How Deadheads became rock and roll's greatest renewable resource

"Love on Haight" is a store on Haight Street in San Francisco that carries a lot of Grateful Dead memorabilia and tie dye clothing as well as a large photo of Jerry Garcia.Deanne Fitzmaurice for NPR hide caption During this year's Days Between — from August 1 and August 9 — NPR Music is publishing a series of stories about what keeps drawing people to the Grateful Dead, and how they plan to carry the band's legacy forward.Jerry Garcia had a particular way of describing the musical preferences of Grateful Dead fans.

Dennis McNally, the band's biographer and long-time publicist, remembers Garcia explaining it this way: "Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice." It was how Garcia made sense of the phenomenon around the Dead, one that drew thousands of people to the band's concerts, a growing cult following that carried the hippie culture of the Summer of Love long past San Francisco's countercultural heyday and into the next three decades.By the 1990s, following the 1987 hit "Touch of Grey," the band was playing to some of its biggest crowds ever, filling stadiums and arenas across the country.

The idea that the Dead never played the same show twice, always reaching for a new unknown, continued to pull people in.To McNally, a big part of the Dead's allure was its egalitarian ethos.

There was no power imbalance between the stars on the stage and the people in the rafters."The Grateful Dead, even when they were playing to 50,000 people — down deep, Jerry had the notion that the audience was, in fact, their peers on a quest," McNally said."Everybody in the room was in the band." Author and former Grateful Dead publicist, Dennis McNally, told NPR that the Dead's communal ideology was likely rooted in the band's early shows at writer Ken Kesey's "Acid Test" parties, where they wou...