Appearing in many cultures, it is a folktale in which the protagonist resolves the debt of a deceased stranger, and later receives karmic repayment from their spirit incarnate: the Grateful Dead.ĭebuting with their new name at the first public Acid Test thrown by author Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters in December 1965, the relationship cemented the band’s part in the multidisciplinary Bay Area arts scene starting to flourish around the use of still-legal LSD. They debuted in May of 1965 and quickly drafted in Garcia’s friend, the lapsed experimental composer Phil Lesh (bass, vocals).ĭiscovering a single by another band called the Warlocks-most likely a Massachusetts garage rock quintet-the now-former California Warlocks resorted to stoned bibliomancy for their new name, picking “Grateful Dead” at random out of a dictionary. Fronted by Ron “Pigpen” McKernan (organ, vocals, harmonic, and later percussion), the blues enthusiast who’d urged them to go electric, the new band also included Garcia’s occasional substitute teacher Bob Weir (guitar, vocals) along with Bill Kreutzmann (drums, percussion).

Assembling a jug band with his coworkers at the Menlo Park music store where he taught, the happily sloppy Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions plugged in and transformed into the Warlocks by 1965. Creating an artistic ecosystem all their own, the Grateful Dead would transform American music and arguably even America itself.Īfter a comically disastrous stint in the Army and discharge in late 1960, Jerry Garcia (guitar, vocals) had spent an intense four years immersed in traditional American music, turning himself into a virtuoso acoustic guitarist and banjoist. Never playing the same setlist twice (except that once), the Dead’s musical legacy remains unfathomably rich, spread across a combined body of live and studio recordings. Emerging as a vessel for a vibrant global counterculture, they would create an unparalleled original songbook through 30 years of recording and touring. Fusing rock and roll, folk, and jazz with avant-garde, visual, and literary traditions-and virtually inventing a new way to play music in the process-they became one of the most popular, enduring, and influential bands in American history. Formed as a quintet in California in 1965, the Grateful Dead became as much a folktale as the story from which they drew their name.

Dead set space grateful dead