Days Between Lyrics

The King of Rock and Roll Elvis Presley played guitar, bass and piano all by ear. He couldn’t read or write music and had no formal lessons, but could hear a song and reportedly play it after only one listen.You don’t need to be able to read music in order to be a great musician. From Hendrix to Zimmer, these famous faces will make you question just how much musical education is needed to achieve greatness.

The Queen of Soul herself, Aretha Franklin could not read music. She music by ear, having perfected this talent by spending her childhood singing gospel at New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit, Michigan.The singer-songwriter Jimi Hendrix reportedly taught himself to play by ear on the electric guitar, and would use words and colours to express how he wanted the music to sound.

Taylor Swift shot to stardom with her first album at the age of 17. While a talented multi-instrumentalist, Swift revealed in a Rolling Stone interview that she does not read music. She says, “I would not have majored in music because when music becomes technical for me I don’t like that part of it.”American singer-songwriter, Bob Dylan is regarded by some as one of the greatest songwriters of all time. Notably, Dylan was inducted into the Hall of Fame without knowing how to read music.

English rock and blues guitarist, singer, and songwriter, Eric Clapton ranked second in the Rolling Stone’s list of the ‘100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time’ despite not being able to read music.“None of us could read music… None of us can write it.” John Lennon admitted this about the band in a 1980 Playboy interview, “but as pure musicians, as inspired humans to make the noise, they [Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr] are as good as anybody.”

Stevie Wonder has been blind since shortly after his birth. He played multiple instruments from an early age, including the piano, harmonica, and drums and was signed to Motown at the age of 11.

Unconventionally, the Grateful Dead made the release of live albums a common occurrence throughout their career. Because many were recently recorded and included previously unreleased original material, they often filled the role of traditional studio albums. An integral part of the contemporaneous evolution of the band, such live albums are included in this section.The third series of concert releases is Dick’s Picks, which are based on two-track concert recordings. Unlike multi-track recordings, two-track recordings cannot be remixed, only remastered. Therefore, the sound quality of the Dick’s Picks series, while generally very good, is not quite as high as that of the other official releases of live recordings, as explained in the various “caveat emptor” notices on the CD boxes.

The Road Trips series of albums is the successor to Dick’s Picks. The series started after the Grateful Dead signed a ten-year contract with Rhino Records to release the band’s archival material. The Road Trips releases are created using two-track concert recordings, but unlike Dick’s Picks they each contain material from multiple concerts of a tour. The production of the CDs is supervised by vault archivist David Lemieux, with mastering by sound engineer Jeffrey Norman. Like the later Dick’s Picks, the Road Trips albums are released in HDCD format.Volume 15 and later were released in HDCD format. This provides enhanced sound quality when played on CD players with HDCD capability, and is fully compatible with regular CD players.In 1991, the band started releasing retrospective live albums, a practice that has continued to the present time. There are several series of these albums. The “traditional” live releases were created by remixing multitrack recordings of concerts. A second series of live albums, from 1993 to 2005, was Dick’s Picks, concert recordings selected for their musical excellence but made using stereo recordings that did not allow the different musical parts to be remixed. Another series of albums was released in 2005 and 2006 in the form of digital downloads. This was followed by a series from 2007 to 2011 called Road Trips, and then, starting in 2012, by Dave’s Picks.The Dick’s Picks series, which started in 1993, was named after Grateful Dead tape vault archivist Dick Latvala. Latvala selected shows with the band’s approval and oversaw the production of the albums. After Latvala’s death in 1999, David Lemieux became the Dead’s tape archivist and took over responsibility for producing subsequent Dick’s Picks releases, as well as his own Dave’s Picks series. Latvala and Lemieux worked with recording engineer Jeffrey Norman, who was in charge of mastering the CDs. The last Dick’s Pick’s compilation was released in 2005.Following is a list of Grateful Dead live albums in recording date order. The dates listed are the principal recording dates and do not include bonus tracks or bonus discs.

The discography of the rock band the Grateful Dead includes more than 200 albums, the majority of them recorded live in concert. The band has also released more than two dozen singles and a number of videos. In the summer of 2005 the Dead began offering download versions of both their existing live releases, and a new Internet-only series, The Grateful Dead Download Series, that was available through their own online store (which offered the albums in both 256 kbit/s mp3 files and FLAC files – a preferred audio standard for those who archive Dead and other fan-made live recordings on the Internet) and the iTunes Music Store (which offered them in their 256 kbit/s AAC format). Not surprisingly, these Internet-only albums have met with the same success as their CD-based brethren. The Download Series is no longer available for purchase on the Grateful Dead’s website. However, they are still available for purchase from the iTunes Music Store as well as from Nugs.net, which offer them in FLAC, Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) and mp3 formats. Amazon also has them available in mp3 format. The Grateful Dead formed in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1965 amid the counterculture of the 1960s. They had many musical influences, and their music evolved to a great degree over time. They made extensive use of improvisation, and are considered one of the originators of jam band music. The founding members were Jerry Garcia on guitar and vocals, Bob Weir on guitar and vocals, Phil Lesh on bass and vocals, Bill Kreutzmann on drums, and Ron “Pigpen” McKernan on organ, harmonica, percussion, and vocals. Pigpen died in 1973, but the other four remained with the band for its entire 30-year history. Second drummer Mickey Hart was also in the band for most of that time. Others who were band members at different times were keyboardists Tom Constanten, Keith Godchaux, Brent Mydland, Vince Welnick, and Bruce Hornsby, and vocalist Donna Jean Godchaux.

While they were together, from 1965 to 1995, the Grateful Dead released thirteen studio albums and nine contemporary live albums. The nine live albums were recently recorded and mostly contained previously unreleased original material. They filled the role of traditional studio albums, and were an integral part of the contemporaneous evolution of the band. (The Dead’s second album, Anthem of the Sun, was an experimental amalgam of studio and live material.)In 2017, the Grateful Dead began offering the 27 singles released throughout the band’s history on 7-inch colored vinyl, for sale exclusively on their website, dead.net. Each 7-inch vinyl features remastered audio, and packaging designed by artists for each single and B-side.

