Making Music Like a Term Paper: The Grateful Dead’s Creative Process In a revealing interview with legendary radio personality Casey Kasem, the Grateful Dead were asked one of the most fundamentally practical and unglamorous questions that could possibly be posed to a band: how had they managed to produce such a massive, sprawling amount of…
The MIT Concert That Never Was (But Happened Anyway) Everyone thinks they know the story of the Grateful Dead’s famous free concert at MIT in May of 1970. The narrative is widely known, regularly repeated, and deeply embedded in Grateful Dead history and popular culture. According to this familiar version, the Kent State shootings occurred…
When a Deadhead’s Enthusiasm Got Him Evicted From the Show Bruce Hornsby, the accomplished pianist and keyboardist who toured extensively with the Grateful Dead during the early 1990s, once shared a genuinely hilarious and revealing anecdote on the Arsenio Hall Show about the intense, often physical expressions of devotion and enthusiasm that characterize Deadhead culture….
Uncovering the Lost Verses: Phil and Grahame Lesh Recover Hidden Verses of ‘Friend of the Devil’ In a fascinating and revealing musical archaeology and research session, Phil Lesh—the Grateful Dead’s foundational bassist and one of the band’s primary creative forces—and his son Grahame Lesh explored the deep and extensive catalog of Grateful Dead compositions, working…
When the Grateful Dead Played With Robed Mystics Around a Bonfire Inside a Wooden Ballroom On March 24th, 1971, the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco hosted one of the most unusual, striking, and genuinely strange events in Grateful Dead history—an event so profoundly strange and unconventional that even seasoned Deadheads arriving at the venue that…
A Song Written for Someone Else One of the Grateful Dead’s most iconic songs almost never became theirs. In late 1969, lyricist Robert Hunter sat in a San Francisco rehearsal space with the New Riders of the Purple Sage, working through a new tune he’d drafted. Hunter, who served as the Dead’s primary lyricist, was…
The Bears Aren’t Dancing—They’re Marching The Grateful Dead’s dancing bears appear everywhere in the cultural landscape: on T-shirts, bumper stickers, license plates, even golf balls. These colorful, playful bears have become shorthand for the Dead’s brand and the community that surrounds the music. But there’s something most people don’t realize when they wear or display…
The Legendary Signing That Never Happened In 1974, the Grateful Dead attempted something that should have been a stroke of pure genius: they tried to sign Bob Marley to their newly formed record label. For a moment, imagine the possibilities that such a partnership could have created—the kings of psychedelic jam rock courting the prophet…
The Network Built by Hand, Before the Internet Before Ticketmaster dominated concert ticketing, before email made instant communication routine, before smartphones revolutionized how we organize our lives and coordinate with others, Deadheads built something that by any rational analysis shouldn’t have been possible. They created a nationwide network that moved 20,000 people across state lines,…
A Prison Song Born From Tragedy An 18-year-old woman sang four verses of a haunting blues melody in a Mississippi prison sewing room. The year was 1933, and she was serving time for murder, confined to a prison institution and separated from freedom and normal life. Blues field researcher John Lomax, who had come to…