Fans of the Grateful Dead are saying goodbye to the band this weekend. It’s not the first time.
Since the band lost its frontman Jerry Garcia nearly three decades ago, it has re-formed several times, touring continuously and winning over new generations. Along the way, it has given each new set of fans its own chance to mourn, my colleague Marc Tracy writes.
The day Garcia died in 1995, the Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir gave a concert near Boston. One fan, Albie Cullen, recalled that the encore felt like an emotional send-off for Garcia and the band. “Everybody kind of knew that was the end,” Cullen said. But it wasn’t.
In 2015, the surviving members held a series of goodbye concerts. It was another emotional send-off, but it wasn’t the end, either. Within months, a new iteration had formed, Dead & Company. It features the singer-songwriter John Mayer, who was born more than a decade after the original band formed.
During Dead & Company’s eight-year run, the band once again became a cultural touchstone. Longtime fans came to embrace Mayer, a skilled guitar player. Many young fans discovered the group on streaming services or through its deep online archive of live concerts, and the band recently had its best week of record sales in 35 years. When I saw the band perform at Citi Field in New York last month, the stadium’s upper deck was packed with Gen Z fans dressed in tie-dye.
Tonight, Dead & Company is in San Francisco to play the final show of what it says will be its final tour. Even if that turns out not to be true, once again, fans have embraced the ritual.
“We like to say goodbye. We find a usefulness to saying goodbye. It’s almost like practice,” Marc told me. “People genuinely like the bittersweetness of it. You’re not supposed to like sad things, but people go see sad movies all the time.”