In 2011, Hopkin’s version of the song was used by Nando’s South Africa in a satirical advertisement featuring Robert Mugabe as the ‘Last Dictator Standing’. The advert was axed quickly, due to controversy and condemnation from pro-Mugabe loyalists. On Christmas 1969, the President of Equatorial Guinea, Francisco Macías Nguema, had 150 alleged coup plotters executed in the national stadium while the amplifier system played the Mary Hopkin recording of “Those Were the Days”. “Those Were the Days” was catalogue number APPLE 2. (The APPLE 1 number had been given to an unreleased version of Frank Sinatra’s “The Lady Is a Tramp”, recorded specially in 1968, for Maureen Starkey’s 22nd birthday, as a gift from Ringo Starr, under the name of “The Lady is a Champ”.) It was the second single to be released on the Apple label, the first — “Hey Jude” by the Beatles —had retained the sequential catalogue numbers used by Parlophone (in the UK) and Capitol (in the US). Hopkin’s recording was produced by Paul McCartney with an arrangement by Richard Hewson and became a number-one hit on the UK Singles Chart. In the United States, Hopkin’s recording reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100 (held out of the top spot for three weeks by “Hey Jude” by The Beatles) and topped the Billboard Easy Listening charts for six weeks. In the Netherlands, it topped the charts for two consecutive weeks. The Russian origin of the melody was accentuated by an instrumentation that was unusual for a top-ten pop record, including balalaika, clarinet, hammered dulcimer or cimbalom, tenor banjo and children’s chorus, giving a klezmer feel to the song. Mary Hopkin played acoustic guitar on the recording, and Paul McCartney also played acoustic guitar and possibly percussion. The cimbalom was played by Gilbert Webster. At the peak of the song’s success, a New York company used the melody in a commercial for Rokeach gefilte fish, arguing that the tune was an old Russian folk-tune and thus in the public domain. (The commercial included the line “The perfect dish, Rokeach Gefilte Fish” where the English-language song would go “Those were the days, oh yes, those were the days.”) Raskin successfully sued and won a settlement, since he had slightly altered the tune to fit his lyrics and had taken out the valid new copyright.In the early 1960s, Raskin, with his wife Francesca, played folk music around Greenwich Village in New York, including White Horse Tavern. Raskin, who had grown up hearing the song, and his wife wrote new English lyrics to the old Russian music and then copyrighted both music and lyrics in his own name. The Limeliters subsequently released a recording of the song on their 1962 LP Folk Matinee. The Raskins were international performers and had played London’s “Blue Angel” every year, always closing their show with the song. Paul McCartney frequented the club and, being quite taken with the song, he attempted to get several singers or groups (including the early Moody Blues) to record it. Failing at that, after the formation of the Beatles’ own Apple Records label, McCartney immediately recorded Mary Hopkin performing the song at Abbey Road Studios in London. He later said, “I thought it was very catchy, it had something, it was a good treatment of nostalgia… (Hopkin) picked it up very easily, as if she’d known it for years.” The song was eventually recorded in over twenty languages and by many different artists, including Gene and Francesca.

The song appears in the 1953 British/French movie Innocents in Paris, in which it was sung with its original Russian lyrics by the Russian Tzigane chanteuse Ludmila Lopato. Mary Hopkin’s 1968 recording of it with Gene Raskin’s lyric was a chart-topping hit in much of the Northern Hemisphere. On most recordings of the song, Raskin is credited as the sole writer, even though he wrote only the later English lyrics (which are not an English translation of the Russian lyrics) and not the music.

Mary Hopkin’s 1968 debut single of “Those Were the Days”, which was produced by Paul McCartney of the Beatles, and arranged by Richard Hewson, became a number one hit on the UK Singles Chart and on the Canadian RPM Magazine charts. The song also reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100, behind “Hey Jude” by the Beatles. It was number one in the first edition of the French National Hit Parade launched by the Centre d’Information et de Documentation du Disque. The song was featured on the US version of the debut album Post Card.The UK and United States recording’s B-side was Pete Seeger’s “Turn! Turn! Turn!”, which had been a United States number-one hit for The Byrds in 1965.

“Those Were the Days” is a song credited to Gene Raskin, who put a new English lyric to the Russian romance song “Дорогой длинною” (Romance transliteration “Dorogoj dlinnoju”, literally “By the long road”), composed by Boris Fomin (1900–1948) with words by the poet Konstantin Podrevsky. It deals with reminiscence upon youth and romantic idealism. It also deals with tavern activities, which include drinking, singing and dancing.Georgian singer Tamara Tsereteli (1900–1968) and Russian singer Alexander Vertinsky made what were probably the earliest recordings of the song, in 1925 and 1926 respectively.

The price of ambition is manifested by a “golden bowl, polished”, also the “Hearts of Summer, still tender and green”, each one “left on shelves collecting dust, not knowing what they mean” The final couplet in the song sizes the ultimate cost of a life’s worth of compromise, “hoping love would not forsake | the days that lie between… lie between”Additionally, we and our advertising partners store and/or access information on your device and also process personal data, like unique identifiers, browsing activity, and other standard information sent by your device including your IP address. This information is collected over time and used for personalized ads, ad measurement, audience insights, and product development specific to our ads program.

The second verse begins with that patterned incantation of days and days and days between, quickly moving into the suggestion of mirage, “When phantom ships with phantom sails | Set to sea on phantom tides”. Once again intoning that pattern of 3 before driving into a phantasmagorical collusion where dreams comingle with waking life:When Robert Hunter spoke to Jerry Garcia for one of the last times, back in 1995, Jerry noted ‘Days Between’ and said, “Your words never stuck in my throat.” Which struck Hunter because Jerry wasn’t one to offer appreciation or hand out compliments. As the last major song to be introduced to the Dead canon, it’s perhaps the perfect song for that honor. It embodies everything Jerry had seen, and most likely captured the inevitability he felt as his days wound down. His voice, world-worn and weathered, beautifully conveys the heartache in the lyric.

