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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)…

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 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…

The Grateful Dead’s most important post-Jerry reunion happened at the Warfield Theatre in April 1999 — Phil Lesh, Trey Anastasio, Donna Godchaux, Steve Kimock — and almost nobody called it a reunion. Four months out from a liver transplant that nearly killed him, Phil Lesh booked three nights at the Warfield in San Francisco and…

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.

Me and My Uncle is the most-played song in Grateful Dead history — and Bob Weir learned it secondhand from a pot smuggler who claimed he helped write it. No two databases agree on the count.

The Grateful Dead built their parking lot on the fewest possible rules. By 1995 organized crews were hauling nitrous tanks into it, and nobody in the community had the power to stop them.