Grateful Dead: Information from Answers.com

The band was also famous for its extended jams, which featured both individual as well as a distinctive "group-mind" improvisations during which each of the band members improvised individually, while still blending together as a musical unit. Musically this may be illustrated in that not only did the band improvise within the form of a song, but also improvised with the form. The cohesive listening abilities of each band member made for a very elevated level of what might be called "free form".

Their concert sets often blended songs, one into the Dead. The band was never satisfied with the house system anywhere they played, so in their early days, soundman designed a public-address and monitor system for them. Stanley's sound systems were delicate and finicky, and frequently brought shows to a halt with technical breakdowns.

After Stanley went to jail for manufacturing LSD in , the group briefly used house PAs, but found them to be less reliable than those built by their former soundman. In , the band purchased their first solid sound system from Studios. Because of this, Alembic would play an integral role in the research, development, and production of the Wall of Sound.

The band also welcomed Dan Healy into the fold system. After got out of prison in late 1972, he, Dan Healy and Mark Raizene of the Grateful Dead's sound crew, in collaboration with Ron Wickersham, eleven separate sound systems in an effort to deliver high-quality sound to live audiences. Vocals, lead guitar, rhythm guitar, and piano each had their own channel and set of speakers.

They piped Phil Lesh's bass through a quadraphonic encoder that sent signals from each of the four strings to its own channel and set of speakers. Another channel amplified the bass drum, and two more channels carried the snares, tom-toms, and cymbals. Because each speaker carried just one instrument or vocalist, the sound was exceptionally clear and free of intramodular distortion.

Moreover, the Dead's Wall of Sound acted as its own monitor system, and it was therefore assembled behind the band so the members could hear exactly what their audience was hearing. Because of this, Owsely designed a special microphone system to prevent feedback. This placed matched pairs of condenser microphones spaced 60 mm apart and run out-of-phase.

The vocalist sang into the top microphone, and the lower mic picked up whatever other sound was present in the stage environment. The signals were summed, the sound that was common to both mics (the sound from the Wall) was cancelled, and only the vocals were amplified.
The Wall of Sound consisted of 89 300-watt solid-state and three 350-watt vacuum-tube amplifiers generating a total of 26,400 watts RMS of audio power.

This systems projected high quality playback at six hundred feet with an acceptable sound projected for a quarter mile. at which point wind interference degraded it. The Wall of Sound was the largest portable sound system ever built (although "portable" is a relative term).

^{Though the initial framework and a rudimentary form of the system was unveiled in February 1973 (ominously, every speaker later in .}

The Wall of Sound was very efficient for its day, but it suffered from other drawbacks besides its sheer size. Synthesist , who toured with the group throughout much of , never received his own dedicated input into the system, and was forced to use the vocal subsystem. Because this was often switched to the vocal mikes, many of Lagin's parts were lost in the mix.

The Wall's quadraphonic format never translated well to soundboard tapes made during the period, as the sound was compressed into an unnatural stereo format and suffers from a pronounced tinniness.
The rising cost of fuel and personnel, as well as friction among many of the newer crew members (and associated hangers-on), contributed to the band's "retirement." The Wall of Sound was disassembled, and when the Dead began touring again in , it was with a more logistically practical sound system.

The Grateful Dead had two Wall of Sound setups. One would go ahead to the next city and begin being set up as soon as possible while the other was being used and torn down after each show.
shrouded in haze, Dead Heads was made canon by the legendary notice inside the album:
How are you?

The Dead Heads formed a huge extended family. Many of the Dead Heads would go on tour with the band. As a group the Dead Heads were considered very mellow.

"I'd rather work nine Grateful Dead concerts than one Oregon football game," Police Det. Rick Raynor said. "They don't get belligerent like they do at the games" .

rock audience. This caused a bit of culture shock between some of the old and new fans, when the peaceful hippie counterculture "brokenlink">citation needed] However the use of the term "Touch Head", for the newcomers, was short lived, as old and new "just listen[ed] to the music play"(lyrics from Franklin's Tower).
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This The Grateful Dead allowed their fans to tape their shows like several other bands during the time. For many years the tapers set up their microphones wherever they could. Naturally the best sound was in front of the sound board.

The eventual forest of microphones became a problem for the official 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 tapes of their shows, as long as no were made on the sale of their show tapes.

Recently, there was some dispute over what recordings archive.org could host on their site. Currently, all recordings are hosted, though soundboard recourdings are not available for download.

Uptown Jug Champions." But as another band (which would later become ) was already recording under the "Warlocks" name, the band had to change its name in order to get a recording contract. After meeting their new manager , they moved to the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco.

Many bands from this area, such as , , and , went on to national fame, giving San Francisco an image as a center for the of the era. (Also see entry for the .) Of these bands, the Grateful Dead had members with arguably the highest level of musicianship, including and Dead most embodied "all the elements of the San Francisco scene and came, therefore, to represent the counterculture to the rest The name "Grateful Dead" was chosen from the dictionary.

Some claim it was a , others , the (Tibetan Book Of the Dead) , but according to Phil Lesh, in his biography (pp. 62), "..

.Jer (Garcia) picked up an old World Language Dictionary..

.(and)..

