Fans toast Grateful Dead’s 60th with concerts at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Fans of the Grateful Dead are pouring into San Francisco for three days of concerts and festivities marking the 60th anniversary of the scruffy jam band that came to embody a city where people wore flowers in their hair and made love, not war.

Dead & Company, featuring original Grateful Dead members Bob Weir and Mickey Hart, will play Golden Gate Park's Polo Field starting Friday with an estimated 60,000 attendees each day. The last time the band played that part of the park was in 1991 — a free show following the death of concert promoter and longtime Deadhead Bill Graham.

Certainly, times have changed.

A general admissions ticket for all three days is $635 — a shock for many longtime fans who remember when a joint cost more than a Dead concert ticket.

But Deadhead David Aberdeen is thrilled anyway.

“This is the spiritual home of the Grateful Dead,” said Aberdeen, who works at Amoeba Music in the bohemian, flower-powered Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. “It seems very right to me that they celebrate it in this way.”

Formed in 1965, the Grateful Dead is synonymous with San Francisco and its counterculture. Members lived in a dirt-cheap Victorian in the Haight and later became a significant part of 1967’s Summer of Love.

That summer eventually soured into bad acid trips and police raids, and prompted the band's move to Marin County on the other end of the Golden Gate Bridge. But new Deadheads kept cropping up — even after iconic guitarist and singer Jerry Garcia ’s 1995 death — aided by cover bands and offshoots like Dead & Company.

“There are 18-year-olds who were obviously not even a twinkle in somebody’s eyes when Jerry died, and these 18-year-olds get the values of Deadheads,” said former Grateful Dead publicist and author Dennis McNally.

Deadheads can reel off why and how, and the moment they fell in love with the music. Fans love that no two shows are the same; the band plays different songs each time. They also embrace the community that comes with a Dead show.

Sunshine Powers didn’t have friends until age 13, when she stepped off a city bus and into the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.

“I, all of a sudden, felt like I fit in. Or like I didn’t have to fit in,” says Powers, now 45 and the owner of tie-dye emporium Love on Haight. “I don’t know which one it was, but I know it was like, OK."

Similarly, her friend Taylor Swope, 47, survived a tough freshman year at a new school with the help of a Grateful Dead mixtape. The owner of the Little Hippie gift shop is driving from Brooklyn, New York, to sell merchandise, reconnect with friends and see the shows.

“The sense of, ‘I found my people, I didn’t fit in anywhere else and then I found this, and I felt at home.’ So that’s a big part of it,” she said of the allure.

Sometimes, becoming a Deadhead is a process.

Thor Cromer, 60, had attended several Dead shows, but was ambivalent about the hippies. That changed on March 15, 1990, in Landover, Maryland.

“That show, whatever it was, whatever magic hit,” he said, “it was injected right into my brain.”

Cromer, who worked for the U.S. Senate then, eventually took time off to follow the band on tour and saw an estimated 400 shows from spring 1990 until Garcia's death.

Cromer now works in technology and is flying in from Boston to join scores of fellow “rail riders” who dance in the rows closest to the stage.

Aberdeen, 62, saw his first Dead show in 1984. As the only person in his college group with a driver's license, he was tapped to drive a crowded VW Bug from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, to Syracuse, New York.

“I thought it was pretty weird,” he said. “But I liked it.”

He fell in love the following summer, when the Dead played a venue near his college.

Aberdeen remembers rain pouring down in the middle of the show and a giant rainbow appearing over the band when they returned for their second act. They played “Comes a Time,” a rarely played Garcia ballad.

“There is a lot of excitement, and there will be a lot of people here,” Aberdeen said. “Who knows when we’ll have an opportunity to get together like this again?”

Fans were able to see Dead & Company in Las Vegas earlier this year, but no new dates have been announced. Guitarist Bob Weir is 77, and drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann are 81 and 79, respectively. Besides Garcia, founding members Ron “Pigpen” McKernan on keyboards died in 1973 and bassist Phil Lesh died last year at age 84.

Mayor Daniel Lurie, who is not a Deadhead but counts “Sugar Magnolia” as his favorite Dead song, is overjoyed at the economic boost as San Francisco recovers from pandemic-related hits to its tech and tourism sectors.

“They are the reason why so many people know and love San Francisco,” he said.

The weekend features parties, shows and celebrations throughout the city. Grahame Lesh & Friends will perform three nights starting Thursday. Lesh is the son of Phil Lesh.

On Friday, which would have been Garcia’s 83rd birthday, officials will rename a street after the San Francisco native. On Saturday, visitors can celebrate the city’s annual Jerry Day at the Jerry Garcia Amphitheater located in a park near Garcia’s childhood home.

