Chicago got a Dark Star, though not in the expected fashion. In the very first hours of the 4th of July, the Grateful Dead’s most exploratory song was performed by a makeshift band of indie stars, three miles west of Soldier Field. Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo pulled long, screeching scrapes on his guitar with a frayed violin bow, while Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan sat near the front of the stage, twirling pedal knobs in reply. Behind them, Real Estate bassist Alex Bleeker’s side project, the Freaks, provided the lengthy jam’s foundation, as they did for an ambitious two-hour set of 20 Dead songs.
Not too long ago, the Grateful Dead might have been forbidden territory for this scene. The image surrounding the Dead for much of their later years—a traveling drug-fueled circus of '60s nostalgia, soundtracked by lengthy, solo-filled jams—was the antithesis of the punk/alternative/indie ethos. In the identity-sorting ceremony of high school, many rock music fans chose and still choose one strain or the other, even if it was by proxy, picking between Pavement and DMB, or Coachella and Bonnaroo.
But of late, those lines have blurred. In the year of the Grateful Dead’s 50th anniversary, the quintessential jam band appears to have greater currency than ever among the indie, the underground, and the generally weird. Members of the National plot an indie-rock-stocked Grateful Dead tribute album, Stephen Malkmus drops musical references to "St. Stephen" into his recent album, and more and more indie artists find themselves a safe space to talk Dead fandom in a public forum.
The star-studded Freaks’ after-show was one of dozens in Chicago on 4th of July weekend, a constellation of barnacles riding the blue whale of Fare Thee Well, the Grateful Dead’s 50th anniversary celebration and semi-reunion send-off. But where most of these bills were predictable combinations of Grateful Dead collaborators and jam-world descendents, the Freaks’ gig at City Winery stuck out.
Besides guitarists from two of the most influential acts in indie rock history, the lineup included Jenny Lewis, Little Wings’ Kyle Field, Nicolas Jaar collaborators Dave Harrington and Will Epstein, and Chicago singer-songwriter Ryley Walker. Though there was more plaid than tie-dye in evidence, the crowd showed no reservations about the smooth jazz of "Eyes of the World" or the earnest sing-along to Buddy Holly’s "Not Fade Away".
A couple days later, still giddy at the opportunity to play songs from his favorite band with some of his biggest influences, Bleeker said he had no problem booking guests to pay their tribute to the Dead.
"Everybody said yes, it was easy to get people to do it," Bleeker said. "Nobody got paid, it was for love of the game. It was the power the love of the Grateful Dead that everybody has. To have that all come together through the Grateful Dead, in a way the most unlikely of common ground that you would think for that cast of characters...what a special thing. It was a joy."
For Bleeker, who has made no secret of his soft spot for the Dead in Real Estate—even convincing them to drop a "Dark Star" tease from time to time—organizing an indie rock tribute to the band wasn’t the bold move it might have been just a couple years prior.
"I’d venture to say there’s not a divide any more. It’s gone. It’s over," Bleeker said. "I think the further away we get from whatever the initial reason there was a social divide, the sillier that seems. That’s a really positive thing, because there’s a massive social aspect to Grateful Dead, and they have all these connotations greater than just the music. It’s so silly to disrespect or not take them seriously for some totally arbitrary reason."
That social dimension carried the weekend over at Soldier Field, where the main attraction often felt like the reunion of a scene more than of a band. Deadheads of all generations sprawled across Chicago’s lakeside museum campus in full hippie plumage for hours before the shows, recreating the famed/notorious "lot scene"—the extracurricular loitering now codified and capitalized into the modern festival experience.
By the end of the Dead’s original run in 1995, the focus on the scene instead of the music was lamentable, reaching its symbolic nadir in the Indiana concert cancelled when ticket-less fans breached the fences around the venue’s lawn. But in Chicago, the old rituals generated a familiar warmth, both for the gray-templed boomers with Deadhead stickers on their Cadillacs back home and those (your author included) too young to have caught the Jerry era and used to the contact-high experience of Dead descendents.
Those vibes had a formidable opponent in the cynicism surrounding the event, tagged from the announcement—not entirely unfairly—as a final cash-grab for Grateful Dead Incorporated. After a clumsy attempt to dust off the band’s old mail-order direct-sales ticket system and a typically shady Ticketmaster release, tickets for these shows dueled with Blackhawks playoff games to be Chicago scalper’s golden goose for the summer. At the stadium, a "Steal Your Face VIP Lounge" served the wealthy Deadhead demo, and a blimp for a satellite provider floated above, twisting the lyrics of "He’s Gone" into a sales pitch.
