jam bands
In 1995, Peter Shapiro purchased the New York club Wetlands. “That was the home of the jam band, Grateful Dead scene in New York,” he recalls. At the time, though, “it wasn’t cool to be a Deadhead. And Wetlands wasn’t necessarily the cool play.”
But styles that were frowned upon by one generation are often taken up by the next. While many artists — and the mainstream music business — ignored jam bands for years, this has started to change. Intrigued by the scene’s genre-hopping open-mindedness and the unwavering devotion of its followers at a time when “superfan” is the industry buzzword of choice, the rest of the music business has started to take an interest in a space it long kept at arm’s length.
“If you’re a pop artist, and you see a bunch of bearded weirdo hippies able to do whatever they want on their own terms, that’s an appealing path to think about,” says Mike Luba, longtime manager of the String Cheese Incident.
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At festivals, “you’re seeing jam bands pop up on lineups that are traditionally more indie rock or haven’t really touched the jam thing in the past,” explains Dave DiCianni, who co-manages Goose along with other jam bands like Eggy and Pigeons Playing Ping Pong. “It’s cool to see it permeating into general pop culture,” he adds.
The Big Bang for jam bands, according to Shapiro, was the death of the Dead’s Jerry Garcia in 1995. “Everyone saw the Dead; they were the number one touring band in the 1990s,” Shapiro continues. “Garcia dies, and that audience of live music, improvisation-loving people splinters. That creates the jam band scene. Phish lifts up” — the band first cracked Pollstar‘s highest grossing U.S. tours list at the end of 1994 — “along with String Cheese Incident, Disco Biscuits, Medeski Martin and Wood,” and more.
Over the years, groups associated with the scene “will pop in and out of mainstream pop culture,” Luba says, pointing to Rusted Root and the Spin Doctors. But many of the acts in this space were overlooked, if not dismissed outright, by the mainstream music industry, in part because they didn’t generate chart hits or millions of streams, even as they moved lots of tickets. Nick Stern, whose management client Karina Rykman is “jam adjacent,” contends that the jam scene is “the most looked down-upon genre in the music business.”
For some artists, that gives it an inherent underdog appeal: “I’m interested in things that are unfashionable,” Vampire Weekend lead singer Ezra Koenig told The New York Times Magazine in 2020. He also noted that he finds Phish “more inspiring, forward-thinking, exciting and talented than a lot of what was higher up in the cool hierarchy;” Vampire Weekend recently hopped on stage with Goose, the new arena-filling stars of the jam scene.
Jam acts may also be benefitting from the catholic tastes fostered in the streaming era — as DiCianni puts it, listeners’ interests are now “less compartmentalized.” And artists and managers in the jam band scene posit that its emphasis on being present, in the moment, with a like-minded community for an ever-changing live experience offers an increasingly potent antidote to the distracted, frenetic, nichified, social media-driven world.
But there’s another reason why the mainstream music industry is increasingly interested in jam acts. “People outside the jam band space are coming to me almost in awe of the fandom in this scene,” says Ben Baruch, Goose’s other co-manager.
In interviews over the last six months, many of the most powerful executives in music have talked up the importance of cultivating “superfans.” Despite music’s popularity, it is poorly monetized compared to spaces like gaming. This is partially because the music streaming model currently offers artists few ways to foster meaningful connections with followers. Jam bands have been doing this for decades — perhaps because they didn’t get much support from the traditional industry, and have never depended on record sales or streaming.
Jam band devotees are impressively diligent about attending shows, buying merchandise, and streaming live performances, which change nightly. “They almost treat their favorite bands like a sports team, where they’re following along with what happens in every moment in every show,” says Ethan Berlin, who is co-agent for Goose, Pigeons and Rykman, among others. “They’re so invested — for years.”
And these fans have long had “ears that are a mile wide,” according to Rykman. At a time when the walls between the jam world and the rest of the music industry appear more porous, jam enthusiasts have flexed their muscles to help propel some artists from adjacent worlds to greater heights.
