The Shakedown Archives

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Bob Weir got fired from the Grateful Dead at twenty. But he was already running the show. Ace, Kingfish, Bobby and the Midnites, RatDog: a 27-year campaign.In 1968, Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh told Bob Weir he didn't count. Rock Scully put it plain: the weight was on four cats, not six. Weir was twenty years old, standing in a construction ditch on his birthday with rainwater up to his ankles.What he did next — and what the Grateful Dead spent the next three decades refusing to acknowledge — is one of the stranger power struggles in rock history. This isn't a musician biography. It's a story about creative control and what happens when one member of a democracy keeps getting told he doesn't matter.Full breakdown: youtu.be/CqEdBsnH8fs

Neal Cassady never played a note. Bob Weir called the entire band his "underlings." This is the argument for the Dead's most important member.Cassady was the human bridge between the Beat Generation and the psychedelic era — the man Jack Kerouac immortalized as Dean Moriarty in On the Road, who later drove Ken Kesey's bus Furthur across America in 1964. By fall 1966 he was living in the Grateful Dead's attic at 710 Ashbury, and the band was calling him their father figure.Jerry Garcia said he was "the first person I met who he himself was the art." Bill Kreutzmann called him "jazz personified." His stream-of-consciousness rap became the rhythm the band learned to improvise inside.Full breakdown: youtu.be/JzIjVkqckdY

Phil Lesh played bass wrong on purpose — and after Jerry Garcia died, he became the one member who treated the Grateful Dead's vault, name, and music as too fragile to sell. This is the real story of the fracture that split the band's survivors for thirty years.When Garcia died in 1995, the Dead didn't replace him — they dissolved. What followed wasn't a feud over money. It was a thirty-year argument fought in band names: The Other Ones, The Dead, Furthur, Dead & Company. Each one a different theory about what survived Jerry.Phil's theory was the narrowest, the most demanding, and the least commercially viable — and it's the one that treated the music like it was still alive.Full breakdown: youtu.be/AXN3m2Q44Ww

The Grateful Dead was Pigpen's idea — an electric blues band, pitched by a janitor at Dana Morgan's Music. Jerry Garcia said it himself: "Pigpen is what made the band work." So why did the band spend 1968 working so hard to work without him?Ron "Pigpen" McKernan talked Garcia into going electric in late 1964, fronted the Warlocks at Magoo's Pizza Parlor in May 1965, and carried the In Room residency in Belmont. Then Kesey's Acid Tests made LSD the band's shared language — and Pigpen never spoke it.In September 1968 Garcia and Lesh tried to fire him; that November Tom Constanten took over keyboards and Pigpen got handed congas in the band he started. The Live/Dead peak of 1969 still ended every night with him closing on "Turn On Your Love Light."Full breakdown: youtu.be/doYqyV821Qg

The Grateful Dead built their entire world on a handshake. With the Hells Angels, that trust worked for four years — until Altamont, where it got an 18-year-old killed.On December 6, 1969, a Hells Angel named Alan Passaro stabbed Meredith Hunter to death at the Altamont Free Concert while the Rolling Stones played fifty yards away. The standard story blames the Stones for "hiring bikers as security." But the Dead were the connective tissue — manager Rock Scully knew the Oakland Angels and warned Mick Jagger directly: "You can't hire Hell's Angels. They're not for hire."The Dead and the Angels weren't a business arrangement. They were neighbors — 710 and 715 Ashbury, co-producers of a 1967 New Year's party in the Panhandle.Full breakdown: youtu.be/QiDIdE3pc24

Four men who held the Grateful Dead's keyboard chair are gone — Pigpen, Keith Godchaux, Brent Mydland, Vince Welnick. Tom Constanten is the one the "curse" never touched. Here's why he walked away clean.Tom Constanten ("TC") played keyboards for just 14 months, 1968–1970 — the only man to sit in that chair and leave on his own terms. No overdose, no firing, no drama. He met Phil Lesh at UC Berkeley in 1961, studied avant-garde composition in Europe with Berio, and programmed computers for the Air Force at Nellis, flying out on three-day passes to record prepared piano on Anthem of the Sun.For 14 months he defined the band's most psychedelic period — the swirling organ behind Dark Star on Live/Dead — and then he simply chose to go.Full breakdown: youtu.be/qsKvJVI3SBc

Keith Godchaux had two jobs at once — and the same hands fading in the Grateful Dead were doing the best work of his life in the Jerry Garcia Band. The drugs were real. They can't explain that.Keith's story almost always gets told as a drug story. But the drugs can't explain the Garcia Band, where he was thriving at the exact moment he was supposedly too far gone to play with the Dead.Something else was going on — and it was in the music itself. This is the case that what pushed Keith out wasn't the needle. It was the room.Full breakdown: youtu.be/2vp1FHnMBC4

Brent Mydland overdosed in December 1989. Two bandmates drove him home from jail and, in one account's words, "refrained from scolding" him. That silence had a name.In the Grateful Dead world, no one told anyone else not to indulge. It traced back to the Acid Tests and Ken Kesey — what Phil Lesh once called almost a religious point: avoidance of confrontation. Applied to music, that radical autonomy produced transcendence. Applied to a man in crisis, it produced a body.Brent joined in April 1979 and spent eleven years and more than five hundred shows still feeling like the new guy. He played his last show on July 23, 1990 — ten years to the day after Keith Godchaux died. Three days later he was gone at thirty-seven.Full breakdown: youtu.be/d2KE3X2LEzE

