Saturday, November 6, 2010 7:21 PM
History of the Grateful Dead
In the days on the verge of the psychedelic revolution in a San Francisco scene, a guitarist known as Jerry Garcia met a drummer Bill Kreutzman while buying a banjo at a local music store. The two began to get along immediately and Garcia secured a job at the music store selling instruments and teaching guitar lessons. Bob Weir, a sixteen year old student of Garcia, became good friends with Garcia. In 1965, Garcia, Weir and Kreutzman formed Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions. Ron McKernan,who was later added to the team, was known as Pig Pen, to sing their blues songs. At the time, Pig Pen was a fifteen year old harmonica player who was often found skipping school and drinking wine. It was Pig Pen who convinced the rest of the band members to make Mother McCree's go electric; thus forming The Warlocks. Phil Lesh was chosen to play bass, after playing around with the bass for two weeks. Lesh had a background in jazz and electronic music.
After Lesh claimed he saw an album by another band calling themselves the Warlocks, the band went in search of another name. They stumbled on the phrase “Grateful Dead” in a randomly opened dictionary. The words referred to a genre of folktales in which a Good Samaritan arranges for the burial of a penniless stranger. At some point later, the Samaritan come across life-threatening peril and is, himself, aided by the spirit of the man he helped bury, hence "grateful dead."
The group's mission statement as voiced by Garcia in 1967: "We're trying to make music in such a way that it doesn't have a message for anybody. We don't have anything to tell anybody. We don't want to change anybody. We want people to have the chance to feel a little better. That's the absolute most we want to do with our music. The music that we make is an act of love and act of joy...we're not telling [anybody] to go get stoned, or drop out.... We are trying to make things groovier for everybody so more people can feel better more often, to advance the trip, to get higher - however you want to say it - but we're musicians and there's just no way to put the idea 'save the world' into music."
July 1986: Garcia enters a life-threatening diabetic coma. Garcia regained consciousness a few days later, but a period of extended convalescence kept the band from touring until the following spring.
1990: Brent Mydland passes. Vince Welnick brought on board as new keyboardist.
On August 9, 1995: Garcia was found comatose and without a pulse in Serenity Knolls treatment facility in Marin County. He was 53 years old.
The band discussed continuing without Garcia, but in December 1995, they announced that the Dead would be no more.
cla.calpoly.edu/cla/legacies/dbsmith/.../history.html