Take Billy Strings: The versatile guitarist and songwriter, now signed to Warner’s Reprise Records, has picked up Grammy nominations for Best American Roots Performance and Best Country Duo/Group Performance; he won the award for Best Bluegrass Album in 2021. At the same time, Strings has played with Bill Kreutzmann (a founding member of the Dead), String Cheese Incident and Goose, among others. He saw “there’s another whole world where traditional bluegrass can actually cross over and be accepted,” Luba says. Strings’ current tour includes multiple arenas.
Berlin is also the agent for Khruangbin, a trio whose dreamy instrumental grooves now attract 10,000 to 25,000 tickets per market; Berlin describes them as “not quite jam, maybe not even jam-adjacent, but definitely jam-friendly.” Notably, “they were embraced by that scene early in their career, ” he continues. “One of the first looks they had outside of Houston, where they’re from, was when they were invited to play Lockn’ Festival [one of the leading jam gatherings] in 2016.”
For Rykman, whose 2023 debut album featured guitar from Phish co-founder Trey Anastasio, this is one of “the beautiful things about the jam space.” “Myself, Khruangbin, Vulfpeck, we’re not jam bands with capital J’s — none of us play two sets, we still play three-minute songs,” she continues. “But jam band fans were early” to signal appreciation.
Similarly minded artists — what Rykman calls “singular groovy organisms” — might also want to court this community — music-loving superfans hiding in plain sight who can help them build the sort of formidable live business that ensures a long career. Another one of Baruch’s management clients is the Disco Biscuits; in the past 18 months, he says “they’re growing more than they have in 20 years.”
“What musician wouldn’t want that level of diehard fan?” Berlin asks.
Few Millennials can boast of having seen the late Jerry Garcia live in concert and yet no generation of jam band fans have benefited from the success and fellowship of bands like The Grateful Dead than those born after Garcia’s death in 1995.
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“Today we live in a golden age for the jam scene,” said veteran music industry executive, producer and artist manager Jonathan Shank, host of The Jam, a new podcast from Osiris Media exploring the bands, the fans and the jams that make up one of the live music’s most enduring musical legacies.
From Phish and Dead and Company’s successful run of shows at The Sphere in Las Vegas, to the emergence of jam superstar artists like Billy Strings, Goose and even EDM pioneers Odesza as mainstream festival headliners, the music born from artists like the Grateful Dead, Allman Brothers Band, the Meters and Dr. John is more accessible than ever.
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Billboard recently caught up with Shank to discuss his long history in the jam scene and hear about his new Osiris Media podcast, which launched in March with interviews from legendary bassist and producer Randy Jackson as well as Relix magazine editor and jam scene scholar Dean Budnick.
Why did you decide to jump into podcasting?
I was inspired by Dan Steinberg and Luke Pierce’s Promoter 101 podcast and the idea of elevating people’s stories in the industry. I wanted to find some untold stories with artists that I love and create a platform to tell those stories in a very organic, free form way, and maybe find a few nuggets that people haven’t heard before.
Besides naming your company after a Grateful Dead album, what are your bona fides in the jam scene?
I’ve managed a few jam bands; first Particle in 2001 and then the Disco Biscuits for quite a little while, who are our guests on the podcast. And then around 2004, I started managing (Grateful Dead percussionist) Mickey Hart, who I met through Irving Azoff and went on to manage Mickey and Bill Kreutzmann in the Rhythm Devils and then later Global Drum Project and the Mickey Hart Band for several years. I love Billy Strings and Goose and I’ve seen The Grateful Dead with Jerry Garcia over 50 times. I still put the Grateful Dead as the benchmark for all live music that I’ve ever experienced.
Where do you see the fingerprints of what the Grateful Dead built in today’s music industry?
The Grateful Dead’s approach to direct to fan marketing through fan club ticketing and community around their live experience is a blueprint for what artists like Beyonce and Taylor Swift are doing today and how they’re connecting with their fans via social media. The Dead were the first to engage fans in a newsletter. They were the first to establish a tape trading practice, which now has really developed into Setlist.net where people go and find sets from different shows. So much of how we think about the connection between artist and fans originates with the Dead.
What does the rise of artists like Billy Strings and Goose say about the longevity of today’s jam band scene?
