The Grateful Dead scored one Top-40 single yet toured for decades as giants
Across a 30-year career the Grateful Dead reached the Top 40 just once, with Touch of Grey in 1987. They stayed among America's highest-grossing touring acts anyway, building a following by word of mouth and by letting fans tape their shows and freely swap the recordings.
The band started out in early 1965 as the Warlocks, assembled from the leftovers of a Palo Alto jug band and a bluegrass-leaning group called the Wildwood Boys. Their first gig, on May 5, 1965, was at Magoo's Pizza Parlor in Menlo Park, and they soon spent six weeks at a Belmont bar playing five sets nightly, five nights out of seven. Then they learned another group already had a record out as the Warlocks, a discovery the Velvet Underground also made about the same name.
Jerry Garcia found the replacement in a dictionary. Phil Lesh recalled him leafing through a Britannica volume and suggesting the phrase, defined as the soul of a dead person grateful to whoever had paid for its burial. Another version, from the band's publishing director Alan Trist, has Garcia's finger landing on it in a folklore dictionary during a game of Fictionary. One biographer adds that the band were smoking DMT at the time.
The first show under the new name came on December 4, 1965, in San Jose, at one of Ken Kesey's Acid Tests, which helped the players develop their improvising and their almost telepathic sense of one another. On January 8, 1966, at San Francisco's Fillmore Auditorium, fans made the first of more than 2,000 concert tapes known to exist. Garcia, Lesh, Bob Weir and Bill Kreutzmann stayed on until the band dissolved after Garcia's death in August 1995; keyboardist Pigpen McKernan had died in 1973.
Recognition piled up afterwards. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction for the band arrived in 1994, and in 2012 their May 8, 1977, concert at Cornell University's Barton Hall entered the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry. Surviving members played farewell shows in Santa Clara and Chicago for the 50th anniversary in 2015, and in 2024 no act had placed more albums in the Billboard 200's Top 40.
Source: Grateful Dead
