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Across three consecutive weekends this month, Golden Gate Park will be hosting Doja Cat and Tyler, The Creator atop the lineup of the 17th annual Outside Lands festival, a three-night series of concerts by Dead & Company to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Grateful Dead, and a country-leaning mega concert led by Zach Bryan and Kings of Leon. When it’s all said and done, 450,000 people will have come through Golden Gate Park between August 1st and August 15th in an unprecedented live music feat for the park.
Before last year, there had never been a concert in the park beyond 7 pm aside from Outside Lands. That’s when Another Planet Entertainment (APE) put on a one-night-only concert led by System of A Down and Deftones, the weekend after the festival — tickets sold out in an hour. Now, in the second year of APE’s expanded programming at the hallowed ground of Golden Gate Park’s meadows and fields, the park will become nothing short of the center of the live music world.
“If you take any venue in the history of San Francisco, from Oracle Park to Chase Center, Candlestick Park, etc., I don’t think there’s ever been a venue in a single month that has sold 450,000 tickets,” says Allen Scott, APE’s President of Concerts & Festivals. “That is historic in and of itself.”
Scott says that APE was heavily inspired by Hyde Park’s British Summer Time (BST) series of concerts in London. Started in 2013, BST grew in 2022 from a two to three-weekend slate of concerts, coaxing attendees from all over Europe and the world with some of the biggest names in music like Taylor Swift and The Rolling Stones in the past, and this year’s iteration featuring Bryan. Stateside, what’s happening at Golden Gate Park is rivaling the springtime revelry at Southern California’s Empire Polo Field, which hosts two weekends of Coachella followed by the Stagecoach Festival.
When APE was seeking the ability to add another weekend or two of concerts at Golden Gate Park surrounding Outside Lands, the Berkeley-based promoter proposed throwing a series of free concerts each year in San Francisco as well. It’s been a win-win for the city as APE has already put on two shows with the Dirtybird dance music collective on the Embarcadero that each had 7,500 attendees, as well as a Portugal, The Man concert at the Civic Center, and another with country singer Don Louis at Union Square. There are two more free shows on the horizon this year as well, in collaboration with titanic local label Empire.
With this structure in place, APE’s biggest announcement this year came in the form of the 60th anniversary of the Grateful Dead series of shows with Dead & Company. Three nights in a row of ticketed concerts, which will coincide with Jerry Garcia’s birthday. From August 1st to 3rd, each show also has a unique headliner in Billy Strings (Fri), Sturgill Simpson (Sat), and Trey Anastasio Band (Sun).
“We’d been talking to Dead & Company for 2 years,” Scott explains. “We tried to get them for 2024, and they decided to do their Vegas residency at Sphere instead. So then we started gelling around the 60th anniversary for so many reasons. It made so much sense to have them come to Golden Gate Park, since they’d played shows here back in the ’60s when they called the city home.”
Before the Sphere residency, Dead & Company famously played in San Francisco at Oracle Park in what was deemed to be the “final tour” in 2023, presented by LiveNation. Scott says that those 30,000-person shows generated $31 million for the local economy. He expects twice that much economic impact with 57,000 tickets sold for each of the three nights (co-presented with LiveNation) at Golden Gate Park, noting that 74% of ticket buyers are coming from outside of the Bay Area and from many parts of the world.
The Polo Field at the Park is where the stage will be set up for the Dead & Company and Zach Bryan shows. Setting up the grounds for what’s necessary for each weekend is a dance that APE’s production staff got a lesson in last year.
“It was like a Tetris puzzle,” Scott says. “How to bring it down, the fencing and moving structures around. We’ll keep building for Outside Lands during the Dead & Company shows, with the extended Hellman Hollow footprint being built around the same time. So it starts small, then expands for the festival and then contracts again for the final weekend.”
As one can imagine, not having to build a fresh main stage three different times presents some serious savings in production costs. Scott says APE is using some of that money to add different festival-style elements for Dead & Company and Zach Bryan shows that will give each a distinctly unique aesthetic. Outside Lands’ famed legal cannabis sale and consumption area known as Grass Lands is expanding into a second weekend so Deadheads can experience it too, because it’s almost too perfect a placement. “A no-brainer if there ever was one,” as Scott puts it.
As for additional wear and tear on the grass turf of the Polo Field, SF Parks and Rec groundskeepers employ a method where they stop watering the grass a week or two before the festivities. It dries out the turf and hardens it to better maintain its integrity after 450,000 people will be walking on it. And while the grass dies out, the root structure of the field isn’t compromised. Boom.
But ultimately, the key to the success of these ventures lies in the lasting cultural and financial impact left behind once all of the structures are taken down. And while Scott says that APE will conduct economic impact reports following the three weekends, the cultural impact surrounding these unprecedented large-scale events at Golden Gate Park is already being felt.
“With the Grateful Dead and Dead & Company, specifically, the city has embraced the anniversary beyond these concerts,” Scott says.”The GD60 IndyCar is on display at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, Jerry Day is happening again at McLaren Park, Mickey Hart has an art exhibit at the Haight St Arts Center, and there are street pole banners all around the city. And just like when a Taylor Swift or Beyoncé was in town — in any city, really — you feel it, everywhere, in those cities.”