“Hi! Long time no see!”: Grateful Dead’s free concert at the Golden Gate Park
No other band inhabits the mainstream while still remaining the archetypal ‘cult’ group as San Francisco’s premier jam band Grateful Dead. Formed in 1965 in Santa Clara County’s Palo Alto, frontman and principal songwriter Jerry Garcia was a staunch creature of the ’60s counterculture, playing an exhaustive amount of free shows and benefit gigs before their growing fanbase rendered impromptu gigs untenable by the mid-’70s.
From the beginning, the Grateful Dead routinely played in the parks of the respective cities they were touring through, serving as free ‘tasters’ and slapdash promotions for their conventionally ticketed shows.
It’s San Francisco’s second-largest park that’s become an essential piece of Grateful Dead’s free show lore. Nestled between the city’s Richmond and Sunset districts, Golden Gate Park hosted numerous Grateful Dead unticketed events. With Garcia and his crew routinely deciding to play their beloved park on the spur of the moment, it’s become impossible to catalogue every free show they played there definitively. Still, thankfully the band enjoy a dedicated ‘Deadhead‘ fan community, who has meticulously laid out as best they can the verfified instances of the Dead’s casual showcases.
Deadhead consensus agrees that at least 14 free shows were played at Golden Gate, likely starting with their billing along with Big Brother and the Holding Company at the ’66 Love Pageant Rally in the park’s panhandle section, protesting the Californian state legislature’s ban on LSD organised by the editors of underground newspaper San Francisco Oracle.
It’s their final free show at the park’s Lindley Meadows area that’s most fondly remembered. Sponsored by the Haight-Ashbury People’s Ballroom and billed as Unity Fair ’75, Grateful Dead took the stage on September 28th with Jefferson Starship to a crowd of over 25,000 on an unusually chilly afternoon, their first public performance in nearly a year.
It was a fruitful time for both groups, as Dead’s Blues for Allah and Jefferson Starship’s Red Octopus were both riding high in the charts. Starting promptly at 12.00, Starship opened with ‘Ride the Tiger’ before technical difficulties struck, forcing a half-hour break while the equipment failure was rectified.
Once back and running, the band tore into ‘Play on Love’ and later treated the crowd to a blast of psychedelic nostalgia with the acid classic ‘White Rabbit‘, singer Grace Slick’s “feed your head” refrain delighting the audience.
“Hi! Long time no see!” Dead bassist Phil Leash roared as the headliners slowly trickled onto the stage, finally followed by a leather-jacketed Garcia slugging an aluminium-necked Travis Beam guitar beginning their set with ‘Help on the Way’ and ending with rhythm guitarist Bob Weir’s rock ‘n’ roll number ‘One More Saturday Night’.
Caught in a reflective mood as the band reached their 10th anniversary, at a concert in Mill Valley the next day, Garcia made a short speech on stage: “We’ll still gig together in the future as the occasions arise, depending on how things strike us — as long as we don’t have to wilfully step back into our old roles. Now that we’ve all formed little bands, each of us can individually start that climb again. Because really, there’s no place else to go from here if you’re a musician. But at least we’re going back to the comfortable part of it, little theatres and clubs that are on a human level.”
