This week alone contains a musical reckoning that was fifty-four years in the making
There are summers that feel like maintenance years in the life of a musical community, years when the touring is steady but unremarkable, the releases routine, the events predictable. And then there are summers like this one, where it seems like every week produces something that demands attention, where the geography of the community’s activity stretches from the old-growth forests of western Oregon to the baseball stadiums of the Jersey Shore, where memorial tributes and debut exhibitions and free park concerts and late-night bar shows exist simultaneously in a landscape too rich to map in a single sitting. The summer of 2026 is the second kind, and for anyone who cares about the Grateful Dead and the world that grew up around their music, it is a genuinely extraordinary moment to be paying attention.
This week alone contains a musical reckoning that was fifty-four years in the making, played on the same Oregon fairgrounds where the Dead once staged one of their most celebrated concerts in history. A golden gate park opens its gates to free music and a landmark exhibition. New Jersey’s local scene is producing a concentrated run of shows that covers everything from free beachside performances to major theater productions to minor league baseball tributes. And the national touring circuit, JRAD, Oteil & Friends, Dark Star Orchestra, Splintered Sunlight, and more, is generating a fall schedule that gives fans on every coast something to plan around. Let’s take it all in, starting in Veneta. Read The Full Article on The Grateful Dead Substack
Veneta, Oregon: Where Bob Weir Came Home One Last Time
The Oregon Country Fair has been many things over its more than five decades of existence, a hippie craft market, a countercultural institution, a community gathering unlike anything else in the American festival landscape. But its relationship to the Grateful Dead runs deeper than most festivals’ connections to their headliners, and that depth was on full display on July 12, 2026, when the fair’s closing day became the site of something genuinely moving: an all-star celebration of Bob Weir that brought together the people who knew him best, on the grounds where the Dead once made history, to honor a musician whose influence on American music cannot be overstated.
The history anchoring the occasion goes back to 1972, when the Grateful Dead played what became known as the Sunshine Daydream concert at the Oregon Country Fair grounds in Veneta, one of the most beloved performances in the band’s entire catalog, documented on film and in audio that has circulated among collectors for decades and officially released in 2013. The fair has always held that performance as a cornerstone of its identity, and returning to those same grounds to celebrate the life and music of Bob Weir carried the full weight of that history.
The tribute was not a standard-issue memorial event assembled from available talent. It was a carefully considered gathering of musicians who had actually shared stages with Weir across his multiple post-Dead projects, people who knew his rhythm guitar voicings from the inside, who understood the specific way his playing created space for everything around it, and who could approach the RatDog and Grateful Dead catalog with the kind of earned intimacy that makes the difference between a tribute and a true remembrance. Read The Full Article on The
The setlist for the July 12, 2026, tribute included these classic Grateful Dead and Bob Weir songs:
Set I
- Jack Straw
- Big River
- Cassidy > The Other One > Cassidy
- The Music Never Stopped [1]
Set II
- Playing in the Band > Only a River > Playing in the Band (Reprise)
- Samson and Delilah
- Estimated Prophet > Truckin’
- Looks Like Rain
- Sugar Magnolia [1]
Encore
- Not Fade Away [1]
Golden Gate Park, Labor Day: Grahame Lesh Brings the Free Concert Tradition Home
On Monday, September 7, 2026, Labor Day, the Forever Grateful, Golden Gate Park exhibition will open its gates with a free outdoor concert by Grahame Lesh and Friends, running from 2:00 PM to 6:00 PM at Robin Williams Meadow. The event is the official kickoff for the companion exhibition that follows the Haight Street Art Center installation, and the choice to open it with free music in a public park is a deliberate and meaningful act of continuity with the tradition that Phil Lesh and the Grateful Dead helped establish in San Francisco in the 1960s.
Grahame was explicit about this connection in announcing the show, noting that the free park concert format was one his father and the rest of the Dead pioneered as a genuine commitment to making the music available to everyone, regardless of economic circumstance, and that returning to Golden Gate Park for exactly this kind of event is a way of honoring that commitment rather than simply referencing it. The difference between honoring a tradition and referencing it is the difference between doing the thing and talking about the thing, and Grahame and his band are doing the thing.