I’ve seldom heard a song so imbued with that specific sense of protracted mortality. It reminds me of a quote from the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, that time “persists merely as a consequence of the events taking place in it.” If ‘Days Between’ has a philosophy on time, I’d say that’s it, because my reading on the lyric is that death is not invoked as something that will happen, but rather something that’s been happening all along, from the first day to the last. As Bob Dylan offered on ‘Time Out Of Mind’, “It’s not dark yet… but it’s getting there.”‘Days Between’ is something I discovered not through bootlegs, but on the collection ‘So Many Roads: 1965-1995’. The closest thing to a studio recording, this version was recorded at Club Front rehearsal from 2/18/93 (it was then performed 41x live) and has quickly become one of my favorite Dead tracks. The song is gorgeous, both musically and lyrically. It’s also one of the more atmospheric songs the Dead ever recorded, and lyrically full of portent and aged wisdom. If Jerry lived long enough to record his ‘Time Out of Mind’ (Bob Dylan’s vulnerable, dark night of the soul masterpiece), this song surely would’ve been a part. ‘Days Between’ is the shadow of a candle erratically flickering against the wall, a pearl of light on an ever-diminished wick. It’s been said that the sun sets slowly, and then it sets fast. But like the sun’s daily arc, the flame in ‘Days Between’ doesn’t burn clean and even. Rather it consumes the wick with increasing urgency as the passing sands run dry. Comprised of 4 verses, each verse in the song contains 14 lines that begin with a common motif that becomes an incantation of sorts:

The Grateful Dead’s lyricist Robert Hunter has said that his 1993 collaboration with Jerry Garcia ‘Days Between’ was not just one of the last songs they ever wrote together, but also a breakthrough that teased new possibilities for their songwriting partnership. Robert Hunter typically handed Jerry complete lyrics, leaving it to meter to differentiate verse and chorus, and Jerry would compose the melody, sometimes blocking off a couplet for the occasional bridge. But ‘Days Between’ brought a new process where the two collaborators sat side-by-side, writing and composing together in time and space. Hunter fed Jerry the first verse (with very “irregular” lines), and Jerry worked out a melody. And while he worked on the melody, Hunter moved on to the next verse. While one moved forwards, the other stepped back, and they discovered the song together as they watched it unfurl.After that suggestion of trophies sitting high on the shelf, serving no purpose, providing no comfort, ultimately bereft of meaning and value, that last line issues a crushing defeat to a life lived, winding down, now relegated to the past. After all, those “days between” will bleed into one another, and in doing so they amount to the content of a life. What the narrator sees in the twilight of his life is the simplicity of joy, the gift of love, all that’s tragically left behind.

Existential regret begins to creep into the third verse, which describes a restless compulsion to spend our days searching, wandering, pursuing the “promise of the glow”. That would be the prospect of riches or glory that consume our days and ultimately break the pact of kinship and connection (personified through home, or childhood).Hello there! We take your privacy seriously, and want to be as transparent as possible. So: We (and our partners) use cookies to collect some personal data from you. Some of these cookies we absolutely need in order to make things work, and others you can choose in order to optimize your experience while using our site and services. It’s up to you!Lyrically, the first two verses most closely approximate the feeling of the music. With its circular organ figure and rising chord progression, the music reveals itself from a fog like that aforementioned phantom ghost ship. There, the ship appears from the ephemeral mist of imagination, swimming with remembrance and loss. In Phil Lesh’s autobiography, “Searching for the Sound”, he describes ‘Days Between’ as “Achingly nostalgic, ‘Days Between’ evokes the past. The music climbs laboriously out of shadows, growing and peaking with each verse, only to fall back each time in hopeless resignation.” The music definitely has a pulsing undercurrent that’s driving toward something of worth, but like the lyrics, there’s a certain resignation that Phil speaks of, a defeated sense of futility. The music’s circular build creates the suggestion of motion, provides some semblance of progress, but each verse inevitably winds up back where it began. So the music is given to rise, but ultimately doomed to fall, and can be best exemplified through metaphor of the tides that chase the moon in a rhythmic, repetitive cycle. As the water rolls up on the shore, its lapping motion washes clean its footsteps, erasing its history and ensuring its own dissipation. This is the song’s perspective.In terms of pure emotional resonance, ‘Days Between’ also reminds me of the penultimate scene from the first season of ‘Mad Men’, also one of my favorite scenes from the whole series. In that season finale, while hovering over a small conference room table, Don pitches Kodak and explains the exact sentiment that Robert Hunter writes about. Don speaks of the power of nostalgia, explaining that in Greek, “nostalgia” means “the pain from an old wound… It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.” But while he pitches his concept of the Carousel slide machine, “a time machine that goes backwards and forwards and takes us to a place where we ache to go again”, we see an assortment of family photos. It’s a beautiful, idyllic American family, but in cherry-picking his favorite moments, Don shows us the father and husband he could only aspire to be. In that sense, Don’s exactly what Robert Hunter describes in ‘Days Between’, a character who’d forsaken his love for the lure of riches, one more man who walked halfway around the world on the “promise of the glow”. Like the narrator, all Don ever wanted was “to learn and love and grow”, or as he puts it, home is the one place where he knew he was loved. Ironically by this scene at the end of season 1, Don had already seen the folly of his ways yet he would continue to repeat those mistakes through 6 more seasons. Which makes me remember that when this song was written and performed, Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter were just past 50. At 50 we’re not old men by any stretch… but we’re old enough to understand our nature.Across their 30 years together, the Grateful Dead played well over 2,000 concerts. In that time, their setlists evolved radically with each passing year. Early concerts would feature R&B covers, while just a year later, the band had a host of psychedelic originals ready to blow minds in and around San Francisco.In fact, according to most sources, Weir’s go-to songs represented the most-played songs in the band’s entire catalogue. Formalising the exact details of the Dead’s live history is virtually impossible: despite being the best-catalogued band in the history of popular music, there are still missing tapes, incorrect setlists, and general blank spots littered throughout the band’s live archives. We’ll never know exactly how many times ‘Dark Star’ was played, for instance, but we can get pretty close.

With each new incarnation and tour came a new batch of songs that reflected the band’s past. Covers were always an essential part of the Grateful Dead experience, from Bob Weir’s fascination with “cowboy songs” to Jerry Garcia’s infatuation with the music of Bob Dylan. Everything from New Orleans calypso to proto-punk garage rock was played at one point or another by the Dead, and each new song would be filtered through their unique lens.

