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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…

Phil Lesh played bass wrong on purpose — and after Jerry Garcia died, he became the one member who treated the Grateful Dead’s vault, name, and music as too fragile to sell. This is the real story of the fracture that split the band’s survivors for thirty years. When Jerry Garcia died in 1995, the…

A dozen people from the Grateful Dead’s office walked up the road for crab sandwiches one afternoon in early 1970. They came back to an empty room and a single phone sitting on the floor. And the band that came out the other side of it played some of the best music of their lives….

The Grateful Dead built a 75-ton PA system so they could hear themselves think — all to protect one rule: every night, every person onstage had to compose in real time.

In July 1973 the Allman Brothers had two dead founders and a lineup that hadn’t existed eighteen months earlier. Then they walked onto the biggest stage in American rock history.

Robert Hunter quit the National Guard during Watts in 1965 — then never wrote a single protest song. The most radical act in the Grateful Dead came from the man with no microphone.

Neal Cassady never played a note, but the man from Kerouac’s On the Road lived in the Dead’s attic, taught them to improvise, and died with his name in their set lists for three decades.

Jerry Garcia called showbiz tricks fascism. Bob Weir was using them every night. From firing to RatDog, the 27-year campaign to become the boss of something.