The story of Grateful Dead

Palo Alto beginnings

Jerry Garcia was born in San Francisco on the first of August 1942, and his parents named him after the songwriter Jerome Kern. His father Jose was a former professional musician who ran a bar in the city. Childhood was rough. When Jerry was four, on a family holiday in the Santa Cruz Mountains, his older brother Clifford accidentally chopped off most of his right middle finger while splitting wood. Less than a year later his father drowned in a fly fishing accident on the Trinity River. His mother took over the bar and the boys spent years living with their grandparents. On his fifteenth birthday his mother gave him an accordion. He was so disappointed that she swapped it at a pawnshop for an electric guitar and a small amplifier.[1]

In 1960 Garcia stole his mother's car and was given the choice of joining the army instead of facing the law. He was a hopeless soldier who kept missing roll call, and he was discharged that December. Early in 1961 he was drifting around Palo Alto, sometimes sleeping in his car. On the twentieth of February 1961 he was a passenger in a car that took a curve at around ninety miles an hour and rolled. Garcia was thrown through the windshield and broke his collarbone. His sixteen year old friend Paul Speegle was killed. Garcia later said that crash was where his life really began, and he turned to the guitar in earnest. That spring he met a young writer named Robert Hunter, who would become his lyric partner for life.[1] [2]

Around the same time Garcia met Phil Lesh, a classically trained trumpet player who dreamed of being a composer and had studied with the Italian modernist Luciano Berio. Lesh was volunteering at the Berkeley radio station KPFA, and he recorded Garcia's folk and bluegrass playing for a radio special. Then, on New Year's Eve 1963, a sixteen year old Bob Weir was wandering the back alleys of Palo Alto with a friend, looking for a club that would let them in. They heard banjo music coming from Dana Morgan's Music Store. Inside was Garcia, twenty one, waiting for students who were never going to show up on New Year's Eve. The two played music all night and decided to form a band.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Weir was an adopted kid from wealthy Atherton who had been thrown out of school after school, partly because of dyslexia nobody had diagnosed. Another friend was Ron McKernan, the son of a rhythm and blues disc jockey, a blues singer and harmonica player everybody called Pigpen, after the grubby character in the Peanuts comic strip. With friends they formed a jug band, Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions. Then the Beatles changed everything. Weir later said the Beatles were the reason they went from a jug band to a rock and roll band. Pigpen pushed hardest for electric instruments. In 1965 they became the Warlocks, with Bill Kreutzmann on drums and Dana Morgan Junior on bass, soon replaced by Lesh, who had never played a bass guitar in his life.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Warlocks played their first show at Magoo's Pizza Parlor in Menlo Park on the fifth of May 1965, two days before Kreutzmann turned nineteen. He was so young that he sometimes used a fake draft card in the name of Bill Sommers to get into the bars they played. Then they learned that another band had already released a record as the Warlocks. The new name came from a dictionary, where Garcia found grateful dead, a folklore term for the spirit of a dead person who shows gratitude to someone who paid for their burial. Garcia found it powerful, but Weir and Kreutzmann disliked it. It stuck anyway. The first show as the Grateful Dead came on the fourth of December 1965 in San Jose, at one of Ken Kesey's Acid Tests.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Acid Tests and the Haight

Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and his friends the Merry Pranksters were throwing parties built around LSD, which was still legal in California. They called them Acid Tests, and they came with black lights, strobes, fluorescent paint and a house band, the Grateful Dead. There were no set lists and no proper stage, so the band learned to follow the room and stretch songs out for as long as the moment lasted. In January 1966 they played the Trips Festival at Longshoreman's Hall in San Francisco, a three day event that drew thousands. Tom Wolfe later wrote that the Haight-Ashbury era began that weekend. Lesh said it was where the band learned what they were really up to, a two way flow between band and crowd.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Much of the LSD at those parties came from Owsley Stanley, known as Bear, the first private chemist known to make the drug in huge quantities. By his own account he produced more than five million doses between 1965 and 1967. In early 1966 Owsley became the band's financial backer. He rented them a house on the edge of Watts in Los Angeles and bought them sound equipment, because what he really wanted was to design their sound. Garcia said they were living entirely on Owsley's good graces. Owsley also began taping the band's shows so he could improve his mixing, partly because a diving accident had left him with hearing damage in one ear. Those tapes were the start of the most thoroughly recorded live career in rock.[1] [2] [3]

By late 1966 the band had moved into a communal house at 710 Ashbury Street, in the heart of the Haight-Ashbury. Rock Scully, a graduate student who had met them at an Acid Test, signed on as manager and booked them into the Fillmore and the Avalon Ballroom. Garcia's partner was now Carolyn Adams, a Merry Prankster called Mountain Girl, who moved in with her baby daughter by Ken Kesey. In January 1967 the band played the Mantra-Rock Dance at the Avalon with Allen Ginsberg and Janis Joplin's band, a benefit for the local Hare Krishna temple. Their first album, The Grateful Dead, came out on Warner Brothers in March 1967. It held only two original songs, and it captured little of what they did on stage.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On the second of October 1967, state narcotics agents raided 710 Ashbury, trailed by reporters and television crews. Weir and Pigpen were arrested along with nine others. The irony was that Pigpen avoided drugs and stuck to whiskey and sweet fortified wine. The next day the band held a press conference in their living room, and threatened the first reporter who asked a stupid question with a cream pie in the face. That autumn the band also found a second drummer. Mickey Hart, a New Yorker who had drummed in an elite Air Force big band, helped Kreutzmann meet Count Basie's drummer at a Fillmore concert. Soon he was sitting in, and by the end of September 1967 the Dead were one of the first rock bands with two drummers.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The psychedelic laboratory

