Three Weekends On Another Planet: Dead & Co, Outside Lands And Zach Bryan Take San Fran’s Golden Gate Park To Another Level

August was a boon for San Francisco tourism thanks to three consecutive weekends of mass music gatherings in Golden Gate Park produced by Berkeley’s Another Planet Entertainment. Dead & Company’s three-day celebration of the Grateful Dead’s 60th anniversary drew 60,000 people each day on Aug. 1-3. Outside Lands hosted 225,000 with headliners Doja Cat, Tyler, The Creator and Hozier and dozens more international acts from Aug. 8-10; the annual festival generated $1B for the city between 2008 and 2023. The following Friday (Aug. 15), 55,000 came to the park to see Zach Bryan and Kings of Leon, supported by the Turnpike Troubadours and Noeline Hofmann. For those counting, that’s a whopping 460,000 attendees.

While most local reporters and photographers who cover such festivities went to the first and/or second weekend only, this writer asked for press passes for all three and received the gift of being able to observe how Another Planet creates elevated event and festival models the rest of the industry can learn from, and how they benefit the region.

As a music reporter, DJ and fan who’s attended 16 of the 17 editions of Outside Lands and lives in one of its surrounding neighborhoods, it’s been a joy to participate in and cover each year as well as these additional weekends that began with System of a Down and Deftones last year and continued with Dead & Company and Zach Bryan this year.

It was exhilarating seeing how the crowd light up when Billy Strings performed and when they tapped into the ambient, meditative power of Dead & Company’s three and a half hour set on what would have been Jerry Garcia’s 83rd birthday on Aug. 1. It was equally joyous to behold New Orleans bounce artist, author and reality star Big Freedia singing with the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus at Outside Lands on Aug. 10. And to witness everything in between.

Even for those who listen to many different types of music, Outside Lands remains a festival where personal discovery is still possible. The crowd reaction to Argentina’s “tender baby gangsters” Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso suggested we were late to their party, but now we’re no less obsessed than the fans who waited early to get an upfront place.

Besides the variations in music presented, each weekend’s people, behavior and energy watching was distinct and fascinating, as was riding the style waves from psychedelic and open-toed Deadhead style to clip-on rave “sprouts” to cowboy boots, belts and hats. 

Another Planet’s Golden Gate Park Concerts are good for San Francisco’s restaurants and retail businesses, and make music culture enthusiasts from outside the Bay Area, California and the U.S. want to travel to the city to experience them. Outside Lands is a significant contributor to Golden Gate Park’s maintenance and preservation to the tune of at least $45M generated for the San Francisco Recreation and Parks department up through 2024. This year’s edition will add even more to that figure.

Dead & Company’s celebration of their hometown heroes got the whole city involved: buses turned tie-dye, roses named after the late Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia were planted in the park and Garcia finally got his own street. The unofficial but band-blessed Shakedown Street marketplace was there all weekend outside the fest’s perimeters but still in Golden Gate Park.

“Deadheads really get out and about and patronize businesses,” Allen Scott, Another Planet’s President of Concerts & Festivals, said in a recent interview with Pollstar. “Haight Street hadn’t seen anything like this in I don’t know how long.”

The festival grounds for Dead & Company included a social action village called Participation Row as well as a charity auction with special edition guitars by Billy Strings, Sturgill Simpson, and Trey Anastasio and fine art by Mickey Hart. It has been a part of the band’s shows since 2015 and has raised $16 million as of 2024. 

Civic engagement organization HeadCount has been a part of Participation Row since the beginning and has also been to all 17 editions of Outside Lands.

“We register more voters at Outside Lands than any other major festival,” Daniel Jubelirer, HeadCount’s Director of Communications, told Pollstar.

Each year, Outside Lands culinary director Tonya Kollar books a mix of in-demand pop-ups, restaurants and future brick and mortar projects for a massive initiative called Taste of the Bay Area, making this music festival also the best annual food festival in the region. The other events in Golden Gate Park weren’t as expressly focused on food, but still had high-quality options. A few acclaimed Bay Area chefs who come back to Outside Lands year after year took on the ambitious task of serving food all three weekends. They include Janice Dulce of Oakland’s FOB Kitchen, which serves Filipino fare, and Alex Hong, who has a fine dining spot called Sorrel and is about to open Parachute Bakery and Arquet in SF’s Ferry Building.

In 2018, Outside Lands became the first festival in the U.S. to bring in an area for both consumption and sales of legal cannabis products, which is called Grass Lands. This year, Grass Lands was also a part of the Dead & Company weekend. Both events featured a booth with THC-infused, guitar pick shaped edibles and smokable flowers from Garcia Hand Picked, a cannabis company founded by the Garcia family.

Grass Lands was presented by embarc, a family of community-focused cannabis dispensaries, during the Dead & Company weekend. Lauren Carpenter, embarc’s co-founder, is proud of including cultivators who relocated from the Bay Area to Northern California’s Emerald Triangle of Humboldt, Trinity and Mendocino Counties in the Sixties to avoid persecution. That was long before cannabis was legalized in California in 1996.

“There’s this full circle moment of bringing them back down from the hill and to this park to celebrate this moment,” Carpenter said on the first day of the Dead & Company party. She praised Another Planet for taking a groundbreaking chance on Grass Lands.

*I think they’ve really paved the way,” she added. “They’ve been a real leader on integrating cannabis sales and consumption into festivals, and I think it’s really important in showing other large-scale events that this can be a creative thing that can be a huge benefit to the fan experience in a way that does not detract from the other sponsors and participants.”

170-year-old French rolling paper king Zig-Zag was the title presenter of Grass Lands the following weekend and handed out free products during both weekends. Grass Lands didn’t return for Zach Bryan, but the smells of cannabis wafting through the crowd all day suggested that the venture may have done quite well there, too.

Countless iconic live performances and surprise guests have helped to build the lore of Outside Lands. Artists have facilitated onstage wedding proposals, and now, couples can actually tie the knot and celebrate with charcuterie and cake in an area called City Hall for the occasion.

Multiple generations have grown up going to the festival with friends and family. A few, like the renowned recording artist Phoebe Bridgers, later became marquee performers as adults. During her 2022 performance, Bridgers reminisced about attending Outside Lands as a Southern California teenager, and revealed that her grandpa was in the audience to see her play.

Another Planet will return to the two-weekend event timeframe in 2026, beginning with Outside Lands on August 7-9, 2026.

“We have offers in for the Outside Lands headliners next year and other acts already,” Allen Scott revealed in his executive profile. “We started in June submitting offers.”

Scott added that they’re currently working on the following weekend for their Golden Gate Park Concerts, and the public can once again expect musical programming that is different from Outside Lands.

“At this point, there’s conversations happening with a number of artists and seeing what sticks, and who wants to do it,” he said.