Fifty years after their founding and 20 years
after the death of lead singer Jerry Garcia,
the Grateful Dead remain one of America's
most renowned bands.
With songs that spanned countless genres beyond
just rock and roll, the common perception
of the Dead is that their music was full of
psychedelic sounds and endless guitar noodling.
Which is true.
But they were also a lot more than that.
Here's a look at the untold truth of the Grateful
Dead.
They started in Palo Alto
San Francisco is synonymous with The Grateful
Dead.
So it may come as a surprise that the band
actually formed in Palo Alto, a quiet college
town 35 south of San Francisco.
Grateful Dead founder Jerry Garcia was born
in San Francisco, but he moved to Palo Alto
in 1960 after being thrown out of the Army
and soon became part of the Palo Alto music
scene.
He'd take me around to all his of friends
places that I played..
That played the Blues and people would go
"damn, listen to that white boy play the blues!
It was great!"
In Palo Alto, he met songwriting partner Robert
Hunter as well as future Grateful Dead guitarist
Bob Weir.
Those meetings laid the groundwork for The
Grateful Dead, but it wasn't until 1966 that
the band actually moved to the City by the
Bay.
The Grateful debs
Garcia and company are infamous for their
connections to the hippie counterculture.
They were the house band for author Ken Kesey,
whose LSD-fueled Acid Tests were immortalized
in Tom Wolfe's classic 1968 book The Electric
Kool-Aid Acid Test.
But in the early days, the Dead were happy
to take any gig that paid — including a
1966 debutante ball.
Naturally, neighbors filed a noise complaint
with the cops.
Those poor debutantes didn't know what hit
them.
Viral marketing pioneers
Viral marketing techniques may seem like an
internet thing.
But The Grateful Dead helped pioneer the technique
a half century ago by encouraging their fans
to make bootleg recordings of their live concerts.
It turned out to be a stroke of genius, as
their studio albums couldn't really convey
the Dead's legendary live improvisation.
As a result of fans trading live bootleg albums,
a whole culture sprung up around the Grateful
Dead's live tours, which even became a way
of life for some people.
Now that's an effective marketing gimmick.
"And then the moon and it was like Jerry willed
it!"
"Right on, Mike"
"Free frilly dude!"
"Ok"
Un-Grateful dad
In 1967, the Grateful Dead decided to add
a second drummer to the group and hired Mickey
Hart.
That in turn led them to hire his dad, Lenny
Hart, to manage their money.
Unfortunately, he was arrested in 1971 for
embezzling $77,000 from the band.
Mickey ended up taking a leave of absence
before rejoining the group in 1974.
Painful as the incident was, though, it gave
them good fodder for their music, as it inspired
the song "He's Gone."
"Steal your face right off your head."
So at least they got something for their money.
Garcia was in a Richard Nixon commercial
One of Richard Nixon's 1968 presidential ads
talked about the youth of America, featuring
photos of the counterculture.
Twelve seconds into the ad, a photo of Jerry
Garcia flashes on the screen, leading to decades
of confusion.
Needless to say, Garcia didn't endorse or
vote for Nixon — because he didn't believe
in voting at all.
In 1989, he told Rolling Stone, "I don't feel
there's anything to vote for yet.
Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils
is still choosing evil."
Pigpen didn't die from drinking
For decades, the story was that keyboardist
Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, who died in 1973, had
passed on due to alcoholism.
Like his onetime love interest and singing
partner Janis Joplin, he was also a member
of rock's infamous 27 Club.
But in fact, he had given up alcohol in the
year before his death, in part because it
was aggravating the congenital autoimmune
disease that actually did claim his life:
biliary cirrhosis.
Blame them for yogurt
It's everywhere in American supermarkets today,
but in the early 1970s, yogurt was a weird
niche food.
In 1972, Ken Kesey's brother Chuck reached
out to the band for a little help because
his company — which sold Nancy's Honey Yogurt,
the first yogurt in the US with live acidophilus
cultures — was struggling.
The Grateful Dead agreed to stage a benefit
concert to keep the yogurt flowing, resulting
in the concert film Sunshine Daydream and
decades worth of yogurt for everyone, as Nancy's
Honey Yogurt is still around today.
"Yogurt!
Yogurt!
I hate Yogurt!"
A long strange trip
Weir was born in 1947 and was adopted by well-off
parents from Atherton, California.
His parents died in 1972, but more than a
decade later, he was contacted by his biological
mother.
According to Weir, they didn't hit it off,
so when she gave him the contact information
for his biological father, Weir decided not
to track him down.
In 1996, though, he finally cold called his
bio-dad, a retired Air Force colonel.
The two immediately bonded, and Weir soon
discovered he had four half-brothers.
The oldest of his new brothers, James Louis
Parber, had been a musician himself before
his untimely death, and had left behind his
old, battered electric guitar.
Weir decided to have the family memento fixed
up, and when he did, he discovered it had
the exact sound he had been searching for.
Ever since, he's been using his brother's
vintage 1956 Fender Telecaster in his shows
with the Dead.
What a long strange trip for a classic guitar.
Altamont changed them forever
In December, 1969, the Grateful Dead were
scheduled to appear as part of the Altamont
music festival.
But after hearing about incidents with the
Hell's Angels, who'd been hired as security,
the band quit at the last second and high
tailed it out of town.
It proved to be a fateful decision.
Altamont became the most infamous tragedy
in rock history, and according to rock historian
Joel Selvin, the group responded by leaving
mainstream music behind and changing their
sound with the folksy 1970 album Workingman's
Dead.
Hall of Famers
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has a rule
that musicians can only be inducted "become
eligible for induction 25 years after the
release of their first record."
So technically, when the Dead were elected
into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994,
only the original members of the band should
have been inducted.
But Garcia insisted that everybody in the
band had to be inducted, including Robert
Hunter, the group's main lyricist.
He won that fight, and 12 members of the band
were included in the induction in 1994.
It was a particularly nice gesture considering
Garcia himself didn't care at all for the
honor.
He didn't even bother attending the ceremony,
except as a cardboard cutout.
"Say goodnight, Jerry."
GOODNIGHT JERRY!"
Addicted to love
Jerry Garcia died in 1995 at the age of 53
from a heart attack.
But it was truly his many addictions that
led to his death.
Besides going to rehab for cocaine and heroin
addiction in the 1985, his overeating led
to diabetes and a diabetic coma in 1986 that
nearly claimed his life.
And if that wasn't enough, he also was a heavy
smoker.
But despite his many health issues, Garcia
refused to stop touring even after it became
clear that the effort was killing him.
Garcia told Rolling Stone that the band had
so many employees on their payroll that they
couldn't stop touring because it would cause
too much financial hardship to the people
who relied on them.
In fact, according to David Browne's book
So Many Roads: The Life and Times of the Grateful
Dead, the band had $750,000 in expenses each
month.
In the end, then, it was Garcia's generosity
that ultimately led to his death.
Mickey Hart said in the documentary Long Strange
Trip, "It shows you how lonely it is when
people want to pick you apart and give you
no peace just because they love you to death.
It's kind of tragic."
Rest in peace, Jerry.
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