For their second album the band wanted to capture what happened on stage. Producer David Hassinger followed them through studios in Los Angeles and New York, then quit with only a third of the record done. Garcia and Lesh took over with their soundman Dan Healy and tried something new. They spliced tapes of live shows together with studio takes, layering versions of the same song on top of each other until one dissolved into another. Garcia called it mixing for hallucinations. A Warner Brothers executive called it the most unreasonable project the label had ever been involved with. The album came out in July 1968, with help from Lesh's old friend Tom Constanten, who added prepared piano and tape effects inspired by John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen.[1] [2]

Robert Hunter had been sending Garcia lyrics from New Mexico, and the band liked them so much they invited him to San Francisco as their lyricist. He joined them at a show at Rio Nido, where he wrote the words that became Dark Star. Released as a single in April 1968, Dark Star sank. Of sixteen hundred copies shipped, only about five hundred sold. On stage it became something else entirely, a launch pad for jams of twenty minutes or more. The band's spirit showed in other ways too. On the third of May 1968, during the student occupation at Columbia University in New York, the Dead were smuggled onto campus in the back of a bread delivery truck and were already jamming before security or police could stop them.[1] [2] [3]

Inside the band there was friction. In the autumn of 1968 Garcia and Lesh felt that Weir and Pigpen were holding back the long experimental jams. For a handful of shows the band played without them, billed as Mickey and the Hartbeats. Within months both were back full time. In November 1968 Tom Constanten officially joined on keyboards the day after his discharge from the Air Force. He joked that he was an Air Force sergeant one day and a rock star the next. Pigpen was moved to congas and vocals, and a road manager said it humiliated him deeply, though he could not show it. Weir, stung by the whole episode, grew fast as a player, and Lesh later said he was astonished by what Weir was doing on guitar.[1] [2] [3]

The third album, Aoxomoxoa, was recorded twice. When one of the world's first sixteen track tape machines arrived, the band threw away their eight track work and started again from scratch. They spent eight months on and off in the studio, and the bill came to about one hundred and eighty thousand dollars, sinking them deep into debt with Warner Brothers. It was the first record built on the Garcia and Hunter partnership, and it carried China Cat Sunflower and St. Stephen. The answer to the debt was a live album. Owsley had a special splitter built so they could record straight off the stage, and the band hauled a sixteen track machine up the steps of the Avalon and the Fillmore West. Live/Dead came out later in 1969.[1] [2]

Live/Dead was among the first live rock albums recorded on sixteen tracks, and the critic Robert Christgau called it the finest rock improvisation ever recorded. But 1969 also brought two bad days. At Woodstock in August the Dead's set was plagued by technical problems and chaos, and it is remembered as one of their worst. Then came Altamont on the sixth of December. The Dead were among the main organizers of the free concert with the Rolling Stones. After a Hells Angel knocked Jefferson Airplane singer Marty Balin unconscious, the Dead refused to play and left. During the Stones' set, eighteen year old Meredith Hunter drew a revolver and was stabbed to death by the Hells Angel Alan Passaro, who was later acquitted on grounds of self defense. The Dead answered with the song New Speedway Boogie.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Busted, robbed and reborn

The new decade began in handcuffs. On the thirty first of January 1970, after the first of two nights at the Warehouse in New Orleans, police raided the band's hotel on Bourbon Street. Nineteen people from the touring party were arrested, including Owsley, who reportedly told police he was the king of acid. The two keyboard players, Pigpen and Tom Constanten, stayed free because neither took illegal drugs. Bail swallowed the band's whole fee for the gig, and they played the second night anyway, then added a benefit show. Most charges were later dropped, but Owsley ended up serving federal prison time from 1970 to 1972 over an earlier LSD conviction. The bust became a verse in Truckin'. For Constanten it was the last straw, and he parted ways with the band.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Worse was waiting at home. The band's manager was Lenny Hart, Mickey Hart's father, a champion rudimental drummer who had walked out on his family when Mickey was a toddler and only reconnected with him years later. The band came home from tour to find him refusing to show anyone the books. It turned out he had renewed their Warner Brothers contract without telling them, and in March 1970 he disappeared with a large share of their money. Mickey was ashamed, and in February 1971 he left the band. A private detective eventually found Lenny in San Diego in July 1971, baptizing people under the name Reverend Lenny B. Hart. He was convicted of embezzlement and served six months in jail. The song He's Gone grew out of his vanishing act.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Out of all that trouble came the biggest surprise of their career. With debts to pay and a drug case hanging over them, Garcia wanted to make a record fast. Workingman's Dead was cut in about nine days in February 1970 and released that June. The sound collages were gone. In their place were warm country and folk songs with close harmonies, like Uncle John's Band, Casey Jones and Dire Wolf. Their friends Crosby, Stills and Nash had a lot to do with it. Stephen Stills had spent three months living at Mickey Hart's ranch, and Garcia played pedal steel guitar on Teach Your Children in exchange for harmony lessons. Hunter came on the road for the first time and appears on the cover as a seventh member. Rolling Stone readers voted it the album of the year.[1] [2]

