This week Rolling Stone crowned Scarlet Begonias the greatest Grateful Dead song. But the thing that makes it great, Fire on the Mountain, is sitting eighteen spots down the same list, all alone.
The Shakedown Archives publishes new research on Grateful Dead history each week. If you enjoyed this essay, you can subscribe to the companion YouTube channel below.
Subscribe on YouTubeThe Shakedown Archives draws on the following primary documents, archival recordings, and biographical sources. Direct citations for specific claims appear inline in the text above where available.
Four men who held the Grateful Dead’s keyboard chair are gone — Pigpen, Keith Godchaux, Brent Mydland, Vince Welnick. Tom Constanten is the one the “curse” never touched. Here’s why he walked away clean. Tom Constanten (“TC”) played keyboards for the Grateful Dead for just 14 months, 1968–1970 — the only man to sit in…
The Grateful Dead built their entire world on a handshake. With the Hells Angels, that trust worked for four years — until Altamont, where it got an 18-year-old killed. On December 6, 1969, a Hells Angel named Alan Passaro stabbed Meredith Hunter to death at the Altamont Free Concert while the Rolling Stones played fifty…
Donna Jean Godchaux sang backup on “When a Man Loves a Woman” and Elvis’s “Suspicious Minds” before she was 22. So why did Deadheads spend decades saying she couldn’t sing? It wasn’t her voice. Check out our membership and get free access to the Shakedown Observatory: https://www.youtube.com/@TheShakedownArchives/join Explore the Observatory: https://theshakedownarchives.com/observatory Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033EHpFn3v6zXoMfiJsQ9s…
Workingman’s Dead is the 1970 Grateful Dead album most newcomers start with, and all eight songs were alive onstage first. The track by track history, and the tapes to go find. The Shakedown Archives publishes new research on Grateful Dead history each week. If you enjoyed this essay, you can subscribe to the companion YouTube…
A police raid, 100,000 uninvited arrivals, and a drug scene turned dangerous — the real reasons the Grateful Dead left 710 Ashbury Street in 1968.
When was the Grateful Dead’s first show? You get four answers, all of them real, and none of them clean. The most documented band in music has no tape of the night it truly began. The Shakedown Archives publishes new research on Grateful Dead history each week. If you enjoyed this essay, you can subscribe…
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