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The Grateful Dead are one of the great American adventures — an outlaw band from the psychedelic frontier of the Haight-Ashbury streets, doing everything their own way. The magic they made onstage every night, improvised without a net or a set list, was a freewheeling 30-year collaboration with their audience. That’s why the Dead’s music remains so fiercely alive, now more than ever. As Jerry Garcia told Rolling Stone in 1971, “We’re trying to guide ourselves into a place where we can become more music.”
The Dead have always shared a special bond with Rolling Stone , and our histories are intertwined. The band and the magazine both rose out of the heady days in San Francisco in the 1960s, flipping off the establishment way of doing things. It was in our pages that so much of the world followed the Dead’s prankster journey from afar, before the internet or the tape-trading network, from Garcia’s epic interviews to our iconic photos. And both managed to keep evolving through the decades, living up to that not-fade-away spirit.
The Dead gave the world a beautifully chaotic body of music, never slowing down long enough to let anyone pin them down. So let’s celebrate that with our tribute to the 100 best Grateful Dead songs. It’s all here: their rock hollers, their ballads, their brain-melting electric jams, their country-folk hoedowns, their jazzy excursions, their covers. Hell, a few of these songs were even hits, though never on purpose.
Some of these 100 tunes are classics from the Garcia/Robert Hunter or Weir/John Perry Barlow songbook; some are traditionals older than anyone in the band. But what all have in common is that the Dead took these songs somewhere different every night. We're releasing our list during the Days Between, a sacred time for Deadheads that honors the period between the day Garcia was born (Aug. 1) and the day he died (Aug. 9). We made the list by taking a poll of longtime Dead fans like Jim James, Chloë Sevigny, and Al Franken. You can see who voted here .
The Grateful Dead took the longest, strangest trip in rock, and invited the world to follow along, show by show, song by song. Jerry Garcia, Bobby Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, Donna Jean and Keith Godchaux, and so many of their kindred spirits — they kept telling their story as they went along, never dreaming that the story would just keep getting bigger and crazier over the decades. But thanks to the music they made, their story will never end. And just like that weeping willow beside the river, it will grow, grow, grow.
The launchpad for countless interstellar inner-eyelid psychedelic journeys and untold dashes to arena restrooms and beer stalls, the second-set, double-drummer, free-form instrumental jam to be forever known as “Drums>Space” was a welcome touchstone of Dead concerts, and it deserves status as a song unto itself. Indeed, it “became some of the most far-out moments of the Grateful Dead music,” as Kreutzmann wrote in his memoir. Sure, there were drum solos and spacey improvs dating back to ’68. But it was early ’78, with Hart back in the fold, that “Drums>Space” became a fixture, a multiarmed beast of beats sculpted with percussion devices from around the world and, increasingly, electronics. Some 'Heads maintain latter-day “Drums>Space,” even recent Dead & Company excursions, bested the 20th-century ones — only proving that the best Dead songs, then or now, are the ones that blew your mind and heart wide open. — Will Hermes
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