Just over four months later came American Beauty, made at a studio where Jefferson Airplane, Santana and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young were all working, which Lesh called jammer heaven. It gave the world Box of Rain, Sugar Magnolia, Friend of the Devil, Ripple and Truckin'. It was also made in grief. That August, Garcia's mother Ruth was badly hurt in a car crash in San Francisco, and he kept leaving the sessions to visit her. She died on the twenty eighth of September 1970. Lesh was dealing with the loss of his father at the same time and said the music helped him through. Truckin' became the song most linked with the band, reaching number sixty four as a single. The album went on to be certified double platinum.[1] [2] [3]

In the summer of 1970 the band rode the Festival Express, a chartered train that carried them across Canada with Janis Joplin and the Band, jamming and drinking all the way. In Toronto, when protesters tried to storm the gates over ticket prices, Garcia helped calm things by setting up a free show in a nearby park. In September 1971 came another live double album, officially untitled but known as Skull and Roses for its cover, adapted from an old illustration for the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The band's own choice of title was too crude for Warner Brothers. Inside was a notice inviting Dead freaks to send their names and addresses. About three hundred and fifty letters arrived by the end of 1971, and the mailing list later grew to around forty thousand.[1] [2] [3]

Europe '72 and the loss of Pigpen

By 1971 Pigpen was seriously ill. Heavy drinking had damaged his liver, and he also had an autoimmune liver disease that had nothing to do with alcohol. In August he was hospitalized and doctors told him to stop touring. Around then a jazz pianist named Keith Godchaux and his wife Donna Jean came into the band's life. Donna Jean had been a top session singer in Muscle Shoals and Memphis, singing backup on Percy Sledge's When a Man Loves a Woman and Elvis Presley's Suspicious Minds. She walked up to Garcia after a show, told him Keith needed to be in the band, and asked for his home phone number. It worked. Keith played his first show on the nineteenth of October 1971 in Minneapolis, and Donna joined as a singer early in 1972.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In April and May 1972 the Grateful Dead toured Western Europe, from Wembley in London through Denmark, Germany and France and back to London's Lyceum Theatre. The touring party had grown to forty three people who called themselves the Grateful Dead family. Warner Brothers paid for a sixteen track recorder to travel with them, hoping a live album would cover the huge cost. Every show was taped, and the result was Europe '72, a triple album released that November, which went on to be certified double platinum. It was packed with new songs like Jack Straw, Brown Eyed Women and Tennessee Jed that never got proper studio versions. Pigpen came along on organ and harmonica, and sang his new song Mr. Charlie, written with Hunter.[1] [2]

The Lyceum shows at the end of May 1972 were Pigpen's last as the band's lead singer. He played one more concert, at the Hollywood Bowl on the seventeenth of June 1972, and then cut himself off from the band, telling them he did not want them around when he died. On the eighth of March 1973 his landlady found him dead at his home in Corte Madera. He had died of a gastrointestinal hemorrhage at the age of twenty seven, and he was buried in Palo Alto. At the funeral Garcia said they all knew it was the end of the original Grateful Dead. Mickey Hart later said Pigpen was the real musician in the band, and Kreutzmann called him the sweetest guy anybody had ever met.[1] [2]

New voices were coming in. Weir had fallen out with Hunter, famously over words Weir had changed in Sugar Magnolia, and a fed up Hunter told Weir's old friend John Perry Barlow to take him, he was his. Barlow was a Wyoming ranch kid who had met Weir at a Colorado boarding school. Together they wrote Cassidy, Mexicali Blues and Black Throated Wind for Weir's 1972 solo album Ace, on which the whole band played. The crowds kept growing too. On the twenty eighth of July 1973 the Dead played the Summer Jam at Watkins Glen in New York State with the Allman Brothers Band and the Band. About six hundred thousand people came, for years the biggest audience ever recorded at a pop festival.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Going it alone and the Wall of Sound

With their Warner Brothers deal finished, the Dead tried something few big bands dared. In 1973, with manager Ron Rakow, they launched their own company, Grateful Dead Records. In a letter to fans they even daydreamed about selling albums from ice cream trucks outside their shows. The first release, Wake of the Flood, came out in October 1973. It was their first studio album in nearly three years and their first without Pigpen, and Kreutzmann called it Keith's coming out party, full of jazz touches. It became their biggest seller yet. From the Mars Hotel followed in June 1974. The band also held on to its business in an unusual way. Their longtime lawyer Hal Kant made sure they kept ownership of their master recordings and their publishing.[1] [2] [3]

On stage, Owsley, out of prison, and the crew set out to build the perfect sound system. The result was the Wall of Sound, a giant stack of speakers placed behind the band, so the musicians heard exactly what the crowd heard. It had about six hundred speakers, with separate channels for vocals, guitars, piano and drums, and Lesh's bass was split so each string had its own speakers. An early version was tried at Stanford in February 1973, where every tweeter blew as the band started the first song. The full system went on tour at the Cow Palace on the twenty third of March 1974. It weighed around seventy five tons and needed four semi trailers and twenty one crew. Lesh said playing through it was like piloting a flying saucer.[1] [2] [3]

The Wall was glorious and ruinous. Rising fuel and crew costs, and friction among a swollen road crew, wore everyone down, and Garcia wanted a break. The band announced a pause and played five farewell nights at Winterland in San Francisco, from the sixteenth to the twentieth of October 1974, with the last one billed as The Last One. At the start of the second set on that final night, Mickey Hart walked on and sat down at a second drum kit for the first time in more than three years. The shows were filmed, and Garcia co directed the footage into The Grateful Dead Movie, released in 1977 and opening with an animated skeleton dressed as Uncle Sam. In 1975 the Dead played only four concerts.[1] [2] [3]

