In what will be a bittersweet announcement for Deadheads, the four surviving and original members of the Grateful Dead revealed that they will reunite to celebrate their 50th anniversary with three gigs at Chicago's Soldier Field July 3rd to 5th. However, for percussionists Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, bassist Phil Lesh and guitarist Bob Weir, these three shows will mark the final Dead shows ever. 
 
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 For "Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years of Grateful Dead" shows – which will take place nearly two decades after the Grateful Dead last performed together with Jerry Garcia – the band will be joined by Phish's Trey Anastasio along with pianist Bruce Hornsby (who toured with the Dead in 1992) and keyboardist Jeff Chimenti. “It is with respect and gratitude that we reconvene the Dead one last time to celebrate - not merely the band's legacy, but also the community that we’ve been playing to, and with, for fifty years," Lesh said in a statement. "Wave that flag, wave it wide and high..." 
 
 "Jerry Garcia was a great American master and the Grateful Dead are not just a genuine piece of musical history, but also an important part of American history," Anastasio said. "This is a band, born right at the beginning of electric rock, that took the American tradition and moved it forward. They really embodied the American concept of freedom, rolling around the country with a ginormous gang of people and the mindset that 'you can come if you want, you can leave if you want. We don’t know what’s going to happen. All we know is we’re not looking back.’ What could be more American?" 
 
 The original Grateful Dead Ticketing Service will have first crack at tickets for the three concerts, with a general public onsale through Ticketmaster starting February 14th. Check out Dead50.net for ticketing information. "Lookin' forward to this one, oh boy, you bet," commented Bob Weir. "Let's see just how much fun we can have this 4th of July." ||||| In a match made in hippie heaven, Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio will join the four living original members of The Grateful Dead for three 50th-anniversary shows July 3-5 at Soldier Field in Chicago. The Dead's last performance with Jerry Garcia, who died in August 1995, was at the same 55,000-seat capacity venue on July 9, 1995. 
 
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 The sense of closure is no ­accident: These shows are likely to be the finale for the "core four," as the ­surviving members are now known: Bob Weir, 67; Phil Lesh, 74; Mickey Hart, 71; and Bill Kreutzmann, 68. "These will be the last shows with the four of us together," Weir tells Billboard. 
 
 "That's why we're doing it in Chicago," says Peter Shapiro, 42, who's producing the shows in association with AEG-owned Madison House Presents. "They're the great American rock'n'roll band returning to where it ended, 20 years later." 
 
 Anastasio is set to take the stage with the band, along with keyboardist Bruce Hornsby, a frequent player with the Dead during the '80s and into the '90s, and Jeff Chimenti, who plays keys with Weir's side project, RatDog. "We had to sort through a number of options," says Weir. "Were we going to do a festival-style event or go back to our classic mode of an evening with the band? We narrowed it down to: Let's just do it simple and clean." 
 
 Competition to land the coveted booking was stiff, with such players as Goldenvoice's Paul Tollett and Live Nation mounting efforts to reunite the Dead at venues like the Empire Polo Grounds in Indio, Calif., the site of Coachella, and Bonnaroo (the latter, according to sources, offered the band $3 million for a headlining set -- and was rejected). It helped that Shapiro has an exclusive contract with Lesh and co-owns three Brooklyn Bowl locations (Las Vegas and London opened in 2014) that are favorites of jam bands, as well as the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, N.Y., where Anastasio previously had joined Weir onstage. 
 
 The Phish frontman says that accepting the invitation was a no-brainer. "I got a really heart-warming letter from Phil saying that he and the other three guys had talked about it and hoped I would do it," Anastasio tells Billboard. "I didn't hesitate for a second to say yes. It's an absolute honor to be part of this final chapter." 
 
 In the tradition of the original Grateful Dead Ticketing Service, tickets for the shows -- named Fare Thee Well for a lyric in the Garcia/Robert Hunter song "Brokedown Palace" -- will be available to fan club members on a first-come, first-served basis from Feb. 9 to 11. A local public presale will occur Feb. 12-13; a general public on-sale starts Feb. 14. Jerry Garcia's daughter Trixie Garcia will officially announce the shows on Dead50.net today (Jan. 16). 
 
