The Grateful Dead

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture by Josephine A. McQuail

The Grateful Dead, with its notorious founding member Jerry Garcia, was a band that epitomized the psychedelic era of American rock 'n' roll music from the 1960s to the 1990s. Even after Garcia's death in 1995, members of the band continued to tour, in part to satisfy the yearnings of the most dedicated group of fans ever to bind themselves to a musical group, the so-called Dead Heads.

Garcia and friends Bob Weir, Ron "Pigpen" McKernan , Bill Kreutzmann, and Phil Lesh formed the band in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1965 after various incarnations as a blues and bluegrass influenced jug band (Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions) and a blues/rock ensemble (The Warlocks). The various members, especially keyboard players, who were to come and go, included Tom Constanten, Donna and Keith Godchaux, Brent Mydland, Bruce Hornsby, and Vince Welnick. Mickey Hart joined the band shortly after its inception, complementing Kreutzmann as a second drummer, left for a while after his father ripped off the band, and later rejoined them. Pigpen died and the band kept on playing, but with the death of Jerry Garcia the remaining members finally disbanded. They kept playing in their various individual bands, however, and in a combined band called The Other Ones, which approximated the Grateful Dead and continued the Dead's summer tour tradition.

According to Garcia, he found the name "Grateful Dead" by randomly opening a book and coming upon a dictionary entry describing the legend of those who, returned from the dead, reward a living person who had unwittingly aided them. The folk derivation of the name was fitting, since it summed up the roots of the founding members in the bluegrass, blues, and folk music that was performed in the early 1960s by artists such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. The Dead continued to play folk classics like "Peggy-O," "Jack-a-Roe," and "Staggerlee" until the end. The grounding of the Grateful Dead in the American folk tradition contradicts its image as a corrupt purveyor of hallucinatory drugs, but their roots can also be traced to free-spirited Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and Beat figures like Neal Cassady. Jerry Garcia acknowledged this very explicitly in a 1991 interview with Rolling Stone: "I owe a lot of who I am and what I've been and what I've done to the beatniks of the Fifties and to the poetry and art and music that I've come into contact with. I feel like I'm part of a continuous line of a certain thing in American culture...." Like the Beats, the hippies and their house band the Grateful Dead continued the rebellion against the conformist 1950s and the middle class culture that had by and large given birth to them.

Some of the Grateful Dead's first concerts were known as the Acid Tests of the San Francisco Bay area where psychedelic music, visuals, and hippies all came together as harbingers of the raves of the 1990s and the Dead's concerts between the 1970s and the 1990s. They spawned bands like Phish, which recreated the Dead's spontaneity in improvisation, and in its nomadic fans and epic tours that extended across America and sometimes Europe.

The Grateful Dead cult started after a call to fans, "Dead Freaks Unite--Who Are You? Where Are You?" was published in the 1971 album Grateful Dead (also known as Skull and Roses). The Dead fans who answered received concert updates and news that would eventually result in the band's formation of Grateful Dead Ticket Sales, which successfully bypassed music company and corporate control by selling up to half the tickets to concert venues by mail. From 1973 to 1976 the band also had its own recording company, Round Records/Grateful Dead Records. However, this collective thumbing of noses at the recording industry came at a price, costing them the respect of critics who saw the band as an aberration and a throwback.

There was another downside to the burgeoning Grateful Dead industry. In his last few years Garcia occasionally wearily commented on the fact that a whole group of people--not just the traveling circus of Dead Heads and unauthorized vendors, but the Grateful Dead ticketing and merchandising industry controlled by the band--were dependent on the Dead. Ironically, as the Dead found more popular success after issuing In the Dark (1987), problems abounded with unruly fans who crashed the concert gates and participated in uncontrolled vending, sometimes even of controlled substances.

The Grateful Dead's cult following was almost religious in its intensity. Dead Heads, as they were known, showed their loyalty (or perhaps obsession) by watching Dead-TV, a television cable program that first aired in 1988; hitting Grateful Dead-related computer online groups like Dead-Flames, DeadBase, and Dead.net; reading Dead theme magazines like Relix and Golden Road and the compendium of Dead statistics known as DeadBase; tuning into the nationally broadcast Grateful Dead radio hour, aired weekly from the San Francisco Bay Area's KFOG radio station by long-time fan and Dead historian David Gans; buying the recordings that continued to be issued even after Garcia's death from the band's own master sound board tapes of concerts in the "Dick's Picks" series; and trading the "bootleg" tapes of Dead concerts recorded by fans almost from the beginning, a practice the band in the end condoned. Garcia didn't make the mistake John Lennon made of comparing his band's popularity to that of Jesus Christ, but he did remark on the ritualistic nature of its concerts in Rock and Roll: An Unruly History: "For some people, taking LSD and going to a Dead show functions like a rite of passage.... Each person deals with the experience individually; it's an adventure that you can have that is personalized. But when people come together, this singular experience is ritualized. I think the Grateful Dead serves a desire for meaningful ritual, but it's ritual without dogma."