Grateful Dead

Grateful Dead
Background information
Also known as	The Warlocks
Origin	San Francisco, California, USA
Genre(s)	Rock
Years active	1965–1995
Label(s)	Warner Bros., Grateful Dead, Arista, Rhino
Website	www.dead.net
Former members
Jerry Garcia Bob Weir Phil Lesh Bill Kreutzmann Ron "Pigpen" McKernan Mickey Hart Tom Constanten Keith Godchaux Donna Jean Godchaux Brent Mydland Vince Welnick

The Grateful Dead were an American rock band formed in 1965 in the San Francisco Bay Area. The band was known for its unique and eclectic style, which fused elements of rock, folk, bluegrass, blues, reggae, country, jazz, Psychedelic rock, and gospel—and for live performances of long musical improvisation.

The fans of the Grateful Dead, some of whom followed the band from concert to concert for years, were known as "Deadheads" and were renowned for their dedication to the band's music. Many fans referred to the band simply as "the Dead." As of 2003, the remaining band members who had been touring under the name "The Other Ones" changed their official group name to "The Dead". Deadheads continue to use that nickname to refer to all versions of the band.

The Grateful Dead's musical influences varied widely. In concert recordings or on record albums one can hear psychedelic rock, blues, rock and roll, country-western, bluegrass, country-rock, and jazz (shown in the kind of long improvisatory sequences that jazz artists such as Charles Mingus and John Coltrane perfected in the 1950s and 1960s). These various influences were distilled into a diverse and psychedelic whole that made the Grateful Dead "the pioneering Godfathers of the jam band world."

History

Formation

The Grateful Dead began their career in Menlo Park, California, playing live shows at Kepler's Books.

They began as The Warlocks, a group formed in early 1964 from the remnants of a Palo Alto jug band called Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions. But as another band was already recording under the "Warlocks" name, the band had to change its name. The Warlocks were originally managed by Hank Harrison, but Harrison went back to graduate school. After meeting their new manager Rock Scully, they moved to the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco. Bands from this area became known for the San Francisco Sound; groups such as Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big Brother & the Holding Company, and Santana went on to national fame, giving San Francisco an image as a center for the hippie counterculture of the era.

The founding members of the Grateful Dead were: banjo and guitar player Jerry Garcia, guitarist Bob Weir, bluesman organist Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, the classically trained Phil Lesh and jazzist drummer Bill Kreutzmann. The Grateful Dead most embodied "all the elements of the San Francisco scene and came, therefore, to represent the counterculture to the rest of the country".

The name Grateful Dead was chosen from a dictionary. According to Phil Lesh, in his biography (pp. 62), "...Jer[ry Garcia] picked up an old Britannica World Language Dictionary...[and]...In that silvery elf-voice he said to me, 'Hey, man, how about the Grateful Dead?'" The definition there was "the soul of a dead person, or his angel, showing gratitude to someone who, as an act of charity, arranged their burial." According to Alan Trist, director of the Grateful Dead's music publisher company Ice Nine, Garcia found the name in the Funk & Wagnalls Folklore Dictionary, when his finger landed on that phrase while playing a game of "dictionary". In the Garcia biography, Captain Trips, author Sandy Troy states that the band was smoking the psychedelic DMT at the time. The term "Grateful Dead" appears in folktales of a variety of cultures.

A new type of sound

The Grateful Dead in concert

The Grateful Dead formed during the era when bands like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were dominating the airwaves. 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 "folk-rock" band The Lovin' Spoonful that they decided to "go electric" and look for a dirtier sound. Gradually, many of the East-Coast American folk musicians, formerly luminaries of the coffee-house scene, were moving in the electric direction. It was natural for Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir, each of whom had been immersed in the American folk music revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s, to be open-minded toward electric guitars.

But the new Dead music was also naturally different from bands like Dylan's or the Spoonful, partly because their fellow musician Phil Lesh came out of a schooled classical and electronic music background, while Pigpen was a no-nonsense deep blues lover and drummer Bill Kreutzmann had a jazz and R&B background. For comparison purposes, their first LP (The Grateful Dead, Warner Brothers, 1967), was released in the same year that Pink Floyd released Piper at the Gates of Dawn and the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

A long, strange trip

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 out of meeting Ken Kesey in Palo Alto, California and subsequently becoming the house band to the Acid Tests he staged. After relocating to the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco, their "street party" form developed out of the many psychedelic dances, open-air park events, and closed-street Haight-Ashbury block parties at which they played. The Dead were not inclined to 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 melding several of them. Often (both in performance and on recording) the Dead left room for exploratory, spacey soundscapes.

The early records reflected the Dead's live repertoire—lengthy instrumental jams with group improvisation, best exemplified by "Dark Star"—but, lacking the energy of the shows, did not sell well. The 1969 live album Live/Dead did capture more of their essence, 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.

Deadheads await the start of a 1987 at the Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado.

As the band, and its sound, matured over 30 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 opted for 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 new dimension to the band's sound that became an important part of its emerging style. Garcia's lead lines were fluid, supple and spare, owing a great deal of their character to his training in fingerpicking and banjo.

