The San Francisco fog, a familiar friend to many Grateful Dead shows, rolled in with an unspoken acknowledgment of this special occasion. Inside the park, a blanket of people gathered across the Polo fields for the band’s 60th anniversary.

My mother, a veteran Deadhead, stood beside me, her eyes welling with tears in awe of nostalgia and revamped joy. Around us, my brothers and their buddies from college, a new generation of Deadheads, mingled along with my mom’s old friends.

But this was not the nonchalant vibe of the 1960s and 1970s nor the parking lots circus of the 1980s and 1990s.

In the early days of the band, and pretty much up to the death of Jerry Garcia and the end of the old Grateful Dead, concert tickets were intentionally kept affordable to legions of fans. (Jerry Day in th

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