“It wasn’t until I heard the rest of the catalog that I really fell in love. “When Jerry died it was a really big deal, but at the time I didn’t have a personal investment in him,” says Zimmerman, an editor at Common Sense Media. The concerts came and went, and Zimmerman went off to field hockey camp, where she was on the field when she heard about Garcia’s death at a rehab center in West Marin on Aug. She wanted to see the Dead when they came to RFK Stadium in June, but she didn’t have her license and “my mom wasn’t going to drive me.” Zimmerman was 15 in rural Maryland and hip enough to music to work in a record store. Sifting through them only brings the pain to the surface from the one that got away. The Other Ones, Furthur, Phil Lesh and Friends, Ratdog, the Dead. ![]() They have a wooden box crammed with ticket stubs from all the concerts they’ve seen by bands that splintered off the group in the photo. They have every Dead album on vinyl, kept in the bins of a record cabinet built by Beall, who has his own woodworking business. They have a framed photo of the band on the steps of 710 Ashbury St., which is actually around the corner from their apartment. “The only reason for that reaction is because that was as close to hearing the Grateful Dead (live) as they were going to get.”Īngie Zimmerman, 35, and her fiancee, Shaun Beall, 36, both came close 20 years ago, and have made up for that miss by moving into a garden apartment in the Haight “across the street from the Dead house,” Zimmerman says excitedly, “to be that close to the lore and where it all went down in the ’60s.” “The audience went nuts, and I turned to my friend and said, ‘There’s hope,’” Meriwether says. “My buddy and I were the only people above the age of 22 in the crowd,” says Meriwether, who said there was a huge reaction whenever Weir would dip into the back catalog. Nicholas Meriwether, the Grateful Dead archivist at UC Santa Cruz, first noticed Lambert’s demographic at a show by Bob Weir’s band Ratdog, 10 or 15 years ago, in North Carolina. “There is this energy about Grateful Dead music that is ever-evolving and ever-changing,” says Lambert, who designs and sells clothes under the label Ramble On Rags, inspired by the band. ![]() Lambert and her boyfriend, Matthew Arceneaux, 30, whom she met on the last Dead tour in 2009, live in Mount Shasta to be equidistant from shows in the Portland area and in the Bay Area, a five-hour drive in either direction. “That would be in my top five shows to see from the past.”ĭenesia would have been at Terrapin Crossroads this month to see Phil Lesh and Friends perform a show dedicated to the Dead’s concert tour in 1977, but the show sold out before he could score a ticket.Īmong those waiting in line was Laura Lambert, not fazed by that earlier ageist slap. That is the most memorable show I own,” says Brian Denesia of Burlingame, who is 37, meaning he was not quite born in time to see that legendary concert in upstate New York. About 150 shows have been officially released by the band on CD and vinyl. That means 2,317 live shows, according to Lemieux, and at least 1,500 of those shows can be downloaded or streamed. “There is a huge learning curve, and they want to know it all.” “I get e-mails from 19-year-old kids, and they are as hard-core as I am,” says David Lemieux, legacy manager for the Grateful Dead. Now everything is online and promoted through social media. Two generations ago, these recordings would surface on bootleg cassette tapes, circulated by hand and compromised through recopying. The main currency among Deadheads has always been recordings of the live shows. “Ninety-five percent of the world think this is idiotic hippie stuff, but the people who get it really get it.” “There is an incredible attractiveness of this culture to the people who are open to it,” he says. As host of “The Grateful Dead Hour,” a nationally syndicated radio show since 1988, he has grown accustomed to callers who start by apologizing for being too young to have seen Garcia play, then follow up by displaying an expertise on the music that impresses even Gans. ![]() “We are on third- and possibly fourth-generation Deadheads now,” says David Gans of Oakland, ponytailed co-author of an oral history of the band, due this fall. ![]() in Menlo Park.Īll five shows are sold out, and in either place, Santa Clara or Chicago, it’s possible that tribes of Gen Y in tie-dye will outnumber the “Touch of Grey.” Then the band will head to Chicago for three more shows before calling it quits, 50 years after they formed at Magoo’s Pizza at 639 Santa Cruz Ave. Many of them will be here this week, hanging in the Haight, and in VW buses breaking down on the road to Santa Clara, where the “core four” of original Grateful Dead members will play two shows at Levi’s Stadium on Saturday and next Sunday.
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