During the break they made Blues for Allah in Weir's new home studio in Mill Valley, writing from scratch with Middle Eastern scales and unusual time signatures. Released in September 1975, it reached number twelve, their highest chart position yet, and gave them Franklin's Tower and The Music Never Stopped. Hart was back for those sessions, and he rejoined for good when touring resumed in June 1976. But the hiatus had a dark side. Garcia had first used heroin on the 1974 European tour, and during the break he began smoking a form of it known as Persian. The strain of finishing his movie and the bitter collapse of the band's own record labels deepened his dependence. By 1977 the Dead had given up the label and signed with Arista.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Cornell, the pyramids and a changing lineup

Arista's boss Clive Davis wanted a hit, so he gave the band an outside producer, Keith Olsen, fresh from Fleetwood Mac's breakthrough album. Olsen struggled to get everyone in the room at once, so the roadie Steve Parish nailed the studio door shut from the inside once they had all arrived. While the band toured, Olsen added orchestra and choir parts without their consent. Garcia said Olsen had put the Grateful Dead in a dress. Terrapin Station came out on the twenty seventh of July 1977 and reached number twenty eight, and its two dancing terrapins became a lasting emblem. That year's spring tour is remembered as one of their best, and in September 1977 they drew one hundred and seven thousand and nineteen people to Raceway Park in New Jersey, a single act ticket record that stood for forty seven years.[1] [2]

On the eighth of May 1977 the Dead played Barton Hall at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Tickets cost seven dollars fifty. Engineer Betty Cantor-Jackson recorded it from the soundboard, and the show became one of the most traded concert recordings by any band. In 2011 it was chosen for the Library of Congress National Recording Registry. Its survival was pure luck. In the mid eighties Cantor-Jackson fell on hard times and her storage units were auctioned. More than a thousand of her tapes, later nicknamed the Betty Boards, went to strangers, after the band declined to bid. One buyer left his share in a barn for years before a musician persuaded him to let them be restored. The Cornell show finally got an official release in 2017.[1] [2]

In September 1978 the Grateful Dead played three nights beside the Sphinx at the Great Pyramid of Giza. Lesh saw it as a chance to play at a place of ancient power. They borrowed a sound system and a recording truck from the Who. Kreutzmann played with his arm in a cast, having broken his wrist falling from a horse. On the last night, the sixteenth of September, there was a total lunar eclipse. The Nubian oud player Hamza El Din performed with the students of his school, and the crew rigged a speaker inside the King's Chamber of the pyramid, hoping to capture its echo, which did not work. Kreutzmann called Egypt the biggest field trip of their thirty years, and a bargain at half a million dollars.[1] [2]

Back home, Little Feat's Lowell George produced Shakedown Street, released in November 1978, with a disco groove in its title song. On New Year's Eve 1978 the Dead closed Bill Graham's Winterland Ballroom. But the Godchauxs were coming apart. Keith was sinking into heroin and alcohol, Donna was drinking heavily, and people around the band remembered violent screaming matches between them. Donna later said they were wasted and exhausted, and the band was exhausted with them. In February 1979, after a meeting at their house, they left. Brent Mydland, a keyboard player and singer from the same East Bay suburbs, who had played in Weir's solo band, made his debut on the twenty second of April 1979. He would stay longer than any other Dead keyboardist.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Keith and Donna went home to Alabama to recover, then formed a new group, the Heart of Gold Band. In July 1980, on his thirty second birthday, Keith was being driven home by his friend Courtenay Pollock, the tie dye artist, when the car crashed. Shortly before, he had told Pollock he was the happiest he had ever been. He suffered massive head injuries and died on the twenty third of July 1980. Donna later married the bassist David MacKay and made her life in Alabama. That April the Dead had released Go to Heaven, their first album with Mydland, who brought synthesizers and a raw, gravelly voice. It would be seven long years before the band made another studio album.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Addiction, a coma and a hit

In the early eighties the Dead became a huge touring machine on the American arena circuit, with no need to make records. But Garcia was in trouble. His heroin and cocaine habit reportedly cost him around seven hundred dollars a day, and he played endless solo dates on top of Dead tours, partly to pay for it. Years of smoking had roughened his voice, he put on a lot of weight, and by 1984 he sometimes rested his chin on the microphone as he played. That year the band fired Rock Scully, their manager and aide since the Haight days, partly for enabling Garcia's addictions and partly over money allegedly taken from the Jerry Garcia Band. In January 1985 the band held an intervention and told Garcia to choose the band or the drugs. He agreed to go to rehab.[1] [2]

Days later, on the nineteenth of January 1985, a police officer in Golden Gate Park noticed a BMW with expired registration. He said he smelled something burning and saw Garcia drop a piece of foil, and police reported finding small bundles of suspected heroin or cocaine in a briefcase. Garcia was charged and sent to a drug diversion program, and by the spring of 1986 he was completely clean. Then, on the tenth of July 1986, overweight, dehydrated and diabetic, after a relapse on the band's first stadium tour, he collapsed into a diabetic coma. He woke up five days later. He had to relearn the guitar, along with some everyday skills. Within months he was back on stage with the Jerry Garcia Band and the Grateful Dead.[1] [2]

