William Miller: “So Russell... What do you love about music?”
Russell Hammond: “To begin with, everything.”
I grew up loving jam bands and traveling around the South to see as many concerts and festivals as I could. This is where my passion for live music began.
I’ll pause while you laugh and shake your head at the idea of an Appalachian teenager whistling on the side of the road like a modern day Huckleberry Finn, hitching rides with friends and strangers alike in search of a good jam.
The jam band practice of touring constantly and the focus on live performance as the epitome of sound shaped my views of what music can and should be. I developed the opinion that truly great artists are better live. I learned to appreciate the improvisation, the differences and even the occasional mistakes of a live performance.
The “jam band” label itself is pretty interesting. It originated with jazz musicians, which I suspect is intuitively cooler to the average person (though that person likely doesn’t listen to either jazz or jam bands). Calling a group a “jam band” doesn’t really specify the type of music they play as much as it evokes stereotypical images of their fans. In reality, their music could be anything from bluegrass to folk to rock to jazz to funk, or a fusion of multiple genres.
I’d like to offer a sincere ode to these artists using the archetypal jam band: The Grateful Dead. They have had many incarnations. I will be referring to them as the Dead, which will be straightforward for a non-Deadhead and mildly annoying for a Deadhead.
There's been so much written about them that you think you know, but they're actually far more interesting than you probably realize.
Community is Everything
Academics have been studying the Dead for decades, trying to decipher what enabled this unusual band to build a cult-like following.
One huge factor is that their music is centered around live performances rather than album success. The Dead’s music is a shared, participatory exchange.
When the Dead was in its infancy, the band hung out with the Beat poets and became the house band for Acid Tests—a series of parties centered on LSD use and hosted by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest author Ken Kesey. The parties doubled as their training grounds, teaching the band to be part of the audience while simultaneously playing to it—and showing them how psychedelics could bend their own personal time signatures.
There is nothing like discovering a song you love for the first time. Imagine doing it surrounded by 25,000 other people who all love it just as much as you do. Now imagine you are on some fantastic LSD listening to the band that wrote the fucking theme music for that very drug. That’s not an experience you ever forget.
As Sadie Sartini Garner put it in a phenomenal piece for The Ringer:
“[The music is] being created and destroyed in the same moment… by understanding their music as something that should be made fresh night after night for new fans, year after year and decade after decade, the Grateful Dead suggested that their songs are never complete. There is no final version; there’s not even a definitive live version.”
A reasonable person might ask: Why would someone go see the same band perform over and over again? First, every show truly is different in ways expected and not. The set lists always change, but the members of the band also change how they approach the songs themselves.
Music is a universal language. And like all languages, that makes it a living, breathing thing that evolves. I happen to believe that the greatest artists (your Radioheads, your Princes, your Elliott Smiths, your Questloves) create music that transforms over time. Their language changes through the introduction of new instruments, new ways of manipulating sonic textures.
So when you attend your first Dead show, you meet other people who speak the same language. It’s a very specific type of bond and Deadheads are a very welcoming group. You are really meeting a community, and an ethos of the community is that everyone is welcome.
There is no leader, no prophet. Jerry Garcia, the true engine behind the band and the most famous member, died 30 years ago. But the music keeps going because it isn’t about an individual, regardless of how singular that individual might be. It’s about everyone.
As bassist Phil Lesh put it, “When the Grateful Dead is happening, it happens to everyone, band and audience. So in a sense, we’re all playing in the band.”
The Family Tree of Music
The Dead have shared bills and stages with a variety of legendary artists over the years: The Allman Brothers, Carlos Santana, Etta James, Miles Davis, Sting, Joan Baez, The Beach Boys, The Who and Neil Young. John Belushi even performed with them in 1980.
When I learn about an artist, I am always curious about their influences, as well as who they have influenced. That helps me understand what I sometimes call the family tree of music. Permit me to keep beating a dead horse with the language analogy, but I think (as with branches of languages) music can all be connected in some way, because musicians and songwriters are themselves the biggest music fans. Radiohead, my favorite group of all time, has famously eclectic influences.
The ethos of jazz, with its improvisational live performances, is heavily infused within the Dead’s music as several members (notably bassist Phil Lesh) were classically trained jazz musicians.
To get a sense of the Dead’s cred amongst jazz legends, look no further than the legendary Miles Davis. He opened for the Dead for several nights in 1970. In his autobiography, Davis described it as “an eye-opening concert for me… I think we all learned something. Jerry Garcia loved jazz, and I found out that he loved my music and had been listening to it for a long time.”
Jazz saxophonist Branford Marsalis sat in during the Dead spring tour of 1990 and was blown away, “I’d never seen anything like it. Most rock shows are just like versions of MTV, but not the Dead… those guys can play music. They’re into jazz, they know Coltrane, they’re American musical icons.”
Bob Dylan also toured and recorded with the Dead, and after Jerry Garcia died in 1995, he said:
“There’s no way to measure his greatness. Or magnitude as a person or as a player. I don’t think eulogizing will do him justice. He was that great. Much more than a superb musician with an uncanny ear and dexterity. He is the very spirit personified of whatever is muddy river country at its core and screams up into the spheres. He really had no equal.”
Shakedown Street
A critical and unparalleled aspect of the Dead community is the parking lot scene, which is known as Shakedown Street. It is lively and welcoming, everything one might expect and quite a lot that they wouldn’t. I remember encountering it for the first time at 14 years old and being totally blown away. You can find amazing, high-quality art pieces, blown glass, clothing, food, yoga and meditation sessions, impromptu jams and numerous folks trading or selling recordings of live shows. And of course, drugs in every form I could have imagined and several I couldn’t, cooked and baked into numerous delicious treats.
