Grateful Dead

Lee Crumpton, founder of the Home Grown Music Network and co-founder of Harmonized Records, won the Grahamy Jammy at this year's The Jammys Awards.

Donna Jean & the Tricksters CD release party, dinner and a Benefit for the Rex Foundation - Saturday, February 23, 2008 at The Knitting Factory.

Offered here as a compilation on two CDs, Phil Lesh tributes the shows recorded at The Warfield in San Francisco, CA (May 18 and 19, 2006) to Lawrence “Ramrod” Shurtliff at the start of track one (“Shakedown Street), because “his love stood like a tree.” And so a recently deceased Grateful Dead roadie gets an ovation from a sea of fans, I mean family.

At Vegoose, Trey Anastasio was asked to comment on some aspect of the current jamband scene. Somewhere in his response, he clarified that, when he was growing up in suburban New Jersey, there was only one jamband—they were called the Grateful Dead. Indeed, when Anastasio was weened on the Dead, Zappa, and progressive radio rock in the mid- to late-70s, the term “jamband” would have fit the Dead pretty well. While there was a strong dose of improvisation in every performance, setlists were constructed of songs with the standard popular music formula—the Dead stepped through a door every time they left a song behind, but the songs themselves generally closed the band inside the four walls and a ceiling of verse, chorus, bridge, rhythm and melody.

Today you can still feel the energy that has been captured by the Ledges over hundreds of years. It is still a meeting place, and it was once told to me that "People weave their individuality through the park, creating a beautiful tapestry of diversity, bound together with a common love.

The Dead were on a roll back in 1989 and this show caught them in full flight on July 4, in front of a huge crowd at Rich Stadium in Orchard Park, New York. Three months before the Mother of All Breakouts, “Dark Star,” the band was relaxed and poised for the next level. This wasn’t a mid-90s romp through the old chestnuts. Nope, not that easy. Each song was given new life while all of the tried and true Dead hallmarks were captured in beautiful start-of-the-art imagery and mixed in 5.1 sound from the master tapes. The holiday gig starts off in third gear with an opening “Bertha”>“Greatest Story Ever Told” that has the stadium floor bouncing like martinets as the Dead, again, pull all of the right strings. Well, they ain’t ready for a breather, just yet, as Garcia veers them into a solid “Cold Rain and Snow” that continues the thunder of the opening trio.

Much has changed since the final Grateful Dead tour in the summer of 1995. Music lost one of its most beloved and iconic characters in Jerry Garcia in August 1995, shortly after the summer tour concluded. After Garcia’s passing and subsequent end of the Grateful Dead, many followers of the band, aptly entitled “deadheads,” found themselves left with a great void in their lives. The band they steadfastly followed from concert to concert (some decades at a time) and fanatically devoted themselves to was gone.