The Grateful Dead was an American rock band formed in 1965 in Palo Alto, California. The band is known for its eclectic style, which fused elements of rock, folk, country, jazz, bluegrass, blues, gospel, and psychedelic rock; for live performances of lengthy instrumental jams; and for its devoted fan base, known as “Deadheads.” “Their music,” writes Lenny Kaye, “touches on ground that most other groups don’t even know exists.” These various influences were distilled into a diverse and psychedelic whole that made the Grateful Dead “the pioneering Godfathers of the jam band world”. The band was ranked 57th by Rolling Stone magazine in its The Greatest Artists of All Time issue. The band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994 and a recording of their May 8, 1977 performance at Cornell University’s Barton Hall was added to the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress in 2012. The Grateful Dead have sold more than 35 million albums worldwide.
The Grateful Dead was founded in the San Francisco Bay Area amid the rise of the counterculture of the 1960s. The founding members were Jerry Garcia (lead guitar, vocals), Bob Weir (rhythm guitar, vocals), Ron “Pigpen” McKernan (keyboards, harmonica, vocals), Phil Lesh (bass, vocals), and Bill Kreutzmann (drums). Members of the Grateful Dead had played together in various San Francisco bands, including Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions and the Warlocks. Lesh was the last member to join the Warlocks before they became the Grateful Dead; he replaced Dana Morgan Jr., who had played bass for a few gigs. Drummer Mickey Hart and non-performing lyricist Robert Hunter joined in 1967. With the exception of McKernan, who died in 1973, and Hart, who took time off from 1971 to 1974, the core of the band stayed together for its entire 30-year history. The other official members of the band are Tom Constanten (keyboards; 1968–1970), John Perry Barlow (nonperforming lyricist; 1971–1995), Keith Godchaux (keyboards; 1971–1979), Donna Godchaux (vocals; 1972–1979), Brent Mydland (keyboards, vocals; 1979–1990), and Vince Welnick (keyboards, vocals; 1990–1995). Bruce Hornsby (accordion, piano, vocals) was a touring member from 1990 to 1992, as well as a guest with the band on occasion before and after the tours.
After the death of Garcia in 1995, former members of the band, along with other musicians, toured as the Other Ones in 1998, 2000, and 2002, and the Dead in 2003, 2004, and 2009. In 2015, the four surviving core members marked the band’s 50th anniversary in a series of concerts that were billed as their last performances together. There have also been several spin-offs featuring one or more core members, such as Dead & Company, Furthur, the Rhythm Devils, Phil Lesh and Friends, RatDog, and Billy & the Kids.
Deadheads
Fans and enthusiasts of the band are commonly referred to as Deadheads. While the origin of the term may be unclear, Dead Heads were made canon by the notice placed inside the Skull and Roses (1971) album by manager Jon McIntire:
Many of the Dead Heads would go on tour with the band. As a group, the Dead Heads were considered very mellow. “I’d rather work nine Grateful Dead concerts than one Oregon football game,” Police Det. Rick Raynor said. “They don’t get belligerent like they do at the games.”
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The Grateful Dead formed during the era when bands such as the Beatles, the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones were dominating the airwaves. “The Beatles were why we turned from a jug band into a rock ‘n’ roll band”, said Bob Weir. “What we saw them doing was impossibly attractive. I couldn’t think of anything else more worth doing.” Former folk-scene star Bob Dylan had recently put out a couple of records featuring electric instrumentation. Grateful Dead members have said that it was after attending a concert by the touring New York City band the Lovin’ Spoonful that they decided to “go electric” and look for a dirtier sound. Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir (each of whom had been immersed in the American folk music revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s), were open-minded to electric guitars.
The Grateful Dead’s early music (in the mid-1960s) was part of the process of establishing what “psychedelic music” was, but theirs was essentially a “street party” form of it. They developed their “psychedelic” playing as a result of meeting Ken Kesey in Palo Alto, California, and subsequently becoming the house band for the Acid Tests he staged. They did not fit their music to an established category such as pop rock, blues, folk rock, or country & western. Individual tunes within their repertoire could be identified under one of these stylistic labels, but overall their music drew on all of these genres and, more frequently, melded several of them. Bill Graham said of the Grateful Dead, “They’re not the best at what they do, they’re the only ones that do what they do.” Often (both in performance and on recording) the Dead left room for exploratory, spacey soundscapes.