The average person likely doesn’t know that a young Keith Haring hung out at Shakedown Street selling shirts with versions of Dead logos. Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, is also a huge fan and has included numerous references to them on the show.
Most Hollywood screenwriters would be surprised to learn of the love affair between psychologist and mythologist Joseph Campbell and the Dead. Campbell’s “hero’s journey” is the backbone of much modern screenwriting. After taking in a Dead concert in 1985 and exploring Shakedown Street, Campbell compared the experience to a Dionysian festival. He said, “This is more than music. It turns something on here, in the heart. And what it turns on is life energy. This is a wonderful fervent loss of self in the larger self of a homogeneous community.” He later described a Grateful Dead concert as a religious experience, “the antidote to the atom bomb.”
I experience a wave of emotions at a great concert. It can run the gamut from joy, nostalgia and excitement, to shock and amazement. But in the best moments, I feel most connected to those around me. They might be strangers, but we all speak the same language, a language we didn’t learn in school. We had to seek out fellow travelers to learn it. Sometimes those experiences are hard-won and time consuming. But the high we are chasing isn’t the fleeting bliss from a material substance. It’s the moment when we feel connected to everyone around us in a way that feels deep and true. We don’t need to say it, but we understand something important about each other.
Chops & Work Ethic
The stereotype of a stoner as a lazy person is (hopefully) dying a slow death.
When Jerry Garcia died in 1995, the Dead had played 2,318 total concerts (a world record). And they never played the same setlist twice.
The Dead’s work ethic was legendary. They played so much that they were almost a single organism on stage. According to the Kennedy Center, their two drummers, “used self-hypnosis to synchronize their beats, each drumming with a hand around the other’s back, both playing with their one free arm, pausing to check their pulses, locking in their heartbeats.”
If you have ever seen really good jazz music, you can tell that improvisation requires a lot of talent. So after all of that work—all of those hours touring, practicing, sharing acid trips, building a synthesis never seen before or since—what do you get? Something truly singular, a total breakdown of the barriers that exist between every human being. Perhaps the most important purpose of art.
An Evolving Legacy
How do you describe the legacy of a group and a sound that is constantly evolving?
In a 1993 interview, two years before his death, Jerry Garcia said that when the Dead started “we were going to be the next Beatles.”
I think they have surpassed the Beatles.
By 2021, incarnated as Dead & Company, they took in $50.2 million and finished with the fifth highest-grossing tour worldwide without ever leaving the US.
Even more impressive is that, unlike the rest of the 1960s era artists still touring, their music continues to evolve. As one writer put it, the Dead have developed a “genuinely new way of performing and presenting what is almost certainly the greatest and most dynamic songbook any American rock band has ever produced.”
The band that started in 1965 and lost their leader in 1995 is still playing sold out shows in 2025. In March, I saw the current incarnation of the Dead, with John Mayer on guitar, perform at the Sphere in Las Vegas.
The visuals were like nothing I have ever seen. And there’s something important about these visuals and the Dead’s music, which was just as groundbreaking as their wall of sound, community-building and early embrace of the Internet.
The Dead, the epitome and progenitor of psychedelic rock music, had a shrewder understanding of business than many would expect. Business professor Barry Barnes highlights a few things the Dead did before any other band (and most US corporations).
The Dead were “masters of creating and delivering superior customer value” by focusing intensely on its most loyal fans. It established a telephone hotline to alert them to its touring schedule ahead of any public announcement, reserved for them some of the best seats in the house, and capped the price of tickets, which the band distributed through its own mail-order house.
They incorporated early on, and established a board of directors (with a rotating CEO position) consisting of the band, road crew, and other members of the Dead organization. This included founding a profitable merchandising division. They famously permitted fans to tape their shows, ceding a major revenue source in potential record sales, displaying both a lack of greed and a penchant for adaptation as well as a vision for the future of both the band and their music. Lyricist John Perry Barlow said in 1994, “the best way to raise demand for your product is to give it away.”
It took over a decade for tech companies to figure this out. In this way, the Dead anticipated what would later be referred to as “internet business models.”
I don’t include this information to laud the Dead as savvy techno-futurist capitalists. I think they recognized the system around them and sought ways to maintain control of their art, while also prioritizing their community of fans.
The original members of the Dead are now in their 70s and 80s. And sure, bringing in millions and selling out venues like the Sphere is a pretty amazing gig if you can get it. The tickets and the merch are more expensive now.
But Shakedown Street is still going strong, and when you watch them perform, in their sixth decade of existence, you understand why they still climb those stairs onto the stage each night. Because they want to play music with their friends and family. They want to help everyone break down those barriers for a few hours, and remind us to love each other, be kind to each other.
As the Dead sing “it’s been a long strange trip.” Indeed it has, and I hope we all make time to seek out those fellow travelers and share a boundaryless moment with them. To be reminded of our shared humanity, the joy and love we are capable of, as well as the pain and the sorrow.
Stuff To Distract You From The Abyss:
I want to acknowledge that while researching this post I found a fantastic longform piece on this subject that I wish I had written. It was done by a great LA-based music journalist and I encourage anyone who is interested to check it out.
Check out: The jam that leads “Scarlet Begonias” into “Fire on the Mountain” on the May 8, 1977, tape. Sadie Sartini Garner put it best in her piece for the Ringer “it is mind-boggling at a technical level; there are moments in which all five musicians seem to be playing both songs at once.
Sly Lives, the new documentary by Questlove about Sly and the Family Stone. Available on Hulu and Disney+.
RIP to one of the realest to ever do it. Val Kilmer Was Everyone’s Huckleberry. I recommend watching Real Genius, Tombstone and Heat.
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On the Best (Worst) Best Man Speech Ever (at My Super Mario-Themed Wedding) (via Kottke.org).