Suspicions were high enough that the too-perfect appearance of a rainbow over the first Fare Thee Well show in Santa Clara was briefly thought to be an artificial effect—fueled by a joke reported as a scoop by a credulous reporter. The news that Jerry Garcia’s family considered commissioning a hologram of the departed guitarist barely raised an eyebrow, given that subtlety hasn’t always been among the Grateful Dead’s strong suits. With months of buildup, tension built over whether such a high-profile event could possibly recapture the true experience, or whether it would instead capture the gloomy final days of the Dead: a cartoon version of the Summer of Love, with fast diminishing musical value.
The few musical artists that can still fill a football stadium today typically deploy productions with all the spontaneity of a Broadway show, based around elaborate sets and expensive effects rehearsed and synced to an unchanging setlist. But in the first Fare Thee Well concert in Santa Clara, their most massively anticipated show in 20 years, this version of the Dead greeted the crowd roar with a meandering, ragged improvisation that found its way to "Truckin’" at its own damn pace. All five nights would go on to feature more of these lovable flaws: long tuning breaks, songs that don’t start so much as limp into action, flubbed lyrics, friendly intra-band struggles over tempo and when to cut off solos.
Setlist choices were equally uncompromising. Casual fans might want to hear "Touch of Grey" and "Sugar Magnolia" every night, obsessives might want to get one last "Dark Star" or a deep rarity, but the band chose at points to play some of their earliest material (the Nuggets-ish "Cream Puff War" or the avant-garde freakout "What’s Become of the Baby") and a series of late '80s/early '90s compositions that are far from fan favorites, to mixed results. Each concert’s second set was interrupted by the lengthy "Drums/Space" segment, an audacious and controversial trademark of latter-day Dead where a duet on Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann’s absurdly massive percussion display is followed up by several minutes of free-form abstract noise-making from the rest of the band.
It may sound weird to hold up these eccentricities as a positive, but they were proof of authenticity, the quality most often missing from cash-in reunions. Instead of a clean, rehearsed precision, the central appeal of the Grateful Dead has always been the communication between all of its members, conversations that can go well or go poorly or be a little of both, all at once. One last opportunity to see the "Core Four" of surviving Dead members (supplemented with Phish’s Trey Anastasio more than capably filling the Jerry-shaped hole, plus keyboardists Bruce Hornsby and Jeff Chimenti) musically squabble, interrupt, and stumble their way to the occasional moment of transcendence was just the right soundtrack for these concerts’ bittersweet funeral.
By the end, even the shambling tempos and befuddling attempts at Jerry’s vocals transformed into moving triumph on songs such as "Days Between" and "Touch of Grey"—who could begrudge giving Bob and Phil one last chance to sing with their departed friend and bandmate? What might have been a sad—in more ways than one—goodbye to a band way past their expiration date instead became a rare second chance, leaving the same Soldier Field stage where they played their final legitimate show in 1995 with a very human grace not too many retiring bands get, or choose, to employ.
But now that the Dead are presumed dead, what will their legacy be, beyond the obvious and surprisingly durable jam band scene they begat? Divorce them from the hippie dream, and it’s apparent that the Dead has left a deep footprint on today’s music world, from the genres of alt country and EDM to the development of the modern concert PA and the very act of discussing bands on the Internet.
These final shows were further evidence that the Grateful Dead experience is as singular as they come, but their long, unorthodox career still contains a multitude of lessons for today’s musicians. As album sales grow increasingly irrelevant, the Dead’s prioritization of touring over recording looks economically prescient. And with that comes a whole host of strategies still largely untapped by today’s acts: the "freemium" model of allowing freely-exchanged fan-made tapes to win over new paying fans, the rule of never playing the same setlist twice to keep fans coming back night after night, even the drive to constantly write and perform new material that never actually ends up on a "proper" studio recording.
Most importantly, the Grateful Dead cultivated an intense following by erasing the lines between band and audience, a phenomenon too often conflated with the nostalgic haze they inspire. The obsessiveness of Deadheads is easy to mock, but it’s a goal any musician should chase, through whatever channels five decades of technological advancement have to offer.
The free trading of music, the unique live experience both around and during the show, the complex iconography, even the high barrier to entry that makes the "initiated" feel special—all of these elements aren’t exclusive to the Dead, and have little to nothing to do with their '60s origins or their not-for-everyone cosmic-choogle sound. Instead, the Grateful Dead crafted a recipe of talent, longevity, practice, and stubborn self-indulgence that has survived for fifty years and even aged surprisingly well, finally seeping across the age-old identity boundaries and spreading their influence in new ways, appropriately from the afterlife.