Jay Blakesberg, whose iconic photos of the Grateful Dead, Neil Young, John Fogerty, Joni Mitchell and U2 have appeared in Rolling Stone, Relix and Guitar Player magazines, cites adolescent stupidity as the spark that started his career.
“How many people here did so much dumb (stuff) while they were young that you’re lucky to be alive?” he asked during a 2026 Song Summit lab titled “Workingman’s Dead: Songs, Stories and Improvisation Inspired by the Music of Bobby Weir of the Grateful Dead” on Saturday at the Park City Library’s Jim Santy Auditorium. “Restlessness was in our bones.”
The lab, which featured live music performed by singer-songwriter Steve Poltz, singer Jim James, guitarist Eric Krasno, bassist Ross James (no relation to Jim James), keyboardist Holly Bowling, singer-songwriter and harpist Mikaela Davis and guitarist and songwriter John Lee Shannon, recounted Blakeberg’s life from his youth living in the New Jersey suburbs to traveling with the Grateful Dead during the 1980s and forming a strong friendship with the band’s late guitarist and singer, Bob Weir.
“When we’re teenagers, all we have in our lives are hopes and dreams (and) we hope we can survive the teenage wasteland,” he said at the beginning of the discussion. “We saw something in these dreams that led us toward a spark, and we want to take that spark and turn it into an inferno.”
The spark Blakesberg referred to was the Grateful Dead zeitgeist, which started for him through other artists during the late 1970s.
“Our parents, the generation before us, told us that life is school, work, death and maybe there (are) taxes somewhere in there, but we believed there was something more,” he said. “In the 1970s, before we had the internet, we listened to songs by Neil Young who sang about ‘silver spaceships flying in the yellow haze of the sun,’ and we wanted to get on that spaceship.”
Eric Clapton was another artist.
“We went to see him at the Spectrum in Philadelphia for $8.50, who sang a song about cocaine, and even though that song was an anti-cocaine song, we were young and stupid. So what did we do when we were 17 years old? We snorted cocaine and spilled bong water everywhere.”
Then there was Bob Dylan.
“Remember when we first heard ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ by Bob Dylan?” he asked the audience. “When I first heard it I knew I needed to get out of New Jersey.”
Rock songs also taught Blakesberg and his friends common decency.
“Jefferson Airplane and Crosby, Stills and Nash cowrote this song, ‘Wooden Ships,’ and it has this basic thing you couldn’t teach us in English class or in history class,” he said. “(The lyric) ‘If you smile at me, I will understand’ is something everybody everywhere does in the same language. We lived for rock ‘n’ roll. We lived for these lyrics because they informed us.”
Then came Grateful Dead songs written by Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia.
Blakesberg singled out their song “Ripple,” which features the lyrics “There is a road, no simple highway, between the dawn and the dark of night. If you go no one may follow. That path is for your steps alone.”
“We wanted that touch of magic,” he said. “That’s why we go see live music. That’s why we experience these lyrics — we want to feel and touch that magic.”
The magic was just around the corner for Blakesberg, who had already dipped his toes into the counterculture readings of “On the Road’ by Jack Kerouac and Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” while analyzing the psychedelic poster art of Stanley Mouse.
“We also knew about Haight-Ashbury. but we were still hanging out in my bedroom drinking cheap beer and playing poker every Tuesday night,” he mused.
Blakesberg’s sister took him to his first Grateful Dead show in Englishtown, New Jersey, when he was 15. A year later, Blakesberg saw the band at Giants Stadium in the Meadowlands Sports Complex, and that’s the first time he photographed the Grateful Dead.
“My dad loaned me his camera,” he said. “I was 16 years old, just ready to go into my senior year of high school.”
Blakesberg’s path intersected with the band a few months later at the the Capitol Theater, in Passaic, New Jersey.
“They had just played in Egypt and were at this tiny theater of 3,000 seats,” he said. “Tickets were $10, and I took photos with the first camera I ever owned.”
A couple of weeks before graduating high school, Blakesberg saw the band in Hampton, New Jersey, and Baltimore, Maryland.
“As we were leaving the Hampton show, the guy I was with totaled his van in the parking lot,” he said. “We hitchhiked a ride with some Deadheads, and while we were in the car, we heard there was going to be a No Nukes rally on the front steps of the capitol in Washington, D.C. We were like, ‘We don’t need to go back to high school on Monday. We’re graduating in four weeks.’”
The group ended up at the rally in time to see actress and activist Jane Fonda’s speech.
“Down in the photo pit in front of the stage behind a picket fence I saw there were photographers from the New York Times and the Washington Post,” he said. “I wanted to be one of those photographers on the other side of the picket fence, and I looked at the ground and (happened to find) a discarded press pass.”
That pass served as another opportunity spark in Blakesberg’s career. Press pass on his chest, he walked backstage and eventually on stage with Fonda and a few guests.
“Joni Mitchell starts playing, and Jackson Browne is on stage with Graham Nash,” he said. “I turn around, and Bob Weir and Brent Mydland from the Grateful Dead are standing backstage.”
After that surreal experience, Blakesberg returned to New Jersey to graduate high school.
