The Shakedown Archives

The Grateful Dead hid their response to the death of the sixties across three songs and eight years — and almost nobody connected the dots. Two weeks after Altamont, Robert Hunter sat down and wrote what he called "musical journalism." Not a protest. Not an indictment. Just a refusal to assign blame while everyone else pointed fingers. New Speedway Boogie was the first move. The Weather Report Sui...

Tonight, one very tall man at the back of the room: Bill Walton, the redheaded kid from La Mesa who won championships at UCLA, in Portland and in Boston, and spent the rest of his life at Grateful Dead shows with both arms in the air. John Wooden and the locker room after the Dead played Pauley Pavilion, the photo of him drumming in Egypt with his foot in a cast, the night the Celtics rode to a sh...

Tonight, not a show but the people standing at the back of it, holding microphones up into the dark: the tapers. Then their little cassettes follow them home, into envelopes and mailboxes and kitchen tables, and from there, very slowly, onto the first glowing screens where Deadheads found each other. A man with a trading sheet, a woman with a stack of reels, a fan typing setlists into a terminal a...

In the late 1960s, the Grateful Dead faced a decision that didn’t look dramatic at the time—but quietly shaped everything that followed. Bill Graham believed in structure, discipline, and treating live music as something that had to survive in the real world. The Grateful Dead believed in openness, trust, and removing limits—on music, on audiences, and on how a band should function. This Grateful...

Tonight, one record: a Grateful Dead album from the late seventies, made in the band's own rehearsal room in San Rafael, north of the bridge, with a guest at the mixing desk who had his own band to worry about. His name was Lowell George, and the record was called Shakedown Street. The band tried, very sincerely, to make a record that would sell, and the title song walked off the record and on...

Tonight, two old friends who never quite worked out how to play together: Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead. A warehouse in San Rafael where they rehearsed one spring, a summer of six stadium shows, a live record almost nobody loved, and a songbook Jerry Garcia carried with him his whole life. The real story is in the rooms around the tour, the couch at the warehouse, the borrowed guitar, the scraps...

Tonight, one long thread through the whole story of the Grateful Dead: the soul music. The Detroit records, the rhythm and blues and the Motown hits that Jerry Garcia loved, carried with him, and kept playing, one way or another, for thirty years. It came in through a record player in a borrowed room, through a disc jockey's son with a harmonica, and through bar sets in a lounge with no window...

Shakedown Street wasn't conjured out of thin air by hippies. In January 1978, a Bill Graham logistics man saw the same fifty faces at every show — and one porta-potty order accidentally built a subculture. Want to dig deeper? check out our memberships and get free access to the ShakeDown Observatory--our interactive journey through the 30 years of music--https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCI4-lWlKDR...

Tonight, out to the high country: a cattle ranch in the far west of Wyoming, in Sublette County near the little town of Pinedale, where a ranch kid named John Perry Barlow grew up and a guitar player named Bob Weir once spent a summer driving a tractor into ditches. The man who wrote the words to Mexicali Blues and Cassidy and Estimated Prophet really did fix fences and move cattle and worry about...

Tonight, one house: a tall old Victorian on Ashbury Street in San Francisco, a few blocks up the hill from the most famous corner of the sixties, where the Grateful Dead lived for a little while when the neighborhood around them was the center of everything. A kitchen, a crowded parlor, a flight of front steps. A hero of the Beat Generation slept in the attic, a Beatle knocked and found nobody hom...

Tonight, back before the beginning: a few small towns on the Peninsula south of San Francisco in the first years of the sixties, where young people with banjos, washboards and borrowed guitars slept in cars, crowded into coffeehouses, and played old songs for whoever would listen. Folk songs, bluegrass, and a jug band. A bookstore that let people stay all day, a room above a pizza parlor, and a mu...

How Bob Marley’s Rejection Led To Grateful Dead’s Iconic ‘Scarlet Begonias #scarletbegonias #gratefuldead #bobmarley Why? Marley couldn’t reconcile joining a label called ‘Grateful Dead’. But that rejection led to something far greater: the creation of one of the Dead’s most beloved songs, “Scarlet Begonias”. In this video, I get deep into the creative process behind the song, exploring: 🎸 How Ma...

Tonight, two drummers: a boy in a garage in Palo Alto, and a boy in a closet in Brooklyn with his father's old sticks, who ended up side by side at the back of the same stage for the better part of thirty years. Bill Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart, and the strange, rolling thing people came to call the Rhythm Devils. Almost nobody in this story agrees on who introduced them or what night the second d...

