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The Grateful Dead was Pigpen’s idea — an electric blues band, pitched by a janitor at Dana Morgan’s Music. Jerry Garcia said it himself: “Pigpen is what made the band work.” So why did the band spend 1968 working so hard to work without him? Ron “Pigpen” McKernan started it all — talked Garcia into…

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…

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…

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…

Keith Godchaux had two jobs at once — and the same hands fading in the Grateful Dead were doing the best work of his life in the Jerry Garcia Band. The drugs were real. They can’t explain that. Keith’s story almost always gets told as a drug story. But the drugs can’t explain the Garcia…

Brent Mydland overdosed in December 1989. Two bandmates drove him home from jail and, in one account’s words, “refrained from scolding” him. That silence had a name. In the Grateful Dead world, no one told anyone else not to indulge. It traced back to the Acid Tests and Ken Kesey. Phil Lesh once called it…

On March 23, 1974, a critic caught himself whispering at a Grateful Dead concert. The Wall of Sound was so clean that 14,000 people could hold a conversation while the band played. Everyone tells the Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound the same way: 600 speakers, 28,000 watts, dozens of McIntosh amplifiers, 75 tons, four semi-trailers….

1985 is the year most Grateful Dead retrospectives skip. Jerry Garcia was arrested in Golden Gate Park that January on drug charges, and the headlines wrote the year off before the music got a hearing. But the twentieth-anniversary tour sent the band back through its own catalog for material it had not touched in years….

Shakedown Street wasn’t conjured out of thin air by hippies. In January 1978, a Bill Graham logistics man saw the same fifty faces at every show — and one porta-potty order accidentally built a subculture. That man was Peter Barsotti, working the winter run through Bakersfield, Fresno, Sacramento, and Stockton for Bill Graham Presents. The…