The Grateful Dead: Where Are They Now?

Summarizing the Grateful Dead’s unique journey to their Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction in 1994, Phil Lesh fittingly put it this way: “It’s been long, it’s been strange, and it’s definitely been a trip.” The band members, known for their unflinching devotion to their music, proudly never became big “recording stars,” but fellow artists and their faithful Deadheads were always in awe of their songwriting, their progressive style, and their live — and often rambling — improvisations.

At a Grateful Dead show, “the music is always up for grabs,” Bruce Hornsby, who toured with them from 1990 to 1992, explained. “Believe me, I know about this,” he quipped. “There were many times when I’d be on stage with these guys when I didn’t know what the hell was happening. True. Billy Kreutzmann would have to give me some sort of sign, some sort of hand signal: ‘We’re going here, Bruce. Go there with us.’ But that’s good to me. That’s freedom and spontaneity.… [A] Dead show to me is about the best party you can go to. The modern-day three-ring circus, the modern day tent show. Something much more than just a rock show.”

Though the magic formally ended in 1995 after the death of co-founder Jerry Garcia in 1995 — following a string of other members’ passings — Deadheads have long continued to support the surviving members and revel in the lasting legacy of the Grateful Dead and its music. Among other groupings, side projects, and solo work, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, and Mickey Hart started performing in 1998 as The Other Ones, with Kreutzmann joining his former bandmates in 2000. By 2003, they were calling themselves The Dead, touring and jamming together through 2009.

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And in 2015, Kreutzmann, Weir, and Hart became Dead & Company, enlisting the help of new recruits John Mayer, Jeff Chimenti and Oteil Burbridge. Due to health and other reasons, Kreutzmann was replaced last year by drummer Jay Lane, and the guys recently reigned at an 18-show Dead Forever experience that “celebrates the Grateful Dead’s unparalleled legacy, combining their songbook with cutting-edge technology for an immersive experience” at the Las Vegas Sphere, the brand-new $2.3 billion venue located on Sin City’s famed strip. 

“This music has made me a better player, and this band made me a better person,” Mayer has said of the life-changing gig with such legends of the music world. “I was given the opportunity of a lifetime — to have access to the greatest songbook in modern music and the deepest well of life memories shared by hundreds and thousands of Deadheads who extended their grace and acceptance to me.”

And the fun continues: “We’re having a ball at @SphereVegas, so let’s keep it going! See you for two additional weekends in August,” Dead & Company recently announced about extending their original May 16 through June 22 Vegas run into the summer, adding six more shows between Aug. 1 and Aug. 10. “Dead & Company is the perfect band for this type of venue. They’re a nostalgia act that transcends generations,” writer Will Hagle reports on The Passion of the Weiss website. “Their music obviously lends itself to psychedelic imagery. They don’t move around much onstage. The music might’ve been all anyone in the 70s needed, but the Sphere’s screen works better than any drug.”

It’s always a good idea to catch the Grateful Dead, wherever and however they’re playing. Here, a look at the band’s most iconic members through the years.

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Jerry Garcia: The Grateful Dead

The artist later known as Captain Trips was born in San Francisco, the son of a professional musician dad. “My father played woodwinds, clarinet mainly. He was a jazz musician,” Garcia once recalled. “I remember him playing me to sleep at night.” Inspired by Chuck Berry, he switched from the piano to the guitar in his teens, later picking up the banjo and a love for bluegrass after a stint in the Army. When he, Bob Weir, and Ron McKernan (his bandmates in Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions) teamed up with Phil Lesh and Bill Kreutzmann and went electric, they became the Warlocks and eventually the Grateful Dead, the house band for Ken Kesey’s famed Acid Tests.

Beyond the counterculture hero’s work with his band, Garcia also played with and produced other artists, such as Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and the New Riders of the Purple Sage. He also toured with his own Jerry Garcia Band during his Dead days, even releasing an album of music for children in 1993 titled Not for Kids Only. His fame and legend transcended just music, however. Macy’s department stores carried a line of his neckties, for example, and when Ben & Jerry’s ice cream sent him the first pints they ever made of Cherry Garcia — the flavor inspired by him — in 1987, he was thrilled, telling his publicist, “As long as they don’t name a motor oil after me, it’s fine with me.” The world was saddened when the the artist, who long struggled with diabetes and drug abuse, died in his sleep at a Marin County drug treatment center at the age of 53 on Aug. 9, 1995.