Their live shows, fed by an improvisational approach to music, were different from most touring bands. While rock and roll bands often rehearse a standard set, played with minor variations, the Grateful Dead did not prepare in this way. Garcia stated in a 1966 interview, “We don’t make up our sets beforehand. We’d rather work off the tops of our heads than off a piece of paper.” They maintained this approach throughout their career. For each performance, the band drew material from an active list of a hundred or so songs.
The 1969 live album Live/Dead did capture the band in-form, but commercial success did not come until Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, both released in 1970. These records largely featured the band’s laid-back acoustic musicianship and more traditional song structures. With their rootsy, eclectic stylings, particularly evident on the latter two albums, the band pioneered the hybrid Americana genre.
As the band and its sound matured over thirty years of touring, playing, and recording, each member’s stylistic contribution became more defined, consistent, and identifiable. Lesh, who was originally a classically trained trumpet player with an extensive background in music theory, did not tend to play traditional blues-based bass forms, but more melodic, symphonic and complex lines, often sounding like a second lead guitar. Weir, too, was not a traditional rhythm guitarist, but tended to play jazz-influenced, unique inversions at the upper end of the Dead’s sound. The two drummers, Mickey Hart and Kreutzmann, developed a unique, complex interplay, balancing Kreutzmann’s steady beat with Hart’s interest in percussion styles outside the rock tradition. Hart incorporated an 11-count measure to his drumming, bringing a dimension to the band’s sound that became an important part of its style. Garcia’s lead lines were fluid, supple and spare, owing a great deal of their character to his training in fingerpicking and banjo.
The band’s primary lyricists, Robert Hunter and John Perry Barlow, commonly used themes involving love and loss, life and death, gambling and murder, beauty and horror, chaos and order, God and other religious themes, travelling and touring. In a retrospective, The New Yorker described Hunter’s verses as “elliptical, by turns vivid and gnomic”, which were often “hippie poetry about roses and bells and dew”, and critic Robert Christgau described them as “American myths” that later gave way to “the old karma-go-round”.
Tracklist
A1 New Minglewood Blues
A2 Loser
A3 El Paso
A4 They Love Each Other
B1 Jack Straw
B2 Deal
B3 Lazy Lightning
B4 Supplication
C1 Brown Eyed Women
C2 Mama Tried
C3 Row Jimmy
D1 Dancin’ In The Streets
The Dead’s May 8, 1977 show at Cornell University’s Barton Hall (LP 1 of 2)
List of Grateful Dead members
Lead guitarist Jerry Garcia was often viewed both by the public and the media as the leader or primary spokesperson for the Grateful Dead, but was reluctant to be perceived that way, especially since he and the other group members saw themselves as equal participants and contributors to their collective musical and creative output. Garcia, a native of San Francisco, grew up in the Excelsior District. One of his main influences was bluegrass music, and he also performed—on banjo, one of his other great instrumental loves, along with the pedal steel guitar—in bluegrass bands, notably Old & In the Way with mandolinist David Grisman.
Bruce Hornsby never officially joined the band full-time because of his other commitments, but he did play keyboards at most Dead shows between September 1990 and March 1992, and sat in with the band over 100 times in all between 1988 and 1995. He added several Dead songs to his own live shows and Jerry Garcia referred to him as a “floating member” who could come and go as he pleased.
