I still miss the concerts at RFK in D.C., we always had such a good time in the Village and the shows were exceptional, especially when Bruce Hornsby would join the show (Ya always know he was gonna be playing when they rolled out a baby grand on stage!). I miss the freedom of dancing with the Children. Here's just a peek at the Dead's influence on the country, music, society from the Washington Post before the Kennedy Center Honors.....
So they purchased a box of live crickets and captured their chirping with a microphone. To speed up their tempo, the band put a lightbulb near the box. The crickets eventually escaped, but you can still hear them on the final track of “One From the Vault.”
For some bands, the antic would be a defining moment in their biography. For the Grateful Dead, it’s a throwaway anecdote from their long, strange trip from the Bay Area to the spiked Kool-Aid pitcher of rock mythology and counterculture.
Their pursuit was simple: Have fun, at any cost.
“This Is Spinal Tap” lampooned rock musicians with the famous line of dialogue describing a keyboardist’s philosophy of life: “Have … a good time … all the time.”
But that actually was the Grateful Dead’s creed.
The band spent 30 years (1965 to 1995) exploring every contour of fun, from the mind-altering to the musical, from the spiritual to the fleshly. It fused rock to jazz, then splintered the sound into tumbling rhythms, which never stopped and always changed. The band’s fan base was its collaborator; swaying, spinning, dancing Deadheads harmonized with the musicians by shaping and sustaining the vibe of each concert. The band created an iconography — grooving bears, lightning-split skull — that’s recognizable even to people who can’t name track titles such as “Dark Star” or “Casey Jones.”
The Dead found profundity in the profane and grooves in the static. They danced in the shadows of assassination and war, past Watergate and Reagan, through the Cold War and the Los Angeles riots.
Late-20th-century America: three decades of overindulgence. Buzzkill after buzzkill. But the music …
“The music would free us,” says Bill Kreutzmann, 78, the band’s founding drummer. “It was the freest thing we knew.”
And the music was fun.
“You cannot underestimate the power of fun,” says Hart, 81, the band’s other drummer. “We laughed our asses off, back and forth across the f---ing country.”
And now this country is giving the Kennedy Center Honors to these old pranksters. It’s another strange stop on the trip — and it comes just as they’ve lost another bandmate.
The Grateful Dead is no stranger to death — enlightenment of the mind takes a toll on the body, and bandmates have succumbed over the decades to various ailments, hedonistic or otherwise.
There were four surviving members who were supposed to be seated at the Kennedy Center this month, and then Phil Lesh, the group’s bassist and founding member, died Oct. 25 at 84 years old — joining a long list of deceased Dead members, which include four keyboard players and Jerry Garcia, the band’s lead guitarist, vocalist and center of gravity. After Garcia died from a heart attack in 1995, while trying to kick a heroin addiction, the band broke up into various side projects to keep its music alive.
A few miles from the Great American Music Hall is 710 Ashbury St., where the band lived from 1966 to 1968, and where fans have left roses and chalk eulogies to Lesh on the sidewalk:
“Love will see you through.”
“Let their songs Phil the air.”
“We won’t let the music end.”
In a dressing room inside the music hall, days after Lesh’s death, Hart, Kreutzmann and rhythm guitarist Bobby Weir — the remaining core members of a band with an ever-changing lineup — sit and reflect on the Kennedy Center Honors.
Their conversation is as melodic and improvisational as their music: free and silly, reflective and serious. They riff through an argument over the most difficult time signatures, whether there is too much music in the world today and the fidelity of digital music (“You can’t listen to that stuff very long,” says Weir, 77. “It’s tiring to the brain”), about being brought together by the weird forces of life — be it destiny or be it a lifetime achievement award.
“You pick your friends. You don’t pick your brothers,” Weir says. “In this particular case, we were fated together. We blurred all those lines. We have a brotherhood, and we also have an abiding friendship.”
The trio reflects briefly on Lesh. This meeting at the hall was going to be the first day in a long time that the four core members would be together.
They don’t really want to talk about it. The band was a “hard-ass fun machine,” says Hart, and losing a part of it — that’s not fun.
So he cracks a joke.
“You shouldn’t be a piano player in the Grateful Dead,” Hart says. “They all die!”
The Grateful Dead was a band of misfits. Garcia was a bluegrass virtuoso who grew bored with the genre’s rigidity. Lesh, trained on classical violin and trumpet, picked up a bass for the first time when he joined the band. Weir was a folk strummer on electric rhythm guitar. Hart and Kreutzmann often drummed in different time signatures, creating one of the first polyrhythmic rock bands.
