Jerry Garcia - Grateful Dead - Winterland, San Francisco, CA - 12.29.77

My first San Francisco Dead show. I was 18 and traveled accross the county solo from Brooklyn, NY on a greyhound bus to make this New Year’s run.

It was easy for me to get up to the rail at this general admission show, people were really cool. I needed to be up front if I wanted to take close-up photographs because I only had a 50mm lens on my new camera, a Minolta SRT101.

Jerry Garcia was already onstage, tuning up, and I could tell by his notes that the opener was going to be ‘Jack Straw.’

At one point he looked directly at me. I paused, sort of mesmerized for a second. He looked so iconic and I pressed the shutter to capture this image.”

Print will be hand-signed by Bob Minkin.