In late 1967 at a Count Basie concert at the famed Fillmore Auditorium two brothers in the groove were introduced by a stranger who quickly disappeared into the technicolor ethers forever altering the course of modern music. Mickey Hart and his new rhythm devil brethren Billy Kreutzmann left the show that night with sticks in […]

It’s no secret Jerry Garcia was a freak of nature when it came to juggling his time with the Grateful Dead and multiple side projects. In 1970 alone, he was riding high on the FM radio success of American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead, which kept the band truckin’ endlessly and tirelessly from university to city […]

If you’ve been lucky, you’ve found yourself in some college dorm, surrounded by DayGlo tapestries, Nag Champa wafting in the air, stinging your eyes. Your singularly nicknamed but gracious hosts and their friends argue. It’s always the same argument: over the so-called greatest Grateful Dead show ever. More often than not, they were arguing about […]

How many Deadheads does it take to screw in a light bulb? 1000. One to do it and 999 to tape it. There was a time when yellow envelopes stuffed to the gills with Maxell XL2s and patchouli-soaked trading lists were the norm. Maybe those packages would lead to being invited to a fellow head’s […]

1974 is one of the greatest and most transformative years within the Grateful Dead’s history, with two major events setting the tone: the official unveiling of the infamous ‘Wall of Sound’ and the band ominously playing “The Last One”, on October 20th, marking the beginning of an extended hiatus. The Wall of Sound was the brainchild […]

Welcome to Dead Notes #11. Forty-two years ago, in the early days of March of 1973, Pigpen and a photographer friend sauntered into the band’s rehearsal space at Stinson Beach Community Center with the hope to have his ‘final’ picture taken with the group. They instead, as friends often do, razed him about his request […]

Dead Notes: “Where all the print is blood. Where all the pages are my days…” Late last year we compiled all our Dead Notes columns into a print ’zine that heavily nodded to the early original issues of Relix, fan’s parking lot flyers and iconic pieces of Dead history. Also accompanying the ‘zine was the […]