For the band's primary lyricists, Robert Hunter and John Perry Barlow, common themes in their work include those of love and loss, life and death, gambling and murder, beauty and horror, chaos and order, God and other religious themes, travelling and touring, etc. Less frequent ideas include the environment and other issues from the world of politics.

Jerry Garcia: de-facto leader

Jerry Garcia

Although he intensely disliked the appellation, Jerry Garcia was the band's de-facto musical leader and the source of its identity. Garcia was a charismatic, complex figure, simultaneously writing and playing music of enormous emotional resonance and insight while leading a personal life that often consisted of various forms of self-destructive excess, including well-known drug addictions, obesity, tremendous financial recklessness, and three complex, volatile, often unhappy marriages. What is less well known about Garcia was the fact that he suffered for most of his life from a condition called sleep apnea. His sleep apnea was apparently diagnosed before he died, but it is unlikely that he ever took any steps to treat it.

Touring

The Grateful Dead are well-known for constantly touring throughout their long career, playing more than 2300 live concerts. They promoted a sense of community among their fans, who became known as Deadheads, many of whom followed their tours for months or years on end. In their early career, the band also dedicated their time and talents to their community, the Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco, making available free food, lodging, music, and health care to all comers; they were the "first among equals in giving unselfishly of themselves to hippie culture, performing more free concerts than any band in the history of music.

With the exception of 1975, when the band was on hiatus and played only four concerts together, the Grateful Dead performed many concerts every year, from their formation in April, 1965, until July 9, 1995. Initially all their shows were in California, principally in the San Francisco Bay Area and in or near Los Angeles. They also performed, in 1965 and 1966, with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, as the house band for the Acid Tests. They toured nationally starting in June 1967 (their first foray to New York), with a few detours to Canada, Europe, and three nights at the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt in 1978. They appeared at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, and at the Woodstock Festival in 1969. Their first UK performance was at the Hollywood Music Festival in 1970. Their largest concert audience came in 1973 when they played, along with The Allman Brothers Band and The Band, before an estimated 600,000 people at the Summer Jam at Watkins Glen. Many of these concerts were preserved in the band's tape vault, and several dozen have since been released on CD and as downloads.

Deadheads

Fans and enthusiasts of the band are commonly referred to as Dead Heads. While the origin of the term may be shrouded in haze, Dead Heads was made canon by the legendary notice placed inside the Skull and Roses album by their manager Jon McIntire:

"DEAD FREAKS UNITE

Who are you?      Where are you?
How are you?
send us your name and address
and we'll keep you informed
Dead Heads

PO Box..."

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".

Dissolution and continuation of the band

Following Garcia's death in August 1995, the remaining members formally decided to disband. The main focus of the members was to pursue various solo projects, most notably Bob Weir's Ratdog, Phil Lesh and Friends, and various projects by Mickey Hart, including music for the 1996 Olympics.

In June 1996 Bob Weir (with Ratdog) and Mickey Hart (with Mickey Hart's Mystery Box), along with Bruce Hornsby and his band, joined five other bands and toured as the Furthur Festival. In 1998's Furthur Festival, Weir, Hart, and Bruce Hornsby were joined by Phil Lesh to form a new band called The Other Ones. The Strange Remain is a live recording of The Other Ones during the 1998 Furthur Festival. The lineup of The Other Ones would shift, notably involving the addition of Bill Kreutzmann, the departure, then return, of Lesh, and the departure of Bruce Hornsby to pursue his solo work; however, the band settled on a steady lineup by 2002.

The tour of The Other Ones in 2002 began with two huge shows at celebrated Alpine Valley and continued with a late October return to Shoreline Amphitheatre and an ensuing full Autumn and Winter tour culminating in a New Years Eve show in Oakland where the band played Dark Star among other fan favorites. The members would continue to tour on and off through the end of their 2004 Summer Tour - the "Wave That Flag" tour, named after the original 1973 uptempo version of the song "U.S. Blues." The band accepted Jeff Chimenti on keyboards, Jimmy Herring on guitar, and Warren Haynes on guitar and vocals as part of the band for the tour.

Members of the Dead still actively tour with their own bands—Bob Weir and Ratdog, Phil Lesh and Friends, the Mickey Hart Band, and Donna Jean and the Tricksters. Bill Kreutzmann toured the eastern U.S. in 2008 with Oteil Burbridge and Scott Murawski, and Tom Constanten often sits in with various bands.

On February 4, 2008, Mickey Hart, Phil Lesh, and Bob Weir, joined by Jackie Greene, John Molo, and Steve Molitz, performed a show entitled "Deadheads for Obama" at the Warfield in San Francisco, in support of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. Reportedly, the remaining members of the band will again reunite in October 2008 in support of the Barack Obama presidential campaign. Warren Haynes is again expected to provide guitar and vocal support for the reunion.

