Down from the woodworks: the 2nd Annual Grateful Day Fest

On October 14th, children in tie-dyed shirts pranced in the middle of the streets, puffing ginormous bubbles and finger painting colorful sketches that reflected the swirls on their t-shirts. College students — some of them wearing their dad’s hand-me-downs and others stylistically echoing the notions of the past through high-waisted vintage Levi’s and the typical thrifty fit — admired the older figures in the crowd and collectively skated across leveled platforms and readymade ramps down Haste. Lastly, as one of my friend’s father, a fan himself amassing about 300 shows, had put the night before: “The tribe [the DeadHeads] came out of the fucking woodworks to relive the sounds of the Dead.” All of these components collectively comprised the 2nd Annual Grateful Day Fest, a community-based dual-stage concert with street vendors, ranging from selling dinosaur succulents to “Bob Marley” incense, that captured the free-flowing nature of the DeadHead phenomena and the unifying, blissful, transcendent sound of the Grateful Dead. On top of that, the fest epitomized the “Berkeley way,” so to speak; the little things we see everyday, such as the passing of a battered joint between happy homeless people, the murals of the Civil Rights Movement that rest on the sides of buildings, the convergence of all ages enjoying the center of the hippie movement.These images, amongst many others we see on our grey, monotonous walks to class were magnified, intensified, and expanded upon at this homage on Telegraph Avenue.

Being as it was Parents’ Weekend this weekend, I was delighted to have incredible conversations with my roommates’ parents about school, art, stories, and, with a select few, music. My friend’s dad, who stated so eloquently the quote above, talked to me about his experience with the Dead, reminiscing about the essence of the crowd and how he got into the strange esoteric culture. He posited that many people were turned off by the crowd and thus had trouble becoming as musically inspired, but once you got passed that eccentricity, you understood the attraction. That’s why the DeadHeads embodied the form of a cult; they understood the cooperative abnormality of the band and they mirrored the psychedelic jams, moving and simultaneously bouncing like a collective amoeba at shows. “It’s not for everyone,” he said. Unbeknownst to me and quite convenient, the Grateful Day Fest would be going on just two days after that conversation.

a young Jerry Garcia at the Greek on October 20th, 1968. Courtesy of Sylvia Clarke Hamilton.

As my two friends and I (one being the son of a DeadHead and the other being a recent listener of the Dead) walked down Haste, we could hear the remnants of Jerry Garcia’s fluid guitar sounds. Bowditch to Haste was blocked off, giving skaters an unrivaled and rare opportunity to skate freely on the streets. Next to People’s Park, they set up two ramps and other little platforms to perform tricks on; a van of skaters rested on the sidewalk with a couple of coolers of beers and scratches on their knees. Nearing the end of the block, a kid, probably around five, and what seemed like his older brother, zoomed down the street, finally falling and skidding to the ground before crashing into the fences that blocked off the festival.They jumped up from the ground, hysterically laughing. Indirectly, yet perfectly natural, the acoustic vibrations of the Dead inspired the new era of hipsters to migrate to the streets, creating a clash of new and old.

Finally, we hit Telegraph and the amoeba was in full force. A shirtless man was laying out tie-dye shirts on the floor, couples — dressed in drapery and light threads — were flailing their arms and twisting back and forth. A cloud of smoke permeated the air, and parents showed their children the life of the dead by throwing their kids onto their shoulders, holding them high in the sky. The same parents promoted freely moving dance movements and let their kids run wild through the streets amongst a totally safe and happy environment. Large afros, eclectic Dead shirts, traversing from Lithuania in 1992 to a shirt that said “Aging Hippie Still Against the Bomb,” and a carefree essence recreated a Telegraph-wide Dead show. This was no place for limitation, no place of force or criticism, no place of anger or polarization — all of which aggressively eat away at this country.  

Loose with the Truth, a Dead cover band, played an assortment of Dead songs, reinventing yet sticking close to the original sounds. We heard a great rendition of “China Cat Sunflower,” a song that starts with the simple observation of Japanese trinkets in the windows of restaurants, migrates through the streets of San Francisco, adventures into the literature of Kerouac and Alice in Wonderland, and juxtaposes its own childlike sound with notions of inward inspection. Per usual, the cover band went right into “I Know You Rider,” a blues song that has crossed paths of many great artists since the 1930s. The band, consisting of a lead guitarist, two singers, and a drummer, played on into the afternoon, making dancing music for the dancing people.

I was asked, during my conversation, a couple nights ago, “How did you get into the dead?” I originally didn’t comprehend the concept. I would try to get through live albums, but met trouble, while sitting in my room, pondering the existential wonder. My friend, who gradually became infatuated and even started listening strictly to the Dead channel on Sirius XM, invited me and a couple others into his world. We drove the streets of LA, stopping and moving, listening to Hartford, Connecticut (1977), widely known as one of the Dead’s best sets of all time. We conversed, listened intently, and tried to understand in our own individual ways the phenomena that engrossed the late 1960s through to the 1990s. A couple weeks later, a few more hot-boxes, and a few more joy rides decoding metaphors while comfortably falling into the light hearted happiness of the group, we celebrated Jerry Garcia’s birthday by going to the movie theater to watch an unreleased show from 1983 at the Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. Unlike any other movie theater experience, members of the cult in their tie-die and dancing bear shirts, navigated through the aisles, not once touching their bosom to the seat. At this point, I was hooked.

A strange convergence occurred at the show. While the DeadHeads and hippies from the hills entered a state of Grateful oblivion, swaying, laughing, and reminiscing to the sounds, groups of Berkelyites — students, the more pedestrian group of adults, and workers — passed by, estranged and bewildered by the fest. Backpacks on, fastidiously and rampantly walking onwards to the library, many of these people did not understand the fest. At the same time, you could tell that many of these onlookers had never heard of the Dead and were now suddenly interrupted by the strange amalgamation of hippies, hooked just like I was in that movie theater. Music was quite literally bringing people together and it didn’t care who you were or where you came from.

Another stage was set up about 40 to 50 feet from campus. And I couldn’t help but think of the past of Berkeley while watching this other band, who did a cover of “Not Fade Away,” an ode to ample and genuine love. On the same grounds that the cover band reinitiated the Dead, the hippies of the 60s rioted;Ken Kesey and the Pranksters gave emphatic speeches; the counter-culture lived in this small nest in Berkeley. The Grateful Dead was commemorated: the fans, the vendors, the smoke, the music commemorated the counter-culture past. And together, a peaceful coexistence, quite the opposite of the Ben Shapiro/Milo riots of the year before, infused the streets of Berkeley on a lovely Sunday.

While many Dead songs circulate around the problem of not having a home (“Jack Straw,” “Friend of the Devil”), this was not the case that day. Many found a home at the 2nd Annual Grateful Day Fest.

Written by Julius Miller