The Grateful Dead was founded in the San Francisco Bay Area amid the rise of the counterculture of the 1960s. The founding members were Jerry Garcia (lead guitar, vocals), Bob Weir (rhythm guitar, vocals), Ron "Pigpen" McKernan (keyboards, harmonica, vocals), Phil Lesh (bass, vocals), and Bill Kreutzmann (drums). Members of the Grateful Dead had played together in various San Francisco bands, including Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions and the Warlocks. Lesh was the last member to join the Warlocks before they became the Grateful Dead; he replaced Dana Morgan Jr., who had played bass for a few gigs. Drummer Mickey Hart and non-performing lyricist Robert Hunter joined in 1967. With the exception of McKernan, who died in 1973, and Hart, who took time off from 1971 to 1974, the core of the band stayed together for its entire 30-year history. The other official members of the band are Tom Constanten (keyboards; 1968–1970), John Perry Barlow (nonperforming lyricist; 1971–1995), Keith Godchaux (keyboards; 1971–1979), Donna Godchaux (vocals; 1972–1979), Brent Mydland (keyboards, vocals; 1979–1990), and Vince Welnick (keyboards, vocals; 1990–1995). Bruce Hornsby (accordion, piano, vocals) was a touring member from 1990 to 1992, as well as a guest with the band on occasion before and after the tours.
The name "Grateful Dead" was chosen from a dictionary. According to Phil Lesh, "[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". According to Alan Trist, director of the Grateful Dead's music publisher company Ice Nine, Garcia found the name in the Funk & Wagnalls Folklore Dictionary, when his finger landed on that phrase while playing a game of Fictionary. In the Garcia biography, Captain Trips, author Sandy Troy states that the band was smoking the psychedelic DMT at the time. The term "grateful dead" appears in folktales of a variety of cultures.
Live performances
The Grateful Dead toured constantly throughout their career, playing more than 2,300 concerts. They promoted a sense of community among their fans, who became known as "Deadheads", many of whom followed their tours for months or years on end. Around concert venues, an impromptu communal marketplace known as 'Shakedown Street' was created by Deadheads to serve as centers of activity where fans could buy and sell anything from grilled cheese sandwiches to home-made t-shirts and recordings of Grateful Dead concerts.
In their early career, the band also dedicated their time and talents to their community, the Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco, making available free food, lodging, music, and health care to all. It has been said that the band performed "more free concerts than any band in the history of music".
With the exception of 1975, when the band was on hiatus and played only four concerts together, the Grateful Dead performed many concerts every year, from their formation in April 1965, until July 9, 1995. Initially all their shows were in California, principally in the San Francisco Bay Area and in or near Los Angeles. They also performed, in 1965 and 1966, with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, as the house band for the Acid Tests. They toured nationally starting in June 1967 (their first foray to New York), with a few detours to Canada, Europe and three nights at the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt in 1978. They appeared at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, the Woodstock Festival in 1969 and the Festival Express train tour across Canada in 1970. They were scheduled to appear as the final act at the infamous Altamont Free Concert on December 6, 1969 after the Rolling Stones but withdrew after security concerns. "That's the way things went at Altamont—so badly that the Grateful Dead, prime organizers and movers of the festival, didn't even get to play", staff at Rolling Stone magazine wrote in a detailed narrative on the event.
Their first UK performance was at the Hollywood Music Festival in 1970. Their largest concert audience came in 1973 when they played, along with the Allman Brothers Band and the Band, before an estimated 600,000 people at the Summer Jam at Watkins Glen. They played to an estimated total of 25 million people, more than any other band, with audiences of up to 80,000 attending a single show. Many of these concerts were preserved in the band's tape vault, and several dozen have since been released on CD and as downloads. The Dead were known for the tremendous variation in their setlists from night to night—the list of songs documented to have been played by the band exceeds 500. The band has released four concert videos under the name View from the Vault.
