The Dead

[Drunk Monk]

7.6 miles the first two days, 7.8 on Sunday. No cramps.

[Greg]

But the Cramps are awesome! Were they scheduled to appear?

[Drunk Monk]

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Aw shoot. The twitter embed doesn't work anymore. Is there a new trick?

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Damn. The Twitter trick works no more.

Dead & Company’s final S.F. concerts pumped $31 million into local economy

• Aidin Vaziri
   
  
•  8 hours ago
  

John Mayer (left), Jay Lane, Bob Weir and Mickey Hart of Dead & Company perform at Oracle Park on July 16, 2023 in San Francisco.




Dead & Company concluded its Final Tour in San Francisco over the weekend with a fantastic drone show, positive vibes and significant financial gains.
Approximately 120,000 fans over three days attended the band’s grand finale at Oracle Park, where it performed three sold-out concerts at the home of the Giants baseball team and raked in $20.4 million in ticket revenue. According to Destinations International’s Event Impact Calculator, the local Final Tour shows were projected to generate $21 million in direct spending and create a $31 million overall economic impact on the city’s struggling economy, providing a much-needed boost to various businesses and industries. 
“It was an honor for us to host Dead & Company’s final shows and we felt Oracle Park was a natural, authentic fit,” said Stephen Revetria, president of Giants Enterprises. “We were thrilled to see the over 120,000 spirited fans fill the ballpark and our city, and hope we were able to provide the band and their loyal following with a memorable platform to celebrate the historic final act.”   
Throughout its tour, Dead & Company — formed in 2015 by surviving Grateful Dead members Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann (who sat out the Final Tour) alongside singer-songwriter John Mayer — drew more than 840,000 fans to its shows, boasted a setlist of 112 unique songs and grossed a record-breaking $115 million.
To put that figure into perspective, the annual gross revenue for Dead & Company’s inaugural tour was $20.8 million, and the total for its previous tour in 2019 was $58.3 million — the highest sum recorded at the time. Adding to the tally, the band’s outdoor concerts in Mexico dubbed Playing in the Sand, a four-day event hosted at the Riviera Maya on the Mexican Caribbean coast, brought in a combined $52 million over three consecutive years in 2018, 2019 and 2020. 
“It’s not the money, it’s the money,” Bill Graham, the late rock promoter who is credited with first booking the Grateful Dead at the Fillmore Auditorium in 1966, famously said. 
In the last leg of the Final Tour alone, the band earned $54.4 million from just 10 stadium shows, contributing significantly to their milestone total.
“Dead & Company have a rich history in San Francisco, it only made sense for them to close out their incredible touring run in this magnificent city,” said Jodi Goodman, president of Live Nation in Northern California. “Over 120,000 fans from all over the country, and the world, came to the city to witness this historical closing chapter together – you couldn’t ask for a better ending to the legacy this band leaves behind in SF.”
Along the way, Dead & Company raised more than $13 million for nonprofits and other initiatives, supporting crucial causes ranging from environmental conservation to climate change solutions, on its most recent tour. An additional $2 million was garnered through charity auctions to further their philanthropic endeavors.
Emphasizing their dedication to sustainability, the rock band allocated nearly $1.6 million towards greenhouse gas reduction and climate justice projects. 
Over its eight-year run, Dead & Company toured across North American cities every year except 2020, performing 235 concerts. Ticket sales from 215 of the shows reported to Pollstar, the leading concert industry journal, show overall grosses from these concerts amounting to $434.3 million and approximately 4.1 million tickets sold.
“Well it looks like that’s it for this outfit,” Weir wrote on social media at the time the Final Tour was announced, “but don’t worry we will all be out there in one form or another until we drop …”
Reach Aidin Vaziri: avaziri@sfchronicle.com

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Damn. The Twitter trick works no more.

[Drunk Monk]

Yay! I thought I hallucinated posting the above...

[Greg]

I'm sure you are still hallucinating. Just not about this. There was some fiddly code that needed to be fiddled with. When the forum moved, it went to a new version of PhP and I updated the forum as well. Things broke.

Go back to hallucinating about more important things.

[Drunk Monk]

No dear, this is the dream, you're still in the cell.

[Greg]

Always.

[thatguy]

I saw a post of the Steal Your Face done display over McCovey Cove. Pretty cool...



--tg

[Drunk Monk]

I saw that live. 
Check my IG. 
I posted video there.

[Drunk Monk]

7/26/90 was the date when Brent Mydland died. That’s 33 years ago. Lawd. I remember his death well. I was only 3 years deep with the Dead but I heard him play plenty of times and was deeply saddened at his passing. 

33 years ago…

[Drunk Monk]

Grateful Dead > Furthur > the Other Ones > the Dead > Dead & Co.

And now...

Dead Ahead

https://www.deadaheadfestival.com/

[Greg]

Too much money to quit now.

[King Bob]

Plus a whole company that they've accumulated over the years that would all be jobless.

Brent's death was the beginning of the end of the Dead for me, and then Jerry's passing was really the end.

[Drunk Monk]

The infrastructure of the Dead is constantly revolving, just like any touring band. Most of the longtime support are retired or dead now.

I’m so grateful that I got to share time and space with Jerry. It was over 300 shows with the Grateful Dead and 100+ for Jerry Garcia Band. Stacy says the ones I worked don’t count, but I deny that. I’ve not tried to tally how many of the shows I’ve been at in Jerry’s wake. Perhaps someday I might. I think I only got tickets for Fare the Well in Santa Clara & Chicago and this last D&C final tour. 

Sure, Jerry’s been dead for 28 years now but the music still plays. Not Fade Away.

[Drunk Monk]

As a Grateful Swifty, I don't know what this even means...