Vince Welnick was the safe pick — and that is exactly why he never had a chance. When Brent Mydland died in 1990, the Grateful Dead didn't reinvent themselves; they chose the candidate who wouldn't change a thing, built him a role with no room to matter, and then forgot him.By 1990 the Dead were a touring institution with hundreds of employees. Jerry Garcia told Rolling Stone the band had become "a board of directors," "running on inertia." So the question wasn't who could push the band somewhere new — it was who could be plugged in without disrupting the tour.Bill Kreutzmann admits in his memoir that Welnick, the synthesizer player from the Tubes, was his "least favorite" candidate, voted in "by default." The chair he inherited was built to change nothing.Full breakdown: youtu.be/h2MeJ5D3Uao

A CIA agent dosed strangers with LSD and watched them through a two-way mirror in a San Francisco safehouse. It was Operation Midnight Climax — the darkest experiment of MK-Ultra.His name was George Hunter White: by day the most powerful federal narcotics cop in San Francisco, by night a CIA consultant running an apartment at 225 Chestnut Street on Telegraph Hill, where women on the Agency payroll slipped acid into men's drinks while White watched from behind the glass with a martini. It was the MK-Ultra sub-project Sidney Gottlieb built to test whether LSD could control a human mind.And four miles away, in the Haight-Ashbury, the exact same drug was becoming a sacrament. Two Americas, one molecule.Full breakdown: youtu.be/gdDGnWjr6WU

In 1977 the Grateful Dead were playing the best music of their lives — and Jerry Garcia was already smoking Persian heroin daily. Here's how it broke every rule they had.Spring 1977: Cornell, Barton Hall, the Terrapin debut, Scarlet Begonias into Fire on the Mountain — the run Deadheads built an identity around. And the man at the center of it was using smokeable "Persian," sold to him as opium but actually 95% pure heroin. Owsley "Bear" Stanley said Garcia didn't even know what it was.The real question isn't why Garcia used it. It's how heroin walked into the Grateful Dead and sat down at the table without a single person raising an alarm. The answer was the culture: a try-anything, do-it-yourself drug religion with no gatekeepers.Full breakdown: youtu.be/6NZElQtUJk8

The Grateful Dead killed this song three times in 15 years — twice on Halloween, 12 years to the day apart. In all 189 plays, it never once closed a set. The band built three different homes for it, and all three collapsed. The song was St. Stephen.St. Stephen was the first song the band tackled for their third album, Aoxomoxoa — work began September 5, 1968 at Pacific Recording in San Mateo, from lyrics Robert Hunter had mailed Jerry Garcia from Santa Fe in 1967. Eight months and $180,000 later, Aoxomoxoa peaked at #73 and took 28 years to go gold.Warner Bros.' Joe Smith described chasing the band's managers down a Burbank sidewalk over the bills. The song that cost the most was the one they could never quite place.Full breakdown: youtu.be/wb5hDSm90RQ

Everyone knows the Beats became the hippies. Almost nobody can tell you how. The answer isn't a movement or a moment — it's one man behind the wheel of a bus, who drove from one America straight into the next. His name was Neal Cassady.In 1957 Jack Kerouac made him immortal as Dean Moriarty in On the Road. Seven years later that same man was doing 80 down a desert highway at the wheel of Ken Kesey's 1939 International Harvester bus, "Furthur" — loaded with still-legal LSD and a film camera pointed at his face.The Beats wrote about the road. Kesey drove it, and turned it from something you read into something that delivered a chemical to your bloodstream. The handoff between the two countercultures never ran through the writers — it ran through Cassady.Full breakdown: youtu.be/QwCc07ICpJA

Every 4th of July, Deadheads wave the flag to "U.S. Blues" — the Grateful Dead's most patriotic-sounding song. Almost nobody notices Robert Hunter wrote it as a con: Uncle Sam confessing a swindle.It isn't a flag-raiser, and it isn't a secret protest anthem either. It's an affectionate con — Uncle Sam as a charming grifter: "I'll drink your health, share your wealth, run your life, steal your wife," shaking the hand that shook the hand of P.T. Barnum. For fifty years a stadium of flag-wavers sang the confession back without hearing it.The proof is a verse the band deleted. Before "U.S. Blues," the Dead played "Wave That Flag" (1973) with an open Vietnam-era line: "feed the poor, stop the war." Hunter cut it. Bob Weir called Uncle Sam "the godfather figure of American culture."Full breakdown: youtu.be/Lre8TYIo8hs

In late 1967, Warner Bros. executive Joe Smith warned the Grateful Dead's manager they'd made themselves undesirable in nearly every studio in Los Angeles. The band's answer was Anthem of the Sun — the record that nearly bankrupted them and defined everything after.Producer Dave Hassinger walked out mid-session after Bob Weir asked him to record the sound of "thick air." Live-sound engineer Dan Healy, who'd never produced a record, took over the board. Sessions moved through six studios in four cities, and Tom Constanten — an avant-garde composer who'd studied with Stockhausen — layered prepared-piano textures into a psychedelic sound collage.By the time it was mixed, the Dead owed Warner Bros. roughly $120,000. It should have ended them. Instead it became the springboard to Live/Dead, the Wall of Sound, and thirty years of refusing to sound like anyone else.Full breakdown: youtu.be/6YD0riJ93pA