That being said, some songs were perennial favourites. During the late 1960s, songs like ‘Dark Star’ and ‘Turn On Your Lovelight’ were played nearly every night, owing as much to the band’s enjoyment of them as they did to their restricted setlists at the time. With the explosion of the songwriting collaboration between Garcia and Robert Hunter, the early 1970s saw an onslaught of new songs that helped define the band’s identity. Whichever source you prefer to cite, Weir is the clear winner for band members with the most frequently replayed songs. Some of his other signature tracks, including ‘Sugar Magnolia’ and ‘The Other One’, also hover around the top of most estimations. The only song that Garcia sings lead on that could contend for a spot at the top is ‘China Cat Sunflower’, which was played at least 550 times over the course of 27 years. {{#message}}{{{message}}}{{/message}}{{^message}}It appears your submission was successful. Even though the server responded OK, it is possible the submission was not processed. Please contact the developer of this form processor to improve this message. Learn More{{/message}}

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When it comes to actual songs, most Dead-ologists agree that Weir is responsible for four of the five most-played songs in the band’s live career. The debate as to which one reigns supreme is uncertain: the Dead-specific online database whitegum.com puts Weir’s cover of ‘Me and My Uncle’ as the most-played song with 616 performances. However, setlist.com contends that Weir’s original jam vehicle ‘Playing in the Band’ was the most-played song, with their math totalling its number of performances at 676 (setlist.com also has ‘Me and My Uncle’ being played 629 times).Comparatively, co-vocalist Weir had a smaller songbook, especially when his own writing partnership with Hunter fell through. Eventually, Weir found a permanent collaborator through his boarding school buddy, John Perry Barlow. But Weir was expected to carry roughly equal vocal weight, something that caused him to repeat songs more frequently than Garcia. “These Days” was recorded in 1968 by The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band on their album Rare Junk, by Tom Rush on his 1970 self-titled album, by Jennifer Warnes (as “Jennifer”) in 1972 (this version was produced by John Cale, who also played on Nico’s Chelsea Girl album), by Kenny Loggins’ first band, Gator Creek, around the same time, and by Iain Matthews on his 1973 album Valley Hi. Nico’s “These Days” was included on both versions of The Royal Tenenbaums soundtrack. Later, a 2002 Kmart commercial looped the guitar part from the Nico recording. There was a new wave of treatments of the song, with some emulating either Nico or Browne while others reimagined it in other ways.Given this new attention, Browne began playing “These Days” in concert on a regular basis, but on acoustic guitar and in a new style. He now started with the fingerpicking guitar part but continued in a technique and feel that falls between the Nico and Browne recordings. He said “And now I’ve learned how to play the Nico version, which we sort of made up for her. [Imitates Nico’s version] Fabulous you know…” It was included on Browne’s 2005 live album Solo Acoustic, Vol. 1, including a humorous spoken introduction about the origins of the song. Another arrangement was constructed for his 2006 tour of Spain with Lindley and percussionist Tino di Geraldo and captured on the 2010 live album Love Is Strange: En Vivo Con Tino. A Spanish-accented vocal from guest singer Luz Casal was set against Browne’s acoustic guitar, Lindley’s violin, and di Geraldo’s cajón; Allmusic stated that the result “makes an already beautiful song exquisite”.

“These Days” is a song written by Jackson Browne and recorded by numerous artists. Browne wrote the song at age 16; its lyrics deal with loss and regret. It was first recorded by Nico in 1967 for her album Chelsea Girl, and Nico’s arrangement was recorded by several other artists. Tom Rush recorded the tune with a string arrangement for his album Tom Rush in 1970. Gregg Allman recorded a new arrangement of the song for his 1973 LP Laid Back, and Browne released his own version, based on Allman’s arrangement, on For Everyman, also in 1973. “These Days” has since been recorded by many other artists, and remains one of Browne’s most enduring compositions.

By 1973, Jackson Browne had become a successful recording artist, and not having raided his back catalogue for the first album, was willing to do so for his second, For Everyman. Recorded at the Sunset Sound Factory, the song had evolved considerably from the version Nico had recorded in 1967. Some lyrics were changed or omitted, such as a couple of lines about “rambling” and “gambling”. The fingerpicking guitar figure was replaced with flatpicking, and the slower-paced instrumentation was typical of early 1970s Southern Californian folk rock — drums, bass, piano, acoustic guitar, but most prominently with David Lindley’s slide guitar, a feature of Browne’s early albums, but also with Jim Keltner on drums and David Paich on piano. Nico’s cool delivery was replaced by Browne’s singer-songwriter-style approach, resulting in a vocal that Philadelphia City Paper later called “unique, and piercingly sad”. The version was recorded at around the same time as a version by Gregg Allman, which Jackson thanked in his liner notes in For Everyman; Browne based the musical arrangement of his 1973 recording partly on Allman’s version; the two versions were released within days of each other in October, 1973. Allman’s version would appear on his debut solo album, Laid Back. (and following by a year or two the loss of bandmates Duane Allman and Berry Oakley in motorcycle accidents).

German model and singer Nico was the first to record “These Days” for release on her October 1967 album Chelsea Girl. The elaborate production featured a fairly fast fingerpicking electric guitar part by Browne, played in a descending pattern ending in a major 7th chord. The use of the instrument was suggested by artist and impresario Andy Warhol, Nico’s manager at the time, who was looking for something more “modern” than the acoustic guitar on the songwriter’s demo recording. This was combined with overdubbed strings and flutes, added after the fact by producer Tom Wilson without Nico’s knowledge. Set against these elements were the sad, world-weary lyrics, in Nico’s mannered, German-accented, lower-register vocals:Many years later, Browne described the inspiration he credited: “When [Allman] did it I thought that he really unlocked a power in that song that I sort of then emulated in my version. I started playing the piano. I wasn’t trying to sing it like Gregg; I couldn’t possibly. I took the cue, playin’ this slow walk. But it was written very sort of, kind of — [strums opening] — a little more flatpicking.”Nico disliked the strings and called the album “unlistenable” as a result. But nevertheless, the “ineffable sadness” and “grandeur of her melancholy” came through, according to Pitchfork.When Allman toured as a solo act, he generally kept “These Days” in his concert repertoire. Browne was a different story. It had appeared in his concerts since before he had a recording contract, and stayed in through the 1970s, usually played on piano in a surprising segue out of his biggest hit single, “Doctor My Eyes”. But by 1980 he had graduated from halls and outdoor amphitheatres to arenas, and “These Days” disappeared from his set lists, perhaps because he felt it no longer effective in those settings. Save for the occasional acoustic show or benefit show, the song was not heard again until the late 1990s, as Browne was again playing smaller venues, often solo, and where it began to reappear out of the “Doctor My Eyes” segue again.

According to Randall Roberts at the Los Angeles Times, the song has “quietly become a classic” over the years. Pitchfork Media’s 2006 ranking of “The 200 Greatest Songs of the 1960s” placed the Nico version of “These Days” at number 31.

