Latest news with #Dead
San Francisco Chronicle
20 hours ago
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
400 Grateful Dead banners to fly across San Francisco as 60th anniversary celebrations begin
With more than 400 Grateful Dead -themed banners displayed across San Francisco, the city is diving headfirst into a multi-week celebration of the legendary band's 60th anniversary. City leaders hope the effort will bolster local businesses and tourism during a crucial phase of economic recovery. The concerts are expected to draw 60,000 fans nightly, with special guests including Billy Strings, Sturgill Simpson (as Johnny Blue Skies) and the Trey Anastasio Band. 'San Francisco is coming alive to celebrate 60 years of the Grateful Dead,' Mayor Daniel Lurie said in a statement marking the official kickoff Tuesday, July 22. 'Our bars and restaurants will be packed, our hotels will be booked, our neighborhoods will come alive, and there will be more revenue to fund the services that benefit all San Franciscans.' Hotel demand between July 31 and Aug. 3 has surged by more than 50%, according to city officials — a spike that has them optimistic about exceeding nearly $31 million in economic impact generated by Dead & Company's 2023 visit to Oracle Park. To ease the flow of concertgoers, Muni will provide expanded service on the 5 Fulton and N Judah lines, and offer free rides to ticket holders through the 'Your Ticket, Your Fare' program. Shakedown Street, the unofficial open-air market synonymous with Dead tours, returns as a fully sanctioned event along JFK Promenade during the three-day concert. Nearly 100 vendors are expected. 'It's a vibrant, colorful bazaar of modern-day hippies selling their wares,' said organizer Molly Henderson. Other c itywide events will stretch into the fall, including art exhibitions, after-parties, tribute concerts, panel discussions and special performances — from Jerry Day in McLaren Park to the San Francisco Giants' Grateful Dead tribute night at Oracle Park on Aug. 12. 'This three-day festival is more than just an anniversary — it's a homecoming,' said Phil Ginsburg, general manager of San Francisco Recreation and Parks, in a statement. 'It promises the kind of energy, joy, and soulful creativity that only Deadheads can bring.' Meanwhile, the Grateful Dead announced Tuesday that a 50th anniversary deluxe edition of its album 'Blues for Allah' will be released Sept. 12, featuring a newly remastered album and nearly two hours of unreleased live and rehearsal recordings. The set captures the band's groundbreaking 1975 comeback with rare performances and restored audio from original analog tapes.
Vogue
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Vogue
‘I'm Just Ready to Turn Up': Sudan Archives' Upcoming Album The BPM Is Her Biggest, Boldest Statement Yet
The album begins with 'Dead,' an exhilarating rollercoaster ride of a lead single, which features Parks crooning 'Did you miss me?' over swooping chords played by a string quartet before pummeling, four-to-the-floor beats and a whir of chopped-up vocals that sound almost like a siren come in—and things don't let up from there. The title hints at the direction she's heading in this time around: taking her distinctive sonic cocktail of neo-soul, R&B, and electronica and channeling it into 15 tracks of genre-defying experimental dance music. Even by Parks's already impressive standards, it's an extraordinary record: Where at moments Natural Brown Prom Queen felt like it was flexing to showcase the sheer versatility of her talents, on The BPM, her sprawling fascination with music history and maximalist instincts are still present, but feel laser focused—and firmly trained on the dance floor. 'I feel like I've got all my personalities in this album still, but it just feels a lot stronger,' she says. So how is she feeling as she prepares to unveil this new chapter to the world? 'I'm not nervous,' Parks says, after a pause. 'I always have a bit of anxiety, but that's normal. I'm just ready to go.' Part of the reason for Parks's excitement is that the album is very much a family affair. She explains that over the course of making it, she found herself reconnecting with her family's heritage—her mom is from Detroit and her dad is from Chicago—and the rich threads of dance music that are woven through the histories of both cities. 'I feel like my beats have always sounded a bit like where my parents are from, but this time it had this more experimental vibe to it, and I was very intentional about the fact that I wanted to make a dance record,' Parks says.
