The rarest of arena rock bands, they’ve been around for sixty years and can still sell out 60,000-seat venues. The Grateful Dead is one of the last Boomer bands still standing. “If you were to vote in 1968, the band most likely to fail, The Grateful Dead would have won,” cracks photographer Jay Blakesberg, the man behind “An American Beauty: Grateful Dead 1965-1995,” at L.A.’s David Kordansky Gallery for a few more days, says. “And here we are sixty years later, and they’re the last band standing. What other original bands out there are still doing this? The Rolling Stones and The Grateful Dead. And they’re playing stadiums.”
The show features twenty-eight large-scale and thirty-two smaller prints, many never seen before, spanning the band’s early days in the mid-sixties through to the death of their irreplaceable frontman, Jerry Garcia, from a heart attack in 1995. At 63, Blakesberg has seen over 250 shows. His daughter, Ricki, is co-curator and heads up Retro Photo Archive, a conglomerate of band photos taken by numerous artists over the years, including Blakesberg, Adrian Boot, Snooky Flowers, Greg Gaar, Andy Leonard, Rosie McGee, Ron Rakow, Jonathan David Sabin, Elizabeth Sunflower and Kirk West.
The exhibit grew out of a 2023 show Blakesberg presented at the Haight Street Art Center in San Francisco to coincide with Dead & Company’s stop at Oracle Stadium. “David saw the exhibit and we ran into each other on the ballfield,” Blakesberg says about the origins of the Kordansky show. “I didn’t know David, and he said, ‘This is incredible, I want to do a book!’ I was like, ‘Crazy guy.’ People say that to me all the time.”
Months later, during the band’s residency at Sphere in Vegas, a new iteration of the exhibit doubled the show’s size to 160 prints. Roughly 65,000 people saw it, as many as 2,000 on show days—a big leap from the 6,000 total attendees in San Francisco.
Laid out chronologically, each wall of the gallery represents a different period. It starts with photos by Rakow, who managed the band in the 1970s through albums like Wake of the Flood, From the Mars Hotel and Blues for Allah.
“Ron Rakow mentioned, ‘By the way, when I managed the Dead, I had a Nikon camera with me,’” Blakesberg recalls. “We scanned 1,000 photos, 800 color, about 200 black and white. It was all in great condition, color slides, well kept.”
The earliest shots are of the band before anyone knew who they were. These are the beardless Jerry days when they called themselves The Warlocks, house band for Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests, LSD-fueled events hosted by the acclaimed author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
“Rakow is so good at capturing in-between moments, cause he was with them so much,” notes Ricki. “This is just them having fun. They’re so young and vibrant, they’re not so serious yet.”
His opus is an Ektachrome shot of Garcia hanging by his fingers from the Pacific Stock Exchange Building. “The chromatic sensibility and the color in this picture, it’s so formal, so amazing, this body bisecting the composition,” says Kordansky, noting the color saturation and film grain.
In the spring of 1967, the band went to New York City for the first time, playing a half dozen shows at Café Au Go-Go in Greenwich Village and a show at the bandshell in Central Park. As the era rolls forward, the crowds grow, but the intimate communal vibe maintains. Fans are within a few feet of the band, some with their arms sprawled on the stage—no chainlink fences or security guards anywhere. Where other bands required a press credential for photography, the Dead allowed anyone to take pictures. “That’s why this band is so well documented,” observes Blakesberg. “They’d let people tape their shows!”
Bootleg tapes are legion among the faithful, with hundreds of concerts recorded and traded. Deadheads follow the band from venue to venue, sometimes living on the road for years at a time. Setting up shop in the parking lot before showtime, some sell drugs and handcrafted items—t-shirts, jewelry, artwork—to earn enough to scalp a ticket and a cheap meal. From this melange sprung a universe of Dead merch—bumper stickers, shirts, hats—that continues to grow over time.
Beth Sunflower’s images of rhythm guitarist Bob Weir in jail is proof of an October 2, 1967, drug bust at 710 Ashbury, where the band was living. It’s an event that only existed through word of mouth over the years. In the shot, Weir, long straight hair, head bowed, is seen behind bars, hands cuffed behind his back, a cop lurking.
“Prior to the discovery of these images, this was all mythology,” notes Kordansky. “The arrest was just a thing we all talked about. And then to find these images, never been seen, to actually know that it happened and it was documented, it’s surreal, in a way.”
A subsequent shot in the accompanying catalog, also titled “An American Beauty: Grateful Dead 1965-1995,” shows the band’s keyboardist Pigpen (Ron Mckernan), seated behind bars. Of the volume’s 275 images, 150 have never been seen before. British photographer Adrian Boot’s black and white shots of the 1978 Great Pyramids concert in Giza are included, notably Garcia posed like a superhero, a step pyramid looming behind him.
Blakesberg was beginning to find steady work as a rock photographer when, in 1987, he heard a rumor that the band would be shooting a music video, Throwing Stones, at an abandoned high school in the Oakland area. He happened to live across the street from an abandoned high school in Oakland.
“I literally put my cameras around my neck, loaded up my pockets with film and just walked on set and stayed for ten hours,” laughs Blakesberg. “About six hours in, Mickey Hart walks up and says, ‘Who are you?’ And I said, ‘Jay Blakesberg, Relix Magazine.’ He goes, ‘Okay.’ And that’s it. Can you imagine if you walked on the set of a Red Hot Chili Peppers video? You’d be arrested.”
The final gallery emphasizes the fans, most of them dancing, including “spinners,” hippies twirling like dervishes. For Blakesberg, these were often the hardest shots to capture because most took him for a narc. “They ran away from me,” he laughs. “So, I took pictures of my friends, cause they knew me and trusted me. But there were a lot of people doing a lot of sketchy things.”
In the 1990s, Blakesberg stepped out of the photo scrum to work with band members one on one, shooting Weir’s portrait for a children’s book he penned and mentoring the guitarist’s daughter in photography. He remained friendly with the late Phil Lesh (bassist), and drummer Mickey Hart, with whom he worked on other projects.
From New Jersey originally, Blakesberg was still in his twenties when he embarked on a career in the 1980s. The Dead were considered old-fashioned, so he photographed bands like Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Jane’s Addiction and the Flaming Lips for magazines like Guitar Player. His first assignment for Rolling Stone was shooting a free U2 concert in downtown San Francisco in 1987. He went on to shoot over 300 stories for them, including Lollapalooza and Radiohead when they were still a club band. In addition to music magazines, his photos appeared in publications like Time and Vanity Fair.
“In the artworld, it’s Velvet Underground, Talking Heads, and that stuff’s cool,” says Kordansky. “But the Grateful Dead was so formative!” The blue-chip art dealer with galleries in New York and L.A. grew up in Hartford, Connecticut, and attended Hartford Art School before matriculating at CalArts. He attended numerous Dead shows between 1992 and 1995 and continues to go to Dead & Company concerts today.
Along with the recent exhibit, “Rearview Mirror” at Gagosian (photos taken by Paul McCartney on the Beatles’ first U.S. tour), the show at Kordansky’s might signal a new trend. “Everything has been brought into the artworld,” says Kordansky. “For R. Crumb to be represented by David Zwirner Gallery, for particular artists to be brought in because they were so visionary and ahead of their time and deserve the context of the artworld—for me, photography is sort of this last documentarian space that hasn’t yet fully been appreciated in the artworld.”
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