Deadhead

They weren't a band, but a support group, like AA.

At the time, it was spawned from the Deadhead culture.

They would go to concerts and hold sessions in between sets to help members lead a drug and alcohol-free lifestyle.

Oh, okay.

A con man with a Bible accidentally created the conditions for the Grateful Dead's greatest era.

That's the argument Deadheads never make about Lenny Hart, and it's the one the evidence actually supports.

The first, the con, and the sandwich, spring 1969.

The dead's business situation was, as usual, a disaster.

This one is being filmed and sent out live, carried over the radio and the local public television station, because everyone involved understands the room deserves a proper wake.

Deadheads who never once made it through these doors will, years from now, know exactly what this stage looked like, because they will watch it.

earlier in the night another act plays a long loud unexpected set that goes over so well it forces the whole schedule to shift nobody minds the band will play for hours after that and it will keep playing until the gray light starts to come up outside and the promised breakfast actually appears here is the strange little detail the tape keeps When the countdown finally hit and the new year landed on the room, the man who ran the place made his entrance.

He did not simply walk out to say a few words.

No audience would ever experience the same song twice.

This radical commitment to impermanence and specificity became central to Deadhead culture, creating a collecting mania around tapes and recordings, a community united by the pursuit of the perfect or most transcendent version.

Different every time.

Let's take that apart slowly because it sounds like the sort of thing musicians say, and it turns out to be a much stranger claim than it looks.

Perhaps there was also artistic exhaustion with the piece.

After more than a decade of intensive exploration, even Dark Star's seemingly infinite capacity for variation had its limits.

But the rarity only deepened Deadhead's reverence.

When Dark Star appeared in performances during the 1990s revival period, the response was electric, a crowd reaction that acknowledged both the song's historical importance and its long absence.

Yeah,

I always loved, like, the Deadheads, Great Foot Deads community, the way that they kind of just, like, it existed beyond the band.

It was almost like a culture that the band was just like facilitating.

And, you know, the Temple of Psychic Youth, I like people to be empowered to take things into their own hands.

Since the band originated in Palo Alto, California in 65, the Dead began their incredible run of touring for 30 consecutive years, performing between 100 to 150 shows a year.

And during that span, there were many accounts of diehard Deadheads seeing the band hundreds of times.

They played to more people than any band in history.

They've sold over 25 million records.

His health was constantly an issue, exacerbated in the 80s when he was diagnosed with diabetes.

In July of 86, after the band played an outdoor concert in DC and during an oppressive heat wave, Jerry Garcia guzzled a large glass of fruit juice backstage, and then he suddenly collapsed into a diabetic coma.

Deadheads everywhere prayed to save his life.

Jerry Garcia, he defied the odds, and he miraculously came out of this coma.