Revisiting Grateful Dead’s 1975 Show In Golden Gate Park

Dead & Company will celebrate 60 years since the founding of the Grateful Dead with three concerts at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco this summer. The beautiful Bay Area park was a space where the Grateful Dead performed early in their career and a place they returned to in 1975, a year that only saw a handful of Grateful Dead shows.

While living in their communal house at 710 Asbury Street in the Haight District of San Francisco, Golden Gate Park was practically the Grateful Dead’s backyard as Haight Street ends at the eastern end of the park. The Dead played all over and often at Golden Gate Park between 1966 and ‘69, although details on many of the performances are known only to the mists that often populate the park.

Perhaps the most famous of the Dead’s early appearances at GGP was The Great Human Be-In on January 14, 1967, a John the Baptist moment of sorts for the Summer of Love. A number of seminal San Francisco Sound psychedelic bands played at the park’s Polo Fields — where Dead & Company will perform in August — that day including the Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother & The Holding Company and Quicksilver Messenger Service.

But by 1975 the Summer of Love was lost in the mist of Golden Gate Park as well. It was also a liminal time for the Grateful Dead. Following five years of extensive touring in North America and Europe, the Grateful Dead took a breather in ‘75.

The band — guitarists Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir, bassist Phil Lesh, drummers Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart, keyboardist Keith Godchaux and vocalist Donna Jean Godchaux — performed just four public shows that year, all in San Francisco. The final of the four was a concert at Golden Gate Park, this time at Lindley Meadow.

According to JerryBase, the Grateful Dead performed at Lindley Meadow once prior to the ‘75 play, during the Summer of Love on August 28, 1967. “Viola Lee Blues” is the only confirmed song from that performance.

On September 28, 1975, the Dead returned to Lindley Meadow, along with the newly minted Jefferson Starship. 1975 served not as a break from touring for GD, but also a time to record one of their best albums, Blues for Allah, which arrived on September 1, 1975.

Nothing sharpens material quite like recording an album, and it showed at the Golden Gate Park concert in ‘75. As they did at perhaps their most familiar ‘75 concert a month previous at Great American Music Hall (officially released as One from the Vault in 1991), the Dead kicked off the Golden Gate Park play with the Blues for Allah’s opening salvo of “Help on the Way” into “Slipknot!” Unlike Great Music Hall and Allah, the band eschewed “Franklin’s Tower” for a particularly funky “The Music Never Stopped,” which saw Grateful Dead/Bob Weir collaborator and Kingfish co-founder Matt Kelly adding harmonica. Jerry absolutely wails on this version.

A pair of early ‘70s staples “They Love Each Other” and “Beat It On Down the Line” followed ahead of the aforementioned “Franklin’s Tower.” As per JerryBase, this “Franklin’s” is the only recording from the ‘75 show that has been officially released, appearing on the 2015 collection 30 Trips Around the Sun: The Definitive Live Story 1965 – 1995 which came during the band’s Golden Anniversary.

The rest of the performance was pretty standard ‘70s fare, a cover of Johnny Cash’s “Big River” and the ballad “It Must Have Been the Roses.” “Truckin’” kicked off a set-closing sequence that included the instrumental Blues For Allah rarity “Stronger Than Dirt” ahead of a trio of classic closers: “Not Fade Away,” “Goin’ Down the Road Feeling Bad” and finally “One More Saturday Night.”

Listen to the Grateful Dead’s September 28, 1975 performance at Golden Gate Park below:

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Grateful Dead members Bob Weir and Mickey Hart will return to Golden Gate Park with Dead & Company August 1 (Jerry Garcia’s birthday) through August 3. Billy Strings, Sturgill Simpson and Trey Anastasio Band will offer support. Scroll down for show and ticket info.