On October 15th, 1987, Jerry Garcia kicked off a two-week Broadway residency at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater in Midtown, Manhattan, offering performances by both the Jerry Garcia Band and the Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band nightly. The Broadway residency fell during an important time in Garcia’s life, just as the Grateful Dead frontman and guitarist was truly recovering and returning to performance full-time following his life-threatening diabetic coma in the summer of 1986. 1987 ultimately turned out to be a good year for Jerry and the Grateful Dead, as Jerry’s recovery process seemed to unlock a newfound energy within him that had been more-or-less absent earlier in the decade.
In 1987, further working off his newfound vitality, Garcia created the Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band, reconnecting with old friends from Palo Alto including David Nelson, Sandy Rothman, and Kenny Kosek, with whom Jerry hadn’t performed with since the early 70’s or before.
Recognizing that the project should continue, Promoter Bill Graham encouraged Jerry to think of a way to bring the acoustic band to the masses while still keeping the performances intimate. Together, Garcia and Graham came up with an innovative and untried idea by other rock musicians: perform a run at a Broadway theatre featuring both matinee and late-night performances. Jerry agreed, though he wanted to bring both the electric Jerry Garcia Band and the newly created Jerry Garcia Acoustic band for the string of Broadway shows.
The Lunt-Fontanne Theatre ultimately housed this thirteen-night run, which stretched to Halloween of that year. Each night, the acoustic band opened the performance with an hour-long set before the Jerry Garcia Band finished off the night. While selections from this historic run have been released, audience recordings are rare, as the union boss for the Broadway theatre forbid recording inside the theatre.
Photographer Herb Greene was one of the most prominent chroniclers of the early Haight Ashbury and Grateful Dead scene and was brought back in as principal photographer in the mid-1980s, shooting the covers of In The Dark and Dylan & The Dead, as well as this poster. Many of his images are on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio.