When Jerry Garcia was alive and the Grateful Dead were constantly touring, the band’s famed singer and guitarist had a vision: A venue of his own he could enjoy when he wasn’t on the road. Now, nearly 30 years after his death, that dream has finally come to fruition.
Garcia’s, a 300-cap concert venue and restaurant in Chicago’s West Loop neighborhood, officially opens Friday, six years after the concept was first unveiled back in 2019. The venue is a partnership between Garcia’s estate and longtime concert promoter Peter Shapiro, the owner of Brooklyn Bowl and the Capitol Theatre who promoted the Dead’s famed Fare Thee Well shows back in 2015.
“Chicago has a lot of great venues — the Metro, the Vic, the Riviera, but it doesn’t have this,” Shapiro tells The Hollywood Reporter. “We think it’ll be a new kind of venue in one of the great music towns in America.”
Fittingly, the first band set to play Garcia’s is Grahame Lesh and Friends, the group fronted by the late Grateful Dead founding bass player Phil Lesh’s son. The venue will certainly attract flocks of deadheads, who remain among the most devout fanbases in music. But it’d be inaccurate to bill Garcia’s as a Grateful Dead museum. The decor is mainly devoid of “steal your face” logos or colorful dancing bears. The goal, Jerry Garcia’s daughter Trixie Garcia says, was to create a venue that reflected Garcia’s personality, passion and the music he loved.
“Jerry hated idolatry and deification and all that, he hated his face on anything,” Garcia’s daughter Trixie, who worked closely with Shapiro to develop the venue, says. “He was a real human guy. This isn’t a shrine, it’s a real living musical endeavor and it’s going to have a life of its own.”
Shapiro says Garcia’s will book bands showcasing some of Garcia’s favorite genres, like bluegrass, jazz, folk and rock. (The full list of the venue’s upcoming shows is on the Garcia’s website.) “Of course the Dead stuff will be in there, it’s the heart and soul, but we want to do everything,” Shapiro says. Meanwhile Shapiro describes the food as an “elevated supper club” inspired by food Garcia loved, listing off items like Mission Street hot dogs and fountain milkshakes for dessert.
Garcia’s is an idea over a decade in the making. Shapiro and the Garcia estate had already created a looser version of Garcia’s at the Lobby Bar at the Capitol Theatre back in 2013, a fitting locale as Garcia had long voiced his affinity for the Port Chester, New York venue. They knew they wanted to open a bespoke venue, settling on Chicago in 2019.
Both Shapiro and Trixie acknowledge that Chicago may seem like a less obvious choice than Garcia’s Dead’s hometown of San Francisco, but they say they were drawn to Chicago because of the band’s strong fanbase in the region. Shapiro points toward the band’s history in the city, noting that Garcia and the Dead’s last concert was in Chicago a month before Garcia’s passing.
“Of course, I want everything to happen in San Francisco, I love it so much,” Trixie says. “But having gotten to know Pete over the years, Chicago makes a lot of sense since it’s the heart of the country, there’s so many fans there and on the East Coast, it made sense to me.”
As Shapiro says: “I went to school in Chicago, married a girl from Chicago, I had this life-changing moment [at a dead show] at Rosemont Horizon in Chicago. I was the one who led the charge for Fare Thee Well shows at Soldier Field. I knew the strength of the market. It’s where Jerry last played. The last time the four surviving guys played together was Soldier Field.”
The economics on a a smaller capacity venue like Garcia’s aren’t without difficulty. Shapiro points to larger promoters like AEG and Live Nation turned their attention to opening larger theatre-sized venues such as Brooklyn Paramount in New York and The Pinnacle in Nashville in the past year. He says he hopes the venue’s offering to pair Garcia’s brand and music with high quality food will create a unique offering to keep up demand.
Garcia’s almost didn’t happen. Originally announced in 2019, the original timeline for the venue was ripped apart by 2020 as the live music business completely stopped during the pandemic. Shapiro says that their landlord encouraged them to stay but that as COVID restrictions began to lift, they’d gotten a rent bill for “hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
“He forgave some of the rent but it was still so much. I could’ve walked without paying probably, or I could choose to still do this,” Shapiro says. “I remember the moment I decided to keep going. I was getting ice cream with my kids at a Dairy Queen in South Haven, Michigan, probably around Labor Day 2023. I remember that moment. I was 50/50 on it. We’d have to get a huge check for rent and everything else. I thought, ‘fuck it, let’s do it.’”
Trixie says it was “amazing that the music industry survived” the pandemic, adding that she trusted Shapiro to navigate through the challenge and keep the venue alive. “Pete Shapiro manifests things. He saves the day in a lot of situations,” she says. “We’ve been trusting him since the rainbows came out at the reunion.”
Part of why Shapiro was so determined to complete the Garcia’s vision was the location itself. He described the building as a “unicorn,” lauding the venue’s acoustics and noting that crucially, the building has no columns, which means there won’t be as many obscured views for concertgoers.
“I knew that if I didn’t grab this venue, I’d never find a space like this in the West Loop in Chicago ever again, period,” he says. “I knew I’d never stop thinking about it. This one is one of a kind.”
Shapiro’s excited for the venue to finally start hosting shows, but says he’s still antsy given how much longer it’s taken than they’d originally planned to get to the starting line. Still, Garcia’s is now here, and with it a new spot to celebrate his legacy.
“It’s been 30 years since Jerry died, but he’s an endearing figure who still means a lot to people all these years later, and it’s my job to share that as much as I can for the benefit of the music lovers,” Trixie says. “Casa Garcia was something my dad visualized and now Peter and myself get to manifest it.”
Source: Hollywoodreporter