“These Days” gained renewed visibility when the Nico recording was included in a scene in the 2001 Wes Anderson film The Royal Tenenbaums, which grossed over $50 million in the U.S. and garnered many award nominations. The Philadelphia City Paper wrote that “It’s no surprise that Wes Anderson used this recording in The Royal Tenenbaums; the fear of missed opportunity that its characters share is what propels ‘These Days’.” The scene in which Gwyneth Paltrow gets out of a Green Line bus as the song is heard was one of the first that Anderson designed for the film. Jackson Browne later said “I forgot that I’d licensed them to use this song. And this is one of those things that comes to you in the mail and you don’t know what they’re talking about and you simply give them their permission. You’re sitting in the movie theater and there’s this great moment when Gwyneth Paltrow is coming out of a bus or something like that. I’m thinking to myself, I used to play the guitar just like that. And then the voice comes on and it’s Nico singing ‘These Days’, which I played on.”The Allman Brothers Band included the song for the first time in their concerts, featuring it on their March 2005 Beacon Theatre run of shows with Gregg Allman and Warren Haynes both playing acoustic guitar and sharing dual vocals.

While Allman was most associated with the emerging Southern rock scene, he had spent considerable time in Los Angeles before The Allman Brothers Band came together; he and Browne had become friends, and he had recorded the Browne composition “Cast Off All My Fears” on the album The Hour Glass, the self-title debut of his band at that time. Allman’s version of “These Days” kept to Browne’s revised lyric until the end, when he changed “Don’t confront me with my failures / I had not forgotten them,” to “Please don’t confront me with my failures / I’m aware of them.” Rolling Stone praised the treatment, saying Allman “does full justice to the quietly hurting lyrics, double-tracking the vocal over a sad steel guitar,” and calling the vocal quality “resigned” and “eternally aching.” In 1999, writer Anthony DeCurtis called Allman’s version “definitive”, and in 2012, American Songwriter magazine said that Allman’s recording had overshadowed Browne’s in the same way that the Eagles had for Browne’s co-written “Take It Easy”.On October 9, 2014, Browne joined Blake Mills onstage at the World Cafe in Philadelphia to perform “These Days.” The two were joined by Mills’ tour band as well as his opener, yMusic. Mills admitted to having played the song at his high school graduation, citing Browne as an early influence and now-frequent collaborator.

Jerry Garcia died on August 9, 1995. A few months after Garcia’s death, the remaining members of the Grateful Dead decided to disband. Since that time, there have been a number of reunions by the surviving members involving various combinations of musicians. Additionally, the former members have also begun or continued individual projects.

Following the departure of the Godchauxs, Brent Mydland joined as keyboardist and vocalist and was considered “the perfect fit”. The Godchauxs then formed the Heart of Gold Band before Keith died in a car accident in 1980. Mydland was the keyboardist for the Grateful Dead for 11 years until his death by narcotics overdose in July 1990, becoming the third keyboardist to die.The Grateful Dead formed during the era when bands such as the Beatles, the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones were dominating the airwaves. “The Beatles were why we turned from a jug band into a rock ‘n’ roll band”, said Bob Weir. “What we saw them doing was impossibly attractive. I couldn’t think of anything else more worth doing.” Former folk-scene star Bob Dylan had recently put out a couple of records featuring electric instrumentation. Grateful Dead members have said that it was after attending a concert by the touring New York City band the Lovin’ Spoonful that they decided to “go electric” and look for a “dirtier” sound. Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir (both of whom had been immersed in the American folk music revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s), were open-minded about the use of electric guitars.

Following Jerry Garcia’s death and the band’s breakup in 1995, their current sound system was inherited by Dave Matthews Band. Dave Matthews Band debuted the sound system April 30, 1996, at the first show of their 1996 tour in Richmond, Virginia.The 1969 live album Live/Dead did capture the band in-form, but commercial success did not come until Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, both released in 1970. These records largely featured the band’s laid-back acoustic musicianship and more traditional song structures. With their rootsy, eclectic stylings, particularly evident on the latter two albums, the band pioneered the hybrid Americana genre. After the death of Garcia in 1995, former members of the band, along with other musicians, toured as the Other Ones in 1998, 2000, and 2002, and the Dead in 2003, 2004, and 2009. In 2015, the four surviving core members marked the band’s 50th anniversary in a series of concerts that were billed as their last performances together. There have also been several spin-offs featuring one or more core members, such as Dead & Company, Furthur, the Rhythm Devils, Phil Lesh and Friends, RatDog, and Billy & the Kids. Over the years, a number of iconic images have come to be associated with the Grateful Dead. Many of these images originated as artwork for concert posters or album covers. Beginning in the early 1990s, a new generation of bands became inspired by the Grateful Dead’s improvisational ethos and marketing strategy, and began to incorporate elements of the Grateful Dead’s live performances into their own shows. These include the nightly alteration of setlists, frequent improvisation, the blending of genres, and the allowance of taping, which would often contribute to the development of a dedicated fanbase. Bands associated with the expansion of the “jam scene” include Phish, The String Cheese Incident, Widespread Panic, Blues Traveler, moe., and the Disco Biscuits. Many of these groups began to look past the American roots music that the Grateful Dead drew inspiration from, and incorporated elements of progressive rock, hard rock, and electronica. At the same time, the Internet gained popularity and provided a medium for fans to discuss these bands and their performances and download MP3s. The Grateful Dead, as well as Phish, were one of the first bands to have a Usenet newsgroup. Fans and enthusiasts of the band are commonly referred to as Deadheads. While the origin of the term may be unclear, Dead Heads were made canon by the notice placed inside the Skull and Roses (1971) album by manager Jon McIntire:Hal Kant was an entertainment industry attorney who specialized in representing musical groups. He spent 35 years as principal lawyer and general counsel for the Grateful Dead, a position in the group that was so strong that his business cards with the band identified his role as “Czar”.

Other supporting personnel who signed on early included Rock Scully, who heard of the band from Kesey and signed on as manager after meeting them at the Big Beat Acid Test; Stewart Brand, “with his side show of taped music and slides of Indian life, a multimedia presentation” at the Big Beat and then, expanded, at the Trips Festival; and Owsley Stanley, the “Acid King” whose LSD supplied the tests and who, in early 1966, became the band’s financial backer, renting them a house on the fringes of Watts (Los Angeles) and buying them sound equipment. “We were living solely off of Owsley’s good graces at that time. … [His] trip was he wanted to design equipment for us, and we were going to have to be in sort of a lab situation for him to do it”, said Garcia.Deadheads, particularly those who collected tapes, were known for keeping close records of the band’s setlists and for comparing various live versions of the band’s songs, as reflected in publications such as the various editions of “Deadbase” and “The Deadhead’s Taping Compendium.” This practice continues into the 21st century on digital forums and websites such as the Internet Archive, which features live recordings of nearly every available Grateful Dead show and allows users to discuss and review the site’s shows.