In the 1990s, the Grateful Dead earned a total of $285 million in revenue from their concert tours, the second-highest during the 1990s, with the Rolling Stones earning the most. This figure is representative of tour revenue through 1995, as touring stopped after the death of Jerry Garcia. In a 1991 PBS documentary, segment host Buck Henry attended an August 1991 concert at Shoreline Amphitheatre and gleaned some information from some band members about the Grateful Dead phenomenon and its success. At the time, Jerry Garcia stated, "We didn't really invent the Grateful Dead, the crowd invented the Grateful Dead, you know what I mean? We were sort of standing in line, and uh, it's gone way past our expectations, way past, so it's, we've been going along with it to see what it's gonna do next." Furthermore, Mickey Hart stated, "This is one of the last places in America that you can really have this kind of fun, you know, considering the political climate and so forth." Hart also stated that "the transformative power of the Grateful Dead is really the essence of it; it's what it can do to your consciousness. We're more into transportation than we are into music, per se, I mean, the business of the Grateful Dead is transportation." One of the band's largest concerts took place just months before Garcia's death — at their outdoor show with Bob Dylan in Highgate, Vermont on June 15, 1995. The crowd was estimated to be over 90,000; overnight camping was allowed and about a third of the audience got in without having purchased a ticket.
Their numerous studio albums were generally collections of new songs that they had first played in concert. The band was also famous for its extended musical improvisations, having been described as having never played the same song the same way twice. Their concert sets often blended songs, one into the next, often for more than three songs at a time.
Tapes
Like several other bands during this time, the Grateful Dead allowed their fans to record their shows. For many years the tapers set up their microphones wherever they could, and the eventual forest of microphones became a problem for the sound crew. Eventually, this was solved by having a dedicated taping section located behind the soundboard, which required a special "tapers" ticket. The band allowed sharing of their shows, as long as no profits were made on the sale of the tapes.
Of the approximately 2,350 shows the Grateful Dead played, almost 2,200 were taped, and most of these are available online. The band began collecting and cataloging tapes early on and Dick Latvala was their keeper. "Dick's Picks" is named after Latvala. After his death in 1999, David Lemieux gradually took the post. Concert set lists from a subset of 1,590 Grateful Dead shows were used to perform a comparative analysis between how songs were played in concert and how they are listened online by Last.fm members. In their book Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn From the Most Iconic Band in History, David Meerman Scott and Brian Halligan identify the taper section as a crucial contributor to increasing the Grateful Dead's fan base.
After the death of Garcia in 1995, former members of the band, along with other musicians, toured as the Other Ones in 1998, 2000, and 2002, and the Dead in 2003, 2004, and 2009. In 2015, the four surviving core members marked the band's 50th anniversary in a series of concerts that were billed as their last performances together. There have also been several spin-offs featuring one or more core members, such as Dead & Company, Furthur, the Rhythm Devils, Phil Lesh and Friends, RatDog, and Billy & the Kids.
Louie Louie
Grateful Dead Lyrics
Jump to: Overall Meaning ↴ Line by Line Meaning ↴
A fine little girl, she wait for me. Me catch the ship across the sea.
I sailed the ship all alone. I never think I'll make it home.
Louie, Louie, me gotta go. Louie, Louie, me gotta go.
Three nights and days we sailed the sea. Me think of girl constantly.
On the ship, I dream she there. I smell the rose in her hair.
Louie, Louie, me gotta go. Louie, Louie, me gotta go.
Me see Jamaican moon above. It won't be long me see me love.
Louie, Louie, me gotta go. Louie, Louie, me gotta go
The Grateful Dead's "Louie Louie" is an interesting song that is ambiguous and difficult to understand. The song seems to be a tale of a young man who is deeply in love with a girl and has to leave her to sail across the sea. The song is essentially a love story with a bittersweet twist. The lead-in chorus of the song, "Louie, Louie, me gotta go" is a signal of the young man's desire to leave and embark on his journey across the sea. He then proceeds to describe the girl's attractiveness and how he cannot wait to see her again.
The young man then reveals that he sailed across the sea all alone, an indication that he was on a life-changing journey. He had doubts about making it back home, which shows the dangers that he faced. The chorus then returns, and the young man's longing for the girl never fades. He spends days and nights at sea, and his thoughts are solely on the girl waiting for him. He dreams of her being there with him on the ship and smells the rose in her hair.
