1965-1995Jerry GarciaGuitar, vocals1965-1995
Bob WeirGuitar, vocals1965-1995
Ron "Pigpen" McKernanKeyboards, harmonica, vocals1965-1972
Phil LeshBass, vocals1965-1995
Bill KreutzmannDrums1965-1995
Mickey HartPercussion, drums1967-1971; 1974-1995
Tom ConstantenKeyboards1968-1971
Keith GodchauxKeyboards1971-1979
Donna GodchauxVocals1971-1979
Brent MydlandKeyboards1979-1990
Vince WelnickKeyboards1990-1995
Ben & Jerry's has an ice cream flavor called Cherry Garcia, named after the Grateful Dead frontman, Jerry Garcia, who donated the royalties to his favorite charities. Garcia also had lines of shirts and ties. His ties have been seen on people as influential as Bill Clinton and Al Gore.
The name Grateful Dead refers to a motif in English (and other cultures') folk tales and ballads in which a poor traveler spends his last coin to pay for the proper burial of a pauper, and is later rewarded for his good deed by some creature or person that reveals itself to be the spirit of the "grateful dead."
When The Dead were touring with
Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers in 1986, Garcia was recovering from drug addiction and fell into a diabetic coma for five days. He had to retrain himself to play guitar because of damage to his motor functions. His
comeback show was held December 15, 1986, at Oakland Alameda County Coliseum. They opened with "
Touch Of Grey," sending the audience into cheers and tears.
The Dead were into preserving the world's rainforests. On September 13, 1988, Dead members joined Greenpeace and the Rainforest Action Network for a United Nations press conference. A couple weeks later they added a 13th night to their Madison Square Garden concert series and donated all the money to conservation nonprofits.
Drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann composed percussion-heavy music for the Apocalypse Now soundtrack in 1979. It's considered one of the great works of American cinema.
Jerry Garcia died in his room at Serenity Knolls, a treatment facility in Forest Knolls, California. He was there battling his heroin addiction and died of a heart attack. His death marked the end of the Grateful Dead.
There were sections at Dead shows specifically designed for the hearing impaired. They were seated next to the speakers and given a person to translate the lyrics into sign language. These fans were lovingly dubbed "deafheads." Some would hold large balloons against their chests and fingertips so that they could feel the pulses of the sound waves coming from the speakers.
At the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, the Dead played a set in between The Who and Jimi Hendrix. They also played at Woodstock on the second day between Canned Heat and Creedence Clearwater Revival.
Their Woodstock performance straddled the night of Saturday, August 16, and the early morning of Sunday, August 17. One would think the Woodstock scene was tailor made for the Dead, but it didn't go well, at least by Dead frontman Jerry Garcia's own estimation:
"We played such a bad set at Woodstock. The weekend was great, but our set was terrible. We were all pretty smashed, and it was at night. Like we knew there were a half million people out there, but we couldn't see one of them. There were about a hundred people on stage with us, and everyone was scared that it was gonna collapse. On top of that, it was raining or wet, so that every time we touched our guitars, we'd get these electrical shocks. Blue sparks were flying out of our guitars."
Garcia seemed to feel things weren't going well during the show. Before starting "
Dark Star," the third song of their set, he addressed the audience to let them know the band's timing was off. Still, the Dead drove on through their set, only stopping a little short because their amps blew during a "Love Light" jam.
Grateful Dead keyboard player Keith Godchaux and backup singer
Donna Jean Godchaux were husband and wife. Keith had played piano for English musician and
Traffic cofounder Dave Mason.
Drummer Mickey Hart was kicked out of his high school band because his teacher didn't think he could keep a beat.
Bill Kreutzmann loves diving and filmed a 50-minute documentary called Ocean Spirit.
No Grateful Dead show was ever the same.
Donna Jean Godchaux told Songfacts: "Whether it was tempo or the whole sense of the song and the vibe of the song, everything changed so often and with every show, which is why the Grateful Dead audience didn't want to miss a show. Even though they could've played the same song again the next night, the same show again, it was going to be different and they knew it. That's the beauty of the Grateful Dead and that's the attraction that so many hundreds of thousands of people had to the Grateful Dead: You go to a concert and it's an adventure."
The fans of the Grateful Dead are known as Deadheads, and have often been called the best fans in rock n' roll. They frequently followed the Dead from town to town, attempting to see as many shows as possible. They usually wore tie dyed clothing and would also engage in the use of many illegal substances.
Garcia was in the army for nine months in 1959 before meeting longtime collaborator Robert Hunter in Palo Alto.
