The band formally dissolved in the wake of Jerry Garcias demise, though members will occasionally reunite for special occasions, and they have performed under other names as The Band Minus the Face (e.g., The Other Ones, The Dead, Furthur, Dead & Company, etc.).Ĭulturally, outside of their music, the bands most famous impact is arguably the Ben & Jerrys ice cream flavor ∼herry Garcia, the companys best-selling flavor, which was briefly made with black cherries after his passing. Keyboardist Brent Mydland died of a drug overdose, and Garcias own health and addictions fluctuated wildly until his death in 1995. This later period was a time of ups and downs, as the band was playing bigger shows than ever, but the influx of new fans led to some unfortunate incidents at shows. That is until 1987, when the band scored the sole US Top 40 hit in their long career, Touch of Grey, a catchy pop tune that had the odd side effect of turning their erstwhile cult into a stadium-filling circus for the rest of their career.
New fans came into the fold largely through word of mouth and the spread of those tapes.
In spite of this cult popularity, the Grateful Dead were never quite as famous or mainstream as many of their peers of the period, which is exactly how the Deadheads preferred it. The Dead toured every year of their existence except 1975, drawing millions of fans, both hardcore touring heads and casual listeners across the country. Compounding this is that many consider the recordings of their songs from the original albums often pale to live versions of the same song, though some albums (notably, Anthem of the Sun, Workingmans Dead, and American Beauty) are still considered classics.
Since the Dead never worked from a show-to-show setlist (they had a gigantic concert repertoire and are documented to have played more than five hundred different songs in their thirty-year existence, with around a hundred songs in rotation at any given time), trading tapes became to the Deadheads the ideal way to experience the music short of attending a concert live. This latter practice was encouraged by the group. The Deadheads, as theyre known, were so dedicated that many of them would follow the band on tour for extended stretches of time, and trade tapes of past concerts. The Dead are probably as famous for their fanbase as they are for their music. Aside from the keyboardists, whose tenures sometimes overlapped into a dual-keyboards lineup, the band's membership was largely stable between 1967 and its split in 1995. Godchaux's wife Donna Jean also joined the Dead as a backing vocalist shortly after he did, and they both left the group together to be replaced by Mydland. The core line-up was Jerry Garcia (lead guitar), Bob Weir (rhythm guitar), Phil Lesh (bass), Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann (drums - yes, two drummers, folks!) and a succession of keyboardists starting with Ron Pigpen McKernan and continuing, in order with Tom Constanten, Keith Godchaux, Brent Mydland, Vince Welnick and - on occasion - Bruce Hornsby.
The Dead appeared at the now-famous Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, and the even more famous original Woodstock festival in 1969 (however, band members admit they werent at top form at either one), and have a reputation for long tours and musically exploratory shows where one song often blends into another. Essentially, they were the godfathers of the Jam Band genre. The Grateful Dead were a six-piece note Well, most of the time there were brief periods where they were a quintet, and one 5-year-long stretch when they were a septet group formed in San Francisco in the mid-1960s, best known for their improvisatory style of rock music, taking elements of Psychedelic Rock, Country Music, Folk Music, Blues, and whatever else they thought would fit.