If you are a fan or even a borderline fan, you know their songs by heart.
"Uncle John's Band." "Truckin'." "Shakedown Street." "Ripple." "Sugar Magnolia." "Alabama Getaway." "The Music Never Stopped."
The band ia as iconic as the San Francisco landscape where they came from. The only thing more iconic than they are happen to be their fans, worldly known as "Deadheads."
That, though, scratches the surface of what was the Grateful Dead. For 30 years, they were one of the main groups most fans wanted to go see on tour. Their fans were so loyal, they literally traveled the country to wherever they played. And let's just say you didn't have to smoke a little weed to enjoy their music at their shows -- all you had to do was inhale it and you felt like you were part of the "in" crowd.
Formed in 1965 in nearby Palo Alto, Calif., the Dead played all brands of music: folk, country, blues, reggae, jazz, bluegrass, psychedelia and a little acid rock. Their jam sessions were long and memorable and fans were allowed to freely tape the band for their pleasure. All you have to do is prowl around YouTube and you can find a Grateful Dead performance somewhere.
The Dead released 18 albums onto the chart between 1967-81, yet never one of those albums hit the Top 10, the closest to doing so was 1975's "Blues For Allah," which peaked at No. 12. Then again, the albums were really just filler for the band's seemingly unstoppable tour schedule. In other words, they never had to have a Top 10 album or even one Top 40 hit and yet, their place in rock history was forever made.
Their unyielding fans would agree with that. To them, the Earth, moon and sun revolved around their band.
In 1981, the band released the albums "Reckoning" and "Dead Set," each peaking at Nos. 43 and 29, respectively. And then that was it: No albums ... nothing ... for six years.
On September 15, 1982, the band went back on stage for their encore at the old Capital Center in Landover, Md. And they had a song to perform that they never had done before. With music by the band's legendary guitarist and lead vocalist, Jerry Garcia, and the words by their longtime lyricist, Robert Hunter, they dove into the song "Touch Of Grey." It got a rousing reception and every so often in the next four years, the band would do that song.
Garcia, Hunter and the band knew that the song needed to find its way on the next album. So on January 6, 1987, the Dead was back working on their 19th album called "In The Dark," but for this album, they struck up an idea: Since they had been performing all or most of the songs for the album on tour for the previous four or five years, they wanted to give each of those songs a "live" feel to them. So most of them were recorded around California in empty arenas, most notably the Marin Veterans Memorial Auditorium in San Rafael, Calif.
When the band had done all eight tracks (the shortest of which was the Garcia-Hunter composition "When Push Comes To Shove, coming in a rather miniscule 4 minutes, 5 seconds) for the album, the tapes were brought back to a studio for "cleaning up" purposes where needed. And the time taken to record the album? How about one single week. That was it -- it started on January 6 and was completed by January 13.
In an interview with deaddisc.com, Garcia stated about recording the album, "Marin Vets turns out to be an incredibly nice room to record in. There's something about the formal atmosphere in there that makes us work. When we set up at Front Street to work, a lot of times we just sort of dissolve into hanging out. Going in (Marin Vets) without an audience and playing just to ourselves was in the nature of an experiment."
Within a couple of months, the band -- consisting of Garcia, guitarist-vocalist Bob Weir, keyboardist-vocalist Brent Mydland, bassist Phil Lesh and drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann -- was back on tour to promote an album that wasn't released yet by their record company, Arista. Once again, the reaction from crowds throughout Deadhead Nation was positive and on Monday, July 6, 1987, the album "In The Dark" was released.
For the first release, Arista chose "Touch Of Grey." Hunter, who co-wrote the classic Dead songs like "Truckin'," "Casey Jones," "Sugar Magnolia" and "Ripple," penned the tune about an older man seeing his world changing from when he was younger and not liking how he relates to it, but finding he's accepting of it. Hunter penned lines in the song that needed meaning:
"Dawn is breaking everywhere. Light a candle, curse the glare. Draw the curtains I don't care 'cause it's all right." Hunter used a line that former U.S. Secretary of State Adlai Stevenson used in a 1962 speech about the late Eleanor Roosevelt when he said, ""She would rather light a candle than curse the darkness ..."
"It's a lesson to me. The Ables and the Bakers and the C's. The ABCs we all must face. And try to keep a little grace." Hunter takes the Ables, Bakers and C's line from the first two words in the military code alphabet -- Able is for A, Baker is for B. That was way back when -- these days, Alfa is for A and Bravo is for B.