Why Taylor Swift is the new Grateful Dead—and what it means for the future of live entertainment
Swifties and Deadheads have a lot in common—including ticket-scalping headaches. 


[Photos: John Shearer/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management, GAB Archive/Redferns/Getty Images]

BY SPENCER ANTE5 MINUTE READ

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My daughter desperately wanted one present for her Sweet 16: to see the Taylor Swift concert with a good friend. Unfortunately, tickets to the recent Eras Tour were sold out on Ticketmaster, and resale prices were in the thousands for even nosebleeds. In a last ditch, but calculated, effort, my wife took her and her friend to the stadium in Philadelphia, hoping to snag tickets right before the show when the scalpers cave, and prices typically dive on the secondary market.
But due to the extraordinary demand, prices only dipped slightly for 10 minutes around the start of the opening band, and then proceeded to rise again. My wife frantically tried to buy some tickets and even placed an order, only to find that the seller rejected the offer. Then not long after, the apps said, sorry there are no tickets left to sell. Tears flowed. 
After seeing the scene, with thousands of fans setting up camp outside the arena to take in the show, it struck me that there are a number of striking similarities between Swift’s brand and that of one of my favorite bands, The Grateful Dead, including their struggles with ticket scalpers, which could lead to big changes in the future of the live-entertainment business and how it is structured.
On the surface, the two bands couldn’t be more different. Swift is a gifted artist who performs very personal songs for legions of young female fans in a series of highly choreographed set pieces with dazzling outfits; while the Dead, for most of their career, were a bunch of grizzled old, bearded guys who were perfectly content playing songs about cowboys, hustlers, and murdering men, dressed in T-shirts and jeans and barely moving on stage.
But dig a little deeper, and you’ll find some surprising similarities. Artistically, in their early years, both the Dead and Swift drew on similar musical roots in country and bluegrass but then evolved and wove other strains into their musical tapestries, including folk, blues, pop, and psychedelia. Both artists are not only musical innovators, but also singer-songwriters who despite covering vastly different territory are lyrical geniuses who have developed a canon of classic songs. While Swift writes or co-writes all her songs, the Dead wrote by small committee with most of their ditties penned by Jerry Garcia and lyricist extraordinaire Robert Hunter.
Both grew over time into incredibly successful commercial acts with cult followings. Believe it or not, after the Dead released their hit album In the Dark in 1987 and grew their fanbase, they were actually the highest-grossing musical act for two years in the early 1990s. Swift continues to top the album charts, and her latest Eras Tour with its 44-songs setlist, is expected to smash current records and be the highest-grossing tour of all time. 
That commercial success stems from a brilliant ability to build community around the music. Many successful brands have used this strategy, such as Disney, which hosts the three-day super-fan festival D23 Expo; or the Harley Owners Group (HOG), operated by Harley-Davidson, which hosts meetups for bikers around the globe.
The Dead and Swift have amassed the most fervent groups of fans who have matured into flourishing communities with unique cultural rituals. Deadheads and Swifties go “on tour” and follow their bands around the country, where they bump into friends and other fans. Deadheads exchange custom T-shirts, and Swifties give handmade, beaded friendship bracelets to their seatmates. Deadheads see multiple shows because the band plays different songs each night, and Swifties always look forward to the surprise song she’ll play at every concert.
Both artists are so popular that thousands of fans come not to see the show, but to hang out in the parking lot and enjoy the music and one another. Similar to the accessory market for the iPhone, Swift and The Dead have even spurred their own secondary economies. When they come to town, small but vibrant economies pop up, driving up hotel and transportation prices while entertaining the locals. 
The intense loyalty stems in large part from the two-way communication between artist and fan, and a bucking of convention designed to protect the community and culture. Due to rampant scalping, The Dead pioneered their own ticket sales operation and were the first band to allow live taping of their shows—presaging the future of digital music and the sharing economy by decades. The Dead realized long ago that bootleg tapes and albums were marketing for the real money maker—touring, merchandise, and licensing of their brand. 
In 2015, Swift famously flexed and forced Apple to do an about-face and pay artists during a free trial of Apple’s new music-streaming service. Swift is rerecording her earlier music because she couldn’t acquire the rights to her masters. 
The question for Swift now is: What more will she do with her immense power? After TicketMaster flubbed the presale for her current tour, Swift wrote on social media that she’s “trying to figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward,” and hinting she might bring this element of her career “in-house” like many others to protect her loyal fans.
What’s happened since then can only make her more livid. The levels of scalping on the Eras Tour has reached absurd proportions with the average secondary ticket price in the thousands and some seats listing for close to $100,000—with the commensurate fees that are often close to half the ticket price, and sometimes more.
This greed highlights a grave problem with the live-concert industry attracting the attention of lawmakers who are concerned that the Live Nation-TicketMaster conglomerate has too much power. Today, Live Nation Entertainment, by some estimates, controls 70% of the primary ticketing and live-event venues marketplace. The company has been regularly accused of threatening venues that don’t use Ticketmaster with the loss of acts promoted by Live Nation. 
Fan rage has sparked calls to break up the company, with politicians from both parties asking the Biden Administration to reevaluate the 2010 merger. Earlier this year at a congressional hearing, the head of rival ticketing platform SeatGeek called for the breakup of Ticketmaster and Live Nation, alleging it’s a monopoly that uses threats to dominate the industry and hurt consumers.
While my wife and daughter were too devastated to hang around the Philly show after they couldn’t get tickets, we were eventually able to snag some for the Foxborough, Massachsetts, show the following week. We spent a small fortune, and made the drive, to make her Sweet 16 dreams come true. Despite a massive storm that threatened to cancel the show, Swift performed for more than four hours in the pouring rain. It was a night they’ll never forget. Maybe next time, they’ll feel comfortable just hanging out in the parking lot and listening to the show.