The Shakedown Archives

The Album Robert Hunter Tried To Erase

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 beli

Grateful Dead Sleep Stories | John Kahn, the Bass Player at Jerry Garcia's Left Shoulder for Twenty-Five Years and more

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

Grateful Dead Sleep Stories | The Night Jerry Garcia Grabbed Phil Lesh, and the Birth of Anthem of the Sun and more

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-ro

Grateful Dead Sleep Stories | Keith Godchaux, and What Really Pushed Him Out and more

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

Grateful Dead Sleep Stories | Box of Rain, the Last Song the Dead Ever Played and more

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.

22 Years of Trying to Forget One Sound

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 19

Sleep Stories — How Phil Lesh Quietly Rebuilt the Grateful Dead: Friends, Not a Reunion

How Phil Lesh Quietly Rebuilt the Grateful Dead Sleep Story: after coming back from a liver transplant, instead of putting the old band back together, he gathered a pool

Grateful Dead Sleep Stories | Watkins Glen, and the Band That Survived the Unsurvivable and more

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

Why Jerry Garcia Never Turned On the Hells Angels

The Grateful Dead built their entire world on a handshake. With the Hells Angels, that trust worked for four years — until Altamont, where it got an 18-year-old killed.

Grateful Dead Sleep Stories | The Hidden Stories Behind Every Song on Workingman's Dead and more

Tonight, the stories behind all eight songs on Workingman's Dead, the cheap, quick record the Grateful Dead made after Aoxomoxoa left them deep in debt. A Hammond organ o

Grateful Dead Sleep Stories | The Night They Played the Pyramids Under a Lunar Eclipse and more

Tonight we go all the way to Egypt, to the foot of the Great Pyramid in the autumn of nineteen seventy-eight, for the strangest and most beautiful thing the Grateful Dead

Brent Mydland & the Year the Dead’s Sound Was Reborn

Brent Mydland didn’t just fill a chair—he reinvented the Grateful Dead’s sound. When he joined in April 1979, he replaced Keith Godchaux’s fading, monochromatic approach

The Solo Career That Was Never About Fame

Bob Weir got fired from the Grateful Dead at twenty. But he was already running the show. Ace, Kingfish, Bobby and the Midnites, RatDog: a 27-year campaign. In 1968, Jer

Sleep Stories — The Missing Link Between Beats and Hippies: Cassady, the Bus, and the Hand-Off

The Missing Link Between Beats and Hippies Sleep Story: how one driver on Ken Kesey's bus carried the Beat road myth into the Acid Test world — and how the Grateful Dead

How a Failed Bob Dylan Tour Rewrote One of His Most Famous Songs

In the early 1970s, Bob Dylan wrote When I Paint My Masterpiece—but it wasn’t his version that defined the song. The Band released it first, giving it a finished, authori

Toby Rogers: The Jazz Secret Behind the Grateful Dead

Toby Rogers traces the Grateful Dead’s jazz roots—and recalls asking Pharoah Sanders about Coltrane, LSD and Om. A reporter’s story, nearly 30 years in the making. A Col

Hip Economics & Ammo Cases: Untold Story of The Music Never Stopped

“The Music Never Stopped” isn’t just a set-closer — it’s the sound of a band holding things together at the edge. After breaking from Warner Bros. and launching their own

Grateful Dead Sleep Stories | Pigpen, the Bluesman Who Started It All and more

Tonight, drift back to Pigpen. The blues-singing heart of the early band, the man who fronted the Grateful Dead before Jerry ever stepped up to sing, and the quiet way hi

Grateful Dead Sleep Stories | What It Was Like to Follow the Dead for a Whole Summer and more

Tonight, drift onto the road. What it was really like to follow the Grateful Dead for a whole summer, town to town and lot to lot, with nowhere to be but the next show.

A Con Man, Crab Sandwiches, and the Leanest Grateful Dead

A dozen people from the Grateful Dead's office walked up the road for crab sandwiches one afternoon in early 1970. They came back to an empty room and a single phone sitt