Their live shows, fed by an improvisational approach to music, were different from most touring bands. While rock and roll bands often rehearse a standard set, played with minor variations, the Grateful Dead did not prepare in this way. Garcia stated in a 1966 interview, “We don’t make up our sets beforehand. We’d rather work off the tops of our heads than off a piece of paper.” They maintained this approach throughout their career. For each performance, the band drew material from an active list of a hundred or so songs.

On April 24, 2008, members Bob Weir and Mickey Hart, along with Nion McEvoy, CEO of Chronicle Books, UC Santa Cruz chancellor George Blumenthal, and UC Santa Cruz librarian Virginia Steel, held a press conference announcing UCSC’s McHenry Library would be the permanent home of the Grateful Dead Archive, which includes a complete archival history from 1965 to the present. The archive includes correspondence, photographs, fliers, posters, and several other forms of memorabilia and records of the band. Also included are unreleased videos of interviews and TV appearances that will be installed for visitors to view, as well as stage backdrops and other props from the band’s concerts.As the band and its sound matured over thirty years of touring, playing, and recording, each member’s stylistic contribution became more defined, consistent, and identifiable. Garcia’s lead lines were fluid, supple and spare, owing a great deal of their character to his experience playing Scruggs style banjo, an approach which often makes use of note syncopation, accenting, arpeggios, staccato chromatic runs, and the anticipation of the downbeat. Garcia had a distinctive sense of timing, often weaving in and out of the groove established by the rest of the band as if he were pushing the beat. His lead lines were also immensely influenced by jazz soloists: Garcia cited Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Bill Evans, Pat Martino, George Benson, Al Di Meola, Art Tatum, Duke Ellington, and Django Reinhardt as primary influences, and frequently utilized techniques common to country and blues music in songs that called back to those traditions. Garcia often switched scales in the midst of a solo depending upon the chord changes played underneath, though he nearly always finished phrases by landing on the chord-tones. Jerry most frequently played in the Mixolydian mode, though his solos and phrases often incorporated notes from the Dorian and major/minor pentatonic scales. Particularly in the late 1960s, Garcia occasionally incorporated melodic lines derived from Indian ragas into the band’s extended, psychedelic improvisation, likely inspired by John Coltrane and other jazz artists’ interest in the sitar music of Ravi Shankar. The Grateful Dead’s early music (in the mid-1960s) was part of the process of establishing what “psychedelic music” was, but theirs was essentially a “street party” form of it. They developed their “psychedelic” playing as a result of meeting Ken Kesey in Palo Alto, California, and subsequently becoming the house band for the Acid Tests he staged. They did not fit their music to an established category such as pop rock, blues, folk rock, or country & western. Individual tunes within their repertoire could be identified under one of these stylistic labels, but overall their music drew on all of these genres and, more frequently, melded several of them. Bill Graham said of the Grateful Dead, “They’re not the best at what they do, they’re the only ones that do what they do.” Often (both in performance and on recording) the Dead left room for exploratory, spacey soundscapes. Ned Lagin, a young MIT student and friend of the band, guested with them many times from 1970 through 1975, providing a second keyboard as well as synthesizers. Upon graduating from MIT, he began touring with the band fulltime in 1974, performing sets of electronic music with Phil Lesh, occasionally with Garcia and Kreutzmann, during the band’s intermission. The “Ned and Phil” set became a regular fixture of that era, and was featured nearly every night during their Summer ’74 and Europe ’74 tours, as well as their five-night residency at the Winterland Ballroom during October, 1974. Lagin is also featured in The Grateful Dead Movie. During 1974 and 1975, he would also occasionally play entire sets with the band, usually on Garcia’s side of the stage, before ending his touring relationship with the band and focusing on his solo music projects, such as his album Seastones, which features several members of the Dead.In 2015, Weir, Lesh, Kreutzmann, and Hart reunited for five concerts called “Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years of the Grateful Dead”. The shows were performed on June 27 and 28 at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, and on July 3, 4 and 5 at Soldier Field in Chicago. The band stated that this would be the final time that Weir, Lesh, Hart, and Kreutzmann would perform together. They were joined by Trey Anastasio of Phish on guitar, Jeff Chimenti on keyboards, and Bruce Hornsby on piano. Demand for tickets was very high. The concerts were simulcast via various media. The Chicago shows have been released as a box set of CDs and DVDs.In 2003, the Other Ones, still including Weir, Lesh, Hart, and Kreutzmann, changed their name to the Dead. The Dead toured the United States in 2003, 2004 and 2009. The band’s lineups included Jimmy Herring and Warren Haynes on guitar, Jeff Chimenti and Rob Barraco on keyboards, and Joan Osborne on vocals. In 2008, members of the Dead played two concerts, called “Deadheads for Obama” and “Change Rocks”. The Dead’s live performances featured multiple types of improvisation derived from a vast array of musical traditions. Not unlike many rock bands of their time, the majority of the Dead’s songs feature a designated section in which an instrumental break occurs over the chord changes. These sections typically feature solos by Garcia that often originate as variations on the song’s melody, but go on to create dynamic phrases that resolve by returning to the chord-tones. Not unlike traditional improvisational jazz, they may occasionally feature several solos by multiple instruments within an undecided number of bars, such as a keyboardist, before returning to the melody. At the same time, Dead shows almost always feature a more collective, modal approach to improvisation that typically occurs during segues between songs before the band modulates to a new tonal center. Some of the Dead’s more extended jam vehicles, such as “The Other One”, “Dark Star”, and “Playing in the Band” almost exclusively make use of modulation between modes to accompany simple two-chord progressions. Their numerous studio albums were generally collections of new songs that they had first played in concert. The band was also famous for its extended musical improvisations, having been described as having never played the same song the same way twice. Their concert sets often blended songs, one into the next, often for more than three songs at a time. Kant brought the band millions of dollars in revenue through his management of the band’s intellectual property and merchandising rights. At Kant’s recommendation, the group was one of the few rock ‘n roll pioneers to retain ownership of their music masters and publishing rights. In the fall of 2015, Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann and Bob Weir joined with guitarist John Mayer, keyboardist Jeff Chimenti, and bassist Oteil Burbridge to tour in a band called Dead & Company. Mayer recounts that in 2011 he was listening to Pandora and happened upon the Grateful Dead song “Althea”, and that soon Grateful Dead music was all he would listen to. The band played six tours: October–December 2015, June–July 2016, May–July 2017., May–August 2018, and May–July 2019. On October–November 2019 they played 6 dates on the “2019 Fall Fun Run”. On December 27 and 28, they played at The Forum in Inglewood (Los Angeles), California as part of their “2019 New Year’s Run” tour. On December 30 and 31, they played in their hometown of San Francisco at the Chase Center, featuring a bi-plane that descended from the ceiling of the Chase Center carrying the daughters of Jerry Garcia, Trixie Garcia and her half-sister, Ken Kesey’s daughter Sunshine Kesey, dropping rose petals on the audience as they toured the arena.

