Grateful Dead Popular Books
Grateful Dead Biography & Facts
The Grateful Dead were an American rock band formed in 1965 in Palo Alto, California, known for their eclectic style that fused elements of rock, blues, jazz, folk, country, bluegrass, rock and roll, gospel, reggae, and world music with psychedelia. The band is famous for improvisation during their live performances, and attracted a devoted fan base, known as "Deadheads." According to the musician and writer Lenny Kaye, the music of the Grateful Dead "touches on ground that most other groups don't even know exists." For the range of their influences and the structure of their live performances, the Grateful Dead are considered "the pioneering godfathers of the jam band world". The Grateful Dead were founded in the San Francisco Bay Area during the rise of the counterculture of the 1960s. The band's founding members were Jerry Garcia (lead guitar and vocals), Bob Weir (rhythm guitar and vocals), Ron "Pigpen" McKernan (keyboards, harmonica, and vocals), Phil Lesh (bass guitar and vocals), and Bill Kreutzmann (drums). Members of the Grateful Dead, originally known as the Warlocks, had played together in various Bay Area ensembles, including the traditional jug band Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions. Lesh was the last member to join the Warlocks before they changed their name to Grateful Dead, replacing Dana Morgan Jr., who had played bass for a few gigs. Drummer Mickey Hart and non-performing lyricist Robert Hunter joined in 1967. With the exception of McKernan, who died in 1973, and Hart, who left the band from 1971 to 1974, the core of the band stayed together for its entire 30-year history. Other official members of the band included Tom Constanten (keyboards from 1968 to 1970), John Perry Barlow (non-performing lyricist from 1971 to 1995), Keith Godchaux (keyboards and occasional vocals from 1971 to 1979), Donna Godchaux (vocals from 1972 to 1979), Brent Mydland (keyboards and vocals from 1979 to 1990), and Vince Welnick (keyboards and vocals from 1990 to 1995). Bruce Hornsby (accordion, piano, vocals) was a touring member from 1990 to 1992, as well as a guest with the band on occasion before and after the tours. After Garcia's death in 1995, former members of the band, along with other musicians, toured as The Other Ones in 1998, 2000, and 2002, and as 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 in Santa Clara, Calif. and Chicago 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. 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 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. In 2024, they broke the record for most top-40 albums on the Billboard 200 chart. 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. Formation (1965–1966) The Grateful Dead began their 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 coffeehouse 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, 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 that 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. Scholar Michael Kaler has written that the Dead's participation in the Acid Tests was crucial both to the development of their improvisational vocabulary and to their bonding as a band, with the group having set out to foster an intra-band musical telepathy. Kaler has further pointed out that the Dead's pursuit of a new improvisatory rock language in 1965 chronologically coincided with that same goal's adoption by Jefferson Airplane, Pink Floyd and the Velvet Underground. 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 and event produced by Ken Kesey, Stewart Brand, and Ramon Sender, that, in conjunction with the Merry Pranksters, brought the nascent hippie movement together for the first time. The name "Grateful Dead" was chosen from a dictionary. According to Lesh, Garcia "picked up an old Britannica World Language Dictionary ... [and] ... In that silvery elf-voice he said to me, 'Hey, man, how about the Grateful Dead?'" The definition there was "the soul of a dead person, or his angel, showing gratitude to someone who, as an act of charity, arranged their burial." According to Alan Trist, director of the Grateful Dead's music publisher company Ice Nine, Garcia found the name in the Funk & Wagnalls Folklore Dictionary, when his finger landed on that phrase while playing a game of Fictionary. In the Garcia biography Captain Trips, author Sandy Troy states that the band was smoking the psychedelic DMT at the time. The term "grateful dead" appears in folktales from a variety of cultures. Other supporting personnel who joined 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 Acid 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 e.... Discover the Grateful Dead popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Grateful Dead books.