“After graduation in 1979, I packed my 1969 Chevy Nova and drove out to Red Rocks to see the band,” he said. “I met this guy named Jay who asked if I was going to shows in Rochester, because he was going to review those shows for a newspaper called Aquarium Weekly.”
Blakesberg took photos of the Rochester show, which was his third Grateful Dead show.
“I got published,” he said. “I was 17 and made $15 for two photos,” he said.
During Saturday’s lab, Blakesberg recounted the first time he photographed the Grateful Dead in California. He was 18 years old, and the show was the first of four leading up to New Year’s Eve at the Oakland Auditorium Arena.
“The first night on Dec. 26, 1979, the band played a song that was absent from the set list for two years,” he said.
Poltz, who had been silent during Blakesberg’s stories during the lab, then launched into a rendition of “Uncle John’s Band” with Bluhm, Krasno, Bowling and James.
That’s how the lab continued. Blakesberg would tell tales of his career, and the musicians, which would sometimes include Davis, Shannon and Jim James, would highlight those scenes with live music.
One of those moments came after Blakesberg recounted his drug bust when he was 19.
“I went through the wheels of justice for a year and then moved out to the West Coast to get residency to attend Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington,” he said. “I wanted to convince the judge that I was someday going to be an upstanding citizen, but the judge did not believe me.”
Prison, Blakesberg said, was a fascinating experience for a 19 year old.
“I don’t recommend it for any of us,” he said.
While doing time, Blakesberg was required to also complete a drug rehabilitation program.
“People stole their parents’ heirloom jewelry or $200,000,” he said. “People were addicted to heroin and quaaludes and did speedballs, and I was like, ‘Hi, I’m Jay, and I’m addicted to LSD.’”
After singing a yarn about Blakesburg’s brush with the law, Poltz addressed the audience that filled the Jim Santy Auditorium.
“When I met Jay a long time ago, I never thought I’d be up on stage with him,” Poltz said. “(But) one day he said, ‘Will you write songs about the things I’m going to talk about?’ and I said, ‘Sure,’ and here we are.”
With that, Poltz led the band into a sublime cover of the Grateful Dead’s “Box of Rain,” which served as the soundtrack to more slides of Blakesberg’s photos.
When the music ended, Blakesberg talked about another opportunity spark that happened in 1987.
That was when Rolling Stone magazine’s Jodi Peckman called and asked him to photograph a U2 concert in San Francisco.
“I had been taking action photos, but magazine covers were portraits,” Blakesberg said. “So I was trying to figure out how to do portraits.”
The first portrait he took was of John Fogerty, formerly of Credence Clearwater Revival.
“I took it at the courthouse where he was sued for writing a song that sounded too much like another one of his songs,” Blakesberg said.
Rolling Stone published the photo, and Peckman, as well as other editors, began thinking of Blakesberg as a portrait photographer.
Some of his subjects included Carlos Santa, Primus, Alanis Morrisette, Iggy Pop, David Byrne and Rob Wasserman.
Blakesberg’s portraits appeared not only on magazine covers. They also began showing up on album covers.
“Like I said, you put yourself in the path of opportunity and say, ‘Yes,’” he said.
July 1990 marked the first time Blakesberg was asked by an official member of the Grateful Dead to take a portrait.
“Bobby Weir wanted me to take a photo for the Weir/Wasserman project,” he said. “And after that, I kind of became Bobby’s guy. Any time he needed portraits, he would call me.”
Blakesberg photographed the Grateful Dead regularly in the 1980s and formed a bond with Weir and his family, especially Weir’s daughter, Chloe, an upcoming photographer.
“Bobby came up to me at an exhibit opening and said, ‘Thank you so much for taking Chloe under your wing,’” Blakesberg said with his voice full of emotion. “It meant a lot to him, and it meant a lot to me. Bobby gave me a big opportunity by inviting me into the inner circle, and I owe a lot to him.”
Blakesberg’s last photo session with Weir was in January of 2023 at Mill Valley.
“Bobby looks at me and says, ‘Jay, don’t you have enough photos of me already?’ and I said, ‘Bob, haven’t you played “Me and My Uncle” enough already?’” the photographer said with a laugh.
Poltz, joined by Davis and Shannon, then serenaded Blakesberg and the audience with a rousing rendition of the song “Cassidy.” The musicians also performed a reverent version of “Attics of My Life,” which originally appeared on the Grateful Dead’s 1970 album, “American Beauty.”
“Adolescent stupidity has turned into lifelong magic,” Blakesberg said before the band played its last song of the session — a sing-along version of “Ripple.”
Early in the lab, Blakesberg told the audience the idea of this lab came from a past Park City Song Summit.
“We did an improv-music-slideshow thing years ago, and I’ve been wanting to do this multimedia Grateful Dead thing for a while,” he said. “So we put this together and have incredible guests who will sit in and make this incredible.”
For information about Jay Blakesberg, visit blakesberg.com.
For information about Steve Poltz, visit poltz.com.
For information about Eric Krasno, visit erickrasno.com.
For information about Jim James, visit jimjames.com.
For information about Ross James, visit rossjamesmusic.com.
For information about Holly Bowling, visit hollybowling.com.
For information about Mikaela Davis, visit mikaeladavis.com.
For information about John Lee Shannon, visit johnleeshannon.bandcamp.com.
For information about the Song Summit, visit songsummit.com.