San Francisco Chronicle
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Grateful Dead's Shakedown Street goes legit for Golden Gate Park shows
As Grateful Dead veterans Bob Weir and Mickey Hart return to their spiritual home for Dead & Company 's celebratory run of shows in Golden Gate Park, the legendary Shakedown Street is once again setting up shop, this time with civic coordination. This year's incarnation of the free-spirited marketplace, which has followed the Dead since the 1980s, is scheduled to run from 10:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Aug. 1-3, along a 200-foot stretch of JFK Promenade between Transverse and Blue Heron Lake drives. The location sits about a mile east of the Polo Fields, where Dead & Company is set to perform each day for an expected 60,000 fans, joined by special guests Trey Anastasio, Billy Strings and Sturgill Simpson. Longtime Deadhead and clothing designer Molly Henderson, a San Francisco native who previously organized markets for the band's shows at Oracle Park and the Sphere in Las Vegas, is leading the effort in partnership with Jay and Liora Soladay and Sunshine Powers, owner of Love on Haight. 'Shakedown Street is a part of the culture of the whole Grateful Dead scene. It's an integral part of the Deadhead experience,' Henderson told the Chronicle. 'It began during the counterculture movement. People created a way to barter their wares to make their way to the next city.' Now a sanctioned event, the market will feature nearly 100 vendors selling tie-dye apparel, handmade jewelry, vintage Grateful Dead merchandise, original prints, patches and collectible posters. Organizers collaborated with city officials and concert promoters to secure permits and minimize disruption to nearby neighborhoods. 'There were a lot of logistics involved,' Henderson said. 'The vendors are coming no matter what. Having a sanctioned, safe place for this to happen was a large consideration.' Auxiliary markets and events are expected to pop up across the city to mark the 60th anniversary of the Dead, including the Heart of Town concert series at Pier 48, Jerry Day in McLaren Park, and activations in the Haight and Sunset neighborhoods.
Atlantic
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
Before the Sphere, There Was the Wall
Picture yourself at a concert. If you're standing by the soundboard, usually near the rear center of the venue, you'll enjoy the best possible version of the band's performance—what the 'sound guy,' whose job it is to make everything coalesce inside the room, hears. But if you step away to grab a beer and end up watching from a different place, you'll hear something else. At an outdoor show, the experience is even more varied, because of the open acoustics and elements such as wind, which break up sound waves. Far too often, the song you've waited all night for may finally reach your ears as a distorted puddle. How does a band ensure that it sounds like the most pristine version of itself, no matter where the show takes place or where the audience listens? In the early 1970s, the Grateful Dead tried to solve this dilemma with the help of their on-again, off-again sound engineer, Owsley 'Bear' Stanley, who conceptualized one of the boldest innovations in music history: a literal 'wall of sound.' On hits such as the Ronettes' 'Be My Baby,' the music producer Phil Spector had famously created a figurative wall of sound by layering instruments and orchestral sweeps. But the Dead's wall was essentially a behemoth sound system, a hulking electrical mess of amps, speakers, wires—like the menacing heavy-metal rig in Mad Max: Fury Road, but far larger, louder, and, perhaps, more ludicrous. The grand idea was both utopian and egalitarian: The wall placed virtually every piece of technology needed for a live show behind the group, allowing the crowd to hear precisely what the Dead heard as they played. The wall, the journalist Brian Anderson writes in his new book, Loud and Clear, 'weighed as much as a dozen full-grown elephants' and 'stretched the length of a regulation basketball court.' At each tour stop, roadies would assemble the nearly 600 speakers that, when operable, stood at about the height of a small apartment building and sounded 'as loud as a jet engine at close range.' During outdoor shows, fans could be up to a quarter mile from the stage and still hear Jerry Garcia's guitar runs with depth and clarity. But a relatively short time after its creation, the complexity and expense of maintaining the wall catalyzed the band's first serious brush with burnout—and, Anderson argues, played a factor in its hiatus. In trying to shorten the pathway from instrument to eardrum, the Dead's wall had simultaneously created a host of previously nonexistent issues. On paper, the wall was a tool to expand the scope of their sky-reaching jams; more than any of their rock contemporaries, the Dead were known for extended, full-band improvisation. But relying on engineering in order to achieve a perfect sound brought a new set of anxieties: Because there was frequently some glitch with the wall, the band was often held back from reliably playing at its best. Stanley helped the Dead reach a new stratosphere of live performance, but he also established an impossible standard—one the band couldn't measure up to. Grateful Dead fandom invites—and thrives on—obsession. Though the Dead's jam-band sound is undoubtedly groovy, many of its songs concern heavy themes such as life and death. There's a deceptive weight to their songs, even when the tunes feel bright; the music is an ongoing search to unlock something hidden in the recesses of your mind. Though the band has a wonderful collection of studio recordings, the real juice is in the live stuff: the thousands of concerts performed over dozens of years, with a different set list every night. There's a lot to get lost in, and from their early days as a touring band, the Dead won legions of stoned and tripping devotees. Anderson's book, though, is dizzying in a different way: It's a detailed, almost show-by-show breakdown of the band's live performances across its first decade (roughly 1965 to 1974), augmented by insider stories. Readers meet not only Stanley but also other engineers, roadies, and crew members who worked long hours under difficult conditions to help the Dead