Best Seller Grateful Dead Books of 2024
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Slipknot
Jason Arnopp"The only plan right now is to kill everybody" Joey Jordison, drummerIgnoring every rule in the book and more besides, Slipknot are a notoriously controversial band who combine a ...
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The Music Never Stops
Peter Shapiro & Dean BudnickThe engrossing, insightful, and personal musical odyssey of Peter Shapiro, perhaps the most notable independent concert promoter since Bill Graham Peter Shapiro is the best known a...
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The Gospel and the Grateful Dead
The Rev. Dr. Pitman B. PotterThis book examines the linkages between the music and message of the Grateful Dead and the Christian gospel. The Grateful Dead emerged from the San Francisco "hippie" scene in the ...
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This Is All a Dream We Dreamed
Blair Jackson & David GansIn This Is All a Dream We Dreamed, two of the most wellrespected chroniclers of the Dead, Blair Jackson and David Gans, reveal the band’s story through the words of its members, th...
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Bear
Robert GreenfieldThe creator of the dancing bear logo and designer of the Wall of Sound for the Grateful Dead, Augustus Owsley Stanley III, better known by his nickname, Bear, was one of the most i...
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Grateful Dead 2013 Almanac
Grateful DeadThe 21st edition of the Grateful Dead Almanac, featuring updates on Grateful Dead family doings, videos, music, comix, exclusive limitededition merch and much, much more.
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The Silver Snarling Trumpet
Robert Hunter, John Mayer, Dennis McNally & Brigid MeierDiscovered at last, the legendary lost manuscript of Grateful Dead cofounder and primary lyricist Robert Hunter, written in the early 1960sa wry, richly observed, and enlightening ...
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Aces Back to Back
Scott W. AllenThe most detailed, uptodate and accurate history of the Grateful Dead ever written ! Aces Back to Back, first published in 1992, updates the Grateful Dead’s history through January...
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Grateful Dead Guitar Anthology
Grateful Dead20 of the very best from the Grateful Dead in notefornote guitar transcriptions, including: Bertha Box of Rain Casey Jones Fire on the Mountain Friend of the Devil Ramble on R...
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Reluctant Immortals
Gwendolyn Kiste2023 Lambda Literary Award Winner 2023 Bram Stoker Award Finalist for Superior Achievement in a NovelFor fans of Mexican Gothic, from threetime Bram Stoker Award–winning author Gwe...
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Back to the Garden
Pete FornataleThe definitive oral history of the seminal rock concert, Woodstockthree days of peace and music and one of the most defining moments of the 1960swith original interviews with Roger...
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The Very Best of Grateful Dead Songbook
Grateful DeadDead heads and budding guitar players everywhere will rejoice for this collection of 17 classics from the Grateful Dead for easy guitar. Includes: Box of Rain Casey Jones Estimat...
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Grateful Dead - The Definitive Collection Songbook
Grateful DeadDead heads will love this newlyengraved collection of 54 songs from the iconic jam band in piano/vocal/guitar arrangements. Songs include: Althea Bertha Box of Rain Brokedown Pa...
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Ripple
Jim Cosgrove“Riveting... a personal and highly original work of truecrime storytelling.” John Douglas, former FBI criminal profiling pioneer and coauthor of the #1 New York Times bestse...
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Skeleton Key
David Shenk & Steve SilbermanNOW AN EBOOK FOR THE FIRST TIMEFor fifty years and more than two thousand shows, the Grateful Dead have been earning the "deadication" of more than a million fans. Along the w...
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Conversations with the Dead
David GansA collection of interviewssome vintage, some recent, and some brandnewConversations with the Dead is the first (and only) book in which the Grateful Dead speak in their own words a...
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Operation White Rabbit
Dennis McDougalA search for the truth behind the DEA’s life imprisonment of acid's most famous martyr. Operation White Rabbit traces the rise and falland rise and fall againof the psychedel...
