The Grateful Dead was an American rock band formed in 1965 in Palo Alto, California, known for their eclectic style that fused elements of rock, blues, jazz, folk, country, bluegrass, rock and roll, gospel, reggae, and world music with psychedelia. The band is famous for improvisation during their live performances, and attracted a devoted fan base, known as "Deadheads." According to the musician and writer Lenny Kaye, the music of the Grateful Dead "touches on ground that most other groups don't even know exists." For the range of their influences and the structure of their live performances, the Grateful Dead are considered "the pioneering godfathers of the jam band world".
Keith Richard Godchaux was an American pianist best known for his tenure in the rock group the Grateful Dead from 1971 to 1979. Following their departure from the Dead, he and his wife Donna formed the Heart of Gold Band in 1980, but Godchaux died from injuries sustained in a car accident shortly after their first concert.
Augustus Owsley Stanley III was an American-Australian audio engineer and clandestine chemist. He was a key figure in the San Francisco Bay Area hippie movement during the 1960s and played a pivotal role in the decade's counterculture. Under the professional name Bear, he was the sound engineer for the Grateful Dead, recording many of the band's live performances. Stanley also developed the Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound, one of the largest mobile sound reinforcement systems ever constructed. Stanley also helped Robert Thomas design the band's trademark skull logo.
The Fillmore East was rock promoter Bill Graham's rock venue on Second Avenue near East 6th Street on the Lower East Side section of Manhattan, now called the East Village, in New York City. The venue was open from March 8, 1968, to June 27, 1971, and featured some of the biggest acts in rock music of that time. The Fillmore East was a companion to Graham's Fillmore Auditorium, and its successor, the Fillmore West, in San Francisco.
Anthem of the Sun is the second album by rock band the Grateful Dead, released in 1968 on Warner Bros/Seven Arts. It is the first album to feature second drummer Mickey Hart. The band was also joined by Tom Constanten, who contributed avant-garde instrumental and studio techniques influenced by composers John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. The album was assembled through a collage-like editing approach helmed by members Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh, in which disparate studio and live performance tapes were spliced together to create new hybrid recordings. The band also supplemented their performances with instruments such as prepared piano, kazoo, harpsichord, timpani, trumpet, and güiro. The result is an experimental studio amalgam that is neither a pure studio album nor a live album.
Two from the Vault is a three-CD live album by the rock band the Grateful Dead. It was recorded at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, California on August 24, 1968. The event was left unreleased for nearly 25 years, before being mixed down from the original multi-track reels and released on Grateful Dead Records in 1992.
One from the Vault is a live album by the Grateful Dead, recorded on August 13, 1975, at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, California, for a small audience of radio programmers. Three weeks later, the concert was broadcast nationwide on FM radio through Metromedia, after which the radio show was widely traded by fans on cassettes, and sold in bootleg LP versions under various titles including Make Believe Ballroom, becoming the most widely circulated Grateful Dead bootleg.
Download Series Volume 5 is a live album by the rock band the Grateful Dead. It includes the complete concert recorded on March 27, 1988, at the Hampton Coliseum in Hampton, Virginia. It was released as a digital download on September 6, 2005.
Download Series Volume 6 is a live album by the rock band the Grateful Dead. It was released as a digital download on October 4, 2005. It was recorded on March 17, 1968, at the Carousel Ballroom in San Francisco. The show features the first set closer "Turn On Your Lovelight" and the whole second set.
Dick's Picks Volume 24 is the 24th installment of the popular Grateful Dead archival series. It contains selections from the March 23, 1974 concert at the Cow Palace in Daly City, California. The two-disc, vault release is mastered in HDCD.
Dick's Picks Volume 4 is the fourth live album in the Dick's Picks series of releases by the Grateful Dead. It was recorded on February 13 and February 14, 1970, at the Fillmore East in New York City, and released in February 1996. It was the first of the Dick's Picks CDs to have three discs. It was also the first Dead album to include the song "Mason's Children".
The Wall of Sound was an enormous sound reinforcement system designed in 1973 specifically for the Grateful Dead's live performances. The largest concert sound system built at that time, the Wall of Sound fulfilled lead designer Owsley "Bear" Stanley's desire for a distortion-free sound system that could also serve as its own monitoring system. Due to its size, weight and resulting expense, the full WoS was only used from March to October of 1974.
Rolling Thunder is the first solo album by Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart.
Three from the Vault is a live album by the Grateful Dead. It contains the complete show recorded on February 19, 1971 at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York. It was released on June 26, 2007.
A taper is a person who records musical events, often from standing microphones in the audience, for the benefit of the musical group's fanbase. Such taping was popularized in the late 1960s and early 1970s by fans of the Grateful Dead. Audio recording, while not officially allowed until the creation by the band of a "tapers' section" behind the soundboard in the mid-1980s, was generally tolerated at shows and fans would share their tapes through trade. Taping and trading became a Grateful Dead subculture.
Dave's Picks Volume 4 is a three-CD live album by the rock band the Grateful Dead. It contains the complete concert recorded on September 24, 1976, at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. It was released on November 1, 2012.
Dave's Picks Volume 8 is a three-CD live album by the rock band the Grateful Dead. It contains the complete concert from November 30, 1980, at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia. It was produced as a limited edition of 13,000 numbered copies, and was released on November 1, 2013.
The Promised Land: The Grateful Dead / Jerry Garcia Hebrew Project is a 2015 album by Sagol 59 and Ami Yares, featuring Hebrew language covers of songs by the Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia. It was released on April 17, 2015. The album was followed, in August 2015, by The Promised Land Acoustic Sessions EP, which contained four additional recordings: Hebrew renditions of "Ripple", "Brown Eyed Women", "Friend of the Devil" and "Ship of Fools". "The Pita Tapes" followed in March 2016, containing two unreleased demo recordings of songs often covered by the Grateful Dead and Garcia. A nine-track limited edition vinyl LP was released in April 2016. On August 1, 2016, studio recordings of "Deep Elem Blues" and "Half-Step Mississippi Uptown Toodeloo" were released digitally, to coincide with Garcia's birthday. A live show recording was released digitally in April 2017 as The Promised Land at The Deanery, Brooklyn NY 3-23-2017. Live in Cafe Bialik, Tel Aviv, a soundboard concert recording, was released July 4, 2017. Another recording of a Tel Aviv show, Acoustic Live at the Tsuzamen, Tel Aviv, Aug 10th 2017, was released in October 2017. Another live set, Live by the Dead Sea, was released in November 2017. A Hebrew rendition of the song "It Must Have Been the Roses" was released in December 2017. A live soundboard recording, The Jaffa Rooftop Concert, was released as a digital download in May 2018. Studio recordings of "Monkey & the Engineer" and "Dire Wolf" were released on April 1, 2021.
Betty Cantor-Jackson is an American audio engineer and producer. She is best known for her work recording live concerts for the Grateful Dead from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, including the Cornell 5/8/77 album. She is noted for her ear for recording and her long tenure with the band.
Pacific High Recording was an independent recording studio in San Francisco. Founded in 1968, the studio was part of the San Francisco sound and the location for recordings by such notable artists as Sly and the Family Stone, the Grateful Dead, The Charlatans, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Van Morrison.
