In the course of their 30-year career, the Grateful Dead covered an enormous swath of geography, crisscrossing the U.S. dozens of times as well as playing Canada, Europe, and as far away as Egypt. But San Francisco was the place they called home, the city where they performed over 320 concerts at more than two dozen venues. That connection began with their debut album, which bore the phrase “San Francisco’s Grateful Dead” across the back, and they mapped that relationship in songs, recordings and performances throughout their history.
The Dead were masters of microcosm, treating each moment as an opportunity for transformation, both musical and personal, and their reverence for San Francisco was a geographic expression of that. The city honored the band’s affection, flying a tie-dye flag at City Hall to half-mast when Jerry Garcia died in 1995, and more recently, giving a hero’s welcome to offshoot band Dead & Company, who played the final three concerts of their farewell tour at Oracle Park.
Although the band began moving to Marin in the late 1960s, the Dead never forgot their roots. In 1993, Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir and keyboardist Vince Welnick sang the national anthem to open the Giants’ season at Candlestick Park, but their most moving tribute was “Standing On the Moon,” one of Garcia and lyricist Robert Hunter’s last songs. One of the band’s great elegies, the song ends with the narrator in San Francisco, looking up at heaven and saying he’d rather “be with you.” It is a poetic summation of the Dead’s enduring affection for the city.
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Ahead of the annual Jerry Day concert taking place Aug. 5 at McLaren Park, this brief list sketches a handful of prominent sites in the Dead’s San Francisco.
A view of Jerry Garcia’s boyhood home (in yellow) on Harrington Street in San Francisco.
Image via Google Street View
87 Harrington St.
Jerry Garcia spent five years of his childhood here with his grandparents, after the tragic death of his father. In the late 1960s, the house became a base for visiting friends and members of the Dead’s extended family, including colorful characters such as poet Max Finstein. It was also a site for art, Garcia using it as the focal point for his illustrated “anecdotal” memoir, “Harrington Street,” published shortly after his death in 1995.
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The house where the Grateful Dead’s musicians lived in the 1960s, at 710 Ashbury St. in San Francisco.
Barbara Munker/Picture Alliance via Getty Images
710 Ashbury
The Dead began moving into the big Victorian just up from Haight Street in summer 1966, where it quickly became a neighborhood center. It hosted a legendary Thanksgiving that fall, with dozens of friends and fellow musicians, and a historic press conference in 1967, where the band defended themselves against a police raid. Their debut album featured pictures of them at the house, which remains a site for Deadhead pilgrims today.
Author Tom Wolfe talks with Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead and the band’s manager Rock Scully under the street signs on the corner of Ashbury and Haight streets in San Francisco.
Ted Streshinsky Photographic Arc/Corbis via Getty Images
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Upper Haight Street
The stretch of Haight between Buena Vista Park to Stanyan Street was ground zero of the hippie movement, immortalized by the Dead with a March 3, 1968, free concert that filled the street with friends, fans and neighbors. While the Dead lived in the neighborhood, they frequented Peggy Caserta’s boutique Mnasidika, the Thelin brothers’ Psychedelic Shop, and performed a handful of concerts at the Straight Theater, a short-lived neighborhood venue that played a key role in the Summer of Love.
16th and Mission
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Hunter had an apartment here in the late 1960s, and he immortalized his fondness for the neighborhood in one of his most beloved songs with Garcia, “Mission in the Rain.”
Concert in Golden Gate Park with Grateful Dead and Jefferson Starship, on Sept. 28, 1975.
Terry Schmitt/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
Golden Gate Park
The Dead loved Golden Gate Park, playing free concerts at several spots, including the Panhandle, Hippie Hill, Speedway Meadows, and most famously the Polo Field, where they performed at the Human Be-In in January 1967 with an array of San Francisco bands, Beat poets and other counterculture luminaries. Garcia loved the way it contained “all these different worlds,” calling it “the work of an artist.”
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1199 Evans St.
Site of the cover portrait of the band’s famed 1970 album “Workingman’s Dead,” artist Stanley Mouse posed the band in this industrial section of the city on a hot day, which he thought “added to the downtrodden, working-class feeling of the photograph.”