Following the Grateful Dead’s “Europe ’72” tour, Pigpen’s health had deteriorated to the point that he could no longer tour with the band. His final concert appearance was June 17, 1972, at the Hollywood Bowl, in Los Angeles; he died on March 8, 1973, of complications from liver damage.

In 2011, a recording of the Grateful Dead’s May 8, 1977, concert at Cornell University’s Barton Hall was selected for induction into the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress.

Following the songwriting renaissance that defined the band’s early 1970s period, as reflected in the albums Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, Robert Hunter, Jerry Garcia’s primary lyrical partner, frequently made use of motifs common to American folklore including trains, guns, elements, traditional musical instruments, gambling, murder, animals, alcohol, descriptions of American geography, and religious symbolism to illustrate themes involving love and loss, life and death, beauty and horror, and chaos and order. Following in the footsteps of several American musical traditions, these songs are often confessional and feature narration from the perspective of an antihero. Critic Robert Christgau described them as “American myths” that later gave way to “the old karma-go-round”. An extremely common feature in both Robert Hunter’s lyrics, as well as the band’s visual iconography, is the presence of dualistic and opposing imagery illustrating the dynamic range of the human experience (Heaven and hell, law and crime, dark and light, etc.). Hunter and Garcia’s earlier, more directly psychedelic-influenced compositions often make use of surreal imagery, nonsense, and whimsey reflective of traditions in English poetry. In a retrospective, The New Yorker described Hunter’s verses as “elliptical, by turns vivid and gnomic”, which were often “hippie poetry about roses and bells and dew”. Grateful Dead biographer Dennis McNally has described Hunter’s lyrics as creating “a non-literal hyper-Americana” weaving a psychedelic, kaleidoscopic tapestry in the hopes of elucidating America’s national character. At least one of Hunter and Bob Weir’s collaborations, “Jack Straw”, was inspired by the work of John Steinbeck.

In the 1990s, the Grateful Dead earned a total of $285 million in revenue from their concert tours, the second-highest during the 1990s, with the Rolling Stones earning the most. This figure is representative of tour revenue through 1995, as touring stopped after the death of Jerry Garcia. In a 1991 PBS documentary, segment host Buck Henry attended an August 1991 concert at Shoreline Amphitheatre and gleaned some information from some band members about the Grateful Dead phenomenon and its success. At the time, Jerry Garcia stated, “We didn’t really invent the Grateful Dead, the crowd invented the Grateful Dead, you know what I mean? We were sort of standing in line, and uh, it’s gone way past our expectations, way past, so it’s, we’ve been going along with it to see what it’s gonna do next.” Furthermore, Mickey Hart stated, “This is one of the last places in America that you can really have this kind of fun, you know, considering the political climate and so forth.” Hart also stated that “the transformative power of the Grateful Dead is really the essence of it; it’s what it can do to your consciousness. We’re more into transportation than we are into music, per se, I mean, the business of the Grateful Dead is transportation.” One of the band’s largest concerts took place just months before Garcia’s death — at their outdoor show with Bob Dylan in Highgate, Vermont, on June 15, 1995. The crowd was estimated to be over 90,000; overnight camping was allowed and about a third of the audience got in without having purchased a ticket.

Like several other bands during this time, the Grateful Dead allowed their fans to record their shows. For many years the tapers set up their microphones wherever they could, and the eventual forest of microphones became a problem for the sound crew. Eventually, this was solved by having a dedicated taping section located behind the soundboard, which required a special “tapers” ticket. The band allowed sharing of their shows, as long as no profits were made on the sale of the tapes.Mydland died after the summer tour in 1990 and Vince Welnick, former keyboardist for the Tubes, joined as a band member, while Bruce Hornsby, who had a successful career with his band the Range, joined as a touring member. Both performed on keyboards and vocals—Welnick until the band’s end, and Hornsby mainly from 1990 to 1992. The Grateful Dead performed their final concert on July 9, 1995, at Soldier Field in Chicago.

The death of Pigpen did not slow the band down, and it continued with its new members. With the help of their manager Ron Rakow, they soon formed their own record label, Grateful Dead Records. Later that year, they released their next studio album, the jazz-influenced Wake of the Flood. It became their biggest commercial success thus far. Meanwhile, capitalizing on Flood’s success, the band soon went back to the studio, and the next year, 1974, released another album, From the Mars Hotel. Not long after that album’s release however, the Dead decided to take a hiatus from live touring. Before embarking on the hiatus, the band performed a series of five concerts at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco in October 1974. The concerts were filmed, and Garcia compiled the footage into The Grateful Dead Movie, a feature-length concert film that would be released in 1977.In October 2014, it was announced that Martin Scorsese would produce a documentary film about the Grateful Dead, to be directed by Amir Bar-Lev. David Lemieux supervised the musical selection, and Weir, Hart, Kreutzmann, and Lesh agreed to new interviews for the film. Bar-Lev’s four-hour documentary, titled Long Strange Trip, was released in 2017.