Garcia, Weir, Kreutzmann and Ron “Pigpen” McKernan formed the Warlocks in 1965 San Francisco, where they germinated alongside Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Jefferson Airplane. After learning of another band named the Warlocks, they changed their name to the Grateful Dead, and later added Hart. (The other Warlocks would later change its name to the Velvet Underground.)
I think the Grateful Dead looms large over pretty much every band around, because they did it all first. And they did it all the best.— Jim James
“I think the Grateful Dead looms large over pretty much every band around, because they did it all first. And they did it all the best,” My Morning Jacket front man Jim James says. “They could do a three-minute folk song or a 20-minute psychedelic jam. There are a lot of bands who can do a lot of things. But they did it all.”
Their musical mission was to create something new. There were three main types of radio stations for music at the time: rock-and-roll, classical and jazz. The Grateful Dead blended them into one airwave.
Lesh, inspired by jazz greats such as John Coltrane and Miles Davis, helped infuse the band with improvisation. Lesh saw a song as a blueprint, not a finished house, and this “jam band” ethos inspired future groups such as Phish and the Dave Matthews Band.
That improvisational spirit transcended their music. The Dead loved being loud but hated distortion, so in 1973 they built their own sound system dubbed “the Wall of Sound,” which included 604 speakers that projected their music a quarter-mile.
They balked at traditional power structures, so their band was an anarchy. Garcia was its center but refused to be its leader, which was good for creativity but bad for making business decisions (when to tour, how not to go bankrupt).
They would trot out bizarre time signatures — “We learned to breathe in seven,” says Weir, which usurps your ear’s expectations — and play anything that made noise (cue the crickets).
“There wasn’t anything to copy,” Kreutzmann says. “There weren’t any real rock bands but the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, who just started. We were five different musicians who came from five different backgrounds. There was no blueprint, so we just improvised.”
They became the house band for Acid Tests — a series of parties centered on LSD use and hosted by “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” author Ken Kesey. The parties doubled as their training grounds, teaching the band to be part of the audience while simultaneously playing to it — and showing them how psychedelics could bend their own personal time signatures.
At one Acid Test, Kreutzmann remembers, they played a single song and then packed their gear up — without realizing it was too soon to wrap.
“When you’re high on acid,” Kreutzmann says, “there is no time.”
As dawn broke after another Acid Test, and everyone began coming down from their trips, Garcia caught sight of the Watts Towers, 17 tall steel sculptures in southern Los Angeles. They’re sturdy structures — so much so that the city gave up trying to dismantle them after the artist’s death.
Garcia saw the payoff of a traditional artist’s life: leaving something behind that will last.
“I thought, ‘Wow, that’s not it for me,’” Garcia said in the documentary “Long Strange Trip.” “Instead of making something that lasts forever, I thought: I think I’d rather have fun.”
On this matter, the band half-failed. Yes, they had fun and created a catalogue of songs that metamorphose with every performance. But they also created music that Weir thinks might be studied in music schools alongside the Beatles in 300 years, and an ethos that Hart thinks could last for a thousand years.
“We can’t stop it now,” Hart says, grinning.
On paper, the Grateful Dead shouldn’t be popular. The band isn’t known for its albums, and its tracks rarely charted high up — except for 1987’s “Touch of Grey,” which was poppy and conventional enough to hit Billboard’s Top 10.
Improvising, not prepackaging, was the Grateful Dead’s mojo. And improvisation exploded their live show into a traveling circus, bringing the ’60s to different towns and different decades.
“When we decided to do something, it almost never happened,” Weir says. “When we tried to focus on something, we were wasting our time. So we always fell back on doing what we had to do, which was to play. I think that’s going to be our enduring legacy.”
Sometimes those shows felt transcendent. Sometimes they were awful. The trio laughs about their disastrous set at Woodstock, made even worse when a wet microphone electrocuted Weir.
“It was as bad as we ever played,” Hart says.
“Well, it wasn’t our fault entirely,” Kreutzmann says. “We were working through some adverse conditions. Like bad acid.”
But sometimes the acid — or the indefinable whatever — was good.
“It felt like there was magic in the room sometimes,” Kreutzmann says. “We would communicate without words. It was spiritual.”
“Well,” Hart says, “part of it is we were using psychoactive drugs back then, quite a lot.”