He left behind wife Deborah Koons and four daughters from various relationships, as well as legions of devastated fans — Jerry’s Kids. San Francisco’s mayor flew flags around the city at half-staff in honor of the Ashbury St. hero, and on Aug. 13, more than 25,000 attended Garcia’s public memorial in Golden Gate Park. “There’s no way to measure his greatness or magnitude as a person or a player,” Bob Dylan said. “He really had no equal. To me, he wasn’t only a musician and friend, he was more like a big brother who taught and showed me more than he’ll ever know.”

In 2015, Garcia was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame with Robert Hunter, and in 2017, his former bandmates and artists such as Eric Church, Jimmy Cliff, Peter Frampton, Buddy Miller, and Los Lobos honored him at a concert event titled Dear Jerry: Celebrating the Music of Jerry Garcia.

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Bob Weir

This rhythm guitarist was just 17 when he started playing with The Warlocks, the band that transitioned into the Grateful Dead. He started playing at the age of 14 just south of San Francisco, and he later joined Jerry Garcia in Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions before they became founding members of their now legendary outfit, for which he penned such classics as “Sugar Magnolia,” “The Other One,” and “Throwing Stones.” His solo work started in 1972 and his most recent solo effort, Blue Mountain, came in 2016.

Other side projects have included stints in bands such as Kingfish, Furthur and RatDog. He’s been playing with Dead & Company since 2015, and he’s also been a part of Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros since 2018, along with Don Was and Jay Lane. His musical accomplishments have lead to such honors as the Les Paul Spirit Award and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Americana Music Association, though he still sometimes struggles with stage fright even after all these years. “As far as the size of the crowd, a living room is the toughest for me. Oftentimes the larger the crowd, the way easier it is for me,” he’s told Guitar World.

The artist uses his notoriety to help fight global poverty and climate change as a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Development Program. Weir, now 76, and his wife, Natascha, have two daughters.

Bill Kreutzmann: The Grateful Dead

Prior to co-founding the Dead, Kreutzmann — a drummer from the age of 13 — played in The Legends, an R&B band. Together with fellow Dead member Mickey Hart, they helped pioneer a new era of rock where two drummers were prominently featured, earning themselves the nickname of “the rhythm devils.” He stayed with the band throughout their entire run up until Jerry Garcia’s death, making him, Garcia, Bob Weir and Phil Lesh the only four members to have played at every single show throughout the Dead’s run. In 2015, he released his book Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead.

“Phil was seriously my older brother, and I looked up to him totally. It’s one of those charisma things again. He just had an attraction. He had stuff to teach me or tell me about. It was how he carried himself and conducted himself, but mostly about music.” Kreutzmann said in an Instagram post about his time, and occasional difficulties, with his musical family through the years.

Some of his post-Dead band collaborations include Backbone, The Trichromes, BK3, and 7 Walkers, and he’s also appeared at times playing with Phish, doing stints with Billy & The Kids, and filling in on drums for the David Nelson Band. Though he helped form Dead & Company in 2015 with Weir and Hart, Kreutzmann, now 78, parted ways with them in 2023 due to a reported “shift in creative direction.”

Still, ahead of their recent string of shows at the Las Vegas Sphere, he took to social media to wish them all well. “The Grateful Dead were always about transformative experiences and so now, as our legacy evolves and as we continue to shape-shift into several different forms at once, it’s great that that part of the tradition continues, with Dead & Company taking up residence in a transformative venue,” he wrote, adding, “To all those who make it there, have a blast, my friends…”

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Phil Lesh

Hailing from the San Francisco suburbs, bassist Phil Lesh — who grew up playing the violin and trumpet — helped define the band’s sound, having joined them after seeing a Warlocks show in 1965. That’s when he was called into duty by his friend, Jerry Garcia, despite the fact that Lesh had never played the bass before!

Nonetheless, he fused his love of classical music and jazz into his unique playing style, and he became one of the band’s “core four” co-founders and occasional lead vocalist. In his post-Dead days, Lesh co-headlined a couple tours on his own with Bob Dylan, and he formed his Phil Lesh and Friends band (with whom he still tours). He and his wife also ran a San Rafael restaurant-bar venue up until 2021 at which he would often play. In 1998, the musician — who’s struggled with alcohol and cocaine dependencies — had a liver transplant, and he’s also battled prostate cancer, all of which forced him to limit his touring through the years.