Legacy

Throughout their 30 years, the Grateful Dead spent their career at the edge of the "official music industry" creating a business model that was antithetical to the model of creating a polished album and then touring to support its sales. The model they evolved was based primarily on touring. Their tours included playing multi-night runs at large arenas and stadiums from year to year. Their shows, usually longer than two hours, rarely featured the same song twice in succeeding nights and never played the songs in exactly the same way.

These unique qualities made the Grateful Dead the most viewed rock band during their 30-year run. It spawned a faithful following of Deadheads that came from all parts of society, many of whom went on to become influential artists themselves. They condoned the live taping of their shows which virally spread their music and added to the number of Deadheads. They proved that a touring rock band could be successful and self-sustaining outside of the standard music industry business model.

Their dissolution left a void which was filled by a variety of jam bands as their fan base sought out other alternatives, causing the 1990s jam-bands boom.

In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked the Grateful Dead #55 on their list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. On February 10, 2007, the Grateful Dead received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. The award was accepted on behalf of the band by Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann.

Discography

Main studio and contemporary live recordings

The Grateful Dead, Grateful Dead, 1967 Anthem Of The Sun, Grateful Dead, 1968 Aoxomoxoa, Grateful Dead, 1969 Live/Dead, Grateful Dead, 1969 Workingman's Dead, Grateful Dead, 1970 American Beauty, Grateful Dead, 1970 Grateful Dead (Skull & Roses), Grateful Dead, 1971 Europe '72, Grateful Dead, 1972 History Of The Grateful Dead, Vol. 1 (Bear's Choice), Grateful Dead, 1973 Wake Of The Flood, Grateful Dead, 1973 Grateful Dead From The Mars Hotel, Grateful Dead, 1974 Blues For Allah, Grateful Dead, 1975 Steal Your Face, Grateful Dead, 1976 Terrapin Station, Grateful Dead, 1977 Shakedown Street, Grateful Dead, 1978 Go To Heaven, Grateful Dead, 1980 Reckoning, Grateful Dead, 1981 Dead Set, Grateful Dead, 1981 In The Dark, Grateful Dead, 1987 Dylan And The Dead, Bob Dylan / Grateful Dead, 1988 Built To Last, Grateful Dead, 1989 Without A Net, Grateful Dead, 1990 Infrared Roses, Grateful Dead, 1991 So Many Roads (1965-1995), Grateful Dead, 1999 The Golden Road (1965-1973), Grateful Dead, 2001 Postcards Of The Hanging, Grateful Dead, 2002 Birth Of The Dead, Grateful Dead, 2003 Beyond Description, Grateful Dead, 2004 Rare Cuts and Oddities 1966, Grateful Dead, 2005

Singles

Stealin' / Don't Ease Me In, Grateful Dead, 1966 The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion) / Cream Puff War, Grateful Dead, 1967 Dark Star / Born Cross-Eyed, Grateful Dead, 1968 Dupree's Diamond Blues / Cosmic Charlie, Grateful Dead, 1969 Uncle John's Band / New Speedway Boogie, Grateful Dead, 1970 Truckin' / Ripple, Grateful Dead, 1971 Johnny B. Goode / So Fine, Grateful Dead / Elvin Bishop Group, 1972 Johnny B. Goode / Truckin', Grateful Dead, 1972 Sugar Magnolia / Mr. Charlie, Grateful Dead, 1972 Let Me Sing Your Blues Away / Here Comes Sunshine, Grateful Dead, 1973 Eyes Of The World / Weather Report Suite Part 1, Grateful Dead, 1973 Truckin' / Sugar Magnolia, Grateful Dead, 1974? U. S. Blues / Loose Lucy, Grateful Dead, 1974 The Music Never Stopped / Help On The Way, Grateful Dead, 1975 Franklin's Tower / Help On The Way, Grateful Dead, 1976 Dancing In The Streets / Terrapin Station, Grateful Dead, 1977 Passenger / Terrapin Station, Grateful Dead, 1977 Good Lovin' / Stagger Lee, Grateful Dead, 1978 Shakedown Street / France, Grateful Dead, 1979 Alabama Getaway / Far From Me, Grateful Dead, 1980 Don't Ease me In / Far From Me, Grateful Dead, 1980 Alabama Getaway / Shakedown Street, Grateful Dead, 1981 Touch Of Grey / My Brother Esau, Grateful Dead, 1987 Throwing Stones / When Push Comes To Shove, Grateful Dead, 1988 Alabama Getaway / Shakedown Street / Throwing Stones, Grateful Dead, 1988 Touch Of Grey / Throwing Stones, Grateful Dead, 1988 Foolish Heart / We Can Run, Grateful Dead, 1989

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Blakesberg, Jay, and Jackson, Blair. Between the Dark and Light: The Grateful Dead. San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 2002. ISBN 978-0879307233
• Dodd, David G., and Spaulding, Diana. The Grateful Dead Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. ISBN 978-0195124705
• Gans, David, and Simon, Peter. Playing in the Band: An Oral and Visual Portrait of the Grateful Dead. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985. ISBN 978-0312616304

External links

• Official Grateful Dead Home Page
• Biography at All Music Guide
• Official Grateful Dead Sirius Channel

Credits

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