"I know the rent is in arrears. The dog has not been fed in years. It's even worse than it appears, but it's all right." Basically, Hunter is trying to make up for lost time as the "older" person and has just been neglectful of matters. And though he could throw a tizzy over the whole thing, he's saying it doesn't matter.
"Oh well a touch of grey. Kind of suits you anyway. That was all I had to say. It's all right." Not only does the look of an older person (the touch of grey) look all right on him, but it looks good on others who grew old along with him, leading to Garcia singing at the end, "We will get by" instead of "I will get by" through most of the song. The "We" part was a message to other Deadheads who grew up and got a little older with the band.
"Touch Of Grey" was the highest debuting song on the Billboard Hot 100 on July 25, 1987, coming in at No. 77 and took 16 notches off its pursuit up the chart the next week to No. 61. By the next week, August 8, it was up to No. 47, which if it had stopped right there, would have been the band's biggest hit of all time.
But it wasn't in a standing still mood. After 22 years and 19 albums and numerous singles failures, "Touch Of Grey" reached the Top 40 for the band on August 15, 1987, debuting as the highest debuting song of the week at No. 32. As Casey Kasem himself would say for that countdown, "I didn't think I would ever say this, but that's the Grateful Dead in our countdown with the highest debuter of the week, 'Touch Of Grey.' It's their first hit and it debuts at No. 32.'"
And the song, featuring Weir's guitar, Garcia's vocals and the work of keyboardist Mydland, kept climbing, also steered up the chart by the music video featuring the band playing as skeletons of themselves -- the logo the band used for their careers -- until midway through the song when they come to real life. Five weeks after making their Top 40 debut, the Grateful Dead went to a place no one ever believed they would ever end up in their careers -- the Top 10 as the song slid up from No. 11 to No. 10. A week later on September 26, 1987, it slid up one last notch to the peak position of No. 9 before falling back the next week.
As for "In The Dark," it pushed its way up the chart and became the band's first (and only) Top 10 album, peaking at No. 6. And on the Mainstream Rock chart, "Touch Of Grey" hit No. 1 the week of August 1, 1987, spending three weeks at the top -- the only No. 1 song the Dead would ever have in their careers on a national level. Their follow-up, "Hell In A Bucket," hit No. 3 on the Mainstream Rock chart, but would never hit the Hot 100.
As a matter of fact, the Grateful Dead would never hit the Hot 100 chart again after "Touch Of Grey." But as the song's refrain kept saying, "It's all right." They drew a younger and more mainstream audience with the "In The Dark" album and Top 10 single and continued to tour endlessly the rest of the decade and into the 1990s when health problems began to plague Garcia, who would eventually go into a drug rehabilitation facility just after he turned 53 years old in August 1995. Sadly, a week later on August 9, 1995, Garcia died of a heart attack. His fans and Deadheads alike were crushed.
The 30-year "long, strange trip" as documented in the song "Truckin'" was over. No one would or could replace the band's biggest emblematic symbol whatsoever. And so the various members of the band went their separate ways to form other bands or join in on established bands throughout the rest of the 20th century and into the 21st.
Then in early 2015, the four remaining living members of the Dead -- Lesh, Kreutzmann, Hart and Weir (Mydland had died of a speedball overdose in 1990) -- made the decision to reunite and do five last shows called "Fare Thee Well" to put an official end to the band on what would be their 50th anniversary as a group. They played two shows at the new Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif., near where the band made musical tracks half a century earlier, on June 27 and 28. A week later, they played Soldier Field in Chicago for the last three shows on July 3, 4 and July 5. Joining the band on stage were Trey Anastasio of the band Phish, the current day group most associated with the kind of music the Grateful Dead do, Jeff Chimenti of the Dead-like bands The Dead and Further, on keyboards, and longtime fan and superstar himself Bruce Hornsby, who was a Dead member from 1990-92, on piano.
In August 2015, it was reported by Billboard that Weir, Kreutzmann and Hart would join bassist Oteil Burbridge, Chimenti and star guitarist-singer John Mayer in a Dead off-shoot band called Dead & Company with the first show planned to be held for Halloween night at Madison Square Garden.
The Dead, Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame inductees in 1994, may be "dead and buried" as an everyday group, but the legacy lives on just over 20 years after Garcia's passing. Their music will be everywhere ... today, tomorrow, forever.
And true, they may have gotten along without a Top 40 hit and been just fine. But when "Touch Of Grey" hit the Top 40 and then went to the Top 10, it was as if the last box on the Dead's legendary card had been checked off.
They did get by.
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