Robert Hunter and John Perry Barlow were the band’s primary lyricists, starting in 1967 and 1971, respectively, and continuing until the band’s dissolution. Hunter collaborated mostly with Garcia and Barlow mostly with Weir, though each wrote with other band members as well. Both are listed as official members at Dead.net, the band’s website, alongside the performing members. Barlow was the only member not inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Grateful Dead discography
The Grateful Dead (1967)
Anthem of the Sun (1968)
Aoxomoxoa (1969)
Live/Dead (1969)
Workingman’s Dead (1970)
American Beauty (1970)
Grateful Dead (Skull & Roses) (1971)
Europe ’72 (1972)
History of the Grateful Dead, Volume One (Bear’s Choice) (1973)
Wake of the Flood (1973)
From the Mars Hotel (1974)
Blues for Allah (1975)
Steal Your Face (1976)
Terrapin Station (1977)
Shakedown Street (1978)
Go to Heaven (1980)
Reckoning (1981)
Dead Set (1981)
In the Dark (1987)
Dylan & the Dead (1989)
Built to Last (1989)
Without a Net (1990)
Associated acts
The Other Ones
The DeadFurthur
Dead & Company
New Riders of the Purple Sage
The Tubes
Ned Lagin
Kingfish
Old & In the Way
Legion of Mary
Jerry Garcia Band
Reconstruction
Bobby and the Midnites
Heart of Gold Band
Go Ahead
Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band
RatDog
Missing Man Formation
Phil Lesh and Friends
Rhythm Devils
Donna Jean Godchaux Band
BK3
Backbone
7 Walkers
Billy & the Kids
Bob Dylan
Bruce Hornsby
Jerry Garcia / David Grisman
Jerome John Garcia (August 1, 1942 – August 9, 1995) was an American singer-songwriter and guitarist, best known for being a principal songwriter, the lead guitarist and a vocalist with the rock band the Grateful Dead, of which he was a founding member and which came to prominence during the counterculture of the 1960s. Although he disavowed the role, Garcia was viewed by many as the leader or “spokesman” of the group.
As one of its founders, Garcia performed with the Grateful Dead for their entire 30-year career (1965–1995). Garcia also founded and participated in a variety of side projects, including the Saunders–Garcia Band (with longtime friend Merl Saunders), the Jerry Garcia Band, Old & In the Way, the Garcia/Grisman acoustic duo, Legion of Mary, and New Riders of the Purple Sage (which Garcia co-founded with John Dawson and David Nelson). He also released several solo albums, and contributed to a number of albums by other artists over the years as a session musician. He was well known for his distinctive guitar playing, and was ranked 13th in Rolling Stone’s “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time” cover story in 2003. In the 2015 version of the list he was ranked at #46.
Garcia was also renowned for his musical and technical ability, particularly his ability to play a variety of instruments, and his ability to sustain long improvisations with the Grateful Dead. Garcia believed that improvisation took stress away from his playing and allowed him to make spur of the moment decisions that he would not have made intentionally. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Garcia noted that “my own preferences are for improvisation, for making it up as I go along. The idea of picking, of eliminating possibilities by deciding, that’s difficult for me”.
Later in life, Garcia struggled with diabetes, and in 1986 went into a diabetic coma that nearly cost him his life. Although his overall health improved somewhat after that, he continued to struggle with obesity, smoking, and longstanding heroin and cocaine addictions. He was staying in a California drug rehabilitation facility when he died of a heart attack on August 9, 1995 at the age of 53.
Legacy
Garcia was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Grateful Dead in 1994. He declined to attend the ceremony; the band jokingly brought a cardboard cutout of Garcia out on stage in his absence.
In 1987, Vermont ice cream maker Ben & Jerry’s introduced their Cherry Garcia flavor dedicated to him. It was the first ice cream flavor dedicated to a musician.
In 2003, Rolling Stone ranked Jerry Garcia 13th in their list of the “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time”.
According to fellow Bay Area guitar player Henry Kaiser, Garcia is “the most recorded guitarist in history. With more than 2,200 Grateful Dead concerts, and 1,000 Jerry Garcia Band concerts captured on tape – as well as numerous studio sessions – there are about 15,000 hours of his guitar work preserved for the ages.”
On July 30, 2004, Melvin Seals was the first Jerry Garcia Band (JGB) member to headline an outdoor music and camping festival called “The Grateful Garcia Gathering”. Jerry Garcia Band drummer David Kemper joined Melvin Seals and JGB in 2007. Other musicians and friends of Garcia include Donna Jean Godchaux, Mookie Siegel, Pete Sears, G.E. Smith, Chuck Hammer, Barry Sless, Jackie Greene, Brian Lesh, Sanjay Mishra, and Mark Karan.
