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…
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.
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.
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.
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,…
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)…
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…
On June 1, 1967, the Grateful Dead played their first show east of California, and New York gave them a parade. The Summer of Love you were taught happened on one coast. It didn’t. Everyone learned the same story. The Summer of Love was born in San Francisco, in Haight-Ashbury, in the Panhandle and Golden…
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.
January 1969 — Pigpen fired a .22 pistol into the ceiling of Herb Greene’s San Francisco photo studio while Led Zeppelin was still inside. They fled without paying. It’s a great story. But what it actually reveals is something nobody talks about. Note–This is a remastered version of a prior video posted a few months…
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