put on incomparable shows. (Many of the roadies also relied on, according to one band member, 'mountains of blow.') But undergirding this occasionally exhausting narrative effort is a tale about the tension between innovation and hubris. The wall was, in a sense, a physical manifestation of a brainiac's acid trip; after Stanley took LSD at a legendary Dead show at an upstate–New York speedway, Anderson writes, he believed that he could weave an unbreakable connection between the wall, the band, and the crowd. His acid-tinged goal with the wall was 'hooking it up to a whole sea of people like one mind,' he said. For years, most other bands had played the same way in concert: with instruments connected to amps, and amps and vocals running through the house PA. Even when traveling with their own sound guy, they'd still be beholden to each venue's setup—unless they toted all of their own gear, which just wasn't realistic. The wall, in theory, allowed for both top-notch sound and show-by-show consistency. In practice, though, it was an unwieldy nightmare. Speakers often blew out or failed mid-show. Stanley drifted in and out of the band's orbit; other engineers and roadies expanded on his original visions. All the while, maintaining the rig became more convoluted: The band kept booking larger venues, thus requiring more sonic power, more crew members, and more attention to detail. Peak functionality was far from guaranteed, and Anderson convincingly makes the case that many early versions of the wall sounded better than the 'official' wall shows in 1974, because the smaller scale allowed for relatively more control (though it was far from an efficient process; early iterations could still take five hours to set up and another five to break down). Within the band itself, the wall was divisive. Bassist Phil Lesh called the wall 'apocalyptic,' but also compared it to the 'voice of God.' For him, the wall allowed for 'the most generally satisfying performance experience of my life with the band.' Bob Weir, who sang and played guitar, called the wall 'insane' and 'a logistical near impossibility.' Drummer Bill Kreutzmann, according to Anderson, said it was a 'creature that was supercool to look at, but impossible to tame.' And Garcia, it seems, would have been fine keeping things a little more down-to-earth. At the wall's official debut, on March 23, 1974, technical difficulties led to Garcia's guitar volume plunging moments into the first song. When you listen to this show today, the beginning sounds, well, kind of crappy. In the end, the Dead played only a few dozen shows with the fully built-up wall, as the cost and draining elaborateness of touring with the device eventually became too much. At the end of 1974, the Dead downsized its crew and, in Garcia's words, 'dumped' the structure. When they hit the road again almost two years later, their sound setup was more practical—in essence, sacrificing the perfect for the sustainable. They remained road dogs until Garcia's death in 1995, and have kept offshoots of the band rolling along since. Though I never saw the band perform with Garcia—I was 7 years old when he died of a heart attack—I've seen its different configurations over the years. Last summer I saw Dead & Company play as part of their residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas. That night demonstrated the clearest and most all-encompassing live sound I'd ever experienced. Most people have heard about the Sphere's mind-bending visuals and mondo LED screens; fewer may realize that it also contains 167,000 individual speakers (including in each seat). Though I was able to lose myself in the show, a very real part of me almost would have preferred hearing these same songs outside in the sun, in an uncontrolled setting, where any number of variables—the breeze, a storm, air pressure—might have affected the sound. Imperfection can feel just as right, in a different way, as technical perfection. It's freeing to accept that something might always be a little off, no matter the herculean effort; the Dead seemed to accept this too. Anderson's book makes a compelling argument that reaching for total audio domination was—and is—a noble endeavor, albeit one rife with pitfalls. But even the most advanced rig in the world doesn't necessarily make the songs any good. That much is up to the band.
Yahoo
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Dead By Daylight Teases New Crossover With The Walking Dead
The acclaimed asymmetric multiplayer experience has become somewhat infamous for its crossovers in the horror genre, and now, Dead by Daylight has sunk its teeth into another. Announced on Twitter, the official Dead by Daylight account posted an iconic image that fans of Robert Kirkman's seminal graphic novel—or AMC's long-running adaptation—will recognize right away. However, for those who may be unaware, the image was clear to point out that it is a collaboration with The Walking Dead. However, details at this moment are sparse, and the post does specify fans would have to wait until July 8th, 2025, for more information. If the reveal is like many of Dead by Daylight's previous collaborations, players could likely see some of the series' beloved characters as Survivors, and its most dangerous foes as Killers—Neagan would seem an obvious go-to in this regard. The announcement follows yet another highly requested Dead by Daylight collaboration, specifically with Five Nights at Freddy's, with the inclusion of both the dilapidated pizzeria as a location, Springtrap as a Killer, and even a surprise costume featuring Matthew Lillard. Behaviour Interactive put an extensive amount of work into paying homage to the series' deep lore while also building a believable environment, so it stands to reason they'll do the same with The Walking Dead. It's amazing to see how far Dead by Daylight has come since its humble beginnings in 2016. Following the successful model of asymmetric multiplayer horror set by games like Friday the 13th: The Game—though releasing before it—the game has far outlasted any other entries into the genre and seen monumental success. Not only has it featured collaborations with iconic horror film franchises like Scream, Child's Play, and A Nightmare on Elm Street, but it's even featured characters from Silent Hill, Resident Evil and Castlevania.
