A lifelong Grateful Dead fan, Sheri Sternberg, looks back on her youth during the height of the Grateful Dead. Sternberg is the CEO of Mercenary Productions, a logistics organization based in San Francisco specializing in organizing and assisting in high profile events such as ESPN X Games, Red Bull events and other local events in the Bay Area.
Q: Where are you from originally?
Sheri: Brooklyn, I am from the East Coast so big Grateful Dead country when I was a kid.
Q: When did you first find out about the Grateful Dead?
Sheri: I started working in a record store when I was 12. I found out about them really early on.
Q: What does the Grateful Dead mean to you?
Sheri: I mean it was a big part of my youth. A lot of my friends went to see them. I had a friend who left high school and did the Grateful Dead tour, and came back pregnant so it was a big part of our right of passage to go see Dead shows. We would often spend our weekends traveling around, going down to D.C. or up to Boston. They certainly played the tri-state area a bunch. I didn’t do what she did, I stayed in school, but definitely went to a bunch of shows as a kid.
Q: What's your opinion about the fandom behind the Dead?
Sheri: That’s very different for me because once I started getting into the industry and I worked my first dead show. I saw somebody at Giants Stadium in New Jersey and literally someone jumped down from the upper decks to get a better seat and broke his leg. I was like, “well maybe these people aren’t really too together.” But ultimately they are devoted. They are the most devoted fanbase I think still that's out there. You talk to people about the Grateful Dead, there's very few bands that evoke that kind of loyalty, like Phish. You don’t hear people talking about going to see Bad Bunny for two weeks in a row or Kendrick Lamar, but deadheads still exist and they're still loyal. They will travel for shows and do destination shows. It’s a special thing.
Q: On a different note, how did Jerry Garcia’s death affect the world, the culture and everything surrounding the dead.
Sheri: It was massive. I was in San Francisco by then. I had moved here not too long before it and had been to some Jerry shows. I did concerts in college and we did Bobby shows and Jerry shows, so to me they were still really important despite the fact that I didn’t go see them all the time. To be in San Francisco at that time and to see the outpouring of grief in the Haight, that things were never the same for the Dead after that. They're not over. They still enjoy a great fan base and have done a great job having different guest people fill in the Jerry spot. But it was the end of an era for sure. It was never the same. He loomed the largest over it all.
Q: With the implementation of John Mayer in the rebranding of the Grateful Dead to Dead & Co, what are your thoughts?
Sheri: I think they've done a good job with it. It's very different, right? I kind of like the Jackie Green version a little bit more myself. John Mayer is a great guitar player. It’s just his whole persona doesn't quite fit the Dead scene for me. I think they’ve done a good job trying to get different people in there. I wouldn’t say fill Jerry’s shoes because you can’t do that. But to try to recreate the parts musically that he would bring to the table. I think it's interesting to keep putting different people in that position. Sort of like their terrible keyboard history of everyone dying. It’s like “Oh you play keyboard for the Grateful Dead, that's a short term thing!” When Bruce Hornsby would play with them, that gave him a different credibility in my eyes. I think the same thing for John Mayer to see him do that differently gives him different credibility, but he’s still not quite my scene.
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