The band assembled for the Golden Gate Park concert is a remarkable collection of Bay Area musicians whose individual biographies read like a who’s who of the extended Lesh family’s musical life. Holly Bowling brings her extraordinary keyboard technique, a playing style rooted in both classical training and deep Grateful Dead immersion that has made her one of the most distinctive voices in the contemporary jam scene, alongside Danny Eisenberg, whose decades on the Hammond B3 with The Mother Hips and Phil Lesh & Friends give the dual-keyboard configuration a richness and depth that few ensembles can match.
The guitar section pairs Scott Law, a Portland-born multi-instrumentalist with deep roots in both the bluegrass tradition and the extended Phil Lesh touring universe, with Garrett Deloian, whose role as lead guitarist and vocalist for Jerry’s Middle Finger has established him as one of the country’s most committed and convincing interpreters of Jerry Garcia’s specific guitar language. Deloian’s playing is rooted in the gospel-and-blues tone of Garcia’s best 1970s work, and his presence in Grahame’s band connects the Phil Lesh side of the family tree explicitly to the Garcia tradition. Read The Full Article on The Grateful Dead Substack
The Bob Weir ‘Ace Radio Show’ features FIVE (5) Hours of Live Music from his solo projects every week!
New Jersey This Summer: A Calendar Dense Enough to Keep You Busy Every Week
For fans in New Jersey and the broader tri-state area, the summer of 2026 presents an embarrassment of riches. The local Dead scene is in one of the most active periods in its history, with shows spread across every corner of the state in venues ranging from beachside bars to performing arts theaters to public libraries to minor league baseball stadiums. Here is the verified schedule through the fall.
This week opens with two different regional acts on the same night. Free Dead, performing alongside Ice Petal Flowers, brings a completely free late-night show to The Orange Lantern in Paramus on Tuesday, July 14th, starting at 8:00 PM, exactly the kind of no-barrier-to-entry event that keeps the scene accessible to people who are encountering the music for the first time. On the same night, Dead Reckoning heads to Donovan’s Reef in Sea Bright for a 6:00 PM show featuring two full sets of Dead classics and deep-cut rarities, with a ten-dollar cover that remains one of the better value propositions in the regional live music scene. Read The Full Article on The Grateful Dead Substack
The National Circuit: JRAD, Oteil & Friends, Splintered Sunlight, and DSO
For fans willing to travel beyond the Garden State, the national touring landscape this summer is as rich as the local calendar.
Joe Russo’s Almost Dead is the national act drawing the largest and most devoted crowds right now. Their closest upcoming stop to the New York area is Riverfront Park in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on Sunday, July 19th, a regional venue that has become a reliable anchor for the major touring jam acts working the Mid-Atlantic corridor. Their return to the New York area proper comes in late September with a two-night outdoor run at The Rooftop at Pier 17 on September 25th and 26th, a booking that represents exactly the kind of elevated setting that JRAD’s national standing now commands. These are performances worth planning travel for.
Oteil Burbridge, whose years as Dead & Company’s bassist made him one of the most publicly recognized figures in the contemporary Dead universe, is aggressively touring this summer with his rotating Oteil and Friends configuration, a supergroup format that allows the set to move fluidly between Jerry Garcia Band material and the broader Grateful Dead catalog. The band headlines Gratefulfest in Ohio on July 24th through 26th, a multi-day gathering that draws the national community for exactly the kind of extended festival experience that the Dead’s own touring always invited. Their Northeast run follows in early August, with stops at Tree House Brewing’s Summer Stage in Deerfield, Massachusetts on August 6th and Jay Peak Resort in Vermont on August 8th. For the fall, Oteil pivots to an adventurous jazz-fusion collaboration with the legendary guitarist John Scofield called Electrospective, a project that reflects the breadth of musical ambition that characterizes the best of what the Dead community’s musicians pursue outside the explicit tribute context. Read The Full Article on The Grateful Dead Substack
What This Summer Is Actually Saying
Step back from the individual events, the Oregon tribute, the Golden Gate Park free concert, the New Jersey calendar, the national tours, and what you see is a community that has found a way to be simultaneously elegiac and alive. The deaths of Bob Weir and the formal retirement of Bill Kreutzmann from legacy touring projects mark the end of an era that cannot be replicated, and the tribute at the Oregon Country Fair was a genuine reckoning with that fact, a gathering of musicians who loved the man and his music coming together in the right place to say so properly. Read The Full Article on The Grateful Dead Substack
