a rip-off? (Fact check: that price was slightly higher than single day tickets for local large festivals like Outside Lands and BottleRock, but not by a longshot.) Can I take out a loan to buy a VIP package that comes with a hotel room, shuttle bus passes, and five minutes of Q&A with Pigpen’s ghost? (Ask your banker.) Will John Mayer walk away with enough of a cash grab to buy an island in the Caribbean? (That’s entirely possible.)

But by the week of the shows, ticket prices on resale websites like Cash or Trade for single days and three-day packages were dropping like lead balloons. Freebies were available by showtime. Just like the old days.

Speaking of the old days…

Dennis McNally was the publicist for the Dead for many years and is also a historian whose books have documented the rise of the counterculture movement in San Francisco and elsewhere. (Check out his latest book, The Last Great Dream / How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties.) On the phone last week, he told me, “The entire city is – it's hilarious. I mean, it's just remarkable. It’s come full circle. The Grateful Dead used to play for free in the Panhandle, now it’s 60,000 people.”

McNally went on: “The mayor in 1967 was concerned about thousands of hippies coming to Haight. Now this mayor, Daniel Lurie, he’s embracing it.” Indeed, Lurie pulled out all stops; some city buses were decorated with Grateful Dead iconography for the week, and event banners advertising the D&C show hung from light polls on major city thoroughfares. (I’m offering my eternal gratitude to anyone who can get me one of those when the city comes to take them down!)

This is where I should tell you that I am not going to spend time in this article reviewing the D&C shows. Reviews are all over the intertubes, and Google is your friend. Suffice to say they were superfun gatherings. Some of the musical moments were incredible – and some were … not. Your results will vary. A huge shout out to Phil Lesh’s son Grahame for killin’ it playing his dad’s bass in a guest appearance with D&C for a song or two each night. Billy Strings, Sturgill Simpson, and Trey Anastasio also took masterful turns jamming with the Weir, Mayer, and crew.

So that was that. I now invite you to come with me on my Saturday journey in San Francisco, which included a stroll in the Haight, a visit to the Shakedown Street vendor market in Golden Gate Park, and an exploration of the Participation Row and Grass Lands areas at the D&C show.

We’ll start in the Haight. My first stop was the Park Branch of the San Francisco Library to catch up with author Hollie Rose. Rose’s book When Push Comes to Shove: Real Life on Dead Tour is a published diary from her Dead tour days in the 80s and 90s. (You can purchase a copy here: https://flamingohippie.com/buy-the-book/.) She held a book signing event in the library, where she reminisced about those days:

“The city was not welcoming to the Deadheads. They did not want us. They wanted to shoo us along. They were like, 'The 60s are over, get away, don't even be on Haight street!'"

Rose noted the irony in the air this week. "The fancy hotels are filled with tie-dyes, and it's just really funny. This whole town is lit up and welcoming.” (In retrospect, looking back on this past weekend in a city where pot is legal and you could even buy it from a respectable business inside the D&C show, I am laughing now at Rose’s words about the town being “lit up.”)

Next, I wandered over to the corner of Haight and Ashbury, which has been home to a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream shop for several decades now. Hippie tourists often stop at the corner for a quick photo. On Saturday, the corner was extra-packed with people waiting to take their turn posing beneath the famous street corner signs.

Streetside vendors were permitted to set up booths for a few blocks up and down Haight Street during the celebratory weekend. Visitors may have been fooled into thinking this is what the Haight looks like all the time these days; hippie buses, tie-dyes, and pachouli everywhere. They’re not entirely wrong, but it was the Haight on steroids for a few days – a microcosmic explosion of the hippie stuff the neighborhood is famous for. The sum effect of the usual boho stuff, the extra vendors, and the bustling crowds of out-of-town Deadheads made it a self-fulfilling scene. The people were the show.

And then I went to Shakedown Street, which was set up halfway between the Haight and the D&C show at the Polo Fields. For the uninitiated: in the 80s and 90s, we called the impromptu area where touring Deadheads set up shop to sell clothes, jewelry, food, and drugs “the lot.” These days, well-established vendors (most of them pretty cool, homegrown outfits) often pay a small fee to set up a booth on “Shakedown Street.” Sign of the times, or same-old, same-old? You decide.

On tour with D&C in the past decade, Shakedown Street was typically close to the event. At the Sphere shows in Vegas, it was in a convention hall a mile from the show. Here in San Francisco, it was a fifteen-minute walk from the Polo Field on a stretch of Golden Gate Park road that was closed to traffic for the duration. The trek may have been too much for some folks, but it was packed curb to curb and beyond with shoppers and gawkers when I was there on Saturday afternoon.

Liora Soladay is one of the Shakedown Street organizers. “We had to deal with the city and the county and the park rangers and the fire marshals. It was a huge challenge. We didn't actually get our permit until five days ago. We knew we were going to get it, but they kept coming back and saying, 'Okay, now you need this, now you need that.'” It took a lot of hard work, but the city that used to chase hippies away is now a city that embraces Deadhead commerce.

