The Grateful Dead and Fairmont Hotel don’t exactly vibe. One is tie-dye and drug rugs, the other is chandeliers and champagne service. But this weekend they collided, with Deadheads in Birkenstocks spilling into marble hallways, ready to party like it’s 1974 … on a $10,000 budget.
And while the Dead has always been replete with indulgence, opulence and big spending is a newer phenomenon in the band’s canon, leading some to boycott the shows altogether.
On Friday morning, the palatial lobby of the Fairmont was already buzzing with tie-dye and the weary countenances of travelers in town to see three days of Dead & Company in Golden Gate Park. The luxury hotel is one of 14 included in the VIP packages, which range from $1,700 to $6,300 — not including travel.
As they spilled out of their Mercedes and Suburbans, bellhops carted in Dead-themed and Rimowa luggage belonging to the visitors behind them decked out in Grateful Dead gear.
After checking in, Steve Leyton, his wife, and their friends stood outside waiting for their Uber to Golden Gate Park. Leyton has the kind of sardonic wit that comes with the average boomer dad who loves the Dead way too much (I should know as the son of one). He stands around his friends, cracking jokes wherever he can.
He’s been to some 500 shows, and feels he’s earned the right to the accoutrements that come with the VIP ticket, like sitting down and avoiding a long bathroom line, especially after knee surgery eight weeks ago. Anyway, as president of a design firm he founded 30 years ago, he can afford to shell out some extra dough to make the experience a little easier on his joints.
“When people bag on me for dropping bucks on stuff like this, I tell them, ‘Listen over the years, I’ve slept in cars, on top of cars, under cars, on the sand, on a cot on the sand, on the ground, in a tent, and in a repurposed livestock shed at the Ventura County Fairgrounds. I’m 65, OK?’” he said. “We can afford it and we’re not spending money we don’t have but still it is breathtakingly expensive.”
His friends Erin O’Brien and Smokey Stout concurred. And between the first-class flights and the VIP packages, they’ve shelled out close to $10,000 for the weekend.
“It beats taking a covered wagon and losing half your family,” Stout quipped.
Past the valets, where a convoy of blacked-out vehicles and one pristine Westfalia were dropping off geriatric hippies, the hotel's grand stairwell was lit with tie-dye-colored lights beside the garden lobby, where VIPs picked up posters and tote bags. Neither the spokespeople for the band nor the Fairmont disclosed how many VIP tickets were sold, but one of the receivers at the hotel told me they had hundreds of posters reserved for people at the Fairmont alone.
Chris Kovac stood smiling in the hotel’s foyer, wearing a shirt that read “DEAD FOREVER LIVE AT THE LAS VEGAS SPHERE 2025.” He might live in Kansas City, but as the founder and CEO of his own artificial intelligence company, it seems he’s got some San Francisco in him yet. After all, he’s following the Dead around. The VIP package was an early 50th birthday present for himself
“[The Sphere] changed our lives,” he said. “As soon as I saw the Golden Gate show, we booked our tickets.”
In the Ponte Vecchio-style shopping center on the far side of the Fairmont’s vestibule, men in golf polos with Grateful Dead trucker hats shopped for fine wine and cigars, while women flipped through options for manicures and the spa. People are exchanging travel details, favorite setlists, and theories for the shows in Golden Gate Park this weekend.
Josh Franklin, president of a $100 million-dollar pharmaceutical company, has been to about 1,000 Grateful Dead shows since his first at Buckeye Lake, Ohio, in June 1988. Last year, he spent three weeks in Las Vegas for the Sphere shows. The music has become a little more predictable, he said, but the travel is “very different.”
“Anything you could do to bum a ride and scratch up enough loose change to get a ticket,” he said, declining to go into detail, calling the stories “not suitable for publication.”
On Thursday, Franklin and his wife, Anne, flew out of Newark for a cozy stay in the Fairmont that ran up a bill of between $5,000 and $10,000.
“It’s all about making sure we are rested and ready for the shows,” he said.
Lorenzo Rojas and Stephen Ash met in the wake of the pandemic at Portland psychedelic society — a nonprofit that offers education and community for psychedelic users — but on Friday morning, they were catching a tan on the Fairmont’s hotel deck.
The two came down from Oregon, where Rojas is a hospice nurse and Ash does day trading.
“There’s a high rate of failure in my world,” Ash said with a chuckle.
All told, the two spent around $2,000 between flights and a stay at the Fairmont. This is not without ambivalence, though. Rojas, for instance, remembers the rough and rowdy days of seeing the Dead in the 1990s and is quick to admit the absurdities of his San Francisco jaunt.
“I wasn’t going to come for that reason — it’s a little spendy and kind of far removed from the old days when it was a VW van and sleeping on the ground and such,” he said.“But we’re all older and achy.”