Berry Oakley’s Tragedy Began Before the Crash
Berry Oakley’s tragedy began before his motorcycle crash. After Duane Allman died, the Allman Brothers bassist struggled through a final year on the road.
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Why the Grateful Dead Waited 21 Years for Unbroken Chain
Phil Lesh gave up songwriting after From the Mars Hotel. The Grateful Dead left “Unbroken Chain” offstage for 21 years—until his son asked for it. On From the Mars Hotel, Phil Lesh and lyricist Bobby Petersen created a song that refused to behave like an ordinary Grateful Dead tune. Its shifting meters, tightly interlocking parts…
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The Truth About Why the Grateful Dead And Allman Brothers Fell Apart
Jerry Garcia called Gregg Allman a narc. The Scooter Herring trial reveals the testimony, immunity, and fallout behind a bitter chapter in Grateful Dead history. Before the accusation, the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers Band shared stages and an appetite for taking the music further. Duane Allman sat in with Jerry Garcia at the…
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The Rise and Fall of Grateful Dead Records (And How The Mob Ripped It Off)
The Grateful Dead started their own record label in 1973. The mob counterfeited the first album, an insider looted it, and in three years it broke. Fed up with being what Jerry Garcia called juice for the Kinney Corporation, the band walked away from Warner Bros. and, on the Fourth of July 1972, let Ron…
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How The Grateful Dead Quietly Rebuilt Themselves Out Of The Allman Brothers
Oteil Burbridge spent seventeen years as the Allman Brothers Band’s longest-serving bassist. Then in 2015 he sat down in Phil Lesh’s chair in the Grateful Dead, and he turns out to be the proof that these were never really two separate bands.
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The Deadhead Who Opened The Door To Biggest Art Heist In History
The largest art theft in history, 500 million dollars gone and still unsolved, had one witness nobody could ever explain: the Grateful Dead fan working the museum door.
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KILL THE GRATEFUL DEAD Wasn’t Cobain’s Idea (It Was Punk’s)
Everyone remembers Kurt Cobain’s “KILL THE GRATEFUL DEAD” shirt. Almost nobody remembers that the backlash he gets blamed for was already twenty years old.
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the grateful dead in 1979: a total transformation
When the Grateful Dead released Go to Heaven on April 28, 1980 — the white-suit “angel” cover, Brent Mydland’s debut, the full Arista push — it was meant to be their commercial breakthrough. Instead it opened seven years of studio silence. This is the three-producer experiment that broke them: Keith Olsen (fresh off Fleetwood Mac)…
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The Grateful Dead’s Lyrics Started With MK-Ultra…Actually
In 1962, a 20-year-old folk singer named Robert Hunter carried a typewriter into a CIA-funded LSD experiment at the Menlo Park VA hospital — and became the first future member of the Grateful Dead to take acid. He later wrote “Ripple,” “Dark Star,” and “Box of Rain.” Drawing on Dennis McNally’s A Long Strange Trip,…
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The Real Reason Owsley Built the Wall of Sound
When Owsley “Bear” Stanley went to federal prison, the Grateful Dead partitioned the stage and turned professional without him. He came back in 1972 to a band he no longer recognized. In December 1967, police raided Owsley Stanley’s lab and seized roughly 350,000 doses of LSD and 1,500 STP tablets. This was industrial production, far…