CHICAGO — Phish’s Trey Anastasio will join the remaining members of the Grateful Dead to celebrate the band’s 50th anniversary and pay final tribute to the band’s gray-bearded leader and guitarist, Jerry Garcia, July 3-5 at Chicago’s Soldier Field.

The announcement Friday in Billboard magazine didn’t come as a total surprise. It was perhaps inevitable that the Dead’s Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann would do something to memorialize the 20th anniversary of the band’s final performances with Garcia. The only real questions were when, where and, more importantly, how.

Additional Images

Grateful Dead lead singer Jerry Garcia will be memorialized when the band members play a concert this year. 1992 Associated Press File Photo

The Grateful Dead, from left, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, Bob Weir and Mickey Hart perform during a reunion concert in East Troy, Wis. 2002 Associated Press File Photo

“These will be the last shows with the four of us together,” Weir told Billboard. Lesh invited Anastasio to join. “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 told Billboard. “I didn’t hesitate for a second to say yes.”

Keyboardists Bruce Hornsby and Jeff Chimenti also will join the group.

Tickets will be available to fan club members Feb. 9-11, Billboard said. Pre-sales will be held Feb. 12-13 and Feb. 14. For more information, visit Dead50.net.

Though the band was founded in 1965 in San Francisco and its headquarters remains in Northern California, Chicago was always a favorite stop usually involving multiple sold-out shows. Soldier Field was the site of its final two concerts in July 1995. The Grateful Dead formally disbanded after Garcia died on Aug. 9, 1995, but over the years there have been various reunions of the surviving members billed as the Other Ones and the Dead.

The notion to reunite under the Grateful Dead banner for a one-off residency without a key band member echoes the reunion of Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones without the late John Bonham for one major concert as Led Zeppelin in London in 2007. Though Page and Jones were reportedly eager to do more shows, Plant decided to walk away from the lucrative revival. Weir and the rest of the surviving Dead members say the Soldier Field sets are the only shows scheduled, even though several festivals also reportedly bid on the band’s services.

“We had to sort through a number of options,” Weir told Billboard. “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.”

The selections to round out the band make sense. Hornsby played many times with the Grateful Dead as a guest keyboardist, and Chimenti participated in some of the post-Garcia reunions and Weir’s band Ratdog. Anastasio has led one of the most successful concert bands in music history and has made no secret of the Grateful Dead’s influence on Phish’s genre-tripping music and business model. For his part, Garcia endorsed the rise of the “baby Dead” such as Phish and the Dave Matthews Band in the ’80s and ’90s.

“They’re like us,” Garcia told the Tribune in 1993. “They’re following the Grateful Dead tradition of screw the record companies, screw MTV, just go out and play to real humans. And it’s working for them. That’s the story. If you want to survive in this business, you go out there and pick up your audience, you recruit ’em. That’s who you’re working for. If you’re a performer, that’s where it’s at. Not playing to a microphone in a studio or a TV screen.”

At the time of that ’93 interview, Garcia had shed 60 pounds and said he felt healthier than he had in decades after struggling with diabetes and drug addiction. But his condition later deteriorated. At Soldier Field in 1995, he looked exhausted.

“Garcia in particular played with the grim, head-bowed earnestness of a foot soldier,” I wrote in my Tribune review of the first night’s performance. “His voice sounded tired, he muffed lyrics and he sometimes dispensed with entire verses altogether in a remote performance.”

A month later, Garcia was found dead of a heart attack. It was a sad end to one of the longest, strangest and most adventurous trips in 20th Century American music, to paraphrase a song co-written by Garcia. Now, Anastasio told Billboard, it’s time to celebrate that legacy with a trio of concerts based on the band’s improvisatory vibe rather than a locked-down “greatest hits” show.

“They really embodied the American concept of freedom,” the guitarist told Billboard, “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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