Biography of Grateful Dead

The Grateful Dead were the longest-lived of the San Francisco "acid rock" groups of the '60s. In the '90s, after more than 25 years in action, the Dead were still playing to enough satisfied customers on the road (most of them "Deadheads") to make them one of the top-grossing concert acts in the music business.The group was formed in 1965 by bluegrass enthusiast Jerry Garcia (b. Aug 1, 1942 - d. Aug 9, 1995) on guitar and vocals, Ron "Pigpen" McKernan (b. Sep 8, 1945 - d. Mar 8, 1973) on vocals and organ, Bob Weir (b. Oct 16, 1947) on guitar and vocals, classical music student Phil Lesh (b. Mar, 15, 1945) on bass and vocals, and Bill Kreutzmann (b. Apr 7, 1946) on drums. From the beginning, they brought together a variety of influences, from Garcia's country background to Pigpen's feeling for blues (his father was an R&B radio DJ) and Lesh's education in contemporary "serious" music. Add to that the experimentation encouraged at some of the group's first performances at novelist Ken Kesey's "acid test" parties -- multimedia events intended to replicate (or accompany) the experience of taking the then-legal drug LSD -- and you had a musical mixture of styles often played with extended improvisational sections that could go off in nearly any direction.The band signed to Warner Brothers in 1967, experiencing some difficulties early on with the restrictions of standard recording practices and the company's interest in producing a conventionally commercial product. As a result, the group's first few albums were somewhat tentative but showed promise for the future, especially with the key additions of Mickey Hart as a second drummer in 1967 and Garcia's old friend Robert Hunter as the band's lyricist.The Dead finally hit their stride with the release of Live/Dead, a double album, in 1969. (They were always more comfortable on stage than in the studio.) Two studio albums in 1970, Workingman's Dead and American Beauty, found them exploring folk-rock and more tightly constructed song forms and, along with extensive touring, won them a much larger audience.In second half of the '70s, the Dead recorded a series of commercially-oriented albums for Arista, then concentrated on road work for the better part of the '80s. In the Dark, released in 1987, was their first studio album in seven years. It sold a million copies and produced the band's first Top Ten hit in "Touch of Grey." The Dead continued to tour, notably doing shows with Bob Dylan, and at the start of the '90s, they began to release vintage material on their own Grateful Dead Merchandising label. Garcia died of heart failure on August 9, 1995. A few months after his death, the surviving members of the Grateful Dead disbanded. ~ William Ruhlmann