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A CIA agent dosed strangers with LSD and watched them through a two-way mirror in a San Francisco safehouse. It was Operation Midnight Climax � the darkest experiment of MK-Ultra. His name was George Hunter White: by day the most powerful federal narcotics cop in San Francisco, by night a CIA consultant running an apartment…

Vince Welnick was the safe pick — and that is exactly why he never had a chance. When Brent Mydland died in 1990, the Grateful Dead didn’t reinvent themselves; they chose the candidate who wouldn’t change a thing, built him a role with no room to matter, and then forgot him. By 1990 the Grateful…

Bob Weir got fired from the Grateful Dead at twenty. But he was already running the show. Ace, Kingfish, Bobby and the Midnites, RatDog: a 27-year campaign. In 1968, Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh told Bob Weir he didn’t count. Rock Scully put it plain: the weight was on four cats, not six. Weir was…

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…