I think we’re in a new golden era of jam and a lot of that really has to do with the emergence of those two artists — Billy Strings and Goose. They are true headliners that can navigate the mainstream and headline major festivals, like Lollapalooza, that are not just jam centric. They’re the ones who will continue the jam scene into future decades.
Let’s talk about some of the guests you’ve had so far, starting with George Porter from the Meters. What does it say about the jam scene that a New Orleans funk band is part of The Jam podcast?
It’s a great example, actually, of how the jam scene encompasses bluegrass, funk, R& B, and jazz into this large gumbo of influences and different styles of music. George Porter Jr. is somebody who has collaborated with Dr. John, with Robert Palmer and with some of the greatest New Orleans musicians of all time. But he also has collaborated with Widespread Panic and The Grateful Dead. George really has embodied that spirit and does his own Grateful Dead covers now on his set with a cover of “Eyes of the World.”
How do you find guests for your podcast?
I’ve known Robby Krieger since the nineties. I’ve known Randy Jackson for over 10 years. He’s been a great mentor to me. You know, Billy Cobham I worked with in Jazz is Dead. Bill Payne and I have mutual friends. I want to give the people that I’ve crossed paths with over the years a forum to thank them for the part they played in my career path and for inspiring so many others in the music industry.
Who is helping you produce The Jam?
I have great partners on this project. We record the podcast inside the Sony studios and then Osiris handles all of the marketing, editing and distribution. It’s an incredible team. Osiris has a great collection of artists and podcasts that super serve the jam audience. My goal is to feature great artists and some industry folks that have stories to tell and and also some tastemakers and people that you don’t hear from very often and help. I feel very blessed to be highlighting these stories and having conversations with some of the greats in this business.
When Phish takes the stage at Sphere on Thursday to begin its four-night run at the cutting-edge new Las Vegas venue, it’ll do so armed with a bespoke production in keeping with its long history of head-turning concert innovation — which is why co-creative director Abigail Rosen Holmes‘ sentiment on the eve of the shows initially seems counterintuitive.
“We’re pushing a lot of technical boundaries, and we’re doing a lot of things that are somewhat new … but never done for its own sake, all done very specifically to achieve what we want to do creatively,” the live music veteran says of her work with Phish, which follows U2 as the second musical act to play Sphere since it opened last fall. “You should just walk in and think that it was amazing, and you had a great time. If you’re sitting there thinking about what it took for us to build it, then that’s probably not right.”
What Holmes wants fans to focus on is Phish “just being the band playing the best Phish music they can.” Phish has an extensive history of intricately produced “gags” — deploying a fleet of clones, turning Madison Square Garden into an underwater world replete with drone-powered whales and dolphins, or even doing a Broadway-caliber staging of its song cycle about the fantasy world of Gamehendge, to name a few — but Holmes says that since she first began conceptualizing the Sphere shows with the band and its frontman Trey Anastasio last July, they’ve eschewed such a creative direction.
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“We’re going to use all of the opportunities of this building — the audio, the visuals — and do it while supporting Phish truly playing music the way Phish plays music,” she says. “That became really the guiding star for everything that we thought about creatively. How do we create visuals and use all the technology of this space — and not impede Phish being able to play anything they want any way they want on the night?”
It’s a marked contrast from U2, which kept its show more or less the same for each of the 40 nights it played Sphere, and designed impressive song-specific visuals for several key tracks. That Phish will mix up its show for each gig on a four-night run — not repeating a single song — is a given; what that looks like in a venue with Sphere’s epic visual capabilities is less familiar territory.
Abigail Holmes
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Still, in Holmes and the Montreal-based multimedia studio Moment Factory, whose Sphere team is led by the show’s co-creative director Jean-Baptiste Hardoin, Phish has secured a creative crew that’s up to the paradoxical task of orchestrating an advanced, immersive sensory experience to accompany a band whose musical signature is improvisation. Holmes started working with Phish in 2016, when she collaborated with lighting director Chris Kuroda on designs for the band’s touring show, and she conceptualized the live production for Anastasio’s 2019 side project Ghosts of the Forest; her career dates back to lighting work on Talking Heads‘ Stop Making Sense, and extends far beyond her concert résumé — she’s also worked with Janet Jackson and Roger Waters, among others — to architectural and installation projects, including a stint at Walt Disney Imagineering. “I feel like people often reach out to me for projects that don’t fall neatly into any really easy category,” she says, adding with a laugh, “People call me for their weird stuff.”
