The Grateful Dead were born as figureheads of the 1960s West Coast psychedelic scene, yet they were utterly untouched by mainstream glamour, according to bbc.com. Long after the original hippy dream soured, their potent mix of lengthy improvised guitar jams and communal celebration remained defiantly unchanged, continuing until the 1995 death of leader Jerry Garcia in rehab at the age of 53. While contemporaries such as the Rolling Stones and Jefferson Airplane adapted to shifting trends, the Dead stayed essentially the same.
It hardly seemed a blueprint for superstardom, yet the band achieved immense, unconventional success. When Forbes magazine listed the world’s 40 highest-paid entertainers in 1990–91, the Grateful Dead ranked 20th, earning an estimated $33 million—placing them within touching distance of global pop sensation MC Hammer. What a long, strange trip it had been for a band who started out three decades earlier playing in San Francisco’s Victorian ballrooms to soundtrack hallucinogenic drug experiments.
With no obvious star performer and a fiercely non-commercial ethos, the Dead were a genuine underground phenomenon. Their success was not built primarily on record sales—though their 1987 album yielded an unlikely MTV hit with Touch of Grey, thanks to a video featuring life-size skeleton marionettes. Instead, they cultivated a devoted tribe of “Deadheads” who followed them from town to town in a travelling circus of bohemian culture.
Garcia said in 1988: “To the kids today, the Grateful Dead represents America: the spirit of being able to go out and have an adventure.” Fans gathered in venue car parks long before showtime for ‘Shakedown Street’, informal markets that sprung up and were named after the band’s 1978 album. The band famously refused corporate sponsorship and even encouraged the trading of bootleg tapes. They also prided themselves on ever-changing setlists, meaning devotees still pore over the nightly variations sparked by the band’s unique chemistry.
“A lot of times we would come into a town and they wouldn’t let us into the hotel, whether we had reservations or not.” – Jerry Garcia, 1981
In 1981, the BBC’s Newsnight was on hand to witness the excitement of the faithful at the Dead’s return to London for the first time in seven years, playing four epic nights at the Rainbow Theatre. Across the city in the Blitz nightclub, the New Romantic pop scene was in full swing, but Garcia’s band had been forged in a different crucible: the white-hot fires of subcultural rebellion.
In 1967, the so-called Summer of Love saw thousands of hippies descend on San Francisco. The small suburb of Haight-Ashbury became the global epicentre of “flower power,” and the Grateful Dead were effectively its house band.
Garcia told Newsnight reporter Robin Denselow in 1981, when he was “an avuncular 38,” that the original hippies were “still pretty much doing what they were doing then, but… the difference is now they have 15 years of experience under their belts and have gotten to be experts in what they do.” He recalled that when the Dead first started out, the US was largely unchanged from the staid 1950s era: “As soon as they saw long hair and eccentricity of any sort, you know, that was it.”
The band’s formation was inextricably linked to the glorification of taking LSD. The hallucinogenic drug was discovered in 1938 by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann. In the 1960s, LSD was being researched by the CIA under the secret programme MK-Ultra.
One volunteer in CIA-funded LSD research at the Menlo Park Hospital in California—where students were paid $40 a day to take the drug—was Ken Kesey, who would later write One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Awed by its power, Kesey assembled a string of like-minded people dubbed the Merry Pranksters and set off across the country.
A year later in California, Kesey began staging parties he called Acid Tests to promote the taking of LSD. The second event, on 4 December 1965 in San Jose, was where The Grateful Dead played their first gig. They had played before as The Warlocks, but a clash with another group led Garcia’s outfit to adopt the name by which they would become known for the next few decades.
Interviewed shortly before his death in 1995, Garcia described the band’s early style as “R&B with a large amount of weirdness inserted in it.” Improvisation was at its heart. “All of a sudden we could be doing a simple R&B song and it would turn into a 20-minute thing,” he said.
The band continued to attract new generations of followers, with their lengthy concerts encompassing everything from bluegrass to jazz. For the Dead, playing live was everything. As Garcia told Newsnight after 16 years of life on the road: “It’s who we are. It’s what we do with our lives, really.”
•Featured image by Getty Images
