30 years of Photo-in-a-Photo at Dead Shows

For the last 30 years, every time Creston and I attend a “last” Dead show, we wear the same shirts and take a picture holding a photo of us from our previous “last” show. It's recursive, because that photo is of us holding the photo from the show before that. It's turtles all the way down to 1995, when we saw our first “last” show.

Here is the story behind the tradition.

Creston and I caught the middle of Summer Tour in 1995. He had to head back home after Deer Creek, while I planned to continue on through Chicago. We took several photos during the run of shows, and one was taken before the Deer Creek Sunday show, while I was still looking for a ticket for the next day. The Monday show ended up being canceled after gate-crashers rioted during “Desolation Row,” and a bit over a month later we woke up to learn that July 2 was our last Jerry-era show together.

A few months later, at the Jerry Memorial in Golden Gate Park, Creston brought a photo book he made with all the shots from that tour. As we flipped through it, we realized that by pure cosmic coincidence we were wearing the same shirts as in the Deer Creek photo. We decided to pose for a photo holding the picture from Deer Creek. And so it began.

For the GD 50th anniversary shows in Santa Clara, not wanting to tempt cosmic coincidence, we planned ahead: I printed out the photo from the memorial, we donned those same shirts, held up the photo-in-a-photo, and posed again.

Rinse. Repeat.

We dressed up and took a photo at the Sunday show at Oracle Park in San Francisco at the end of Dead & Co's Last Tour in 2023 and again at GD60 in Golden Gate Park in August 2025.

Now, here's the amazing part—the part that would only and could only happen at a Dead show.

Cosmic coincidence kicked in again. Maybe it was the hawk that flew over during Ripple at the Bob Weir Celebration.

While we were taking our truly last photo-in-a-photo (for real this time) a woman walked up and said she was the artist who made Creston's shirt. She was from Indiana, where he had purchased it the first time we went to Deer Creek in 1993.

And for perfect closure, she didn't have a ticket for the show that night at the Warfield, but we fixed that, and she'll be there when we take our final photo-in-a-photo.

After 30 years of service at Dead shows, these shirts served us well and are now retired.

Here is the “box set” of photo-in-a-photo photos.

• Bob Weir Memorial – 1/17/2026, Civic Center Plaza, San Francisco, CA
• Last Dead & Co show – 8/3/2025, GD60, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, CA
• Last Dead & Co Tour – 7/16/2023, Oracle Park, San Francisco, CA
• Our last “Grateful Dead” show – 6/28/2015, GD50, Levi's Stadium, Santa Clara, CA
• Jerry Garcia Memorial – 9/13/1995, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, CA
• Our last Jerry-era show – 7/2/1995, Deer Creek, Noblesville, IN

Thank you for a real good time.