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The long, strange trip is far from over. Especially in Portland.
Sure, other cities boast their own Dead-themed businesses; there’s a Grateful Head Pizza Oven and Tap Room with locations in Broken Bow, Okla., and Hot Springs, Ark., and a place called Ripple Rays in Richmond, Va. But Portland’s relationship with the band seems especially thick.
While the 21st Avenue sports bar decorated with marching bears and Dead lyrics Lightning Will was a casualty of COVID, we’ve still got Fire on the Mountain—which is named for a Dead song, and so committed to the bit that one of its restrooms is decorated with a decidedly nightmarish version of those marching bears.
But who are we kidding: If you like tater tots, and you live in Portland, you’re going to spend some time thinking very, very hard about your particular relationship with the Grateful Dead sitting in a McMenamins. I’ve thought a lot about my relationship with the band, either while staring at poster art or eating tater tots or listening to whatever’s on the stereo at whichever McMenamins I was closest to when I realized my blood sugar was perilously low.
I was 14 the summer Jerry Garcia died, and while my parents were cool, they weren’t take-your-tween-daughter-to-a-Dead-show cool. (Plus, they were more into the Stones.) Though a slightly older friend of mine had seen his first Dead show around that time. And with all the confidence of a teenager who’s done something exactly once, he told me Garcia’s death marked the end of an era. There would never, ever be anything like that band, never an experience like the experience of seeing them live.
I just assumed he was right, with all the credulity of a teenager who simply believes what older friends tell her. But I’m starting to think my friend was dead wrong about the Dead.
Jerry Garcia drew his last breath on Aug. 9, 1995, 53 years and eight days after he took his first. Deadheads refer to the period between Aug. 1 and 9 as the “days between”—which is also the name of a Dead song. These are the high holy days in the modern Deadhead calendar. While McMenamins didn’t invent the concept, the company has taken it to the highest imaginable level, with more than 30 events across its locations this summer.
“I don’t know exactly when or where it was first coined, but for the uninitiated, it celebrates the life and legacy of Jerry Garcia and the spirit of the Grateful Dead,” says Jimi Biron, director of music and entertainment for McMenamins.
Biron, who’s been with the company for 35 years, doesn’t remember when the brewpub chain began recognizing the holiday, but he says “it becomes a little bit more official” every year.
This year, the McMenamins festivities span author events (a conversation between Garcia biographer Jim Newton and Gabi Moskowitz, co-author of Dead in the Kitchen) to tie-dye golf tournaments to a game night to art tours and food and drink specials (a Panama Red IPA and a Sloppy Jerry sandwich).
There will also, of course, be music. Local Dead cover bands Garcia Birthday Band and Panama Red will play the Aug. 2 Garcia Birthday Bash at the Crystal Ballroom, and the Dark Star Orchestra, a Chicago cover band that re-creates specific Dead shows note for note, will play at the Grand Lodge in Forest Grove on Aug. 8. Plenty of other cover bands—and Dead-influenced acts like the Tedeschi Trucks Band (playing Edgefield on Aug. 7)—will take McMenamins stages during the Days Between.
The link between Oregon and the Dead is fairly well established: The band famously helped save the Kesey family’s creamery (which is still going strong, many tubs of Nancy’s Yogurt later), and whipped through the state on countless tours. I always assumed McMenamins’ founding brothers, Mike and Brian, were Deadheads. They were, but Biron says the Dead’s influence on the company can be found in more subtle ways as well. The band’s commitment to being a constant touring presence, but also having multiple-night runs in one city where they never repeated a song—that carries over into the McMenamins philosophy of being consistent across locations, but also making each location a little unique.
“The idea of the Dead mixing genres, mixing styles of music—jazz and bluegrass and rock and roll and just creativity of a mixed genre—is how we apply it to our properties,” Biron says. “So there’s history, music, gardens, food and beverage, art, events. It’s just mixing all of this together while maintaining a respect for the tradition and maintaining a creative mindset.”
Talking to Biron about the Dead makes it tough for me to hang on to my cynicism about the Dead, or my bewilderment at the persistence of events like Days Between or bands like Dead and Company, which comprises the original band’s surviving members plus John Mayer, and which stopped touring in 2023 but didn’t quite stop being a band.
When I confess that most of the Dead’s music doesn’t speak to me, but that I do like the acoustic, countryish numbers, Biron cheerfully notes there’s plenty to explore within that side of the band’s catalog, and suggests I give Workingman’s Dead a listen. He also says Dead culture has proven to be much bigger than any one member, or even the band itself.
“It’s an all-inclusive, welcoming community. It feels good. It’s fun, and so many bands have taken up that spirit—whether they’re playing Grateful Dead music or they’re playing their own music—and created this culture,” Biron says, naming bands like Phish and the newer Dead-adjacent band Goose.
The scene, he says, is thriving: “Now we’re dealing with second- and third-generation Deadheads out there at the shows. And when you get the mainstream endorsement of a John Mayer, it really cements the legacy well past the lives of the actual founding members of the group.”
Well, he had me up to John Mayer. But I’ll split the difference and give Workingman’s Dead another spin.
CHECK IT OUT: Days Between: A Celebration of Jerry Garcia takes place Aug. 1–9 across all McMenamins locations. For a full calendar of events, visit mcmenamins.com/events/277505-days-between-a-celebration-of-jerry-garcia.
