‘LSD? Been there, done that’: the Grateful Dead’s 60 years of substances, epic noodling and obsessive fanatics

‘We didn’t wish to be the law enforcement officials,” says Bobby Weir, guitarist and founder member of the Grateful Dead, giggling as he describes his band’s legendarily lax perspective to other people taping their concert events. Bootleggers got their very own space at gigs at the proviso their tapes had been traded, no longer bought – a demonstration of the band’s generosity of spirit. “It was an easy decision to make,” Weir says.

Decisions like the ones have ensured that, many years earlier than these days’s obsessional Swifties and Ok-pop stans, the Dead have cultivated certainly one of tune’s maximum passionate fandoms. They are undoubtedly the sector’s best-documented band. This 12 months, they’re marking their 60th anniversary with a 60-CD field set, simply one of the gargantuan programs through the years. Their 2024 Friend of the Devils field set simplest coated a unmarried month of reside tune (April 1978) but it stretched to 19 CDs.

“When we first got started,” says Weir, “it quickly became apparent that the business of music was pretty much populated by people who were only a notch above – or maybe not even a notch above – the level of professional wrestling. The business was really tawdry. And so we went about things in our own way.”

The Dead have duly operated in large part out of doors the mainstream: no longer such a lot a band as a fiercely unbiased travelling circus that would conveniently promote out 100,000-capacity stadiums, whilst simplest ever having had one unmarried grace america Top 40 (Touch of Grey in 1987). While the unique lineup led to 1995, with the loss of life of bandleader Jerry Garcia, a plethora of Dead-related initiatives have spiralled out ever since.

In June, Weir’s band Wolf Bros will play the Royal Albert Hall in London, along a complete orchestra. Meanwhile, the wildly a hit spin-off band Dead & Company has simply completed a residency on the Las Vegas Sphere, the immense dome that dominates the strip skyline. Formed in 2015, the lineup contains 77-year-old Weir on guitar and vocals, with authentic drummer Mickey Hart and quite a lot of visitors. Dead & Company are giant trade: their 2023 excursion grossed $115m, no longer a ways in the back of Metallica, Depeche Mode and Coldplay.

The Vegas display featured a mind-bending AV part. “For us,” says Weir, “it’s a matter of what are the storytelling possibilities on stage?” He provides that within the 1960s, “we’d do liquid light shows. It’s a part of what we do, always has been.”

Emerging from the San Francisco Bay Area’s countercultural maelstrom in 1965, the Dead received a name for hypnotic, freewheeling, improvised jam periods. No two gigs had been ever the similar. Psychedelic of their sheer unrelenting scope, but grounded in a rootsy, bluesy Americana, theirs used to be tune you want to transfer to. It used to be the time of Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests – LSD advocacy events with a rotating lineup of acts on the creator’s farm at La Honda, California. These supplied a herbal atmosphere, despite the fact that these days Weir is strangely loth to characteristic an excessive amount of significance to chemical affect.

“I don’t think drugs had all that much to do with our development, actually,” he says. “I was in and out of that scene. But after a year or so of taking LSD, I felt it just wasn’t bringing me much in the way of clarity or new direction. So I stepped out of it. Some of the guys smoked pot for decades but I don’t think you’d find – certainly with what’s going on in Dead & Company – that there’s much in the way of drug use. We’ve really been there and done that.”

As the Dead’s reputation grew, a vital selection of their fanatics – referred to as the Deadheads – started dedicating their whole life to the band, making plans their lives round excursions, the place they might arrange meals stalls or promote garments to toughen a full-time nomadic way of life.

John Kilbride, creator of The Golden Road: The Recorded History of the Grateful Dead, remembers “going down the Barras market in Glasgow in the early 80s and getting a load of live cassettes, and just being completely spun around by the sound. Even some of the more underground bands in the UK were nowhere near as radical from a business perspective, encouraging fans to tape shows and so on. Not even Hawkwind did that!”

It didn’t forestall at taping: the Dead arrange publishing firms and document labels, booked their very own gigs and attempted to stay the whole thing DIY. The again quilt of 1971’s Skull and Roses reside album bore the promise: “Tell us who you are … we’ll keep you informed.” By the 1980s, the Dead boasted a mailing listing of over part 1,000,000 fanatics, and had been additionally regularly dealing with their very own price tag distribution – no imply feat when it got here to stadium presentations.

The complete Dead revel in used to be, to many fanatics’ ears, by no means captured on a studio recording. “I mean, we got some of it down,” says Weir. “American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead fell together pretty well. But I won’t say they reached some of the loftier moments that we got to on stage. In order to really get what we’re doing, and what we’re up to, you’ve got to be there.”

Weir makes use of the extraordinarily Dead-coded word “gestalt linkage” to explain the quasi-telepathic feeling that has resulted from greater than part a century of taking part in. “That’s what we bring to the table,” he says, “although it’s not all that unusual: a good jazz band will have that going. We’ve learned to trust each other. That makes a big difference.” The linkage wasn’t even damaged by means of Garcia’s loss of life, elderly 53. “The feeling that we had to carry it on was immediate,” says Weir. “Jerry wouldn’t have had it any other way. It was a major blow to us for sure, but there was no fighting it, so on we went.”

But how have they stored such passionate fanatics onside for 6 many years? Sam Bedford, co-founder of Brighton document label None More Records, is one, and he emphasises a loss of polish and predictability. “They were different to everyone else,” he says, “and yet they couldn’t find stadiums that were big enough.” He marvels at how they’d play “10 minutes of feedback during the 60s, or in the 80s, doing 20-minute ambient interludes. It’s incredible that they were playing to 90,000 people and there’s an ambient interlude in the middle. I love all that stuff!”

I ponder whether there are tensions between the countercultural, DIY, rootsy sides of the band, and a undertaking such because the Las Vegas Sphere residency. “The Dead have always been a broad church,” Kilbride argues. “There’s people who want to go to a big slick show and spend hundreds of dollars on merchandise, but they had that element in the 70s, too. The well-heeled fans who would jump on a plane to shows and stay in the same hotels as the band – that’s always been there. So have the people who’ve spent hundreds of miles on the road and make a living selling T-shirts. It works on every level and there’s space for both.”

Part of the continued appeal is that, even these days, the band don’t simply trot out a gentle setlist of classics. Kilbride has simply purchased a price tag to peer Weir and Wolf Bros on the Royal Albert Hall in June. Even as a diehard fan, he says: “I have no idea what to expect.”

The London gig will characteristic two units: Dead classics and tune from Weir’s solo repertoire, all with the orchestra. “We’ve been hearing enormous philharmonic renditions of what we do all along,” says Weir. “That’s what’s been going on in our heads – it’s been great to be able to flesh that out.”

Bassist Phil Lesh died in 2024 and it’s no longer transparent how lengthy the Grateful Dead’s legacy can closing once they forestall taking part in presentations, with no definitive run of studio albums. But Weir says that isn’t in reality the purpose of the band: “We initially learned to play from a place of profound disorientation and fun – where we didn’t have much legacy to draw from, when we were playing at the Acid Tests and that stuff. Every time we pick up our instruments, it’s a new situation.”