The Grateful Dead

The Grateful Dead came together in Palo Alto in 1965, right as the Bay Area counterculture was catching fire, and they grew up right alongside it. The founders were Jerry Garcia on lead guitar, Bob Weir on rhythm, Phil Lesh on bass, Bill Kreutzmann on drums and Ron "Pigpen" McKernan on keyboards, harmonica and vocals. Mickey Hart came aboard as a second drummer in 1967, Tom Constanten added keyboards for a couple of years, and Robert Hunter wrote their words without ever playing a note on stage.

What the Dead play is less a style than a territory: rock, blues, country, bluegrass, folk, gospel and jazz, all stirred up with psychedelia and stretched out night after night until a song turns into a voyage. The 1967 debut and Aoxomoxoa in 1969 sound about as far-out as rock records got. Then in 1970 came Workingman's Dead and American Beauty, a pair of plainspoken, rootsy records that sound as if they were cut on a back porch at dusk. "Uncle John's Band", "Truckin'", "Sugar Magnolia", "Ripple", "Box of Rain" and "Friend of the Devil" all come from that remarkable year.

The '70s brought turnover. Keith Godchaux took over the keyboards in 1971, Pigpen died in 1973, and Donna Jean Godchaux added her voice before the couple left in 1979. The albums kept coming, Wake of the Flood, From the Mars Hotel, Blues for Allah and Shakedown Street, and the band eventually set up its own label, Grateful Dead Records. Brent Mydland played keyboards from 1979 until he died in 1990, and Vince Welnick saw them through to the end.

They landed exactly one Top-40 single, "Touch of Grey" in 1987, and it hardly mattered: for decades they sat among the highest-grossing touring acts in America, spread by word of mouth and by fans who were allowed to tape the shows and swap the tapes. Garcia's death in August 1995 brought it to a close. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted them in 1994, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award followed in 2007, and the Kennedy Center Honors came in 2024.

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