When did the Grateful Dead adopt their name?
1965 was a pivotal year in pop music. Between the British Invasion being staged by the likes of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Kinks, along with the folk boom being pushed by Bob Dylan out in New York, the rising tides of popular music were changing rapidly. Out on the west coast, Los Angeles was the place to be. Comparatively, San Francisco was still on the verge of a breakthrough, and it wouldn’t be until the Grateful Dead adopted their signature name that the psychedelic rock scene would begin in earnest.
The story of how the Dead stumbled upon their name has been pretty much written in stone. According to just about any band biography you can read or see, whether it is Dennis McNally’s A Long Strange Trip, Blair Jackson & David Gans’ This Is All a Dream We Dreamed, or Amir Bar-Lev’s Long Strange Trip documentary, everybody pretty much has the same story with slightly different beats.
After turning their jug band, Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, into an electric outfit, Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, and Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan decided to call themselves The Warlocks. Only there was one problem: there was already a band called The Warlocks. The Velvet Underground ran into the same problem out in New York, and both bands had to change their name.
For the Dead, this came sometime toward the end of 1965. After doing one studio session as The Emergency Crew, Phil Lesh and Jerry Garcia went on the hunt for a new name. At a loss, the pair simply opened a dictionary and thumbed through until they flipped to “The Grateful Dead”, a term referring back to a number of folk tales relating to helping out a corpse that never received a proper burial.
The exact timeline between when The Warlocks became the Grateful Dead isn’t as definitive. According to the Jerry Base website, the final Warlocks gig took place on December 8th, 1965, at the Matrix, the same club owned by Jefferson Airplane singer Marty Balin. The Dead/Warlocks then played at a benefit for the San Francisco Mime Troupe at the Fillmore Auditorium two days later, but they weren’t listed in the event’s advertisement, meaning they could have played under either name.
The first definitive gig where the band was advertised as “the Grateful Dead” was actually a week earlier at a casual get-together that later became known as one of Ken Kesey’s first ‘Acid Tests’. The San Diego Acid Test on December 4th included a hand-made advertisement that was passed out to assorted freaks in the California art scene. Although it’s small, there is definitive proof in the hand-out that the band that would be playing was called “the Grateful Dead”.
“When we finally got to the Acid Tests, we’d set up before the whole thing began – wisely so, I think,” Bob Weir recalled to Jas Obrecht about the earliest days of the Dead. “And then we’d take acid, and then we’d wait until we could kind of deal with the physical. Back then, God knows who decided what the appropriate doses were gonna be and stuff like that. So there were times where it was a couple of hours, at least, before we could come around and make a stab at trying to play.”
“And oftentimes, the first couple of attempts, we’d get on, we’d pluck around a little, and we’d abandon ship pretty quick,” Weir remembered. “You know, it was hard to relate. We were heavily into hallucination and stuff like that. We got better and better at it as time wore on, so that we could take a pretty massive dose and hang in there after a while.”
It seems that the band hemmed and hawed between fully adopting the name “the Grateful Dead” for at least a week or so. The next Acid Test was a week later at Muir Beach, and there, the band was certainly known as “the Grateful Dead”. By the time 1966 rolled around, there was no doubt: the name of the band was to forever be the Grateful Dead.
