Grateful Dead Music Group

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.

The breadth of Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia's musical tastes can be heard in a series of concert recordings being released in the wake of a solution to the legal wrangling that arose after his 1995 death. "He had a phenomenal knowledge of all popular American music," the Dead's official historian, Dennis McNally, told Reuters. When he wasn't at one of the 80 or so shows the group averaged each year, Garcia often performed solo, and his archives hold about 550 tapes from those concerts.

UC Santa Cruz says it has received $10,000 each from two foundations established by members of the rock group the Grateful Dead to help preserve the archive of the late composer Lou Harrison. The money will be used to pay remaining taxes and legal costs so that none of the archival materials stored at the university library will have to be sold, the school said. Harrison, best known for his pioneering fusion of Eastern and Western musical traditions, died in February 2003.

The word "expect" was kicked around like a Hacky Sack before Thursday's concert at Irvine's Verizon Wireless Amphitheater by the Dead. This was the first Southern California appearance by the group built around all four surviving core members of the Grateful Dead. Singer-guitarist Bob Weir spoke backstage about how he didn't know what to expect when the four decided to reunite more than a year ago.

The hardest moment for Dennis McNally in the more than two decades he's served as historian and publicist for the Grateful Dead was not when group leader Jerry Garcia died--seven years ago this Friday--of a heart attack while in a drug rehab center. Nor was it the earlier death of a band member, the 1990 overdose of keyboard player Brent Mydland.

It's been seven years since Jerry Garcia's guitar fell silent, but the kaleidoscope of wriggling humanity he kept on the road for more than 30 years is very much alive. The reanimated Grateful Dead, who have taken to calling themselves the Other Ones, stuttered to a start Saturday. Apparent equipment problems waylaid the opening notes--a spacey flourish that would have sparkled were it not for the speakers clipping out at least a dozen times.

A settlement was said to be "imminent" Wednesday in one of the messier custody fights in Bay Area rock history, as lawyers confirmed that they have a tentative deal in the ownership of guitars that had been willed by Jerry Garcia to the destitute craftsman who made them.

How many bands do you know that would start a show in the middle of a song? That's what the Other Ones did at the Universal Amphitheatre on Thursday, headlining the fourth edition of the Furthur Festival tour. The group, featuring former Grateful Dead members Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann and auxiliary Dead pianist Bruce Hornsby, opened the show with a jam that led to the coda of "Sugar Magnolia," one of the Dead's most popular songs.

Phish and its fans travel the land marked with a tie-dyed bull's-eye inherited from the granddaddy of all hippie bands, the Grateful Dead. Phish's phenomenon is a replay of the hippie caravan that followed the Dead. Turning concert venues and surrounding areas into urban campgrounds and street bazaars, the Deadheads wore out their welcome in city after city in the late 1980s and early 1990s, making it difficult for the band to find places to play. Irvine was one of them.