The comeback record was In the Dark, recorded in January 1987 in an empty, darkened auditorium in San Rafael, with the band set up and lit as if for a show. It came out on the sixth of July 1987 and reached number six, their only top ten album. Touch of Grey, a Garcia and Hunter song they had played live since 1982, went to number nine. It was their first top forty single, seventeen years after their first entry on the Hot 100, which at the time was the longest such gap for a band. The MTV video showed life size skeleton puppets playing the song, turning into the real band, and ended by revealing the band as puppets too. That summer they toured stadiums with Bob Dylan.[1] [2] [3]

Success brought a flood of new fans, and older Deadheads dismissed some of them as Touchheads, blaming them for gate crashing and trouble outside shows. Around the venues grew a traveling market called Shakedown Street, selling tie dye shirts, veggie burritos and grilled cheese sandwiches. The band had always let fans record them, and in October 1984 they set aside a tapers section behind the soundboard with its own ticket. The rule was that tapes could be shared but never sold. Their archivist Dick Latvala, a former zookeeper who had traded tapes by mail from Hawaii, convinced the band to preserve its vault. In 1993 he began the Dick's Picks series of archival concert releases, which continues today in other forms.[1] [2] [3]

Brent Mydland had grown into a third frontman, and Weir later said the late eighties with him were his favorite years in the band. But Mydland was fighting his own demons. On the twenty third of July 1990 he played his last show with the Dead, at Tinley Park near Chicago. Three days later, on the twenty sixth of July, he was found dead at his home in Lafayette, California, at the age of thirty seven. The county coroner ruled that he died of a lethal mix of cocaine and morphine, known as a speedball. He was the third Grateful Dead keyboard player to die. Garcia called the loss crushing, and believed the band's chemistry would never be the same again.[1] [2] [3]

The last tours

To replace Mydland the band auditioned several players and picked Vince Welnick, the keyboardist from the Tubes, partly for his high harmony voice. His first show was on the seventh of September 1990 in Richfield, Ohio. He was so nervous he could barely play until fans held up banners reading Yo Vinnie. Bruce Hornsby, a hitmaker with his band the Range, came in on grand piano to help Welnick learn the enormous repertoire, and played most Dead shows until March 1992. Garcia called Hornsby a floating member who could come and go as he pleased. The Dead were now among the biggest live acts in America, and their tours earned two hundred and eighty five million dollars in the nineties, second only to the Rolling Stones.[1] [2] [3]

Garcia was worn out and wanted a long break, but management pressure kept the tours rolling. He relapsed into heroin, the band staged another intervention, and after a disastrous meeting he told Lesh he would clean up his own way at a methadone clinic. After the 1992 summer tour he fell seriously ill and the fall tour was cancelled. His partner Manasha Matheson organized his care at home, and he cut down on cigarettes, lost weight and became a vegetarian. That same year the band helped an unlikely team. Newly independent Lithuania could not afford to send its basketball team to the 1992 Olympics. The Dead paid about five thousand dollars in travel costs and supplied tie dye designs for the team's shirts. Lithuania won bronze.[1] [2]

In 1994 the Grateful Dead were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, presented by Bruce Hornsby. Robert Hunter went in with them, the only non performer ever inducted as a member of a band. Garcia refused to attend, so the band brought a cardboard cutout of him on stage. His health kept sliding, and he turned to narcotics again to dull the pain. The summer 1995 tour was troubled. In July, gate crashers at the Deer Creek Music Center near Indianapolis tore down a fence in a riot, and the band cancelled the next night's show. The last Grateful Dead concert took place on the ninth of July 1995 at Soldier Field in Chicago. The final song Garcia played with the band was Box of Rain.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Weeks later Garcia checked into the Betty Ford Center, but stayed only two weeks. He then moved to Serenity Knolls, a treatment center in Forest Knolls in Marin County. He died there of a heart attack on the ninth of August 1995, eight days after his fifty third birthday. Diabetes, weight problems, sleep apnea, heavy smoking and addiction had all worn his body down. Lesh said he was struck numb, having lost his oldest surviving friend, his brother. The funeral was held on the twelfth of August at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Belvedere, with Bob Dylan and the basketball star Bill Walton among the mourners. The next day about twenty five thousand people gathered at the Polo Fields in Golden Gate Park to remember him.[1]

A few months after Garcia's death, the surviving members decided the Grateful Dead could not go on, and the band was retired after thirty years and more than two thousand three hundred concerts. In April 1996 Weir and Garcia's widow Deborah Koons, whom he had married on Valentine's Day 1994, scattered half his ashes in the Ganges at Rishikesh in India. The rest went into San Francisco Bay. Koons would not let his former wife Carolyn, Mountain Girl, attend. Lawsuits followed. Carolyn settled her claim over their divorce agreement for one point two five million dollars. The guitar maker Doug Irwin, to whom Garcia had left his guitars in his will, beat the band in court in 2001, and Wolf and Tiger sold at auction the next year for one point seven four million dollars.[1] [2] [3]

After Jerry

The years after Garcia were hard on several of those left behind. Vince Welnick had been diagnosed with cancer and emphysema just before the final tour, and about six months after Garcia's death he attempted suicide on a tour bus. He recovered from the cancer, but was deeply hurt when his old bandmates regrouped without him, and he said he was and always would be a member of the Grateful Dead. In June 1997 Bill Kreutzmann pleaded no contest in Kauai, Hawaii, to charges of beating his former girlfriend at the home they shared, and spent two days in jail. In 1998 Phil Lesh had a liver transplant after hepatitis C. From then on he asked every audience to become organ donors, in honor of his donor, a man named Cody.[1] [2] [3]

