Grateful Dead tribute band Quality Jerry performs at the Avenue Cafe in Lansing, Mich. on March 15, 2026. Their performance marked the 55th anniversary of when the Grateful Dead performed at MSU in Jenison Fieldhouse in 1971.
Just three miles off Michigan State University’s campus, members of the faculty and community gathered in The Avenue Cafe on a rainy Sunday afternoon to commemorate a day 55 years ago.
Members of every generation tapped their feet and bobbed their heads through a bustling, blue-lit haze to the music played by three Grateful Dead tribute bands. The event titled "Jenison 55," celebrated the Grateful Dead’s March 13, 1971 performance at MSU’s Jenison Field House.
Fascinated by the 1971 performance, was tribute band Quality Jerry’s drummer and curator of rare books in MSU Library’s Special Collections Unit, Tad Boehmer. The original performance was and still is so coveted because there is no found tape of it.
"For a band that was heavily, heavily taped — whether officially or unofficially — people would bring tape recorders into these shows from some of the very earliest days," Boehmer said. "There's no tape of this. There's no recording, and it's kind of shrouded in mystery. This band has been dissected and studied, and the statistics have been looked at from every angle, by all kinds of crazy, nerdy academics. This was why [the performance] draws people like us."
A hope Boehmer had with this event was to attract people who were at the 1971 show and possibly bring forward a tape of it. The band’s lead guitarist, Joshua Barton, even made an official call to action during the show and led a chant hoping to conjure a tape from a member of the crowd.
"Maybe there's a tape hiding in somebody's attic, maybe there's a memory that's going to be jogged, maybe there's a photo album that's gonna come out," Boehmer said. "So this is about looking backwards, it's about today, it's about looking forward. It's an exciting moment for me that started a year and a half ago when all of us had this crazy idea to start a band."
After their group had an informal performance at Jenison Field House last year, Boehmer wanted to keep the fun going. With the band the Dead Honey Collective in mind, Boehmer knew the event couldn’t be contained in Jenison, so they reached out to The Avenue Cafe in Lansing and even brought in The Deadly String Band for what he described as an "extravaganza."
Each band has a different style, helping to keep the show interesting. The Deadly String Band plays more acoustic, folk-style. Members of Quality Jerry have backgrounds in punk rock and garage rock, which shines through in their music by means of distortion and other pedals.
The Dead Honey Collective’s dead giveaway is their standout pedal steel guitar. The instrument is reminiscent of Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia’s playing in "New Riders of the Purple Sage," which he played in as an opener for the 1971 show.
"You have the more pure, folk, traditional opener, which is also a little quieter, without the percussion," Quality Jerry percussionist and MSU history professor Peter Alegi said. "Then you get the more garage band, Dead-style sound that we tend to put forward, and then you've got the more polished, perhaps melodic, but also jammy and technical at the end — it kind of brings it all together."
Sandwiched between the two other tribute bands, Quality Jerry matched the multigenerational crowd that the event drew. The band’s members range from their late 20s to 70s and have two female members in their group of eight.
What was originally a fun break from work — librarians playing jazz in the basement during their lunchtime — grew to include other faculty and expanded to new locations like the Beal Botanical Gardens. After discovering a shared interest in the Grateful Dead and a reluctance to return to work after their vamping, they started meeting in the evenings.
In just 18 months, they grew from the library to jamming out in garages on weekends to playing at private parties. Including Sunday’s show, they have played live three times.
"We now have the momentum, the drive and the interest to get out and keep doing this because we have such a good time," Boehmer said. "We don't want it to stop, and it won't. People who listen to it, I think, hopefully feel the same way, and they want to keep coming out to shows like this."
When paying tribute as a band, it can become easy to fall into the routine of note-by-note recreation, but these bands use their creativity to keep out of that trap. For Alegi, Quality Jerry’s music is a conversation.
"Each night is different," Alegi said. "Some nights, it doesn't sound very good because the mood isn't right or somebody came in and was grumpy, sick or whatever. But then, the next time we get together, it's fantastic. And that's also exciting because we never know what's gonna happen."
No stranger to what he refers to as "The Dead’s" music is Alegi. Alegi went to his first show in 1987 and has estimated seeing them around 50 times. After a childhood in Italy, Alegi’s enchantment with the band helped introduce him to American culture upon coming here for a year of high school.
"I got to learn about America, just going to places," Alegi said. "Greensboro, North Carolina; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; or Oxford, Maine — places I probably never would have gone as a teenager, but I did, because I was following the band. And I think it was musically very interesting, too, because the Americana comes across in the music. There is rock, psychedelia, jazz, blues, country — just about every genre of American music. And so, for me, it was a musical education as much as an experience."
Guitar player for Quality Jerry and a junior at MSU at the time of the 1971 Grateful Dead show, Mike Tuckey, was in attendance at Jenison that Saturday night.
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"It was exciting and really fun," Tuckey said. "Being a crowd of people and seeing professional musicians, big rock stars and stuff. I enjoyed the concert."
Tuckey said he "used to go to all the concerts," recalling performances such as Neil Diamond, Chicago, B.B. King and more. Although, he was not particularly a fan of the Grateful Dead when he attended their show.
"I'd heard of them before, of course," Tuckey said. "And since they were from San Francisco, I expected they were gonna be kind of, like, a psychedelic-rock, but they turned out more laid back than that."
Tuckey described these concerts as what are now known to students as the spring concert held in the Breslin Student Events Center. These musical performances of the past and present were both hosted by the Associated Students of Michigan State University (ASMSU), and both occurred in the typical basketball arena of the time.
"The music is more — you get deeper into it than watching a sporting event — the mental experience," Tuckey said.
Friends of the Dead Honey Collective and members of the Lansing community, Carol Pierce and Jen VanDerHeide, attended the concert. Pierce and VanDerHeide stated that they are more fans of the Dead Honey Collective than of the band being paid tribute to, but they both listen to the Grateful Dead at home.
"I was never really a Grateful Dead fan," Pierce said. "But the Dead Honey Collective seems to pick out the songs that I like from the Grateful Dead. So yeah, it's been fun learning their songs."
Having been to The Avenue Cafe before, Pierce and VanDerHeide noted that the building was "filled up."
"I never heard this second band [Quality Jerry], so it was really fun to hear them, and they did a great job," VanDerHeide said. "I have seen [The Deadly String Band] play in The Peanut Barrel before. It’s great to have such a big crowd of people who aren’t typically here on a Sunday night."
