Grateful Dead

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On May 5th, 1965, a new band called The Warlocks debuts at a pizza parlor on the peninsula south of San Francisco. It includes Jerry Garcia (a former bluegrass banjo player), Ron 'Pigpen' McKernan (a blues harmonica player), Bob Weir (a folk guitarist), Bill Kreutzmann (an R & B drummer), and, soon after, Phil Lesh, a jazz trumpeter and classical composer, on bass. They begin working at a variety of area bars, but as fall passes, their music, influenced by John Coltrane-style improvisation and the psychedelic experience, grows much stranger.

The Acid Tests crest in size at the three-day (January 21-23) Trips Festival at Longshoreman's Hall in San Francisco, where thousands of people experience Rimbaud's "systematic derangement of the senses." With their new soundman and backer, Owsley Stanley, the Dead settle for some months in Los Angeles to woodshed, then return home in June to find a thriving rock scene centered on Bill Graham's Fillmore Auditorium and Chet Helms' Avalon Ballroom.

Hippies across Northern California come together to celebrate all of life and nothing special at the Be-In in Golden Gate Park on January 14, 1967. Almost all of the major SF rock bands, plus Beat poets who act as spiritual elder brothers, join in a very special afternoon's delight. The Dead record their first album, The- Grateful Dead, for Warner Bros. in January ' it's rather rushed, but a start. In June they travel east for the first time and present themselves to New York City.

The Dead always seek independence for themselves, and they begin the year with a self-organized tour ('The Great Northwest') and then in March take over the Carousel Ballroom, running it on their own for some months. They also take charge of their music, leaving the conventional recording world (along with their producer) behind as they try to fuse studio and live recordings in a flawed, magnificent, very strange masterpiece called Anthem of the Sun, out in July.

As 1969 passes, a number of the Dead's experiments begin to bear ripe, beautiful fruit. They've become a fantastic experimental jazz/rock fusion band, which they document with the world's first live 16 track recording, Live Dead, in February/March. They have a solid home-away-from-home in New York City at the Fillmore East, and shows there are legendary. This is good, because in between the coasts their audience continues to grow very slowly.

1970's intense. T.C. leaves the band in late January. The band's 'busted down on Bourbon Street' on January 31st. In March they discover their manager, Mickey Hart's father Lenny, has been stealing them blind (they're already hugely in debt to the record company). Only the music is sane; they enter the studio in March and in three weeks record Workingman's Dead, fulfilling Garcia and Hunter's work of the past year. It comes out in June. They add a regular opening act, the New Riders of the Purple Sage (Garcia plays pedal steel in it), and their shows stretch ever longer.

Always changes: Mickey Hart retires from the road in mid-February, and in the same series of shows, John Barlow replaces Robert Hunter as Bob Weir's lyricist and songwriting partner. Also at those shows, the band takes part in an experiment testing the relationship of altered states, dreams, and ESP run by the distinguished Dr. Stanley Krippner. It seems to work' In the course of the spring, the band records Grateful Dead, also known as 'Skullfuck,' their second live album. In between helping close Fillmore East and Fillmore West, in June they enjoy a one-show adventure in Herouville, France.

'72 will always be remembered for the greatest Grateful Dead tour of them all, a two-month journey across Europe in April and May that produces a great album ' Europe '72 ' and even better memories. Though they only play 20-some very odd shows, they somehow still perform at an incredibly high level. And they have adventures, such as needing to escape the wrath of an audience enraged by a cancelled show by sneaking out the back door. Being the Dead, they make up the show a few weeks later in magical fashion.

New equipment, experiments, and research are the ongoing theme of this year and the next, as the band reacts to bigger shows with an aggressive program of creative energy directed at their sound system. Pigpen dies on March 8th, and the original Grateful Dead is nevermore. On April 19th, the band approves the wildest experiment of them all, the formation of the Grateful Dead Record Company, which will dominate the band's business life for the next three years; there's also various satellite businesses like their booking agency, Out of Town Tours, and travel agency, Fly by Night.

On March 23rd, the Dead test their new sound setup at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, and The Wall is born. From then until the tour year ends in October, Dead shows take place in front of the most remarkable sound system ever devised ' 641 speakers arrayed in a wall behind the band that fills the entire stage and rises about 25 feet high. It is living thunder ' and costs too much to support, both financially and in terms of human energy. On June 27th the band releases its second G.D.R.C.