have been just another band, stated Phil Lesh in a nineteen eighties interview. This is now where the Grateful Dead were born as we know them today. The name, Grateful Dead as every deadhead knows, choose itself when Garcia flipped open an old dictionary at Phils house, and there it wasIt was one of those moments, he told Rolling Stone, like everything else on the page went blank, diffuse, just sorta oozed away, and there it was grateful dead. Big black letters edged all around in gold, man, blasting out at me, such a stunning combination. A veritable fat trip. So I said, How about Grateful Dead, and that was it. The band was smoking a superpsychedelic DMT. In another, later account, Garcia didnt like the name at first but thought is was just to powerful to ignore. Weir and Kreutzmann didnt like it either but people started calling us that and it just started, Grateful Dead, Grateful Dead Here is the definition of the word Grateful Dead in the 1955 Funk and Wagnalls Dictionary. GRATEFUL DEAD- The motif of a cycle of folk tales which begins with the heros coming upon a group of people ill-treating or refusing to bury the corpse of a man who had died without paying his debts. He gives his last penny, either to pay the mans debts or to give him a decent burial. Within a few hours he meets with a traveling companion who aids him in some impossible task The story ends with the companions disclosing himself as the man whose corpse the other had befriendedLSD, of course was the genie behind the birth of the Dead. It surprised me to learn that the Grateful Dead used LSD every time they played until the 1970s. By then, the larger crowds demanded more control from the musicians than LSD allowed. LSD, introduced the Dead to what percussionist Mickey Hart calls a road map, to which they could return again and again to bring back the sights and sounds and sensations of the early trips. However it wasnt the kind of map that told you what to do, ...
