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by Isabella Gomez Sarmiento

Whether you love them or not, the Grateful Dead is an undeniable icon of American music. This summer marks a moment of transition in the Dead's long, strange trip, so NPR Music went on the road to look at the legacy — and future — of a band and its followers who collectively rewrote the rules of music fandom.

Photo of NPR reporters Isabella Gomez Sarmiento (left) and Felix Contreras with the marionettes used in the Grateful Dead video for "Touch of Grey"

Deanne Fitzmaurice for NPR

This week has been a big deal for the two Deadheads on the team at NPR Music. Not only is it the unofficial, week-long Grateful Dead holiday known as the Days Between (from August 1, Jerry Garcia’s birthday to August 9, the anniversary of the day he died in 1995), but also because we got a chance to celebrate in style, with a huge, joyful series on a band that has left an indelible mark on American culture.

This year’s Days Between was a little different — it’s the first one without Bob Weir, who spent the three decades since Jerry’s death passing the Grateful Dead tradition down to younger fans and musicians. It’s also the first summer in a very long time without an official Grateful Dead live experience.

But “official” has never been the limit of the Grateful Dead experience, whether you’re talking live recordings or t-shirts. As fans and as journalists, Felix Contreras and I knew that people would still be looking for ways to get together and listen to the Dead this summer, but also that there would be a lot of questions to answer. What does this moment mean for a community that has somehow managed to rebuild and reinvent itself again and again for 60-plus years? Who takes on the mantle now? If anyone does?

We decided to go out on the road and find out. (For journalism, of course!) We called the result The Ripple Effect: a series made up of podcast episodes, digital features, photos and more chronicling this moment in the Grateful Dead’s history — and looking ahead to what comes next.

Our summer adventure took us to a bunch of different places. We took a Waymo to the house of a Grateful Dead historian (talk about a changing San Francisco), we drove down the Pacific Coast highway to a university library in Santa Cruz, where we visited the band’s official archive (OK, “official” in this case was pretty cool — that's us in the photo above, with the marionettes from the "Touch of Grey" video). We talked with famous Deadheads and musicians who have played with members of the band itself, or followed in its footsteps. I made friends at a Deadhead documentary screening in a Brooklyn bowling alley; Felix checked out a jam band festival in Maryland.

We also spent an afternoon in the middle of the redwood forest in Northern California, at a grassroots festival put on by the family of Phil Lesh. It was a musical celebration of the Grateful Dead’s songbook, with a performance by Phil’s son Grahame. The entire thing felt very DIY. There was a grassy field, a sea of picnic blankets and hundreds of Deadheads hanging out in the sun. The backstage area was a circle of blue Adirondack chairs under the trees and a cooler full of tie-dye popsicles. Felix and I were in heaven.

When the band went onstage, it sounded different than the original, of course. That’s kind of the beauty of the Grateful Dead: You can know every word and every note of a song, but when you’re hearing it live, you don’t know where it’s going to take you. Surrendering to that experience is incredibly humbling, but also euphoric — you have to be willing to be present in a totally different way. And the people in Monte Rio were up to the task.

I watched a 25-year-old who never saw an original member of the Dead perform, dancing her heart out next to an older woman who told me she saw Jerry live too many times to count. They were unintentionally in sync with one another. Without saying a single word, they smiled and twirled and clapped as one song transitioned into the next.

That was the first of many Grateful Dead tribute performances Felix and I witnessed over the summer. There are musicians playing the songs in every corner of the country, and there are people of all generations showing up to listen. The Grateful Dead’s songs were often long metaphors about the cycles of life and death, about making peace with this world before you head into the next one. But somehow, over the course of our summer reporting road trip, we realized maybe the one thing that will not die is the spirit of this music and the devotion it instills in anyone willing to lend their ears to it.

You can listen to that story, a travelogue of our summer tour, here.

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Check out our picks from the series

Even as the band has changed and reinvented itself, the Grateful Dead's fanbase has proven to be uniquely vibrant and devoted — a cosmic inheritance passed down from one generation to the next. Read this story on How Deadheads became rock and roll’s greatest renewable resource.
The vibe at festivals and concerts where Grateful Dead music is played might be impossible to fully explain, but it turns out a picture can get you close. We asked a handful of great photographers to document the scene in different corners of the country this summer, and the results are glorious.
We asked fans to share their stories of falling in love with the Dead — the response was overwhelming response. On the podcast that closes our series today, we shared a few of our favorites.
And if you’re not a Deadhead, worry not! (And thank you for making it this far!) Listen to Felix and I talk with our colleague, Robin Hilton, a Dead skeptic, about how to learn to love the Grateful Dead.

Explore the series

You can find all our audio coverage from this week in a playlist on the NPR App.

Listen to the playlist

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