Mars Hotel (192 Fourth St.)
The Dead named their 1974 studio album for this rundown hotel, featured prominently in Jack Kerouac’s 1962 novel “Big Sur.” Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley’s cover made the hotel the center of an otherworldly landscape; the back cover photograph showed the band lounging in the lobby, with the musicians transformed into fantastic creatures. The art captured the band’s self-deprecating sense of humor, but it also charted their continuing metamorphosis into mainstream rock stars.
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The former site of Pacific High Studios on Brady Street in San Francisco.
Image via Google Street View
Pacific High Studios (60 Brady St.)
Originally a plastics factory, this building became the home of one of the principal studios in the San Francisco music scene. The Dead booked dozens of sessions for their 1969 album “Aoxomoxoa” here, and although they ended up scrapping those tracks, they used the studio to superb effect for “Workingman’s Dead.”
The site of CBS Studios where the Grateful Dead recorded their album “From the Mars Hotel.”
Image via Google Street View
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CBS Studios (829 Folsom)
The Dead recorded “From the Mars Hotel” at this recently rechristened South of Market studio, site of the old Coast Recorders studio where they had recorded their 1967 paean to the Haight-Ashbury “The Golden Road.”
Wally Heider Studios (245 Hyde St.)
One of San Francisco’s most storied studios, this long-running institution birthed dozens of famous albums, including the Dead’s 1970 masterpiece “American Beauty.” The band left its mark in other ways as well, persuading Heider to have the doors decorated with paintings.
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Bill Graham, left, rock concert producer and promoter, talks on the phone in his office at the Fillmore West music club, in San Francisco, August 1969. A promotional postcard, right; for concerts at the Fillmore Auditorium, featuring the Grateful Dead, October 1966.
Images via Getty
Fillmore Auditorium (1805 Geary Blvd.)
Made famous by famed promoter Bill Graham, the Fillmore anchored the burgeoning San Francisco rock music scene in the 1960s, hosting the Dead 46 times. The Fillmore cemented Graham’s relationship with the Dead, and he remained one of their two principal promoters until his untimely death in 1991.
Avalon Ballroom (1268 Sutter St.)
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Run by beloved hippie impresario Chet Helms from 1966 to 1968, the Avalon was a hub for the Haight-Ashbury scene, known for its relaxed and welcoming atmosphere. It hosted the Dead 30 times, including appearances commemorated by some of the most iconic posters in rock.
Marquee on New Year’s Eve 1978, at left, for the final shows at Winterland with the Grateful Dead, right, and the Blues Brothers in San Francisco.
Images via Getty
Winterland Ballroom (2000 Post St.)
An old ice-skating rink cum concert hall, the 5,400-seat Winterland was the next step up from the Fillmore and Avalon. It hosted the Dead 59 times between 1967 and 1978, stewarding their transition from neighborhood heroes to national icons, documented by some of the band’s most revered archival releases. Bill Graham honored that history by tapping them to close the hall with a legendary New Year’s Eve 1978 concert later released as a DVD and CD.
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Carousel Ballroom/Fillmore West (10 South Van Ness Ave.)
Occupying the old El Patio Ballroom, the Carousel was a short-lived colorful experiment in hippie entrepreneurialism cooperatively run by the Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Company. It lasted for part of 1968 before Bill Graham took it over and renamed it the Fillmore West. Those ventures represented a stepping stone between the Haight and the big time, not only for the Dead and the scene, but also for Graham, providing the West Coast counterpart to his Fillmore East in New York City.
FILE: Grateful Dead performing at the Warfield in San Francisco on Oct. 14, 1980.
Larry Hulst/Getty Images
Warfield Theatre (982 Market St.)
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The site of one of the Dead’s most remarkable box office feats, the Warfield hosted the Dead for 15 nights in fall 1980, sold out with only a cryptic ad in the newspaper. The Dead played only a few more shows at the Warfield, outgrowing it after 1983, but it became a major venue for the Jerry Garcia Band in the 1990s, with devout Deadheads calling it the Church of Jerry.
