The Dead Took Acid. The Allmans Took Mushrooms. You Can Hear It.

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…

The Grateful Dead didn’t begin in 1965 — the line runs back to a 1944 murder in Riverside Park and Kerouac’s scroll, and forward to Box of Rain at Soldier Field. One American dream, three containers. [full description truncated in enrichment note — see YouTube for the complete text with chapters/sources] The Shakedown Archives publishes…

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.

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…

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…

Jerry Garcia’s Tiger sold for $11.56 million. Christie’s also corrected its final-show story: this wasn’t the guitar from the Dead’s last night. Doug Irwin spent six years building the instrument Garcia had given him free rein to create. When Tiger reached the stage in 1979, Brent Mydland had recently joined the Grateful Dead and the…