 Both of these iconic bands have had historic success in the live arena. During its last 10 years on the road, the Dead grossed more than $200 million from 350 shows, according to Billboard Boxscore; Phish ranks among today's top touring acts, grossing more than $30 million in 2014, $4 million during its four-night New Year's Eve run at Miami's American Airlines Arena alone. Melding the followings of both acts could potentially inject some $50 million into Chicago's local economy (in addition to marketing the 20th anniversary of the Dead's last show, the city was chosen for ease of travel). 
 
 Still, there is substantial risk involved. Given that the Dead have no recent touring history indicating they could support a triple stadium play, producers are treating this as a true one-of-a-kind destination event, a la Led Zeppelin at the O2 in London in 2007. But for millions of fans, the significance of these gigs goes beyond the bottom line -- most considered such a pairing purely a thing of fantasy. 
 
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 Even Anastasio is giddy. "I saw my first Dead show at the Hartford Civic Center in 1980 when I was 16," he says. "After that, I went to as many shows as I could, sometimes even standing right in front of Jerry, up on the rail, a few feet away from his amplifier. I've been listening, going through the history, and it has been really fun." Adds Weir: "Trey is schooled in what we call 'the fluid tonic': listening intently to what's going on and reacting meaningfully to what other people are playing." 
 
 The connection between the Dead and Phish, who had only a few years of crossover early in Phish's career while Garcia was still alive, has long been viewed as a sort of passing of the baton from one generation of like-minded music fans to the next. But when it comes to the players, offers Weir, "The comparison is just apples and oranges -- they have their flavor, we have ours." 
 
 For his part, Anastasio sees the Dead's place as the quintessential American band. "I've realized that it's no coincidence that they named their best album ever American Beauty," he says. "Jerry Garcia was a great American master and the Grateful Dead are not just a genuine piece of musical history, but also an important part of American history. This is a band, born right at the beginning of electric rock, that took the American tradition and moved it forward. They really embodied the American concept of freedom, rolling around the country with a ginormous gang of people and the mindset that 'you can come if you want, you can leave if you want. We don't know what's going to happen. All we know is we're not looking back.' What could be more American?" 
 
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 Anastasio's enthusiasm is shared by the Dead's members. "The Grateful Dead lived an incredible musical story and now we get to write a whole new chapter," said Kreutzmann in an announcement issued on Friday. 
 
 Added Lesh: "It is with respect and gratitude that we reconvene the Dead one last time to celebrate - not merely the band's legacy, but also the community that we've been playing to, and with, for fifty years." 
 
 "I have a feeling this will come out just right," offered Mickey Hart. "Can't wait to find out…HERE WE GO!" 
 
 The one remaining burning question: will the Core Four return to touring as the Grateful Dead? Weir says it's unlikely that the Chicago bow will be part of a longer run, it's by no means the end of the road. "I know we'll all continue playing this music forever in our own ways," he says. "I've got some miles left in me." 
 
 With reporting by Ray Waddell 
 
 An edited version of this article first appeared in the Jan. 24 issue of Billboard. ||||| There are two kinds of Deadheads. 
 
 Those who think the Grateful Dead experience should have died with Jerry Garcia. 
 
 And those who think it can go on with a pinch-hitter in the band's MVP seat. 
 
 If ever there was a time for those in the first camp to come back and check out the Dead 2.0, it was this weekend at Levi's Stadium, the band's 50th anniversary and the last time the surviving four members would play together. A chance to pull out the tie-dyes one last time, see some old friends and wish the boys a fond farewell. 
 
 And the band delivered a set seemingly tailored for the old-timers, three and a half hours of their most classic songs, not one written after 1970. They plucked rarely played gems off of their 1967 debut album, and played one song --1969's "What's Become of the Baby" -- that the Dead had never played, with or without Garcia. 
 
 A rainbow stretches over Levi's Stadium as the Grateful Dead play Saturday night June 27, 2015 in Santa Clara, California as part of their Fare Thee Well final trou. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group) 
 
 And this Dead, complete with that pinch-hitter -- Phish's Trey Anastasio -- did a pretty fair job of regenerating the kind of cosmic energy the original Grateful Dead was able to summon up during its 30-year lifespan. 
 
 Anastasio missed a couple of cues, and there were some less than seamless transitions in the first set, but the "Core Four" members (Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart) and auxiliary members (Anastasio and keyboard players Jeff Chimenti and Bruce Hornsby) got sharper as the night went on. That bodes well for the second Levi's show on Sunday, and the three final shows in Chicago next week. 
 
