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.
Wharf Rat
Grateful Dead Lyrics
Jump to: Overall Meaning ↴ Line by Line Meaning ↴
Way down, down, down by the docks of the city
Blind and dirty
Asked me for a dime, a dime for a cup of coffee
I got no dime but I got some time to hear his story
My name is August West, and I love my Pearly Baker best more than my wine
More than my wine
More than my maker, though he's no friend of mine
Everyone said
I'd come to no good, I knew I would Pearly, believe them
Half of my life
I spent doin' time for some other fucker's crime
The other half found me stumbling 'round drunk on Burgundy wine
But I'll get back on my feet again someday
The good Lord willin'
If He says I may
I know that the life I'm livin's no good
I'll get a new start, live the life I should
I'll get up and fly away,
I'll get up and fly away, fly away
Pearly's been true
True to me, true to my dyin' day he said
I said to him
I said to him, "I'm sure she's been"
I said to him, "I'm sure she's been true to you"
I got up and wandered
Wandered downtown, nowhere to go but just hang around
I've got a girl
Named Bonnie Lee, I know that girl's been true to me
I know she's been, I'm sure she's been true to me
The lyrics of Wharf Rat by the Grateful Dead tell a story of a man named August West who is down on his luck and seeking help from strangers. The singer of the song encounters him by the docks of the city and though he has no dime, he offers to hear the old man’s story. August West then goes on to confess that he loves his Pearly Baker more than anything else in the world, including his wine and maker. Though August has spent half his life in jail for someone else’s crime and the other half drunk on wine, he still hopes to get back on his feet someday and live the life he should. The song is a tale of hope and redemption while also reflecting on the struggles that people go through in their lives.
Line by Line Meaning
Old man down
I saw an old man who was down on his luck
Way down, down, down by the docks of the city
He was in a bad area by the ocean
Blind and dirty
He was visually impaired and unclean
Asked me for a dime, a dime for a cup of coffee
He asked me for some spare change to buy a drink
I got no dime but I got some time to hear his story
I didn't have any money to give him, but I was willing to listen to what he had to say
My name is August West, and I love my Pearly Baker best more than my wine
He introduced himself as August West and shared that he loved his girlfriend Pearly Baker more than anything
More than my wine
More than my maker, though he's no friend of mine
He loved Pearly more than anything else, even more than alcohol and God
Everyone said
I'd come to no good, I knew I would Pearly, believe them
People doubted his ability to succeed, and he believed them
Half of my life
I spent doin' time for some other fucker's crime
He served time in jail for a crime he didn't commit
The other half found me stumbling 'round drunk on Burgundy wine
He spent the other half of his life drinking and being aimless
But I'll get back on my feet again someday
The good Lord willin'
If He says I may
He hopes to turn his life around someday, with the help of God
I know that the life I'm livin's no good
I'll get a new start, live the life I should
He acknowledges that his current lifestyle isn't good and hopes to make a change
I'll get up and fly away,
I'll get up and fly away, fly away
He plans to leave his troubles behind and start fresh
Pearly's been true
True to me, true to my dyin' day he said
He affirms that his girlfriend Pearly has been faithful to him
I said to him
I said to him, "I'm sure she's been"
I said to him, "I'm sure she's been true to you"
He tells the old man that he is sure that his girlfriend has been faithful to him
I got up and wandered
Wandered downtown, nowhere to go but just hang around
He got up and walked around downtown with no particular destination
I've got a girl
Named Bonnie Lee, I know that girl's been true to me
I know she's been, I'm sure she's been true to me
He mentions his other girlfriend Bonnie Lee and affirms that she has been faithful to him as well
Lyrics © Warner/Chappell Music, Inc., Universal Music Publishing Group
Written by: JERRY GARCIA, ROBERT HUNTER
Lyrics Licensed & Provided by LyricFind
Grateful Dead
"Debuted on 2/18/71 in Port Chester, NY, Wharf Rat was staple of the Dead's live repertoire since it first appeared. By 1973 and onward, it was generally played toward the end of the second set, in the Jerry 'ballad slot,' which included songs like Stella Blue, Black Peter, Morning Dew, and later Standing On The Moon and Days Between." - David Lemieux
double sharp
@bobby thompson Sandy Scag
bobby thompson
No one beat brent
Oat Milk
8.2.13
Ryan LaCourse
David mentions this being in the “jerry ballad slot”. I’m curious what the other slots were. Thanks!
GWHinCA
Are you familiar with this version & if so I’d like to hear your thoughts…. https://youtu.be/3tLJep40Mlw
Angela Chayce
I believe Brent was their greatest keyboardist. He had such beautiful energy, especially between He and Jerry.
Michael Ross
Too bad drugs messed him up.
infiniteandroid
Yes and nobody could follow him and I think it destroyed everybody who came after
Gerard Washack
I been following the Dead for as long as I can remember. 1972 was my first concert and I feel that Brent is the MAN!