The Grateful Dead

Genres:	Country & Bluegrass • Documentaries • Folk • Music & Radio • Music Videos & Concerts • Pop / Rock • Special Interest • Spoken Word • Television
Descriptive "tags":	psychedelic rock • 70s • 60s • rock • experimental • classic rock • psychedelic • blues • folk • americana • country rock
Decades Active:	1960s • 1970s • 1980s • 1990s • 2000s
Links online:	BBC Music • Discography • Fan Page • MusicMoz • Wikipedia

Biography

The enigmatic, erratic and mercurial (cliché, but absolutely true) Grateful Dead evolved from Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions to become the Warlocks in 1965. A number of conflicting reasons for the choice of name have arisen over the years. The most popular one is that the name was chosen from a randomly opened copy of theOxford Companion To Classical Music (others say a Funk & Wagnells dictionary and group member Phil Lesh cites the Britannica World Language Dictionary), the juxtaposition of words evidently immediately appealing to the group, who at the time were somewhat chemically stimulated on DMT. The theory that it came from the Egyptian Book Of The Dead has been denied by each member of the band.

The original line-up comprised Jerry Garcia (Jerome John Garcia, 1 August 1942, San Francisco, California, USA, d. 9 August 1995, Forest Knolls, California, USA; lead guitar), Bob Weir (b. Robert Hall, 16 October 1947, San...

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