In Moment Factory, Phish united Holmes with kindred interdisciplinary spirits. The firm has worked with Phish several times dating back to 2015, including on its 2018 and 2021 Halloween gags and on its 2022 Earth Day show at Madison Square Garden — the one where the band turned the venue into an arena-sized aquarium. Like Holmes, Moment Factory’s work extends beyond its music clients — who include Billie Eilish and Halsey — and into airports, malls and more. But even so, Moment Factory producer Daniel Jean explains, “The challenge with Phish [at Sphere] was the biggest challenge we’ve ever faced […] to make sure that we create a show that is flexible and can react in real-time.” As Hardoin puts it, the team has been “trying to design the unpredictable.”
While Holmes and Moment Factory are tight-lipped about specific creative elements of the show, which they began workshopping in earnest last October, they share some broad strokes. Each night will have a loose theme, Holmes says, not unlike those that governed each concert in Phish’s 13-show Madison Square Garden “Baker’s Dozen” run in 2017. That choice “provided a little bit of a framework for a jumping-off point for ideas for the visuals,” she says, though she emphasizes it’s “not rigid in the song choice, it’s not rigid in the visuals.”
Those visuals will be twofold. Kuroda, the band’s longtime lighting designer, known for improvising his work along with the band’s jams, will continue that role at Sphere, utilizing a new version of his intricate rig designed specially for the venue. “The amazing rig that he has on tour was not a good fit into this building,” Holmes says. “It sits in front of the screen, it takes a lot of motors that would be in front of the screen. We realized pretty early on that that would have to change. I’m extremely excited to watch the new rig that’s designed for him in here. It plays a role in tandem with the screens instead of existing on its own.”
Moment Factory contributed to the set design that ensured Kuroda’s lighting rig and Sphere’s screen could live in harmony. And furthermore, Sphere has provided an opportunity for the company to expand its early 2000s roots in multimedia to staggering proportions. “We’re basically VJ’ing on a 16,000-by-16,000-pixel ratio for Sphere,” Jean says.
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The exact nature of those visuals remain under wraps until Phish takes the stage on Thursday night, but the creative process Holmes and Moment Factory describe sounds groundbreaking. In a nutshell, the Moment Factory team has created visuals and worked with Holmes to create a playback interface — not unlike the custom programming Kuroda has implemented over the years for his lighting rig — that will allow for real-time manipulation of the visuals that follow Phish’s musical impulses.
“It was a matter of, OK, how can we evolve this universe for eight to 20 minutes, with different parameters, wheter it’s the colors, whether it’s the saturation, whatever,” Hardoin says. “[Holmes] has a very good understanding of the music of the band. She’s able to modulate [the visuals] live, as lighting designers do.”
At the shows, Holmes will be executing the visuals, which will integrate generative content and use existing technologies in new ways, like Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, a platform that allows creatives in fields like gaming, television and live events to blend live-action video and CG. (“That’s been pushed very far past what’s been done in other places,” Holmes says of Unreal.)
For months, Holmes and her team have used the vast trove of Phish concert recordings to simulate how the Sphere visuals “might evolve during a jam … being quite careful to use multiple versions, because they’re going to be radically different,” she says. “The visuals go in real-time to support [the band] and follow them musically, not the other way around.”
Phish’s penchant for newness is, in Holmes’ estimation, what will define the band’s Sphere run — and it explains why the booking appealed to the band in the first place. While the band capped off its 40th anniversary year in 2023 with a New Year’s Eve production of its Gamehendge saga, comprised of some of its oldest material, Phish has a new studio album out this summer (Evolve, due July 12) and continues to introduce fresh material while rethinking its live presentation.
“When we think about this show, it’s today — it’s not referencing the past,” Holmes says. “This is a piece of them taking a huge risk and experimenting and trying something new, because that’s what they like to do.”