Soladay told me, “We pulled it off. The vendors are over the moon. I was worried that people wouldn't find it. It's like a mile walk from the venue. But we've come to realize is that in this community, if you create it, they will come." Because after all, the people are the show.

I chatted with Jen Croft Yaghoubian, who was vending with Shakedown Street merchant Bloom and Decay. Weekend sales, she said, were “amazing.” She said, “Actually, yesterday, our booth and all of our friends here had our best day ever. Better than Vegas."

Also on Shakedown Street in the park (coincidentally): Naga & The Captainess is a 100-foot-long, 25-foot-tall serpent made of over 5,000 shimmering scales. This former Burning Man denizen, an artistic collaboration between local artists Cjay Roughgarden, Stephanie Shipman, and Jacquelyn Scott, was installed just a few weeks ago on the stretch of road that housed the vendor market. Just in time for the Deadheads to come and say, “Whoa, dude!” The dragon blew bubbles, Deadheads smoked joints, the air was full of sparkles.

In front of Naga, I met Cory and Vic, twenty-somethings who were born long after Garcia died, but who look just like me and my friends did when we were on tour following the Dead in the 80s. They said they were from “all over Canada, kind of."

I asked how their trip was going, and Cory said, “It's been a phenomenal weekend. We got in on Thursday and we hit Mason's Children [one of those many cover bands in town] on the Haight, and they fucking blew it out of the park. And Billy Strings yesterday with Dead & Co. on "Wharf Rat" was just like, oh my God! He just totally gets the fucking assignment!" We took a few moments to appreciate Naga before I went on my merry way toward the show venue.

Now inside the even gates, I went to check out Participation Row, an area set aside within the Polo Fields for booths featuring a collection of nonprofits. There, I met Dan, who was helping out in the Reverb booth. He told me all about Reverb’s Rockin' Refill program. "We partner with Nalgene, and people can get a bottle for a $20 donation. We have refill stations set up all over in here.” The bottles were commemorative D&C keepsakes; my wife was thrilled to get one of the last ones. The booth ran out of their allotment before the weekend was halfway through.

Dan told us that Reverb’s mission is “to keep down single-use plastics and trash. We try to be as sustainable as we can." The organization works with world-class artists including Dave Matthews Band and Billie Eilish to reduce waste and nudge the musical touring industry toward eco-friendly footprints. Their website says, "We’re proud to have been part of Dead & Company’s team since their very first time touring as a band in 2015. Since then we’ve built on our work engaging fans and greening Dead & Co.’s tour, bringing the band’s Participation Row social action village to life at every show in a joint-effort with our long-time partner Headcount."  

Participation Row was way in the back of the Polo Fields, fairly hidden behind a row of over a hundred porto-potties. You’d have to go looking for it to find it, which was kind of a bummer. But if you did go look for it, you’d also find a semi-secret concert viewing area. A small stage was set up on the path toward Participation Row with speakers and a screen broadcasting the entire show. At the end of the night, I ended up at that stage, enjoying a few songs with only a few hundred fans seemingly far from the mass of sparkly humanity in the main polo field area.

But before that, I’d trekked over to Grass Lands. The Outside Lands music festival, which will be held in this same venue next week, first sponsored a Grass Lands marketplace over a decade ago, perhaps the first of its kind at any music festival in the U.S. Here, marijuana vendors sell their wares, including pre-rolls, edibles, and accoutrements, to over-21 attendees.

I don’t imbibe these days, but I loved the Grass Lands area! It was spacious, had lots of cool art exhibits, and there were some pretty comfy spots to sit down on an Adirondak chair and listen to the show. A community art wall was set up in one section for anyone who wanted to grab some paint and add contribute to the sparkle. A hidden gem.

So yeah, then there was the D&C performance itself, yadda yadda yadda. Sparkly dancers, sparkly light show, a sparkly windmill in the back of the audience area of the Polo Field with a rotating Steal Your Face. And no, tourists, that was NOT the famous Golden Gate Park windmill; there are actually two real Dutch windmills in the park, but this wasn’t those. And yes, I did actually hear that some Deadheads were confused about that. (Confused? They should have just listened to the music play.)

After D&C, I finished my night at the nearby Balboa Theater, a movie theater that occasionally hosts music events. Garrett Deloian Band (Deloian is the guitarist from JGB cover band Jerry’s Middle Finger, put them on your must-see list!) laid down some funk and soul jams that packed the aisles in the tiny theater with dancers until way past midnight. The tunes were smokin’, the air was hot, and it felt like being in a dynamite basement club in 1967.

Okay, I know it wasn’t exactly the same. But it was a blast. San Francisco, live music, Deadheads – we aren’t the same. But we all still sparkle. And we are the show.