[23] As The Wildwood Boys they played regularly at The Tangent, a folk music coffeehouse operated by Stanford Medical Center doctors Stuart "Stu" Goldstein and David "Dave" Shoenstadt on University Avenue in Palo Alto (1963).

According to Alan Trist, director of the Grateful Dead's music publisher company Ice Nine, Garcia found the name in the Funk & Wagnalls Folklore Dictionary, when his finger landed on that phrase while playing a game of Fictionary.

[36][37][38] Scholar Michael Kaler has written that the Dead's participation in the Acid Tests was crucial both to the development of their improvisational vocabulary and to their bonding as a band, with the group having set out to foster an intra-band musical telepathy.

[39] Kaler has further pointed out that the Dead's pursuit of a new improvisatory rock language in 1965 chronologically coincided with that same goal's adoption by Jefferson Airplane, Pink Floyd and the Velvet Underground.

[41] Later that month, the Grateful Dead played at the Trips Festival, a three-day psychedelic rock weekend party and event produced by Ken Kesey, Stewart Brand, and Ramon Sender, that, in conjunction with the Merry Pranksters, brought the nascent hippie movement together for the first time.

[34] One of the group's earliest major performances in 1967 was the Mantra-Rock Dance, a musical event held on January 29, 1967, at the Avalon Ballroom by the San Francisco Hare Krishna temple.

The Grateful Dead performed at the event along with the Hare Krishna founder Bhaktivedanta Swami, poet Allen Ginsberg, bands Moby Grape and Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin, donating proceeds to the temple.

The band travelled to Europe for a string of shows in September 1974, before performing a series of five concerts at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco in October 1974, and delved into various other projects.

At different times the shifting lineup of the Other Ones also included guitarists Mark Karan, Steve Kimock, and Jimmy Herring, keyboardists Bruce Hornsby, Jeff Chimenti, and Rob Barraco, saxophonist Dave Ellis, drummer John Molo, bassist Alphonso Johnson, and vocalist Susan Tedeschi.

The band's lineups included Jimmy Herring and Warren Haynes on guitar, Jeff Chimenti and Rob Barraco on keyboards, and Joan Osborne on vocals.

[69] In the fall of 2015, Hart, Kreutzmann and Weir teamed up with Chimenti, guitarist John Mayer, and bassist Oteil Burbridge to form a band called Dead & Company.

Grateful Dead members have said that it was after attending a concert by the touring New York City band the Lovin' Spoonful that they decided to "go electric" and look for a "dirtier" sound.

They developed their "psychedelic" playing as a result of meeting Ken Kesey in Palo Alto, California, and subsequently becoming the house band for the Acid Tests he staged.

Garcia's lead lines were fluid, supple and spare, owing a great deal of their character to his experience playing Scruggs style banjo, an approach which often makes use of note syncopation, accenting, arpeggios, staccato chromatic runs, and the anticipation of the downbeat.

Particularly in the late 1960s, Garcia occasionally incorporated melodic lines derived from Indian ragas into the band's extended, psychedelic improvisation, likely inspired by John Coltrane and other jazz artists' interest in the sitar music of Ravi Shankar.

[109] Lesh was originally a classically trained trumpet player with an extensive background in music theory, but did not tend to play traditional blues-based bass forms.

At the same time, Dead shows almost always feature a more collective, modal approach to improvisation that typically occurs during segues between songs before the band modulates to a new tonal center.

Some of the Dead's more extended jam vehicles, such as "The Other One", "Dark Star", and "Playing in the Band" almost exclusively make use of modulation between modes to accompany simple two-chord progressions.

[118] An extremely common feature in both Robert Hunter's lyrics, as well as the band's visual iconography, is the presence of dualistic and opposing imagery illustrating the dynamic range of the human experience (Heaven and hell, law and crime, dark and light, etc.).

[120] Grateful Dead biographer Dennis McNally has described Hunter's lyrics as creating "a non-literal hyper-Americana" weaving a psychedelic, kaleidoscopic tapestry in the hopes of elucidating America's national character.

He spent 35 years as principal lawyer and general counsel for the Grateful Dead, a position in the group that was so strong that his business cards with the band identified his role as "Czar".

In 2006, the Grateful Dead signed a ten-year licensing agreement with Rhino Entertainment to manage the band's business interests including the release of musical recordings, merchandising, and marketing.

[138] In their early career, the band also dedicated their time and talents to their community, the Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco, making available free food, lodging, music, and health care to all.

"That's the way things went at Altamont—so badly that the Grateful Dead, prime organizers and movers of the festival, didn't even get to play", staff at Rolling Stone magazine wrote in a detailed narrative on the event.

[144] In a 1991 PBS documentary, segment host Buck Henry attended an August 1991 concert at Shoreline Amphitheatre and gleaned some information from some band members about the Grateful Dead phenomenon and its success.

"[170] Despite this reputation, in the mid-1990s, as the band's popularity grew, there were a series of minor scuffles occurring at shows that peaked with a large scale riot at the Deer Creek Music Center near Indianapolis in July 1995.

On April 24, 2008, members Bob Weir and Mickey Hart, along with Nion McEvoy, CEO of Chronicle Books, UC Santa Cruz chancellor George Blumenthal, and UC Santa Cruz librarian Virginia Steel, held a press conference announcing UCSC's McHenry Library would be the permanent home of the Grateful Dead Archive, which includes a complete archival history from 1965 to the present.

Blumenthal stated at the event, "The Grateful Dead Archive represents one of the most significant popular cultural collections of the 20th century; UC Santa Cruz is honored to receive this invaluable gift.

Lead guitarist Jerry Garcia was often viewed both by the public and the media as the leader or primary spokesperson for the Grateful Dead, but was reluctant to be perceived that way, especially since he and the other group members saw themselves as equal participants and contributors to their collective musical and creative output.

[183] The "Ned and Phil" set became a regular fixture of that era, and was featured nearly every night during their Summer '74 and Europe '74 tours, as well as their five-night residency at the Winterland Ballroom during October 1974.