Shortly after Michael Cherman founded his apparel company, Market, in 2016, he designed and sold a tie-dyed T-shirt with the Grateful Dead’s dancing bears spiraling toward a center point. Spotting the trademarked image online, the Dead’s official merchandise company, Rhino Entertainment, contacted him and asked: “Would you like to do this more legit instead of bootlegging it?”
“Yes,” he responded, and today, the company’s streetwear products include a $200 Grateful Dead screen-printing kit and a $45 trucker hat with the lightning-skull Stealie Rose logo. “This has unlocked the world for me,” says Cherman, whose company sells clothing licensed from the estates of Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix and others. “People just came to us and said, ‘Hey, how can you do that for us?’”
Since the Dead sold one of its earliest T-shirts in the late ’60s, featuring keyboardist Ron “Pigpen” McKernan and designed by Hell’s Angel Allan “Gut” Terk, its merchandise business has evolved into an international brand licensed to dozens of companies and sold in stores from Walmart to Saks Fifth Avenue. What Cherman calls the “holy trinity” of Dead logos — dancing bears, lightning bolts and skeletons — is on thousands of products. Online, fans can buy a pair of tie-dyed Crocs containing pink-and-yellow dancing-bear charms for $160; a $70 Teton hoodie designed for snowboarding; Grateful Dead leggings marked with “GD” and pink roses, $38; Grateful Dead fluorescent green Nike skateboarding shoes, $110; a psychedelic Air Garcia skateboard, $65; and a pair of Grateful Dead skis topped with the “Steal Your Face” skull logo, $750.
The band’s merch machine has also served as an exemplar of how an act can expand its brand into a multimillion-dollar business, raking in revenue years, and even decades, after the deaths of such core members as McKernan, Jerry Garcia and lyricist Robert Hunter.
Dead products are a sliver of the nearly $4.4 billion music merch licensing industry, as valued by trade organization Licensing International in 2022, an increase from $3.7 billion in 2019. Universal Music Group, which owns merch giant Bravado, earned $618 million from product in 2022, according to financial reports — a 70.2% increase from $363 million the previous year. Much of that revenue comes from traditional sales (T-shirts, hoodies and caps sold at concerts), and contemporary stars like Taylor Swift and BTS dominate the business. But classic-rock merch is booming, too.
“That universe has expanded,” says Rhino president Mark Pinkus, who oversees the Dead account. “The shirts are being worn by people of all ages.” Jeff Jampol, CEO of Jam Inc., which manages licenses for The Doors and the estates of Janis Joplin and others, adds that classic-rock merch has evolved from basic black T-shirts to a diverse fashion industry “largely driven by 10- to 20-year-old females and their moms.”
The rich and famous also boosted demand. In the late ’90s, Brad Beckerman, who worked with his father at the sports-licensing company Starter, noticed that most music merch came in the form of mass-marketed T-shirts and saw an opening. Beckerman’s company, Trunk, secured 76 licenses, including Madonna and The Beatles, and expanded the market to high-end customers and department stores. Trunk sold T-shirts, but also jackets and rhinestone belts, Japanese denim and Italian leather for prices that could approach $1,000. “It was unbelievable, the exposure we got,” he recalls. “We had hundreds of celebrities buying these things.”
Until the early 2000s, the Dead — whose members weren’t getting along at the time, according to their former longtime publicist, Dennis McNally — ran Dead Merchandising. Later, the band licensed its name and various logos to just a few companies, like Ripple Junction and Liquid Blue, and mostly focused on T-shirts. “It was easier to go their own ways and let somebody else deal with the business,” McNally says.
According to a source who works in the business, merch licenses are normally structured as a percentage of the licensee’s gross sales income. Smaller licensees typically pay 12% of gross revenue; national licensees, 4% to 5%; and for internet sales, where there is less overhead, it’s a few points higher.
In 2006, after the Warner Music Group-owned Rhino took over the Dead’s merch, Heather Lewis, vp of merchandising for Warner’s artist-branding division WMX, saw how well the band’s CDs and box sets, such as the dozens of Dick’s Picks live albums, were selling, and steered Rhino’s Dead team toward a similar strategy for merch. “Over the past decade, it has been about growing not just the merch but the creative aspect of the merch and working with Deadhead artists,” she says.
