It’s a funny coincidence — at least I think it’s a coincidence — that the San Francisco Chronicle started its Graying Bay series just as the city itself has gone crazy for Dead & Company and their three-day residency at Golden Gate Park this week.
The Chronicle series is based on all kinds of data (and many more anecdotes) showing that, as Dan Kopf, Roland Li, and Nami Sumida put in their curtain raiser essay, “The Bay Area is getting old fast, and it’s accelerating.” While our civic and business leaders talk a big game about building the future and attracting a young, vibrant workforce, our city is closer to a retirement community. (This may explain why restaurants close so early.)
Perfect time then, to celebrate the Grateful Dead’s 60 year association with San Francisco. Never mind the fact that they were formed in Palo Alto and the ensemble playing this week has lost and replaced so many members in the last half century-plus that, like the Ship of Theseus, it’s basically an entirely different band. Our aging town is getting the old tie dyes outta mothballs to celebrate this mostly Dead band.
Groovy, man.
As I’ve been watching the city reshape itself in the Dead’s image over the last few weeks (psychedelic Muni wraps, Dead street lamp flags, free blotter acid for school kids, etc.), I find myself in a reflexive Gen-X pout. I feel like Lonnie, Alan Alda and Lily Tomlin’s sullen teen in Flirting With Disaster as his Boomer parents reminisce about their favorite band: “Jerry Garcia, blah, blah, blah! I am so sick of this fucking story! It’s so boring!”
I know that this publication has contributed to the Dead & Co hype with a handful of stories (with more to come). What can I say? We’re all susceptible to nostalgia and the vagaries of the news cycle. It’s one thing for a little newsroom to temporarily hop a bandwagon, but there’s something a bit sad when an entire city does. Is this town so umbilically connected to The Sixties (capital T, capital S) that we’re collectively tuning out whatever’s new and next in favor of an endless Classic Rock playlist? Talk about the Graying Bay: Even those of us born decades after the band moved out of 710 Ashbury St. are getting lost in this interminable Space Jam.
Confession time: I used to like the Dead. I had the bandana, the box of Maxell bootlegs, and those stripy Guatemalan pants. This was back when Jerry walked the earth and John Mayer barely had 51% of his own body hair, much less (allegedly) the band he’d eventually commandeer. One of my formative experiences was seeing the Grateful Dead in concert, and not just because it was the first time I saw my dad take a hit off a joint.
Back then, it was still possible to imagine that the band was a kind circus troupe, its diehard followers a bunch of beautiful losers who took the offramp from the Go-Go 80s to travel city to city in search of a miracle. Sure, the Dead made a music video and crossed over with “Touch of Grey” in 1987, but they were still counterculture: weird, semi-obscure, and inscrutable to squares. In other words, perfect for a suburban kid looking for something, anything, to make him more interesting.
It’s been a long, strange trip since then. The Dead are now an institution, beloved by everyone from Nancy Pelosi to Tucker Carlson. The beautiful losers I remember from Shakedown Street cut off their dreads, upcycled their stripy pants into Tesla-polishing rags, and are now wealthy enough to spend $2,000 for VIP tickets for this week’s shows.
In 1990, The Nose, a San Francisco magazine, ran a cover with the sardonic Gen-X coded headline “Grateful Dead Inc.: $0 to $28 Million in Only 25 Years”; in 2024, The New Yorker reported that Dead & Co grossed $4.5 million a night during their Sphere residency in Las Vegas. Clearly, the band appearing at Golden Gate this weekend ain’t your father’s — or my father’s — Dead. It’s a money-making machine. In other words, a shakedown, and our city fully bought in.