Weir, Lesh and Hart toured as the Other Ones in 1998, with Kreutzmann joining later, and in 2003 they renamed themselves the Dead. On the second of June 2006, after ten years of depression, Vince Welnick died by suicide at the age of fifty five. That year the band signed a ten year deal with Rhino to run its catalog while keeping ownership. In 2007 the Dead received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 2008 they gave their entire archive to the University of California, Santa Cruz. Weir joked that anyone who ever wrote the band a letter would probably find it there. Lesh and Weir led a new band, Furthur, from 2009 to 2014. Owsley Stanley was killed in a car crash in Australia in March 2011.[1] [2] [3]

For the fiftieth anniversary in 2015, Weir, Lesh, Kreutzmann and Hart played together for the last time, in shows called Fare Thee Well, with Trey Anastasio of Phish on guitar alongside Bruce Hornsby and Jeff Chimenti. Half a million people logged on to Ticketmaster, a record for concert demand. After two shows in Santa Clara in June, they played three nights at Soldier Field in Chicago in early July, twenty years after the final Garcia show there. Owsley's ashes sat on the soundboard. That autumn Weir, Hart and Kreutzmann launched Dead and Company with John Mayer, who had fallen for the Dead in 2011 when Pandora played him Althea. With bassist Oteil Burbridge and Chimenti, they carried the songs to a whole new generation. Lesh chose not to join.[1] [2] [3]

Old friends kept slipping away. John Perry Barlow died in February 2018 and Robert Hunter in September 2019. In April 2023 Kreutzmann dropped out of what Dead and Company billed as their final tour, over what the band called a shift in creative direction, and Jay Lane took his place. The farewell ended in San Francisco that July, yet the band came back for long residencies at the Sphere in Las Vegas in 2024 and 2025. In July 2024 the four surviving core members were named Kennedy Center honorees, and Weir said the band had finally been accepted into the American musical tradition. Phil Lesh did not live to see the ceremony. He died on the twenty fifth of October 2024, aged eighty four, and was honored posthumously that December.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

In August 2025 Dead and Company played three nights in Golden Gate Park for the Grateful Dead's sixtieth anniversary. Weir had been diagnosed with cancer weeks earlier and told almost no one. On the final night he sang Touch of Grey, took a bow with Mickey Hart, and walked off. It was his last show. Donna Jean Godchaux MacKay died of cancer on the second of November 2025, aged seventy eight. In December, Guinness World Records recognized the Dead for the most top forty albums in Billboard 200 history, sixty six of them. Then, on the tenth of January 2026, Bob Weir died at seventy eight of underlying lung problems, after beating the cancer. A week later thousands gathered at San Francisco's Civic Center to say goodbye. As of 2026, Bill Kreutzmann is the last surviving member of the original lineup.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]

The people around Grateful Dead

Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter. They met in Palo Alto in 1961, introduced by Garcia's girlfriend, who had dated Hunter before. Their folk duo, Bob and Jerry, did not last, partly because Hunter was a limited guitarist. As songwriters they were a perfect match. Hunter wrote the words to nearly all of Garcia's songs for almost three decades, from Dark Star to Touch of Grey. He admitted he sometimes felt left out watching the band take the glory, and he disliked the cocaine use around the band in the mid seventies.[1] [2]

Bob Weir and John Perry Barlow. They met as teenagers at Fountain Valley School in Colorado, a place for boys who had struggled elsewhere. When Weir and Robert Hunter fell out, Barlow became Weir's writing partner, starting with Cassidy and Mexicali Blues in 1971. Barlow ran his family's Wyoming cattle ranch for almost two decades while writing for the Dead, later co founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and remained Weir's lyricist until the band ended. He died in 2018.[1] [2] [3]

Robert Hunter and Bob Weir. Hunter wrote Sugar Magnolia and other early songs with Weir, but he insisted singers stick to his exact words. Weir liked to rearrange and improvise lines. A backstage row over a couplet in Sugar Magnolia ended with Hunter telling Barlow to take Weir, he was his. After that Hunter decided he could only really work with Garcia, while Weir built his catalog with Barlow.[1] [2] [3]

Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh. Lesh met Garcia in the early sixties and recorded him for KPFA radio. In 1965 Garcia asked him to play bass in the Warlocks, though he had never touched the instrument. Their partnership drove the band's long improvisations for thirty years. When Garcia walked out of a second intervention in 1991, it was Lesh he invited home to explain he would get clean his own way. Lesh called him his oldest surviving friend and his brother.[1] [2] [3]

Mickey Hart and Lenny Hart. Lenny Hart, a champion rudimental drummer, abandoned his family when Mickey was a toddler. Mickey found his father's practice pad and sticks and started drumming, then reconciled with him in the sixties, and they opened a music store together. Lenny became the Dead's money manager and in 1970 disappeared with a large share of their funds. Mickey left the band in shame. When Lenny died in 1975, Mickey cleared the funeral home and played a drum piece on his coffin.[1] [2]

Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann. They met at a Count Basie show at the Fillmore in 1967, and within months were sharing the drum riser. Francis Ford Coppola nicknamed them the Rhythm Devils, and their drum duets were a feature of nearly every show from 1978 to 1995. Hart's decline in 1971 strained the friendship, Kreutzmann later wrote, but they reunited in the Rhythm Devils and later in Dead and Company.[1] [2]

Keith Godchaux and Donna Jean Godchaux. They married in 1970, and it was Donna who talked Garcia into hearing Keith play. They joined the Dead together, had a son, Zion, and released an album as Keith and Donna in 1975. By the late seventies both were drinking heavily and their fights were violent. They left the band together in 1979, and Keith died after a car crash the following year.[1] [2] [3]

