The Grateful Dead will be playing farewell shows in the Bay Area after all.
The legendary band that formed 50 years ago in Palo Alto announced Friday it will perform two “Fare Thee Well” concerts, June 27 and 28, at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara. In a statement on the band’s website Friday, the surviving members noted that the stadium is just 12 miles from what is essentially the birthplace of the Grateful Dead.
Tickets will be sold via lottery, at prices ranging from $60 to $200.
The news comes three months after the band announced it would perform three shows in Chicago, July 3-5, celebrating the band’s 50th anniversary and putting the touchstone on a storied career that saw a ragtag group of musicians arise from San Francisco’s psychedelic rock scene to become one of the top touring acts in the world and an American cultural icon. But the Chicago shows raised questions and some complaints from fans wondering why the band wouldn’t recognize its birth place with a Bay Area concert.
And after weeks of speculation that additional shows would be scheduled, those fans got the answers they wanted on Friday, along with an assurance for those seeking to be part of history that these are the last dates the band will add.
The Santa Clara concert lineups will be the same as those for Chicago: The four surviving members of the Grateful Dead — Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, Phil Lesh and Bob Weir — joined by guitarist Trey Anastasio, best known as the frontman for the wildly popular jam band Phish; and keyboard players Jeff Chimenti and Bruce Hornsby, both of whom have extensive history performing with the Grateful Dead’s many offshoots.
The band took an almost conciliatory tone in announcing the Santa Clara shows on its website Friday, acknowledging that it had to do something for its local fans, many of whom were unable to land tickets for the Chicago shows.
“We have tried to do the right thing wherever we could for the Chicago shows by honoring the roots of where we came from, while dealing with the realities of the current times,” the band said in a statement posted on its website. “But that’s hardly comforting when you’re (expletive) outta luck for tickets and your only option is inflated prices on secondary ticketing websites. That would (tick) us off too.”
The band originally picked Chicago’s Soldier Field for its farewell concerts because the famed stadium hosted the final Grateful Dead shows on July 9, 1995. Singer, guitarist and band leader Jerry Garcia died about a month after those shows and the Grateful Dead disbanded after that, although its musicians continued on in a number of side projects together and individually.
The band also offered that the Santa Clara shows would add a more fitting historical note to its “Fare Thee Well” concerts, noting that the Grateful Dead started “fifty years ago when we grabbed a bunch of instruments off the walls of a music store in Palo Alto.”
A statement by Weir, Hart, Kreutzmann and Lesh said “it has become clear to us that we first need to return to our beginnings, where we first said hello — to each other and to all of you. And so it is that we have decided to plug in for two additional shows on June 27 and 28 at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California — just a dozen miles south of where Dana Morgan’s Music Store once stood.”
Fans wanting tickets for the two shows, priced at $59.50-$199.50, can sign up for an online ticket lottery that the band installed on its website, www.dead50.net. The sign-up will be in place through April 14 and those who place requests — with a maximum of four tickets per person, per show — will learn if they have received tickets on April 19, according to the band’s website. The announcement said 65,000 tickets would be sold for each show.