Robert Hunter and John Perry Barlow were the band’s primary lyricists, starting in 1967 and 1971, respectively, and continuing until the band’s dissolution. Hunter collaborated mostly with Garcia and Barlow mostly with Weir, though each wrote with other band members as well. Both are listed as official members at Dead.net, the band’s website, alongside the performing members. Barlow was the only member not inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Shortly after Mydland found his place in the early 1980s, Garcia’s health began to decline. His drug habits caused him to lose his liveliness on stage. After beginning to curtail his opiate usage in 1985 gradually, Garcia slipped into a diabetic coma for several days in July 1986. After he recovered, the band released In the Dark in July 1987, which became their best selling studio album and produced their only top-40 single, “Touch of Grey”. Also that year, the group toured with Bob Dylan, as heard on the album Dylan & the Dead. 1970 included tour dates in New Orleans, Louisiana, where the band performed at The Warehouse for two nights. On January 31, 1970, the local police raided their hotel on Bourbon Street, and arrested and charged a total of 19 people with possession of various drugs. The second night’s concert was performed as scheduled after bail was posted. Eventually, the charges were dismissed, except those against sound engineer Owsley Stanley, who was already facing charges in California for manufacturing LSD. This event was later memorialized in the lyrics of the song “Truckin'”, a single from American Beauty which reached number 64 on the charts.In 1998, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, and Mickey Hart, along with several other musicians, formed a band called the Other Ones, and performed a number of concerts that year, releasing a live album, The Strange Remain, the following year. In 2000, the Other Ones toured again, this time with Kreutzmann but without Lesh. After taking another year off, the band toured again in 2002 with Lesh. That year, the Other Ones then included all four living former Grateful Dead members who had been in the band for most or all of its history. At different times the shifting lineup of the Other Ones also included guitarists Mark Karan, Steve Kimock, and Jimmy Herring, keyboardists Bruce Hornsby, Jeff Chimenti, and Rob Barraco, saxophonist Dave Ellis, drummer John Molo, bassist Alphonso Johnson, and vocalist Susan Tedeschi. Professor of music Fredric Lieberman was the key contact between the band and the university, who let the university know about the search for a home for the archive, and who had collaborated with Mickey Hart on three books in the past, Planet Drum (1990), Drumming at the Edge of Magic (1991), and Spirit into Sound (2006). In September 1975, the Dead released their eighth studio album, Blues for Allah. They resumed touring in June 1976. That same year, they signed with Arista Records. Their new contract soon produced Terrapin Station in 1977. The band’s tour in the spring of that year is held in high regard by their fans, and their concert of May 8 at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, is often considered to be one of the best performances of their career.Blumenthal stated at the event, “The Grateful Dead Archive represents one of the most significant popular cultural collections of the 20th century; UC Santa Cruz is honored to receive this invaluable gift. The Grateful Dead and UC Santa Cruz are both highly innovative institutions—born the same year—that continue to make a major, positive impact on the world.” Guitarist Bob Weir stated “We looked around, and UC Santa Cruz seems the best possible home. If you ever wrote the Grateful Dead a letter, you’ll probably find it there!”

Despite having only one top-40 single in their 30-year career, “Touch of Grey”, the Grateful Dead remained among the highest-grossing American touring acts for multiple decades. They gained a committed fanbase by word of mouth and through the free exchange of their live recordings, encouraged by the band’s allowance of taping. Rolling Stone named the Grateful Dead number 57 on its 2011 list of the “100 Greatest Artists of all Time”. The band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994 and a recording of their May 8, 1977 performance at Cornell University’s Barton Hall was added to the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress in 2012.With the exception of 1975, when the band was on hiatus and played only four concerts together, the Grateful Dead performed many concerts every year, from their formation in April 1965, until July 9, 1995. Initially all their shows were in California, principally in the San Francisco Bay Area and in or near Los Angeles. They also performed, in 1965 and 1966, with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, as the house band for the Acid Tests. They toured nationally starting in June 1967 (their first foray to New York), with a few detours to Canada, Europe and three nights at the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt in 1978. They appeared at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, the Woodstock Festival in 1969 and the Festival Express train tour across Canada in 1970. They were scheduled to appear as the final act at the infamous Altamont Free Concert on December 6, 1969, after the Rolling Stones but withdrew after security concerns. “That’s the way things went at Altamont—so badly that the Grateful Dead, prime organizers and movers of the festival, didn’t even get to play”, staff at Rolling Stone magazine wrote in a detailed narrative on the event.

Lesh, who was originally a classically trained trumpet player with an extensive background in music theory, did not tend to play traditional blues-based bass forms, but more melodic, symphonic and complex lines, often sounding like a second lead guitar. In contrast to most bassists in popular music, Lesh often avoids playing the root of a chord on the downbeat, instead withholding as a means to build tension. Lesh also rarely repeats the same bassline, even from performance to performance of the same song, and often plays off of or around the other instruments with a syncopated, staccato bounce that contributes to the Dead’s unique rhythmic character.

On November 2022, the children book The ABCs of The Grateful Dead was released. Authorized by the group, it was written by Howie Abrams, illustrated by Michael “Kaves” McLeer, and published by Simon & Schuster.

Twelve members of the Grateful Dead (the eleven official performing members plus Robert Hunter) were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994, and Bruce Hornsby was their presenter.

The two drummers, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, developed a unique, complex interplay, balancing Kreutzmann’s steady shuffle beat with Hart’s interest in percussion styles outside the rock tradition. Kreuzmann has said, “I like to establish a feeling and then add radical or oblique juxtapositions to that feeling.” Hart incorporated an 11-count measure to his drumming, bringing a dimension to the band’s sound that became an important part of its style. He had studied tabla drumming and incorporated rhythms and instruments from world music, and later electronic music, into the band’s live performances.

The Grateful Dead began its career as the Warlocks, a group formed in early 1965 from the remnants of a Palo Alto, California jug band called Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions and members of The Wildwood Boys (Jerry Garcia, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, David Nelson, Robert Hunter, and Norm Van Maastricht). As The Wildwood Boys they played regularly at The Tangent, a folk music coffee house operated by Stanford Medical Center doctors, Stuart “Stu” Goldstein and David “Dave” Shoenstadt, on University Avenue in Palo Alto (1963). As the Warlocks, the band’s first show was at Magoo’s Pizza Parlor located at 639 Santa Cruz Avenue in suburban Menlo Park, on May 5, 1965, now a Harvest furniture store. It continued playing bar shows, like Frenchy’s Bikini-A-Go-Go in Hayward and, importantly, five sets a night, five nights a week, for six weeks, at the In Room in Belmont as the Warlocks, but quickly changed the band’s name after finding out that a different band known as the Warlocks had put out a record under the same name. (The Velvet Underground also had to change its name from the Warlocks.) The first show under the name Grateful Dead was in San Jose on December 4, 1965, at one of Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests. Earlier demo tapes have survived, but the first of over 2,000 concerts known to have been recorded by the band’s fans was a show at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco on January 8, 1966. Later that month, the Grateful Dead played at the Trips Festival, a three-day psychedelic rock weekend party/event produced by Ken Kesey, Stewart Brand, and Ramon Sender, that, in conjunction with the Merry Pranksters, brought together the nascent hippie movement for the first time.