.In that silvery elf-voice he said to me, 'Hey, man, how about the Grateful Dead?'" The definition there was "A song meant to show a lost soul to the other side.

" According to the Garcia biography, Captian Trips by Sandy Troy, the band was smoking the psychedelic at the time.
The Grateful Dead formed during the era when bands like and were dominating the airwaves. Former folk-scene star had recently put out a couple of records featuring electric instrumentation.

Grateful Dead members that they decided to "go electric." Gradually, many of the East-Coast American , formerly luminaries of the coffee-house scene, were moving in the electric direction. It was natural for and , each of whom had been immersed in the American of the late 1950s and early '60s, to be open-minded toward electric guitars.

But the new Dead music was also naturally different from bands like Dylan's or the Spoonful, partly because their fellow musician came out of a schooled and electronic-music background. Listening to their first LP ( The Grateful Dead, Warner Brothers, 1967), one is also reminded that it was recorded only a few years after the big "surfing music" craze; that California rock-music sound seeped in, to some degree, as well.
The Grateful Dead’s early music (in the mid 1960s) was part of the process of establishing what " " was, but theirs was essentially a "street party" form of it.

This was natural, because they played psychedelic dances, open-air park events, and closed-street block parties. The Dead were not inclined to 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 melding several of them.

Often (both in performance and on recording) the Dead left room for exploratory, spacey soundscapes—a form of psychedelia that might run the gamut from strange to exotically beautiful. Most connoisseurs believe that the Grateful Dead's true spirit was rarely well captured in studio performance. ^{did capture more of their essence, but commercial success did not come until and , both released in . These records largely featured the band's laid-back acoustic musicianship and more traditional 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.}

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 opted for more melodic, symphonic and complex lines, often sounding like a second lead guitar. Weir, too, was not a traditional rhythm guitarist, but tended to play jazz-influenced, unique inversions at the upper end of the Dead's sound. The two drummers, Hart and Kreutzman, developed a unique, complex interplay, balancing Hart's cleaner, more structured drumming with Kreutzman's interest in jazz and swing percussion.

Garcia's lead lines were fluid, supple and spare, owing a great deal of their character to his training in fingerpicking and banjo. The overall effect was of an extraordinarily complex, interlocked group of individual instruments, which, at its best, had three or four simultaneous melodies rather than one.
Although he intensely disliked the appellation, Jerry Garcia was the band's de facto musical leader and the source of its identity.

Garcia was a charismatic, complex figure, simultaneously writing and playing music of enormous emotional resonance and insight while leading a personal life that often consisted of various forms of self-destructive excess, including well-known drug addictions, obesity, tremendous financial recklessness, and three complex, volatile, often unhappy marriages.

Later, in another accident, the middle finger on his right hand was accidentally amputated by his brother while the two boys were splitting kindling. Finally, as a young man, he was involved in a horrendous car accident which resulted in the death of a close and talented friend. Garcia narrowly escaped being killed himself.

This series of losses, coupled with the impact of psychedelic drugs and tremendous fame, gave Garcia's personality a unique, double-edged kind of rootlessness. At its best, this perspective resulted in a willingness to experiment musically that led to an lyrically. At its worst, particularly later in Garcia's life, the emotional pain of these early experiences propelled him into cathartic, self-destructive behavior that ultimately contributed to his untimely death.

The main focus of the members was to pursue various solo projects, most notably 's members occasionally got together under the Stealth Band during the late 1990s, infrequently playing unannounced shows.
The mid- tour of , with Bob, Bill, Phil and Mickey, was so successful and satisfying that the band decided the name was no longer appropriate. On , , (as they said) "reflecting form of the band name that fans had long used and keeping "Grateful" retired out of respect for Garcia.

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Blues." The band accepted on keyboards, on guitar, and on guitar and vocals as part of the band for the tour. In addition, Haynes also plays lead guitar with and Most recently, the Grateful Dead family (sans Lesh, who declined the invitation and instead opted to attend his son's orientation at Stanford) held the "Comes A Time" tribute to Jerry Garcia at the Greek Theater.

Lesh's absence led to fan speculation about a schism in the band, which was exacerbated by the highly publicized music downloading PR debacle, which set tensions high within the community. Although differences of opinion were exhibited publicly by various band members, Lesh helped clear the air about the "state of the band" by saying "A lot of our business disagreements are the result of poor communication from advisors. Bobby is my brother and I love him unconditionally; he is a very generous man, and was unfairly judged regarding the Archive issue.

" As for the future of the band, Lesh also said "The Dead is a big rusty machine that takes awhile to crank up. I am completely open to doing a Terrapin Station weekend and hopefully we will get it together for this summer."

In early May 2006 Lesh announced plans for a 24 date summer tour with a band billed again as Phil Lesh Friends. The tour began with Tennessee's festival on June 18.
Music in the USA.

Allyn Bacon. ISBN 0-205-13703-2. Little, Brown and Co.

. ISBN 0-316-00998-9. Inside History of the Grateful Dead.

Broadway Books. ISBN 0-7679-1186-5. Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock and Roll.

Rolling Stone Press. ISBN 0-671-54438-1.

Garofalo, pg.

219, quote in Garofalo, cited to Roxon, Lillian Roxon's CASH THEY GET", Los Angeles Times, 1990-06-26, p. C2.