During this year's Days Between — from August 1 and August 9 — NPR Music is publishing a series of stories about what keeps drawing people to the Grateful Dead, and how they plan to carry the band's legacy forward.
Jerry Garcia had a particular way of describing the musical preferences of Grateful Dead fans. Dennis McNally, the band's biographer and long-time publicist, remembers Garcia explaining it this way: "Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice."
It was how Garcia made sense of the phenomenon around the Dead, one that drew thousands of people to the band's concerts, a growing cult following that carried the hippie culture of the Summer of Love long past San Francisco's countercultural heyday and into the next three decades. By the 1990s, following the 1987 hit "Touch of Grey," the band was playing to some of its biggest crowds ever, filling stadiums and arenas across the country. The idea that the Dead never played the same show twice, always reaching for a new unknown, continued to pull people in. To McNally, a big part of the Dead's allure was its egalitarian ethos. There was no power imbalance between the stars on the stage and the people in the rafters.
"The Grateful Dead, even when they were playing to 50,000 people — down deep, Jerry had the notion that the audience was, in fact, their peers on a quest," McNally said. "Everybody in the room was in the band."
It's the fans, in turn, who have sustained the Dead's long, strange trip for more than six decades. In every corner of the country, generations of Deadheads have built local scenes and communities, a mosaic of people sharing their love of the songs and doing their part to keep it going.
McNally, who wrote the 2002 book A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead, has been one keeper of that collective legacy. At his sun-drenched home in San Francisco, decorated with framed Grateful Dead album covers and lyrics, McNally told NPR that the Dead's communal ideology was likely rooted in the band's early shows at writer Ken Kesey's "Acid Test" parties, where they wouldn't perform for an audience so much as participate in a larger collective experience. Sixty years later, that improvisational quest continues. Even as the band has changed and reinvented itself, the Grateful Dead's fanbase has proven to be uniquely and consistently renewable — a cosmic inheritance passed down from one generation to the next, welcoming younger Deadheads with open arms rather than an exclusionary attitude that permeates so much of rock and roll. Deadhead culture exists almost as the musical equivalent to a fervent sports team fandom: true believers willing to ride out even the roughest waters — every messy and less-than-perfect jam — until the next big win.
To quote George Harrison, ‘All things must pass.’ And they do — except Deadheadism.Dennis McNally, the band's biographer and long-time publicist
"Improvisation offers the possibility of magic because there's this great risk: You could fall on your face, and they did many times," McNally said. "But there was also the possibility that when you jumped off the cliff, you flew. And they did a lot of flying, too."
When Garcia died in 1995, the Grateful Dead formally ceased to exist. But even without the band's center of gravity, the music continued to be played by cover bands, at tribute shows and in different configurations of the surviving members — RatDog, The Other Ones, Furthur, The Dead. In 2015, all of the surviving members reunited for the Grateful Dead's 50th anniversary at a slate of concerts titled Fare Thee Well; the shows were billed as the band's final curtain.
"At the time I thought, 'Well, it's about time for the Deadhead phenomenon to start dwindling away,'" McNally said. "To quote George Harrison, 'All things must pass.' And they do — except Deadheadism."
The 50th anniversary shows drew hundreds of thousands of fans and opened a new door. Grahame Lesh, the son of late bassist Phil Lesh, said those concerts felt like a wake up call. "That was sort of when everyone came out of the woodwork," Lesh said before a performance in Monte Rio, Calif. "It was like, 'Oh, this is way deeper than we thought.'"
A few months later, Dead & Company was born. The band featured surviving members Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, plus John Mayer on lead guitar, Oteil Burbridge on bass and Jeff Chimenti on keys. The group picked up right where the original band left off, spending the next decade playing stadiums and amphitheatres across the country, bringing millennials and Gen Z into the fold.
Suddenly, the Grateful Dead was cool again, its psychedelic iconography becoming a staple in streetwear and leading publications like GQ to declare Dead & Company the "tour of the year" in 2019. Shakedown Street, the traveling caravan of grilled cheese slingers, T-shirt sellers and hula-hoop twirlers that popped up in every city the band played, was in full swing. Then, in the summer of 2023, the band announced its final tour.
“There's this band that plays on stage, but there’s so much more than just the band."Mischa Richter, filmmaker and artist
Co-manager Irving Azoff told the live music trade publication Pollstar that there were concerns about the physical toll of going on the road, especially after Kreutzmann had to sit out the previous tour for health reasons. Dead & Company went on to perform a residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas and a special run of shows in San Francisco for the Grateful Dead's 60th anniversary in 2025; less than six months later, Weir died from underlying lung complications after surviving a private battle with cancer.
Still, the music has continued to find its way to younger fans. Filmmaker and artist Mischa Richter, who started going to Dead shows as a teenager in the '90s, wanted to capture a slice of Dead & Company's renewed legacy — not through the musicians reviving the music, but by focusing on their devoted followers.
"There's this band that plays on stage, but there's so much more than just the band," Richter said. "I love that [in] this scene, the core character is kindness."
His documentary, Summer Tour, opened nationwide in July. It centers on a couple of 20-year-olds who followed Dead & Company across the country on the final 2023 tour. A long-haired son of a police officer, Jeremiah Pierce (Jerry for short) grew up listening to the Grateful Dead; when he turned 18, he decided to hit the road instead of following his family's tradition of joining the military. Annie Dunn comes from a family of Deadheads. Throughout the film, Richter captures the couple's summer adventure: fixing up their van, skinny-dipping in lakes, making friends, adopting a kitten and spinning in circles at every concert.
