TIME Grateful Dead

IN 2024, NEARLY THREE DECADES AFTER the death of Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead unlocked a new achievement: The band broke the record for most Top 40 albums on the Billboard 200, with 59. It was surprising for several reasons. One is that the Grateful Dead were never really known for record sales—the performances were the thing, along with the community of Deadheads that gathered at those concerts. The other is that the previous mark had been shared by Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra, two mainstream titans of 20th-century music. Who would have ever thought the Dead could knock off both Ol’ Blue Eyes and the King in one swoop? But they did in February 2024 with the release of an archival concert whose title does not roll off the…

Jerry Garcia “OUR AUDIENCE IS LIKE PEOPLE WHO like licorice,” Jerry Garcia famously said. “Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice.” A nice encapsulation of Deadheads, the metaphor also describes people’s feelings about Jerry’s guitar playing. People either hate his style or they really, really like it. Among those in the latter camp: Bob Dylan. “There’s no way to measure his greatness or magnitude as a person or as a player,” Dylan said in tribute to his friend after Garcia’s death in 1995. “There are a lot of spaces and advances between the Carter family, Buddy Holly, and, say, Ornette Coleman, a lot of universes, but he filled them all without being a member of any school. His playing was moody, awesome, sophisticated, hypnotic,…

THIS STORY STARTS ON NEW YEAR’S EVE 1963, in Palo Alto, California, south of San Francisco, part of a web of small cities known as the Peninsula. Twenty-one-year-old Jerry Garcia had lived in the area since his release from the Army near the end of 1960. During his brief military stint (Private Garcia had some problems with authority), he learned the rudiments of finger-picking guitar from another soldier, and when he returned to civilian life, it was acoustic music that he wanted to pursue. Living in poverty on the Peninsula, he devoted most of his waking hours to mastering the guitar so he could dabble in old-time country music with friends (including future Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter), then threw himself wholeheartedly into the banjo in order to play. One…

IT WAS A WHO’S WHO OF THE SAN FRANCISCO counterculture. For three nights in January 1966, some 10,000 weirdos, longhairs, rockers, folkies, and peaceniks gathered at Longshoremen’s Hall to attend what was billed as the Trips Festival, a mind-blowing, multimedia experience. They’d come at the invitation of author Ken Kesey, the pied piper of psychedelia; Stewart Brand, the brains behind the Whole Earth Catalog; Roman Sender, cofounder of the San Francisco Tape Center, the city’s’ “it” avant-garde performance space; and a young concert promoter, Bill Graham. The Hell’s Angels were on hand. So was the San Francisco Mime Troupe, a group of street theater actors, and many of Kesey’s cohorts, called the Merry Pranksters. Kesey was present, too, but disguised in a space helmet to avoid the fuzz (he…

IF TWO PERSONALITIES EMERGED from the San Francisco scene larger than life, they were Jerry Garcia and Grace Slick. They traveled in the same circles; they were friends. She warmly recalled the time in a 2015 interview with LIFE Books. “I came in a bit after the Warlocks,” Grace says shortly before the sun rises in Southern California. These days, she is up predawn and enjoys the day—as best as she can. “As Bette Davis said, growing old’s not for sissies. I’ve got diabetes. I’ve got this weird thing where I can’t fly because my feet swell up,” she notes. “So when I met them, they were already the Grateful Dead. At the time, you don’t think, Oh this is gonna be noteworthy, I better remember this, it’ll be important in…

WHAT DO AL GORE, WHOOPI GOLD-berg, Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin, Carlos Santana, Nancy Pelosi, Mario Batali, and, yes, Ann Coulter have in common? Give up? They’re all members of the inimitable community of Grateful Dead fans commonly and affectionately known as Deadheads. Urban Dictionary defines Deadhead as “a person who greatly enjoys the music of the Grateful Dead and particularly the genius of Jerry Garcia.” Decades ago, a subset of fans cranked that devotion up to a whole new level and began following the band from city to city. This subset grew in number, soon giving birth to a community with its own set of rules and even its own slang. Sure, Beatlemania once swept the U.S., where the demand to see the foursome live gave…