Percussionist/keyboardist Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, guitarist/vocalist Bob Weir and Jerry Garcia were members of Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions in 1964. Also in the band were John Dawson (New Riders of the Purple Sage) and Bob Matthews, later a Dead engineer and founder of Alembic Electronics.
They were the house band for Ken Kesey's Acid Tests. These were public LSD parties held before the drug was outlawed.
They lost three keyboard players during their run: Pigpen McKernan died of cirrhosis, Keith Godchaux was killed in a car accident (The Dead fired him a year earlier) and keyboardist Brent Mydland died of a drug overdose.
By the end of the 1960s, the Grateful Dead owed Warner Brothers $100,000 for studio time. Their first three albums were not commercially successful.
Pigpen's last show with the band was at the Hollywood Bowl on June 17, 1972. He died of liver disease a year later. Considered to be a key to the band's heart and soul, his presence went way beyond his musicianship, and the band felt something irreplaceable had been lost with him, even though they chose to drive on. Garcia and Weir both later said that Pigpen had more natural talent and charisma than anyone else in the band.
Vince Welnick, the keyboard player for The Grateful Dead from 1990-1995, was a member of the Tubes, a San Francisco band of the late 1970s and early '80s. They combined music with performance art and political commentary. Sometimes,
Bruce Hornsby would sit in on piano during concerts.
Starting in 1984, they let fans tape their shows, which made them a lot more popular. They did it because the bootleggers that gathered in front of the soundboard drove the audio engineer nuts.
They got very little radio play and did not sell many albums, but they are one of the top-grossing concert acts of all time.
The band members were friends with Lithuanian basketball player Sarunas Marciulionis, and when the Lithuanian team needed money to play in the 1992 Olympics, The Dead helped them out. Lithuania won the bronze and wore tie-dyed uniforms on the podium to repay the favor.
The name "Grateful Dead" was chosen from the dictionary. Some claim it was a Funk & Wagnalls, others, the
Bardo Thodol (
Tibetan Book Of the Dead), but according to Phil Lesh in
his biography (page 62), "Jer (Garcia) picked up an old Britannica World Language Dictionary... in that silvery elf-voice he said to me, 'Hey, man, how about the Grateful Dead?'" The definition there was "A song meant to show a lost soul to the other side."
In 1994 the Hotel Triton in San Francisco created the
first Jerry Garcia room specifically for Deadheads.
In 1995, Garcia designed a suite at the Beverly Hills Prescott Hotel (Room 807) that was available for occupancy for a short time that year. It featured Garcia's paintings, pillows, bathrobes and towels.
The sound system they set up for shows was called "The Wall Of Sound." It was a huge array of speakers and amplifiers that required four trucks to transport. There were two copies of The Wall, as one would travel to the next show while the other was in use.
Throughout their career the Grateful Dead played 317 cover songs and 184 original tunes.
They performed a quickly arranged concert the night before the 2008 Super Tuesday primaries in support of Barack Obama. The Deadheads For Obama concert was the band's first show since their 2004 reunion tour. According to Phil Lesh, it was the first time they've ever performed at a political rally.
The Grateful Dead played the final concert at the Winterland Arena in San Francisco on New Years Eve 1978. The Dead celebrated the closing of the iconic venue at an all-night party and invited some guests, including the actor Dan Aykroyd, who provided the midnight countdown. The guests were treated to a hot buffet breakfast at dawn when the show ended.
Bob Weir died on January 10, 2026 after a battle with cancer. Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux
remembered him as "a guitar player unlike any other, and a songwriter who created some of the most interesting, exciting, and oddly-timed songs in rock history, Bobby was also the unabashed rock star in the Grateful Dead."
The Dead were one of the few long-lasting bands to have a member dedicated exclusively to writing lyrics: Robert Hunter. He was a musician as well, but his role in the Dead was lyricist. His words brought poetry and mysticism that became an inextricable part of the Dead brand. In 1990 his lyrics were collected in the book Box of Rain. Hunter died in 2019 at 78.
They originally called themselves The Warlocks. The first time they used the name The Grateful Dead was on December 4, 1965, at a San Jose Acid Test.
The band's third album, Aoxomoxoa, was the primary cause of their early financial trouble. The group wanted to make a true work of art and invested lots of time and money into it. After, they realized that high art and business are rarely compatible and that they had to become more practical.
Founding bassist Phil Lesh died on October 25, 2024 at 84. On what would have been his 85th birthday, Port Chester, New York, named part of a street after Lesh. The section of road runs outside The Capitol Theatre, a venue the Dead played many times, especially in their early years.