"I felt this responsibility to highlight this community and particularly the youth that are not so cynical and not stuck in their rooms on a computer and are really understanding America," Richter said. "They know all the national parks, they know where to camp. They're making music. They're making art. They know about commerce. They know how to hustle. I just love the ingenuity and the positivity."
In true Dead fashion, the documentary — which was produced by Richter's high school friend and fellow Deadhead, the actress Chloë Sevigny — went on a tour of its own this summer, screening at different cities across the country. During a stop at the Brooklyn Bowl in June, dozens of people watched the film while sitting cross-legged on the venue's floor. Afterwards, Pierce's band Mason's Children, a group of fresh-faced, long-haired kids, took the stage. Many in the audience described them as reminiscent of the Grateful Dead in the 1960s. Under the venue's flashing, colorful lights, the group traipsed through high-energy renditions of early Dead tunes including "Mountains of the Moon" and "Turn On Your Love Light." Richter and Sevigny joined the crowd of dancers, bright-eyed youth in facepaint next to veteran Deadheads in their best tie-dye.
Pierce says Mason's Children was formed on the road, following Dead & Company. "We all would jam outside in the parking lots after the show. We were just so inspired by the music that we couldn't stop playing," he said. "We danced so hard during the shows and came right out and played music all night, packed up and did the next night, wherever the tour brought us."
In the absence of any formal Grateful Dead band this summer, Mason's Children is finding like-minded fans in listeners of their generation. Tyler Goodmoore, 23, met one of the band members at a Santana concert last year. He turned her onto the Grateful Dead; now Goodmore considers herself a "first-generation Deadhead" and listens to the band every day, even though she says she doesn't have many friends in New York City who share her appreciation, yet.
"Shows like this really bring everyone together," she said during the Brooklyn Bowl show. "I just met someone today and she lives in New York and now I get to go to concerts with her."
For a generation facing internet fatigue, political polarization and a music industry increasingly driven by social media algorithms, the Grateful Dead still represents a special kind of escapism. Bob Weir was deeply aware of that ability. In 2024, when the Grateful Dead was named one of the Kennedy Center Honorees, Weir reflected on the band's role in promoting unity not just within American musical traditions, but also within the country's social fabric.
"Here in this country, we disagree deeply on political issues, but we all agree on one thing — that American music is the stuff," Weir told NPR in 2024. "It's the real thing. It's my hope that American music can help pull us together."
For Sky Edenfield, a 27-year-old attending the Summer Tour screening, the way the Dead brings people together in person is a big part of the draw. She saw Dead & Company a handful of times and attended the Grateful Dead 60 shows at Golden Gate Park last summer.
"I think the purity of only experiencing it at a show is really nice," she said. "I never listen to them on my own, but then when I'm at the show, it's like [I'm] locked in."
Peter Shapiro, co-owner of the Brooklyn Bowl and producer of the 2015 Fare Thee Well concerts, says the people who follow the Grateful Dead are unlike any other fandom. He got hooked during his second Dead show in 1993. He remembers that voice actor Ken Nordine appeared onstage to do a spoken word performance with the band, and Shapiro — who says his "head was in the sky" — got freaked out and left.
"The next thing I knew, I was in a parking lot in a drum circle," Shapiro said. "It was snowing, and I was having a great time."
That night changed Shapiro's life. In the summer of 1993, he made a student film called And Miles To Go Before I Sleep, following the Dead on the road. He couldn't get any of the band members to participate, but he included interviews with other notable members of their crew, including Kesey, peace activist Wavy Gravy and psychologist-slash-psychedelic enthusiast Timothy Leary. After Garcia died, the owner of a New York City rock club called Wetlands Preserve — who had seen the film and felt that Shapiro understood the power of Dead culture — called the then-23-year-old and asked if he wanted to take over the venue, which became ground zero for blossoming jam bands.
Since then, Shapiro has become deeply embedded in the scene. He owns multiple venues, including several Brooklyn Bowl locations, the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, N.Y., and a Jerry-themed venue called Garcia's in Chicago. He's also the publisher of Relix Magazine, a publication dedicated to live music and jam band culture. (Shapiro is also on the Board of Trustees for NY Public Radio).
Shapiro said Deadheads' penchant for uncharted territory is what keeps pushing the scene forward: "It's that openness that Deadheads and fans of this music have — you're a fan of the Dead, but most Deadheads are fans of live music and go to other shows and explore. It's that exploratory nature that is still going today, and I don't think it will ever shut off."
Musician Don Was agrees. The Grammy-winning producer and bass player has shared the stage with legends ranging from Mavis Staples to Iggy Pop. In 2018, he formed a trio with Bob Weir called the Wolf Bros, performing Dead classics, covers and Weir's original material. During an interview with NPR in Washington, D.C., Was said Deadheads stand out from any audience he's played for before, not just for how they hang on to every note but also to each other.
"The sense of community is really tightly woven. It reminds me a little bit of a family. My family used to get together every Thanksgiving. My parents instigated it, but when they passed, we had to find a way to get together again," he said. "I think that will very much be the case with Grateful Dead fans. It's a tribal gathering, and it's this crazy diverse, super wide-ranging tribe. Who's playing the songs may not necessarily matter as much as the songs are being played and you're with your people."
This story includes reporting by Felix Contreras.
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