morrowplanet: To see the Grateful Dead onstage was to see a band that clearly understood the meaning of playing together from the perspective of the long haul. Interestingly, that’s something we’ve seen fairly little of in rock & roll, since rock is an art form, the most valuable and essential pleasures of which – including inspiration, meaning and fraternity – are founded in the knowledge that such moments cannot hold forever. The Grateful Dead, like any great rock & roll band, lived up to that ideal, but they also shattered it or at least bent it to their own purposes. At their best the Dead were capable of surprising both themselves and their audience while at the same time playing as though they had spent their whole lives learning to make music as a way of talking to one another, and as though music were the language of their fellowship and, therefore, their history. No doubt it was. What the Grateful Dead understood – probably better than any other band in pop-music history – was that nobody in the group could succeed as well, or mean as much, outside the context of the entire group, and that the group itself could not succeed without its individuals. It was a band that needed all its members playing and thinking together to keep things inspiring, Just as important, it was a band that realized it also needed its audience to keep things significant – indeed, it would probably be fair to say that for the last 20 years the Dead’s audience informed the group’s worth as much as their music did. “On Aug. 9, 1995, Jerry Garcia died in his sleep. He leaves behind a legacy of wondrous creations.” Mikal Gilmore, writing just weeks after we lost Jerry. 

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Via  morrowplanet

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  15. stupon said: I worked for the Score at that time and we shared a studio with WXRT. It was crazy watching those people run around all day, searching the archives, morning the loss and trying to keep working.
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