The Grateful Dead began their career in Menlo Park, California, playing live shows at Kepler's Books.
They began as The Warlocks, a group formed in early 1964 from the remnants of a Palo Alto jug band called Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions. But as another band was already recording under the "Warlocks" name, the band had to change its name. The Warlocks were originally managed by Hank Harrison, but Harrison went back to graduate school. After meeting their new manager Rock Scully, they moved to the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco. Bands from this area became known for the San Francisco Sound; groups such as Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big Brother & the Holding Company, and Santana went on to national fame, giving San Francisco an image as a center for the hippie counterculture of the era. Of these bands, the Grateful Dead had members with arguably the highest level of musicianship, including banjo and guitar player Jerry Garcia, bluesman organist Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, the classically trained Phil Lesh and jazzist drummer Bill Kreutzmann. The Grateful Dead most embodied "all the elements of the San Francisco scene and came, therefore, to represent the counterculture to the rest of the country".
The name Grateful Dead was chosen from a dictionary. Some claim it was a Funk & Wagnalls, others, the Bardo Thodol (Tibetan Book Of the Dead), but according to Phil Lesh, in his biography, Jerry Garcia picked up an old Britannica World Language Dictionary, and, in that silvery elf-voice he said to me, "'Hey, man, how about the Grateful Dead?' The definition there was "the soul of a dead person, or his angel, showing gratitude to someone who, as an act of charity, arranged their burial."
Alright, something changed! Yeah, the rainbow wasn't there before! Not sure which way I like better. You did a great job with that rainbow, but the pot o'gold definitely needs work!
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