Set the controls for the heart of 1985 and the Dead’s 20th anniversary shows at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley, with a look at the band’s very busy year, plus Dead Head adventures aplenty.
Summer Magic 1985: Greek Theatre, 6/14-6/16 supplementary notes
by Jesse Jarnow
The Grateful Dead began a summer-long 20th anniversary celebration with a three-night weekend at Berkeley’s Greek Theatre in mid-June 1985. The shows were recapped in the Summer 1985 issue of Blair Jackson and Regan McMahon’s zine, The Golden Road, including a full transcription of their pre-show press conference and a reproduction of Robert Hunter’s “20th Anniversary Rag,” handed out at the gates to all attendees.
During the press conference, one reporter asked the Stupid Question, and happened to be standing next to photographer Susana Millman when doing so, resulting in this startling portrait of the Grateful Dead gazing directly through the camera’s lens to judge you, the viewer.
Also present at the Greek with her camera (and standing just to Susana’s left at the press conference) was Rosie McGee, recently returned to the Dead scene after roughly a decade away. She recently launched a Substack newsletter, and included her Greek ‘85 photos in a recent edition.
Len Dell’Amico was the in-house video director at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic throughout the 1970s before helming the Dead’s theatrical simulcast from Radio City Music Hall in 1980 (which he spoke about with us on our Dead Behind Dead Ahead episode). In today’s episode, we cover his follow-up project with the Dead, the home video So Far, released in 1987, but filmed two months before the Greek Theatre ‘85 shows. Recently, he published the great book, Friend of the Devil: My Wild Ride with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead. The summer 1987 issue of The Golden Road featured an interview with Garcia and Dell’Amico just after they finished the project.
Dave Perlis is the author of the fantastic forthcoming book, Morning In Marin: Zen, Drugs, and Ewoks on the California Coast, named for the Howard Wales composition, which frames the Dead inside a multi-decade cultural explosion Perlis calls the Marinissance. One of the other examples is George Lucas and his special effects unit Industrial Light and Magic who, starting in 1978, were located just blocks from the Dead’s Front Street warehouse rehearsal space. Oscar-winning animator Phil Tippett talked about a slightly-too-trippy experience he had while making 1984’s Return of the Jedi.
Printknot! co-founder and longtime Golden Road correspondent David Leopold (now creative director of the Al Hirschfeld Foundation) made a Sgt. Pepper-themed collage in his tour book to celebrate the band’s 20th anniversary, where they took to the stage at the Greek to the Beatles’ classic.