The final verse comes with a twist, as the young man finally arrives in Jamaica, and he is elated to see the girl he longed for. He takes her in his arms and tells her that he will never leave again. This final line hints at the possibility that he may have died soon after completing his journey, and this was a final meeting between the young man and the girl. Overall, "Louie Louie" is a heartwarming love story that may have a tragic ending.
Line by Line Meaning
Louie, Louie, me gotta go. Louie, Louie, me gotta go.
The singer urgently needs to leave and is repeating it.
A fine little girl, she wait for me. Me catch the ship across the sea.
The singer is referring to a woman waiting for him, and he's taking a ship to get to her.
I sailed the ship all alone. I never think I'll make it home.
The singer is alone on the ship and doubts he will return home.
Louie, Louie, me gotta go. Louie, Louie, me gotta go.
The artist's urgency to leave is reiterated.
Three nights and days we sailed the sea. Me think of girl constantly.
The journey takes three days, and the artist constantly thinks about the woman he's going to see.
On the ship, I dream she there. I smell the rose in her hair.
The singer dreams of the woman and smells the fragrance of her hair.
Louie, Louie, me gotta go. Louie, Louie, me gotta go.
The singer is still in a hurry to leave.
Me see Jamaican moon above. It won't be long me see me love.
The artist sees a Jamaican moon and senses he'll soon see the woman he loves.
Me take her in my arms and then. I tell her I never leave again.
The artist will embrace the woman and promises he'll never leave her again.
Louie, Louie, me gotta go. Louie, Louie, me gotta go
The song ends with the repeated chorus, emphasizing the artist's need to leave.
Contributed by Eva R. Suggest a correction in the comments below.
tom hogan
05/18/67- Awalt High School - Mountain View, CA
09/07/69- Family Dog at The Great Highway - San Francisco, CA
06/07/70- Fillmore West - San Francisco, CA
04/05/88- Hartford Civic Center - Hartford, CT
04/15/88- Rosemont Horizon - Rosemont, IL
04/22/88- Irvine Meadows Ampitheatre - Irvine, CA
05/01/88- Frost Amphitheater, Stanford University - Palo Alto, CA
09/20/88- Madison Square Garden - New York City, NY
04/09/89- Freedom Hall - Louisville, KY
Jeffry Phillips Burns
This is by far the best performance of “Louie, Louie” I’ve heard. (To be sure, it’s the only Grateful Dead performance of the song I’ve heard.)
Grateful Deadmarsh
Awesome !!! 🌈😎🌈
tom hogan
I loved this shit not to many did at the time
Ari
I saw all 9 of the MSG shows that fall. this was a great show
W Tango Delta
Ari M.~Wish I was there>a great show indeed!
Dennis Campbell
I went to the Rex benefit show, the final night of the 9. Susanne Vega and Hall and Oats were guests of and played with the boys. Garcia's voice was toast.
tom hogan
05/18/67- Awalt High School - Mountain View, CA
09/07/69- Family Dog at The Great Highway - San Francisco, CA
06/07/70- Fillmore West - San Francisco, CA
04/05/88- Hartford Civic Center - Hartford, CT
04/15/88- Rosemont Horizon - Rosemont, IL
04/22/88- Irvine Meadows Ampitheatre - Irvine, CA
05/01/88- Frost Amphitheater, Stanford University - Palo Alto, CA
09/20/88- Madison Square Garden - New York City, NY
04/09/89- Freedom Hall - Louisville, KY
peter betts
AW Yeah . . . . Its A BRENT Song , with a strong guitar player and good back up vocals , but Another Reason to MISS ;' The New Guy ' .
W Tango Delta
Hey Peter~I love this band more than anything, and I miss Jerry and Brent like crazy...but I'm gonna try the new outfit in a few days at Deer Creek. I've heard a little of their stuff with Mayer and I think he's done a better job of handling Garcia's guitar parts than most of the other guys. That said, I've only heard a couple of sets by the current outfit on youtube, and I'm gonna catch 'em at the Creek in a few days...I'm hoping the sound system is as amazing as it used to be. Can't imagine they'd start slacking in that department at this stage of the game....We shall see!
Cheers Mate, and keep on keepin' on!
peter betts
W Tango Delta Wish i could say ,ill see u there ! Have a GooD Show Buddy !