Jerry Garcia and Carolyn Adams, Mountain Girl. The Merry Prankster Carolyn Adams moved in with Garcia in 1966 and raised her daughter by Ken Kesey with him, along with two daughters of their own. Garcia left her for Deborah Koons in 1975, and they separated for good over his drug use in 1978. They married in 1981, mostly for tax reasons, divorced in 1994, and she was kept away when his ashes were scattered.[1] [2]

Grateful Dead and Owsley Stanley. Owsley, the chemist known as Bear, bankrolled the young band in 1966, built its sound equipment, and started taping its shows. He co designed the lightning bolt skull logo with the artist Bob Thomas and led the design of the Wall of Sound. His prickly nature clashed with the road crew, and he stopped touring with the band in 1972, but his ashes sat on the soundboard at Fare Thee Well in 2015.[1] [2]

Ron McKernan, Pigpen and Janis Joplin. Pigpen and Janis Joplin were close friends who shared a love of the blues and a preference for alcohol over psychedelics. A poster from the era shows them together at 710 Ashbury. Joplin joined him on stage at the Fillmore West in June 1969 to sing his showpiece Turn On Your Love Light, and they repeated the duet in 1970.[1]

Bob Weir and John Mayer. Mayer got hooked on the Dead in 2011 after Pandora played him Althea. In 2015 he invited Weir to perform with him while guest hosting a late night television show, and that autumn they formed Dead and Company. Weir dreamed of the band carrying the songs on for decades. When Weir died in 2026, Mayer spoke at his memorial in San Francisco.[1] [2]

Grateful Dead and Bill Graham. The promoter Bill Graham booked the Dead at the Fillmore, Winterland and stadium shows for decades, and they were one of his favorite bands. He famously said they were not the best at what they did, they were the only ones who did what they did. The mystery extra eye on the cover of In the Dark belongs to him. After he died in 1991, the Dead played a free tribute concert for him in Golden Gate Park that drew an estimated three hundred thousand people.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Grateful Dead

