Perhaps unsurprisingly for a band from the West Coast of the USA, The Grateful Dead were pioneers. You don’t have to be a tie-dyed-in-the-wool Deadhead to appreciate some of their innovations – from selling band-related T-shirts at gigs to sound systems designed for arenas and stadiums, The Dead were the first with much that’s now taken for granted. But one of their innovations was perhaps more significant than others: their practice of recording their shows.
The Grateful Dead were active from 1965 to 1995, but over their 30-year career, managed to release only thirteen studio albums. Some were great, others less so. The recording studio was perhaps not their natural environment. They did, however, release a number of live albums documenting the concert experience, where they excelled. While their studio output was patchy – only a handful of their albums coming close to capturing the band’s magic – several of their live albums are cited as the band’s finest releases. Whether it beLive/Dead,Europe ’72 orReckoning, The Grateful Dead’s reputation was built on their live performances and the recordings that captured their unique genius.
From early in their career they routinely recorded their performances, a practice their sound engineer Owsley ‘Bear’ Stanley introduced, to check after the show that they’d been operating with the optimal sound quality, and so the band could listen back to how they’d played. This was important for the musicians, as they worked more like an exploratory jazz act than a regular rock band. Instead of simply performing a static repertoire of the same songs, their live set varied from night to night – the songs themselves often used as platforms for extended improvisation and jamming, taking the song’s original ideas into new unexplored areas; the musicians inspiring each other to spontaneously create new music every time they played. While these ‘sonic journals’ gave the technical staff an indication of how their work was being received by audiences, they also gave the band a chance to look back on what had been created in the moment, so they could consider what and how they played and continue to develop it.
The band knew their live performances were their strength, and so did their fans: The Deadheads. In another pioneering move, The Dead encouraged them to record the shows from the audience, and circulate the recordings, trade them, compare them and listen to them, building a community of devotees with a loyalty unique amongst music fans. While other acts strongly discouraged the practice for fear of losing money, The Dead realised the live performance could be the end in itself, rather than just an opportunity to sell their latest studio album. And what better way to encourage an audience than to give them a taste of what they might expect to see for themselves? While the band enjoyed increasing commercial success in the 1980s, they didn’t even release an album between 1981 and 1987. As 21st-century musicians struggled to adjust to an environment where album sales had collapsed and they had to focus on their live experience, The Grateful Dead were decades ahead of the curve.
The band’s lineup changed over the years, but centred on guitarists Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir, bassist Phil Lesh and drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann. Other musicians played their parts – whether Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan or Keith and Donna Jean Godchaux, Brent Mydland and Vince Welnick – all bringing the