A man uses a cellphone to record musicians performing during Haight Street Daydream, a community event celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Grateful Dead, in San Francisco, Saturday, July 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vasquez)

A merchant picks up a Grateful Dead patch out his inventory for a customer in San Francisco, Saturday, July 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)

Sunshine Powers, owner of Love on Haight and fan of the Grateful Dead, poses for a photograph inside her store Saturday, July 19, 2025, in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vasquez)

A man walks past the house where the original members of the Grateful Dead music group lived in San Francisco, Saturday, July 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vasquez)

A tour van featuring a painting of musician Jerry Garcia travels through Haight Street in San Francisco, Saturday, July 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vasquez)

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Iran has sent its response to the latest U.S. ceasefire proposal via Pakistani mediators and wants negotiations to focus on permanently ending the war, Iran’s state-run media said Sunday. Pakistan confirmed receiving it.

Iran seeks to end the war on all fronts, including in Lebanon, where Israel fights the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militant group, and to ensure the security of shipping, its state TV said. Washington’s latest proposal addressed a deal to end the war, reopen the Strait of Hormuz and roll back Iran’s nuclear program, an issue that Tehran would rather discuss later.

The White House had no immediate comment about Iran’s reply. President Donald Trump is giving diplomacy “every chance we possibly can before going back to hostilities,” the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Mike Waltz, told ABC.

Iran's new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, who has not been seen or heard publicly since the war began, “issued new and decisive directives for the continuation of operations and the powerful confrontation with the enemies” while meeting with the head of the joint military command, the state broadcaster reported, with no details.

Meanwhile, the fragile ceasefire was tested when a drone ignited a small fire on a ship off Qatar and the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait reported drones entering their airspace. The UAE blamed Iran. No casualties were reported, and no one immediately claimed responsibility.

Qatar's Foreign Ministry called it a “dangerous and unacceptable escalation that threatens the security and safety of maritime trade routes and vital supplies in the region."

Iran and armed allied groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon have used drones to carry out hundreds of strikes since the war began with U.S. and Israeli attacks on Feb. 28.

Trump has reiterated threats to resume full-scale bombing if Iran does not accept an agreement to reopen the strait and roll back its nuclear program. Iran has largely blocked the strategic waterway that's key to the global flow of oil, natural gas and fertilizer since the war began, rattling world markets.

The U.S. in turn has blockaded Iranian ports and on Friday struck two Iranian oil tankers it said were trying to breach the blockade. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard navy says any attack on Iranian oil tankers or commercial vessels would be met with a “heavy assault” on one of the U.S. bases in the region and enemy ships.

The American military said Sunday that it has turned back 61 commercial vessels and disabled four since the blockade began April 13.

Another sticking point in negotiations is Iran’s highly enriched uranium. The U.N. nuclear agency says Iran has more than 440 kilograms (970 pounds) of uranium that is enriched up to 60% purity, a short, technical step from weapons-grade levels.

In an interview with state media posted late Saturday, an Iranian military spokesperson said its forces were on “full readiness” to protect nuclear sites where uranium is stored.

“We considered it possible that they might intend to steal it through infiltration operations or heli-borne operations,” Brig. Gen. Akrami Nia told the IRNA news agency.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in an excerpt of an interview with CBS scheduled to air later Sunday said the war isn't over because the enriched uranium needs to be taken out of Iran. “Trump has said to me, ‘I want to go in there,’ and I think it can be done physically,” he said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Saturday that Moscow’s proposal to take enriched uranium from Iran to help negotiate a settlement remains on the table.

The majority of Iran’s highly enriched uranium is likely at its Isfahan nuclear complex, the International Atomic Energy Agency director-general told The Associated Press last month. The facility was bombarded by U.S.-Israeli airstrikes in the 12-day war last year and faced less intense attacks this year.

Pakistan oversaw face-to-face talks between the U.S. and Iran last month and continues to pursue mediation. In rare public comments, army chief Field Marshal Asim Munir said Islamabad remains committed to helping end the conflict. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif spoke by phone with his Qatari counterpart.

The UAE's Defense Ministry said it shot down two drones and blamed Iran.

In Kuwait, Defense Ministry spokesperson Brig. Gen. Saud Abdulaziz Al Otaibi said hostile drones entered Kuwait’s airspace and forces responded “in accordance with established procedures.” The ministry did not say where the drones came from.

Qatar's Defense Ministry said a drone targeted a commercial ship coming from Abu Dhabi, setting a small fire that was extinguished. The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations Center said the attack happened 23 nautical miles (43 kilometers) northeast of the capital, Doha. It gave no details about the ship’s owner or origin, and there was no claim of responsibility.

Several attacks against ships in the Persian Gulf have occurred over the past week, and a U.S. effort to “guide” ships through the strait was soon paused.

South Korea announced initial findings from a investigation that said two unidentified airborne objects struck the South Korean-operated vessel HMM NAMU about one minute apart while it was anchored in the Strait of Hormuz last week, causing an explosion and fire. A foreign ministry spokesperson said officials have yet to determine who was responsible.

Magdy reported from Cairo. Associated Press writers Munir Ahmed in Islamabad; Melanie Lidman in Tel Aviv, Israel; Tong-hyung Kim in Seoul; Julia Frankel in Jerusalem; and Josh Boak in Washington contributed to this report.

Container ships sit at anchor in the Strait of Hormuz off Bandar Abbas, Iran, Saturday, May 2, 2026.(Amirhosein Khorgooi/ISNA via AP)