Tonight, an organ player: Merl Saunders, from the fog and the hills of San Francisco, and the guitar player who kept turning up at his side for twenty-five years, Jerry Garcia. Small clubs on weeknights, a pizza parlor where dancing was against the rules, and a bar in Berkeley where the band had to walk through the crowd to reach the stage. Two friends taught each other things neither could have l...

On March 23, 1974, a critic caught himself whispering at a Grateful Dead concert. The Wall of Sound was so clean that 14,000 people could hold a conversation while the band played. Check out our membership and get free access to the Shakedown Observatory: https://www.youtube.com/@TheShakedownArchives/join Explore the Observatory: https://theshakedownarchives.com/observatory Listen on Spotify: http...

Tonight, one man and the rooms he built around a band: Bill Graham, a promoter from San Francisco with a clipboard and a temper, and the Grateful Dead, who played his halls for most of their long working life. The Fillmore up its flight of stairs on Geary, the old ice rink called Winterland, and a great many New Year's Eves. He shouted, they wandered off, and for the better part of three decad...

Tonight, the early summer of the Grateful Dead's first record, when the band stepped off a plane in New York for the very first time. A parade down St. Mark's Place, a key to the East Village made of white carnations, a free show in Tompkins Square Park, and two weeks in a low brick room on Bleecker Street. San Francisco gets the credit for that summer, but New York had its own version, ol...

Robert Hunter's Tiger Rose stands as one of the most fascinating and heartbreaking stories in Grateful Dead history - a perfect album that its creator spent 15 years believing he had ruined with his vocals. This deep dive explores how Hunter and Jerry Garcia crafted their only true collaboration from scratch in 1974, featuring Mickey Hart secretly drumming under the pseudonym "B.D. Shot" and some...

Tonight, one man who almost never stood in the middle of anything: John Kahn, the bass player at Jerry Garcia's left shoulder for twenty-five years, outside the Grateful Dead entirely. The Monday night jams, the bluegrass band, the organ trios, and the long nights at the Keystone and the Warfield, with a quiet man picking the songs. He hired the bands, chose the material, and held the floor, a...

Tonight, the winter the Grateful Dead made the Carousel Ballroom on Market Street their own room, and the night Jerry Garcia grabbed Phil Lesh at the top of a dressing-room stairwell. Lesh had frozen on stage, still grieving Neal Cassady, and nobody who was there agrees which night it was or what happened on those stairs. The tape was rolling, and those Carousel reels were spliced with studio sess...

Tonight, the quiet story of Keith Godchaux, the piano player who slipped into the Grateful Dead almost without anyone noticing and changed the whole sound of the band. A slow, calm story made for one thing, helping you fall asleep. Dim the lights, let the day go, and let it carry you off. CHAPTERS 0:00 Two jobs at the piano 6:56 Joining, the fall of 1971 13:04 What his playing changed 19:07 Europe...

Tonight, the story of Box of Rain, a song Phil Lesh wrote for his dying father, and the song the Grateful Dead chose, all the way at the end, for their very last goodbye. A slow, calm story made for one thing, helping you fall asleep. Dim the lights, let the day go, and let it carry you off. CHAPTERS 0:00 Phil Lesh's dying father 6:49 The lyrics, on many levels 13:08 American Beauty, 1970 19:1...

Pigpen died in March 1973. The Grateful Dead spent 22 years trying to leave his ghost behind. The setlist data says they failed — 791 times. That's not metaphor. From 1973 through 1979, zero performances of Pigpen's narrow blues-and-R&B basket — Smokestack Lightnin', Turn On Your Lovelight, Little Red Rooster, Wang Dang Doodle. From 1980 through 1995: 791 performances. Including the second song of...

Tonight, the story of how Phil Lesh came back from a liver transplant and, instead of putting the old band back together, gathered a pool of friends for three nights at San Francisco's Warfield Theatre in April 1999. Donna Jean Godchaux back on a Dead stage after twenty years, Steve Kimock in the Garcia chair after Bob Weir first said no, and Trey Anastasio and Page McConnell of Phish breaking...

Tonight we go to a racetrack in upstate New York in the summer of nineteen seventy-three, for the biggest concert anyone had ever seen, and for the story of the band that walked into it carrying more grief than most bands survive. A slow, calm story made for one thing, helping you fall asleep. Dim the lights, let the day go, and let it carry you off. CHAPTERS 0:00 Macon, the autumn of nineteen sev...