Grateful Dead Music Group

When Blair Jackson first heard that the Georgia-based composer Lee Johnson had written a suite for symphony orchestra based on 10 songs by the Grateful Dead, he was unimpressed. "There is a long and ignoble tradition of butchering rock songs by rearranging them in lame and unimaginative 'classical' settings.

Music festival: Bloc Party, Justice, Satellite Party and Kinky were among the bands announced Wednesday for the second annual L.A. Weekly Detour Music Festival, to be held outside at Main and 1st streets in downtown L.A. on Oct. 6. Film festival: "Lions for Lambs," a drama starring Robert Redford, Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise, will get its North American premiere on the opening night of the AFI Los Angeles International Film Festival on Nov. 1 at the ArcLight in Hollywood.

Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart says he and other members of the band never really understood the forces that turned them into a 30-year cultural phenomenon. "It was an alchemical thing," Hart said. "It's for other people to decide our fate in history, our place in the culture." That is exactly why fans, followers and some of those who were in the inner circle of the Grateful Dead plan to travel to the University of Massachusetts for three days beginning Friday. This is no music festival.

It looks like the old Dead are gettin' on. Surviving members of the Grateful Dead say they'll regroup for a 19-city tour -- their first since 2004 -- beginning April 12 in Greensboro, N.C. The group, which now just calls itself the Dead, announced its plans last week. Original band members Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann have toured sporadically since the 1995 death of guitarist Jerry Garcia but struggled to get along personally and artistically.

Jerry Garcia might have died 15 years ago, but ambling through the parking lot of the Forum on Saturday night, you'd have been hard pressed to know he's gone. Two hours before the Dead's first L.A. show in more than a half a decade, the sun-scorched asphalt was already swarming with people. The scene was a cross between a Renaissance Faire, a Bedouin crossing and the world's most pot-addled family reunion.

A decade after Jerry Garcia died of a heart attack while at a drug rehabilitation facility on Aug. 9, 1995, the legacy he and the Grateful Dead left is stronger than ever. That's not so much a comment about the young fans who follow such Dead-influenced "jam" bands as the String Cheese Incident. Nor is the band's spirit to be found in its full flower at Bonnaroo or other festivals furthering the scene the Dead anchored in its heyday.

Angry fans of the Grateful Dead stopped truckin' on Wednesday as word spread that the legendary San Francisco psychedelic jam band had pulled the plug on free downloads of its concert recordings from a nonprofit website. Calls for a boycott on Grateful Dead music and paraphernalia and performances by surviving group members ricocheted online as news of the ban traveled.

What a short, strange trip it was. After the Grateful Dead halted free downloads of its ubiquitously circulating concerts from a nonprofit website last week, surviving members of the psychedelic jam band changed their minds late Wednesday amid protest from some of their biggest fans. Internet Archive, a site that catalogs content on websites, reposted recordings of Grateful Dead concerts for download after band members decided to make them available again.

By day he was a mild-mannered, buttoned-down reference librarian. By night -- and on weekends and during vacations -- David Dodd would shed his jacket and tie for tie-dye and morph into a Grateful Dead fan. He was one of those people who, for what seemed like endless summers, followed the band from show to show in search of that elusive, transcendent musical moment. Then one day, this scholarly fellow stumbled upon the perfect union for his two passions.

Robert Hunter laughs at the irony as he turns the image over in his head: the solitary writer, secluded in a cabin along Northern California's Russian River, churning out the Great American Novel.