On July 21, 2005, the San Francisco Recreation and Park Commission passed a resolution to name the amphitheater in McLaren Park “The Jerry Garcia Amphitheater.” The amphitheater is located in the Excelsior District, where Garcia grew up. The first show to happen at the Jerry Garcia Amphitheater was Jerry Day 2005 on August 7, 2005. Jerry’s brother, Tiff Garcia, was the first person to welcome everybody to the “Jerry Garcia Amphitheater.” Jerry Day is an annual celebration of Garcia in his childhood neighborhood. The dedication ceremony (Jerry Day 2) on October 29, 2005 was officiated by mayor Gavin Newsom.
On September 24, 2005, the Comes a Time: A Celebration of the Music & Spirit of Jerry Garcia tribute concert was held at the Hearst Greek Theatre in Berkeley, California. The concert featured Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart, Bruce Hornsby, Trey Anastasio, Warren Haynes, Jimmy Herring, Michael Kang, Jay Lane, Jeff Chimenti, Mark Karan, Robin Sylvester, Kenny Brooks, Melvin Seals, Merl Saunders, Marty Holland, Stu Allen, Gloria Jones, and Jackie LaBranch.
Georgia-based composer Lee Johnson released an orchestral tribute to the music of the Grateful Dead, recorded with the Russian National Orchestra, entitled “Dead Symphony: Lee Johnson Symphony No. 6.” Johnson was interviewed on NPR on the July 26, 2008 broadcast of Weekend Edition, and gave much credit to the genius and craft of Garcia’s songwriting. A live performance with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Johnson himself, was held Friday, August 1.
In 2010 the Santa Barbara Bowl in California opened Jerry Garcia Glen along the walk up to the venue. There is a statue of Garcia’s right hand along the way.
Seattle rock band Soundgarden wrote and recorded the instrumental song “Jerry Garcia’s Finger”, dedicated to the singer, which was released as a b-side with their single “Pretty Noose”.
Numerous music festivals across the United States and Uxbridge, Middlesex, UK hold annual events in memory of Jerry Garcia.
On May 14, 2015 an all-star lineup held a tribute concert for Garcia at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland. The event was called “Dear Jerry”.
In 2015, Hunter and Garcia were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.Hunter accepted the award along with Garcia’s daughter, Trixie Garcia, accepting on behalf of her father.
In 2015, Jerry Garcia’s wife, Manasha Garcia and their daughter, Keelin Garcia launched The Jerry Garcia Foundation, a nonprofit charity that supports projects for artistic, environmental, and humanitarian causes. The Foundation’s Board members are Bob Weir, Peter Shapiro, Glenn Fischer, Irwin Sternberg, Daniel Shiner, TRI Studios CEO, Christopher McCutcheon and Fender Music Foundation Executive Director, Lynn Robison. Keelin Garcia said, “It is a tremendous honor to participate in nonprofit work that is in accordance with my father’s values.”
In 2018, Jerry Garcia family members, Keelin Garcia and Manasha Garcia launched the Jerry Garcia Music Arts independent music label.
Jerry Garcia discography
New Riders of the Purple Sage – New Riders of the Purple Sage – 1971
Hooteroll? – Howard Wales and Jerry Garcia – 1971
Garcia – Jerry Garcia – 1972
Live at Keystone – Merl Saunders, Jerry Garcia, John Kahn, Bill Vitt – 1973
Compliments – Jerry Garcia – 1974
Old & In the Way – Old & In the Way – 1975
Reflections – Jerry Garcia – 1976
Cats Under the Stars – Jerry Garcia Band – 1978
Run for the Roses – Jerry Garcia – 1982
Vintage NRPS – New Riders of the Purple Sage – 1986
Keystone Encores – Merl Saunders, Jerry Garcia, John Kahn, Bill Vitt – 1988
Almost Acoustic – Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band – 1988
Jerry Garcia / David Grisman – Jerry Garcia and David Grisman – 1991
Jerry Garcia Band – Jerry Garcia Band – 1991
Not for Kids Only – Jerry Garcia and David Grisman – 1993
Associated acts:
Grateful Dead
Legion of Mary
Reconstruction
Jerry Garcia Band
Old & In the Way
Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band
New Riders of the Purple Sage
Hart Valley Drifters
Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions
Merl Saunders
Garcia & Grisman
Rainforest Band
Muruga Booker