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Dancing with the Dead--A Photographic Memoir
Rosie McGee“The acid is just coming on as I slip through the narrow space between Jerry’s amps and find my spot behind him on the stage, far enough to stage right to not block his view of his...
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Deal
Bill Kreutzmann & Benjy EisenThe Grateful Dead are perhaps the most legendary American rock band of all time. For thirty years, beginning in the hippie scene of San Francisco in 1965, they were a musical insti...
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Back from the Dead
Bill Walton“An elegiac yet exuberant new memoir” (The New York Times Book Review)Bill Walton’s New York Times bestselling memoir about his recovery from debilitating physical injury and how l...
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So Many Roads
David BrowneFifty years after they first came together and changed the sound of rock 'n' roll, the Grateful Dead remain one of rock's most beloved bands a musical and cultural phenomenon that...
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CSNY
Peter DoggettAn engaging and illuminating biography focused on the formative and highly influential early years of “rock’s first supergroup” (Rolling Stone) Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Youngwhen ...
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Living with the Dead
Rock ScullyAs a manager for the Grateful Dead, Rock Scully was with the band from its early days in San Francisco to the years it spent touring the globe as one of the most enduring legends i...
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Thorn Tree
Max Ludington"Terrifically vivid. . . stirring." New York Times A beautifully wrought novel on the aftershocks of the heady but dangerous late 1960s and the relationship between trauma and the...
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Jerry on Jerry
Dennis McNally & Trixie GarciaThese neverbeforepublished interviews with Jerry Garcia reveal his thoughts on religion, politics, his personal life, and his creative process. Jerry on Jerry provides new insigh...
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Phish
Parke PuterbaughThe definitive biography of the jam band based on original interviews, by a veteran music journalist Drawing upon nearly fifteen years of exclusive interviews with the members of P...
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Brothers and Sisters
Alan PaulTHE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERNew York Times bestselling author Alan Paul's indepth narrative look at the Allman Brothers' most successful album, and a portrait of an era in...
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Fanocracy
David Meerman Scott & Reiko ScottA Wall Street Journal bestsellerFrom the author of New Rules of Marketing & PR, a bold guide to converting customer passion into marketing power. How do some brand...
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So Much to Say
Nikki Van NoyDAVE MATTHEWS BAND has one of the largest and most loyal followings of any band todayafter twenty years of constant touring and several acclaimed, multiplatinum albums, the members...
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Ticket Masters
Dean Budnick & Josh Baron“A clear, comprehensive look at a murky business.” The Wall Street Journal Your favorite band has just announced their nationwide tour. Should you pay to join their fan club a...
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A Long Strange Trip
Dennis McNallyThe complete history of one of the most longlived and legendary bands in rock history, written by its official historian and publicista musthave chronicle for all Dead Heads, a...
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Searching for the Sound
Phil LeshThe legendary bass player tells the full, true story of his years with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead in this "insightful and entertaining" (Austin Chronicle) memoir of life in...
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Home Before Daylight
Steve Parish & Joe LaydenThe untold story of life on the road with the Grateful Dead, written by an insider who lived it from the early days to today.Steve Parish was never one to walk the straightandnarro...
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Chronicles
Bob DylanWINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE The celebrated first memoir from arguably the most influential singersongwriter in the country, Bob Dylan.“I’d come from a long ways off and...
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Fare Thee Well
Joel Selvin & Pamela TurleyA tellall biography of the epic infighting of the Grateful Dead in the years following band leader Jerry Garcia's death in 1995 The Grateful Dead rose to greatness under the inspi...
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Dead to the Core
Eric WybengaThe Grateful Dead have left us a musical bounty of thirty years and thousands of shows. Now Dead to the Core: An Almanack of the Grateful Dead takes Deadheads through th...
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Everything I Know About Business I Learned from the Grateful Dead
Barry Barnes & John Perry BarlowThe Grateful Dead is one of the most popular bands of all time and they have enjoyed incredible relevance to this day. But let's admit it, they were not exactly poster boys for cor...