Deadheads Photographs by Jay Blakesberg Curated by Ricki Blakesberg
- Stuart Ake
- Nov 23, 2025
- 3 min read
Updated: Mar 24
"I borrowed my dad’s Pentax camera and photographed the Grateful Dead for the first time. I took 2 or 3 photos of the Deadheads in the audience. I didn’t know it at the moment, but this would be the very beginning of my lifelong quest to document the modern day hippie tribe."
Presented as an upscale fanzine, Deadheads gathers Jay Blakesberg's photographs of the parking lots, hallways and the chaotic traveling circus that followed the band from venue to venue. Turning his lens away from the stage lights and toward the crowd, the veteran photographer places the focus on the Heads themselves.
Shot on film over the course of twenty years, from parking lots in the late ’70s to the bittersweet final tours toward the mid-’90s, Deadheads is less a concert chronicle and more akin to a family album. The grain and haze of analog film feel right as Blakesberg isn’t chasing polish or technical perfection. Instead, the book is closer to a visual ethnography, assembled with the same devotion and patchwork energy that powered the parking-lot bazaars outside every show.
Co-curated with his daughter Ricki, Blakesberg’s volume will particularly resonate with those members of the traveling carnival who chased sound and song from venue to venue. As one who eclipsed the 100-show mark during this stretch, I found myself scanning pages for familiar faces amongst the shots at sacred 1980s spaces like the Frost, Kaiser, Greek or Alpine Valley.
“With no technology yet invented, we found our way, made human connections, figured out our fashion vibe and lived to tell the story.”
A few photographs are framed with images of ticket stubs, backstage passes or offset borders that distract and compete with Blakesberg’s own vision. Fortunately, the effect is limited to a small selection. I also wish Deadheads featured a more cogent key to dates and venues of the photographs. For a band whose story is so deeply rooted in specific nights and places, the delivery feels like an afterthought which leaves the viewer wishing for a better map to accompany the memories.
In the end, Deadheads isn’t about the band so much as the gravitational pull they created. Blakesberg’s camera finds poetry in the faces that followed the sound, reminding us that an essential part of the Grateful Dead was never just confined to the stage. It lived in the parking lots, campgrounds and hotels across American highways between each city on tour.
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Thirty-five years later, thanks to Glenn Davis for cueing this up. Winding south along a fog-soaked Pacific coast, I was involved in a head-on crash en route to Laguna Seca when a car drifted into our lane. Two friends suffered terrible injuries. We were lucky to survive. The months that followed were a haze of pain, PT and recurring nightmares. I usually tracked every show and devoured every tape, but after the accident I couldn’t stomach the idea of listening to the run.
Fast forward to 2022. Glenn Davis put on the show while we crossed the Bay Bridge after an underwhelming Roger Waters concert. About 2 minutes into the jam, Jerry flips the switch, his tone mutates and everything starts to unravel. The music spirals into chaos, then detonates into a wall of noise that’s both terrifying and cathartic. Forget “good for 1988.” I’ll put this Playin' against Veneta on 8/27/72 or the Boston Garden 12/2/73 blowout. Epic.
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