“Oh, how could I forget!” says Kreutzmann. “The fun of LSD and music is that it’s unlimited. There are no rules.”
The jovial anarchy became part of the appeal for the legions of Deadheads who followed the band as it crisscrossed the country, thrilled by the idea of seeing the band either flop or soar.
“There’s a spectrum of excellence, and they’re willing to let theirs be really wide,” says Dawes front man Taylor Goldsmith, who has also played with Lesh. “Most bands operate at 90 to 95 percent. The Grateful Dead are willing to give you something that might hit around 50 percent, because they might stumble across something that hits at 150.”
If you liked music, or if you liked fun, you could like the Dead. There were no other requirements.
“When you listen to the Grateful Dead, you feel how you wish you felt all the time,” James says. “They’re not too sad, but they’re not afraid to get sad. They’re not too happy, but they’re not afraid to get happy. They love to rock, but they don’t rock too hard.”
Part of the band’s appeal was its blank-slate nature. They avoided party politics to avoid alienating audiences.
“You couldn’t pigeonhole the Grateful Dead. You still can’t,” Hart says. “The Grateful Dead is a lot of things. The Grateful Dead is a record. The Grateful Dead is mythology. The Grateful Dead is us. The Grateful Dead is a force.”
They didn’t wear costumes or have elaborate pyrotechnics. They skipped stage chatter. The music — and the resulting togetherness — was the focus, the locus, the hocus-pocus.
“The community around the band is what made me want to come back for my second show, a little bit more than the music,” says Rich Mahan, co-host of the podcast “The Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast.” “These people were so wonderful and friendly and helpful and caring and giving and all the great adjectives.”
The more shows I went to, the more I wanted to go to. It becomes part of your DNA.— Rich Mahan, co-host of the podcast “The Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast.
Mahan adds: “The more shows I went to, the more I wanted to go to. It becomes part of your DNA.”
Garcia famously compared the band to licorice. Not everyone liked them, but the ones who liked them really liked them.
Talk to a Deadhead, and they’ll begin shouting dates and places at you, referring to this bootleg concert record or that one, the one with the best version of “Hard to Handle” or “Uncle John’s Band” and, just, like — Man, you just gotta hear it. I can get you a tape!
Over the years, Deadheads recorded the concerts, which the band allowed despite pushback from their record company. (The band had a habit of not listening to the record companies. If Warner Bros. sent them a letter alerting them to an upcoming deadline, they would correct its grammar in red ink and mail it back.)
And those fans would trade cassettes like baseball cards.
“As soon as you let people know you were investigating the Dead, tapes started flying at you,” Mahan says.
Letting the tapers into shows was “one of the most important business decisions we ever made,” Hart says. “That allowed the music to fly around the world.”
The Kennedy Center Honors “is really a celebration of our audience, of the Deadheads,” Kreutzmann says.
Deadheads: Tucker Carlson and Al Franken.
Deadheads: Ann Coulter and Bill Clinton.
The tribe exists beyond tribalism. And nearly 60 years into the trip, the tribe still gathers: in a giant sphere in Las Vegas.
On a blazing day in early August, Deadheads and their children and grandchildren seek shelter and transport in the Las Vegas Sphere, a 366-foot-tall, 516-foot-wide dome covered in LED lights. Onstage is Dead & Company, which includes Weir and Hart and other musicians, such as John Mayer.
Grateful Dead iconography flashes across the domed screen — dancing bears, a motorcycle-riding skeleton, an image of 710 Ashbury — while the band stretches out through classic Dead songs: “Brown-Eyed Women,” “Eyes of the World” and “St. Stephen.” Seated Deadheads watch the screens in awe. Some dance on the floor in front of the stage.
One older Deadhead tells a younger convert that this iteration of Dead & Company noodles too much, that Garcia was the band.
“Is this your first time seeing them at the Sphere?” the young Deadhead asks.
“The sixth,” answers the older, offering his one-hitter to anyone seeking to board the train.
The tie-dyed Deadheads still lay their bandanna’d heads on the ground during “Drums,” a classic extended drum-solo track, but in 2024 they stare at computer-generated images of the solar system rather than actual stars.
And when a portrait of Garcia appears across the vast screen — filling the fake sky with true sunlight — the Deadheads go silent, in reverence for what was and still is.
A previous version of this story was unclear about the timing and nature of Mickey Hart's association with the Grateful Dead. This version has been clarified.
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