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 The 49ers' high-tech new home was well-staged for a Dead show, with band iconography flying from flagpoles and adorning walls. Concertgoers were all handed red roses on the way in and the video screens showed off arresting digital versions of the old Fillmore light shows. 
 
 As the sun started to slip behind the western scoreboard, the band launched the show with "Truckin" and "Uncle John's Band," staples throughout the Dead's history. But they followed with songs that hadn't been played by the full band since 1967 ("Cream Puff War"), 1968 ("Born Cross Eyed"), 1970 ("Viola Lee Blues") and 1971 ("Alligator.") 
 
 The open question among Deadheads has been whether Anastasio was the best choice to play the Garcia role for these last shows. Lesh and Weir have employed nearly a dozen different lead guitarists in their post-Dead projects over the years, ranging from John Mayer to former Allman Brother Warren Haynes. Anastasio has the improv cred he'd earned turning Phish into the second biggest jam band in the world, but his funky, syncopated style isn't in line with Garcia's flowing psychedelia. Anastasio told interviewers he was studying like he never had before, analyzing Garcia's style so he could express it without actually imitating him. 
 
 He occasionally succeeded, finding great turns of rhythmic phrase in the second set opus, "Dark Star," arguably the Dead's most beloved song. But he missed the mark in some other spots and seemed to sound best when he stayed roughly within Garcia's footprints. Though the Dead were famous for their ensemble playing, Garcia's unique magic was always the driving force behind the band, the thing that raised it above all the other Bay Area bands of the Sixties. And for that core of old-school Deadheads, nobody is going to fill his shoes. 
 
 Anastasio did an adequate job singing the Garcia vocal parts he was assigned and probably would have been better off taking a few more. Lesh's voice has never been strong and Weir was a bit off the mark at times when singing parts made famous by Garcia. 
 
 In the second set, "Dark Star" was the first of a four-song cycle lifted straight from the landmark "Live Dead" album, recorded in 1969. The new Dead seemed to find its stride midway through and after a thundering "Morning Dew" to close the main set, they returned for "Casey Jones," a favorite encore in the early 70s, with Hornsby taking his only lead vocal part of the night. 
 
 There was no shortage of adulation from the crowd, which featured even a wider range of ages than usual. What could have been more an exercise in nostalgia and closure than a milestone musical achievement was lifted on this night by a stellar setlist, if not sure-fire playing. But the band is sure to stray from it tremendously in the next four shows, trying to play as many different songs as possible as it writes its final chapter. It may be a challenge to match this impressive first night. 
 
 The setlist: 
 
 Truckin 
 
 Uncle John's Band 
 
 Alligator 
 
 Cumberland Blues 
 
 Born Cross Eyed 
 
 Cream Puff War 
 
 Viola Lee Blues 
 
 Intermission 
 
 Cryptical Envelopment 
 
 Dark Star 
 
 St. Stephen 
 
 The Eleven 
 
 Turn on Your Lovelight 
 
 drums 
 
 space 
 
 What's Become of the Baby 
 
 space 
 
 The Other One 
 
 Morning Dew 
 
 Encore: 
 
 Casey Jones
– "Bittersweet" is how Rolling Stone describes it: The four surviving members of the original Grateful Dead are getting together to play three shows in Chicago this summer, but there's a catch: "These will be the last shows with the four of us together," Bob Weir tells Billboard. Weir himself is 67, Phil Lesh is 74, Mickey Hart is 71, and Bill Kreutzmann is 68. The Dead will play July 3-5 at Soldier Field, site of the last performance with Jerry Garcia before his death in 1995. The four originals, marking 50 years as a band, will be joined by Trey Anastasio of Phish, Bruce Hornsby, and Jeff Chimenti of Ratdog. Anastasio reflects to Billboard: "I've realized that it's no coincidence that they named their best album ever American Beauty," he says. "They really embodied the American concept of freedom, rolling around the country with a ginormous gang of people and the mindset that 'you can come if you want, you can leave if you want. We don't know what's going to happen. All we know is we're not looking back.' What could be more American?" (The mystery of a Deadhead who went missing in 1995 may be solved.)