One of Rhino’s challenges is when to turn a blind eye to bootleggers — such as the Shakedown Street vendors who sell unlicensed products at spinoff concerts such as Dead & Company — and when to shut them down or, as with Cherman and Market, license their creations.
The Dead’s first line of merch gatekeeping is archivist David Lemieux and Pinkus, a Deadhead who recently flew to Boulder, Colo., to attend three Dead & Company shows. Their shared philosophy for licensing the band’s nine trademarks: “The Grateful Dead should be everywhere, for everybody, at all price points and in all styles,” Pinkus says. Accordingly, he and Lemieux are “easy to find and open to doing licensing deals.” They recently approved Dead-branded coolers, hammocks, camping equipment and polo shirts with embroidered lightning bolts where you might typically find a horse or alligator. They run every potential licensee proposal by the band members and the estates of those who’ve died, but they usually approve the decisions. (A representative for the band members said they declined to comment.)
“My impression is that Rhino tries to honor the Grateful Dead example, which was choosey, low-key, and generally it wasn’t to make money,” McNally says. “It’s like everything else about the world of the Grateful Dead. It just grew.”
Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros featuring the Wolfpack are playing a five-night residency at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, NY Dec. 12, 13, 15, 16 & 17 as part of a recently announced year-end mini-tour with Wolf Bros. members Don Was, Jay Lane, Jeff Chimenti and Barry Sless.
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“Well OK, looks like we’re back at the Cap for five nights this time around in December; this is gonna be big fun,” Weir tells Billboard. “We’re gonna get a chance to get to most everything in the song book – and maybe see if a couple folks are willing to make the hr-or-so trip outta the city to join us.”
The five-show run marks the largest residency performance of 2023 for the Capitol Theatre, which is owned by Brookyln Bowl founder and Dayglo Presents CEO Peter Shapiro. The 2,000-cap venue has become the unofficial home for residency shows, especially within the jam band and Grateful Dead fan scene thanks to Shapiro’s deep musical roots — including his ownership of Relix Magazine — and the theaters central location. Port Chester is a 30-mile drive north of Manhattan, near the Connecticut state line about ten minutes from Greenwich.
“I tell the artists that more shows they play during their residency, the larger the geographic draw will be,” says Shapiro, who hosted residencies for Goose and Wilco in March and a three-night run for Disco Biscuits in May.
Shapiro, who has hosted more than 100 shows at the Cap for Grateful Dead bandmate Phil Lesh, including six in 2023, says key to the success of the theater is that artists play original sets each night of their residency since many fans who travel to attend a residency often buy tickets for multiple shows.
“The bands and crew like it because it gives them more downtime to rest and make adjustments to sound and production,” he tells Billboard. As a promoter, the model significantly reduces costs, especially for the middle shows on a three, four or five night run.
“Not having the load-in and load-out costs to deal with can make a huge difference,” Shapiro says. “And for the band, not having to rely on tour busses can mean significant savings, especially with the high costs of travel right now.
Weir’s manager Matt Busch tells Billboard Weir enjoys playing the Capitol Theatre because “we know there’s a singular focus on the music to make this run of shows as unique and special as possible.”
Artist presale begins Thursday, Sept 28 at 10 a.m. ET, with local presale beginning at 12 p.m. Sign-up for early access to tickets here. General on sale begins Sept 29 at 10 a.m.
Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros featuring The Wolfpack are currently on their Fall 2023 tour and have joined Willie Nelson’s Outlaw Music Festival 2023 for a number of shows. The band will also be performing with the Stanford Symphony Orchestra at the Frost Amphitheatre in Stanford, Calif. on Oct. 29. Fans can also join the band for Playa Luna Presents Dead Ahead, an all-inclusive vacation experience in Riviera Cancún, Mexico on January 12-15, 2024 celebrating the Dead songbook featuring two nights of curated collaborations themed “Dead Ahead” as well as one night of Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros featuring The Wolfpack and more. More info on Dead Ahead can be found here.
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