Anyone who has traveled great distances to catch a concert will appreciate the understated opening scene in Summer Tour, a tender new documentary about followers of the Grateful Dead. The movie, by filmmaker Mischa Richter and produced by actor Chloë Sevigny, begins in 2023 at a California roadside gas station, where twentysomething Deadheads Jeremiah Pierce and Annabelle Dunn are refueling their camper van. Bound for Inglewood, the couple hope to attend a show at the Kia Forum that will commence the final tour of Dead & Company, the stadium-packing offshoot band featuring surviving Dead members and some new additions. “Could you possibly spare any gas?” a barefoot Pierce asks a man at a nearby pump. Fortunately for Pierce and Dunn, who live in Santa Cruz, the stranger is kind. And they’re off.
Released in theaters nationwide on July 23, Summer Tour is a road trip movie chronicling mostly young people following Dead & Company’s final trek. As the film progresses, the trip begins in Inglewood, crisscrossing the United States before returning to San Francisco, where the Dead’s story began over 60 years earlier. Along the way, Pierce, Dunn, and their friends honor Deadhead traditions of vending homemade goods, busking, swimming in lakes and creeks between shows, taking ego-shattering acid, and either scoring a “miracle”—when someone gifts you a ticket—or sneaking into concerts. Using Dead cofounder and rhythm guitarist Bob Weir’s remarks about how the Dead’s songbook will continue to be celebrated and performed centuries into the future, the film articulates a question that hangs over the community: What’s next?
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Absent are any performance shots from the 2023 tour of the musicians, including Weir, drummer Mickey Hart, and guitarist John Mayer. Jerry Garcia, the late Dead cofounder and lead guitarist, appears briefly in an archival interview clip. “The Deadhead is that person, wherever they turn up in society, that’s looking for an adventure in America…and a chance to get out and scare themselves a little, and maybe have a little trouble, but also find a lot of support and make a lot of friends,” Garcia says. The self-sustaining Deadhead community is “a subsociety of some kind,” he adds.
Summer Tour reveals just how deep that Deadhead subculture runs to this day, as Pierce and Dunn’s generation carry the flame. It’s a tight 82-minute scene report with none of the Dead gatekeeping that has long nagged newcomers, who take unfair flak from certain older fans who don’t consider anyone who didn’t see the band with Garcia a true Deadhead. (Richter smartly gives no space to these gatekeepers.) The film celebrates the thriving Deadhead diaspora, variously melancholy and hopeful about the future post–2023 tour. It focuses on the fans, who were always as big a part of a Dead concert as the band. Richter’s movie is an ode to how it’s not just the show; it’s everything and everyone around it, too, that make the trip worth taking.
Shot on 16mm film, Summer Tour hits like an audiovisual artifact from the Dead’s heyday, only set decades after that band’s dissolution. Like many of the film’s subjects, Pierce and Dunn were both born after Garcia’s death, in 1995. Yet the Dead are something like religious practice for them. Originally from upstate New York, Pierce says he was “forced” to attend church growing up, only it never stuck. But he felt the community of religion the first time he saw Dead & Company. “I found God in my own way,” Pierce says. For him, Dunn, and others like them, Weir was their Garcia. “It’s kind of what I came up on,” Trey Short, Dunn’s sister’s partner, says of Dead & Company as their caravan cruises between Charlotte, North Carolina, and Bristow, Virginia. Weir died early this year.
With the blessing of the band and manager Bernie Cahill, Richter was allowed to shoot footage of the shows. A loose, guerrilla-like approach to cinematography captures the ecstatic dance many Deadheads dutifully perform. Shots of shuffling feet, spinning bodies, and trippy if subtle tracer light effects pay homage to The Grateful Dead Movie (1977), which documented a five-night run of shows in San Francisco that ended the Dead’s monumental 1974 touring year. But at the tour stop at the Gorge in Washington State, vulnerable self-expression through bodily movement is juxtaposed with the cordoned-off machinery of Big Dead, a multimillion-dollar business. Richter’s camera pans out from hippies dancing, taking in the band’s sleek tour buses parked just beyond the venue barrier. The message is stark: The support of paying fans has provided the musicians a level of cushiness the average Deadhead will never experience.
If not inside the show or driving to the next one, the film hangs out on Shakedown Street, the traveling bazaar in the parking lot at every Dead gathering. “You can get anything you need there,” Dunn says of Shakedown. Even a hug, though Dunn sells woven hats.
Richter interviews characters one might expect to encounter in this kind of autonomous zone. Through them, the film taps into the existential and the mundane, illuminating the duality of Deadworld—galaxy-brained, peace-and-love hippies on a righteous path and hustler types with more-base concerns—without coming off heavy-handed or trite. In Dallas, a glassblower describes how, on Shakedown, he’s “not working but working.” Another Shakedown vendor, who sells coconuts, waxes cosmic. “We’re drops of sand,” he says. “But good butterfly effects, you know?” At the tour stop in Deer Creek, Indiana, a dude slinging vegan grilled cheese sandwiches is more blunt: “Everybody’s got their hustle,” he says. And then there’s the tour veteran who, like a character from a Dead song about a card game, runs a blackjack table on the lot. He’s been sneaking into gigs for 35 years, with the goal of leaving shows “without spending any money.”
We also meet “riders,” or those who show up on tour without a ride but typically provide gas money for a lift. Riding in Short’s van is Dominic, a Deadhead from Ireland later seen scoring a “miracle” ticket, a moment of anticipatory joy fulfilled. Another rider in Short’s van, Matt, embodies the hardcore Deadhead dedication to touring. During the pandemic summer of 2020, he went on tour with a band that wasn’t on tour: He drove to California from the East Coast for what would have been the opening show for that year’s canceled Dead & Company tour. He then hit every empty lot on the day of a “show” and blasted a tape of an old Dead concert from that city on his van speakers. He called it a “ghost tour.”
Back on the 2023 itinerary, the cities roll by: Saratoga Springs, Boston, Boulder, and onward to the Bay Area—each stop a microcosm of the kindness-centric lifestyle to which Summer Tour is a love letter. Mileage will vary for those expecting the film to sit with any of Deadworld’s inconvenient realities: It doesn’t address the subsociety’s overwhelming whiteness, despite the Dead’s songbook being indebted to the Black musical tradition; or the misogyny in the touring community; or the corporatization and “culture vulture” co-opting of all things Dead.
The only gesture at negative energy comes from Dunn’s mom, who tours and dances with her daughters, Pierce, and their friend circle. “I know there’s some darkness—I’ve seen it,” she says. “But this journey that we’ve been on, that we continue on, is so full of hope and magic.”
Who knows where “what’s next” will go. But if Summer Tour makes one thing clear, it is that there is plenty of gas left in this tank. •
Brian A Anderson is a journalist, a Pulitzer Prize–winning editor, and the author of Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection.