• Jerry Garcia was named after the Broadway songwriter Jerome Kern. His father Jose was a retired professional musician and his mother played piano. They chose the name Jerome in honor of Kern, one of the great American songwriters.[1]
• Garcia lost most of his right middle finger at age four, when his brother accidentally hit it while chopping wood. It happened on a family holiday in the Santa Cruz Mountains in 1946. Garcia later admitted he used the missing finger to show off to other children in his neighborhood.[1]
• Garcia played pedal steel guitar on Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's Teach Your Children. He did it in exchange for harmony lessons for the Grateful Dead, who were then recording Workingman's Dead. Despite calling himself a novice on the instrument, he often ranked high in player polls.[1]
• Robert Hunter was paid to take LSD in Stanford experiments secretly funded by the CIA. Around 1962 he volunteered for drug studies later tied to the CIA's MKULTRA program, taking LSD, psilocybin and mescaline. He brought his typewriter along, and some of his visions later fed lyrics like China Cat Sunflower.[1] [2]
• As a teenager, Bill Kreutzmann was encouraged in his drumming by the novelist Aldous Huxley. Huxley walked in while Kreutzmann was practicing alone at his high school and told him he had never heard anything like it. Kreutzmann's sixth grade music teacher had told him he could not keep a beat.[1]
• Phil Lesh had never played a bass guitar when Garcia asked him to join the Warlocks. Lesh was a trumpeter and would be composer. He learned bass on the job, which meant he had no fixed ideas about its role, and he said his style owed more to Bach's counterpoint than to rock bassists.[1]
• Donna Jean Godchaux sang backup on both When a Man Loves a Woman and Suspicious Minds. After the Elvis session in Memphis in 1969, she and the other singers took a Polaroid with him, then went to a pancake house and screamed with excitement for about an hour.[1] [2]
• Pigpen's father was one of the first white disc jockeys on a Black rhythm and blues radio station. Phil McKernan's record collection shaped his son. Pigpen taught himself blues piano and harmonica and collected old blues seventy eights from labels like Chess.[1]
• In 1969 Warner Brothers ran a Pigpen look alike contest. Pigpen's biker image made him a minor celebrity in the band's early years. Behind the tough look, friends described him as quiet, kind and introspective.[1]
• Tom Constanten composed music on Air Force mainframe computers before joining the Dead. Stationed near Las Vegas as a computer programmer, he wrote music on machines like the IBM 1401. He joined the Dead full time the day after his discharge in November 1968.[1]
• Mickey Hart played a drum piece on his father's coffin at the funeral home. After Lenny Hart died in 1975, Mickey cleared the room, took out the snakewood sticks he had inherited, played The Downfall of Paris on the coffin, and left.[1]
• The embezzling manager Lenny Hart was caught while baptizing people as Reverend Lenny B. Hart. A private detective tracked him to San Diego, where he was arrested in July 1971. He was convicted of embezzlement and sentenced to six months in jail.[1]
• The lightning bolt skull logo was inspired by a roadside sign Owsley glimpsed in the rain. He saw a circle with a bar across it on a freeway sign and imagined it in red with a lightning bolt. He and the artist Bob Thomas designed it to mark the band's equipment.[1]
• The Wall of Sound's first outing at Stanford blew every tweeter during the first song. An early version was unveiled at Maples Pavilion in February 1973. The full system, weighing about seventy five tons, did not start touring until March 1974.[1]
• Live/Dead was among the first live rock albums recorded on a sixteen track machine. Owsley had engineer Ron Wickersham build a splitter that fed both the sound system and the recorder. The band hauled the machine up the steps of the Avalon and the Fillmore West.[1]
• Only about five hundred copies of the original Dark Star single sold. Warner Brothers shipped sixteen hundred copies in 1968, and Lesh said it sank like a stone. It is also the only Dead record featuring Robert Hunter as a performer, reciting a monologue.[1]
• The 1967 police raid on 710 Ashbury was followed by a press conference with a cream pie. Manager Danny Rifkin threatened to hit the first reporter who asked a stupid question with a pie. When one asked how long it took to grow his hair, a bowl of whipped cream appeared, but Rifkin spared him.[1]
• Touch of Grey reached the top forty seventeen years after the Dead's first Hot 100 entry. Their first Hot 100 hit was Uncle John's Band in 1970. When Touch of Grey climbed in 1987, it set a record at the time for the longest gap between a band's chart debut and its first top forty hit.[1]
• The extra eye on the In the Dark cover belongs to promoter Bill Graham. The lettering forms an eye filled with photos of the band members' eyes. The band joked the extra eye was the Ayatollah Khomeini's, but it was Graham's.[1]
• In the Dark was recorded in an empty, darkened theater with the band set up as if for a show. In January 1987 they played the songs live at Marin Veterans Memorial Auditorium in San Rafael with no audience, running the amplifiers in the basement, to capture their concert feel.[1]
• Kreutzmann played the Egypt shows in 1978 with a broken wrist in a cast. He had broken it horseback riding. The final night at the pyramids coincided with a total lunar eclipse, and the band played through a sound system borrowed from the Who.[1]
• The Dead helped fund Lithuania's basketball team at the 1992 Olympics. The newly independent country could not afford to send its team. The band paid about five thousand dollars in travel costs and supplied tie dye designs for the team's shirts. Lithuania won the bronze medal.[1]
• Cherry Garcia, launched by Ben and Jerry's in 1987, was the first ice cream flavor named after a musician. The Vermont ice cream maker dedicated the flavor to Jerry Garcia. It became one of the most famous tributes to him outside music.[1]
• An asteroid and a species of wood roach are both named after Jerry Garcia. Astronomers named an asteroid between Mars and Jupiter for him in November 1995, soon after his death. In 1998 scientists named a newly discovered wood roach Cryptocercus garciai.[1]
• Garcia skipped the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, so the band brought a cardboard cutout of him. The Dead were inducted in 1994, presented by Bruce Hornsby. Garcia declined to attend, and his bandmates jokingly stood a life size cutout of him on stage.[1]
• Robert Hunter is the only non performer ever inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a band member. He went in with the Grateful Dead in 1994. The band's other lyricist, John Perry Barlow, was never inducted.[1] [2]
• Mickey Hart's album Planet Drum won the first ever Grammy for Best World Music Album. Released in 1991, it spent twenty six weeks at number one on Billboard's world music chart. Hart has also worked to preserve endangered musical traditions with the Library of Congress.[1]
• Mickey Hart recorded his unborn son's heartbeat and built an album around it. He captured the heartbeat of his son Taro in the womb and used it as the basis for the album Music to Be Born By, released in 1989.[1]
• The Dead played to about six hundred thousand people at Watkins Glen in 1973. The Summer Jam with the Allman Brothers Band and the Band sold around one hundred and fifty thousand tickets. Everyone else got in free, and it held the Guinness record for the largest pop festival audience.[1]
• The 1977 Cornell show cost seven dollars fifty to attend and is now in the Library of Congress registry. Barton Hall on the eighth of May 1977 was added to the National Recording Registry in 2011 as culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.[1] [2]
• Brent Mydland's old Hammond organ, once covered in stickers, is still played by Jeff Chimenti. The B3 Mydland used for most of his time with the Dead was on stage at the Fare Thee Well concerts in 2015, and Chimenti plays it in live performance.[1]
• Vince Welnick named his publishing company Yo Vinnie Music after fans' welcome banners. At his nervous first show in September 1990, fans held up signs reading Yo Vinnie, which put him at ease. He later used the phrase for his own publishing company.[1]
• Dick Latvala, who started the Dick's Picks series, had worked as a zookeeper in Hawaii. In Hilo he traded Dead tapes by mail, sometimes swapping marijuana for recordings. Later, working at the band's office, he persuaded them to preserve their tape vault.[1]
• Phil Lesh asked every audience to become organ donors after his 1998 liver transplant. His new liver came from a young man named Cody, who had told his mother he wanted to be a donor. Lesh's nightly appeal became known to fans as the Rap.[1]
• The first Fare Thee Well show in Chicago drew seventy thousand seven hundred and sixty four fans, a Soldier Field record. Fans mailed more than sixty thousand envelopes requesting over three hundred and sixty thousand tickets, and the pay per view broke a music event record with more than four hundred thousand subscriptions.[1]
• In 2004 Bob Weir won a prize for the most accurate celebrity Super Bowl prediction. He picked New England to beat Carolina thirty three to twenty four. The real score was thirty two to twenty nine, the closest guess of one hundred and forty eight celebrities polled.[1]
• Garcia married Mountain Girl on the last day of 1981, largely for tax reasons. By then they no longer lived together. She stayed in Oregon while Garcia lived near the band's offices in San Rafael, and they divorced in 1994.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.