Grateful Dead’s ‘Fare thee Well’ tour simulcasting at local theater

The rise of the Grateful Dead from cult band to rock ’n’ roll juggernaut didn’t take hold until some 20 years after the group was born in Palo Alto, Calf., in the 1960s.

Who led the charge? Besides Jerry Garcia and his bandmates, there was another charismatic California icon who deserves a share of the credit.

Ronald Reagan.

Yes, that Ronald Reagan – the 40th president of the United States – who spent eight years in the White House during the biggest decade of the band’s career. And, yes, we’re talking about the ’80s, a famously materialistic decade that, along with Reagan’s conservative political movement, stood in stark contrast to the hippie Summer of Love ideals with which the Dead had long been associated.

This contrast, and an improbable hit single, helped propel the band’s career into overdrive at a time when it looked like the Dead could be done.

“They were popular to a highly enthusiastic but small audience through the ’60s and ’70s,” says Dennis McNally, the band’s biographer and former publicist. “They became this enormous social phenomenon in the ’80s.”

That phenomenon is getting its closing chapter this summer, 20 years after Garcia’s death, as the four remaining members reunite for a series of “Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years of Grateful Dead” concerts July 3-5 at Soldier Field in Chicago.

Locally, you can watch the any of the three concerts, being simulcast, at Regal Columbiana Grande Stadium 14, beginning July 3.

Tens of thousands of fans will turn out each night to see longtime Grateful Dead members – bassist Phil Lesh, vocalist-guitarist Bob Weir and percussionists Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann – perform alongside Phish vocalist-guitarist Trey Anastasio and keyboardists Bruce Hornsby and Jeff Chimenti.

Some will be old-school fans who might have seen Garcia and crew perform in the ’60s. But it’s likely that many more of these fans will be those who got turned on to the Dead in the ’80s, when an odd confluence of factors turned the cult favorite into an act that could compete with U2, Bruce Springsteen and other top rock concert draws.

Ironically, the decade started out looking like the Dead could be on the way out rather than on the way up. After delivering six studio albums in an eight-year period (1973-1980), the Dead went seven years without a follow-up. Band members were suffering from many personal problems – especially Garcia, who dealt with weight, drug and other health issues for much of his career (he slipped into a diabetic coma in 1986 and nearly died).

Meanwhile, the country’s cultural landscape had grown more hostile to a free-flowing band like the Dead, and no one person represented that better than the president. “Reagan had been a hippie-baiter and kind of hippie-puncher even as governor – he got a lot of mileage out of going after hippies as well as student activists on campus,” says Peter Richardson, a humanities teacher at San Francisco State and author of the book “No Simple Highway: A Cultural History of the Grateful Dead.”

But what brought it to a boil was something almost unthinkable: The Dead had a hit single.

The band known primarily for its epic live shows with long, meandering songs, scored its first and only Top 10 single with 1987’s “Touch of Grey.”

“Up until 1987, people became Deadheads in what I regularly refer to as an organic way – which is to say, you’d know somebody, frequently an older sibling, and they would give you a tape,” McNally says. “And you would feel like you’d been initiated into a secret cult.”

Now the secret was out, and the Dead, which had been playing theaters and other comparatively intimate venues as late as the mid-’80s, was playing arenas and football and baseball stadiums. What newcomers to the scene found was “the wildest party they have ever seen in their lives,” McNally says. And the music, a jam-happy blend of folk, blues, bluegrass and other Americana music forms that occasionally drifted into prolonged “space jams,” was a perfect counterpoint to the new wave and slick commercial rock that dominated the 1980s.

Jim Harrington, Contra Costa (Calif.) Times