Jerry Week at the End of the Road for Dead & Co.

Jerry Garcia (left) with his bandmates of the Grateful Dead and the New Riders of the Purple Sage, Novato, California, 1970 (Photo by Herb Greene)

Strange feelings on the night of July 16, the last show of the Dead & Co. Final Tour in San Francisco. I did not stream the final performance, nor attend a single show on the tour, but it was still weird knowing that the world’s collection of half the surviving members of the Grateful Dead were in the process of pulling the plug for good on the sum of what was left of their parts.

The first time I had been to a Grateful Dead concert was February 1, 1978, at the Uptown Theater in Chicago. Clearly, I was late to the party. Later that year, the band would travel to Egypt to play a storied, if far from flawless, mid-September run of shows beside the Great Pyramid and at the feet of the Sphinx at the Giza Sound and Light Theater in Cairo; and in the shadow of the historic peace accords hammered out by President Jimmy Carter with Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin at Camp David. I am surely not arguing that one event had much of anything to do with the other, but we take what we can gather from coincidence. And it arguably did not hurt the process.

By the mere longevity of their lifespan, from the remnants of the Beatniks to the hardened crusty folkies of the post-punk era, the impression they leave on the culture will likely outlive most if not all of us now left to simply remember them. From where I sat, and still sit, the Grateful Dead’s approach to their craft was good for the culture and remains one of the brighter spots in Western civilization.

The Grateful Dead performing in Cairo, Egypt, during a lunar eclipse on their final night of three shows in September 1978. (Photo by Adrian Boot)

The weekend ahead of this Jerry Week, some friends and I enjoyed an anniversary tribute to the 1973 Watkins Glen Summer Jam with The Band, Allman Brothers and Grateful Dead, featuring Allman and Dead tribute bands Peach Jam and Cream Puff Warriors, respectively. The two outfits collaborated to open their show at the Venue in Aurora, Illinois, with a set of Band tunes, many from their album Northern Lights-Southern Cross that came out two years after Watkins Glen. But who is really counting? It was a party and it was a pretty good one. The musicians know their stuff and they made it look easy all night, jamming in and out of one tune to the next and back again.