Still, in 2022, he and Bob Weir (who were members of another band called Furthur from 2009 through 2014) set out on a six-show Bobby & Phil duo tour. “We’re going to try and play everything we’ve ever played together and maybe some new stuff too,” he told Billboard at the time. Lesh, now 84, recently celebrated a birthday residency at Port Chester, New York’s Capitol Theatre, performing five sold-out shows there in March 2024. “Music can define life itself, and it has indeed defined my life,” he wrote in his 2005 book, Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead.

Mickey Hart: The Grateful Dead

This Grateful Dead’s drummer — the son of two accomplished drummers — banged away in his high school marching band, as well as in the Air Force’s. A meeting with Bill Kreutzmann led to him joining the group on stage one night in 1967, which then led to his joining them as a full-time member, and he became known for introducing non-Western music influences into the mix. Beyond the group, he’s gone on to be a music ambassador, contributing works to the Library of Congress’ Endangered Music Project, and he’s spoken in Congress about the benefits of music and rhythm therapies. He’s also authored several books, including Drumming at the Edge of Magic: A Journey Into the Spirit of Percussion and Songcatchers: In Search of the World’s Music.

He’s recently been performing as part of the Dead & Company’s 30-show residency at the Las Vegas Sphere. Hart’s artwork — created by letting loud music blast from speakers so that it moves paint in a style he’s dubbed “vibrational expressionism” — can be seen headlining the Dead Forever experience at the nearby Venetian resort.

“I approach it very much like I do when I approach the stage: I try to empty my mind of everything,” Hart, now 80, told Variety of his creations, and his Las Vegas stint has been a mutual blessing for both the artist and the Dead’s fans. “It’s an escape from reality into another virtual place, which is consciousness-raising. You need that in this crazy f—ing world that we are living in now. Anything that does that helps,” he shared.

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Robert Hunter

The gifted lyricist joined the Dead in 1967, having played with some of Jerry Garcia’s bluegrass bands. Hunter proved his talents as a folksy songwriter on tunes such as “Dark Star,” “Scarlet Begonias,” “Truckin’,” and “Uncle John’s Band.” In 1962, Hunter was one of the volunteers who took hallucinogens for the C.I.A.’s MK-Ultra research program at Stanford, and he’d noted that the experience helped his gift for lyric writing, telling The Independent that “the words jumped from subconscious to the page.” In addition to his success with the Dead, he also wrote for other artists, such as Bob Dylan.

Though he was a non-performing member of the band (and the only non-performer to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with them), he would play guitar later in life at his own solo shows of his works. Hunter, the author of several poetry books, died on Sept. 23, 2019, at the age of 78. “There was nobody like Bob Hunter, and there never will be. A visionary wordsmith extraordinaire. He explained the unexplainable and the words struck deep,” Mickey Hart said upon the writer’s passing.

Ron “Pigpen” McKernan: The Grateful Dead

In the earliest days of the Warlocks/Grateful Dead, founding member Ron “Pigpen” McKernan fronted the action, singing as well as playing keyboards and harmonica. The son of an R&B disc jockey, McKernan — a self-taught musician from California who exuded a biker image during his heyday — grew up loving the blues, country, and R&B music, but he also loved hard drinking as well, which started at a young age.

At 14, he met Jerry Garcia at Dana Morgan’s Music Store in Palo Alto, later jamming with Garcia at his shows, which ultimately led to the Dead’s formation. During his time with the band, McKernan welcomed friend and fellow musician Janis Joplin a couple of times to join him live on one of his trademark tunes, “Turn On Your Love Light.” He played with the Dead through late 1972, but his years of hard living caught up to him by March 8, 1973, when he died at the age of 27 from alcohol-related internal hemorrhaging. The band’s 1972 song “He’s Gone,” Robert Hunter had noted, “became an anthem for Pigpen.”

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Tom Constanten

Billed as the Grateful Dead’s “advisor/keyboard creative spirit” during their early years, Tom “T.C.” Constanten is responsible for many of the band’s innovative sounds — and the harpsichord — on their albums Anthem of the Sun and Aoxomoxoa. The talented pianist/keyboardist and musical improviser is a New Jersey native who bonded with Phil Lesh at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1961.

Their bond lead to his tenure with the band, which he left in 1970 over frayed relations and creative differences. Constanten, now 80, released Persistence of Memory in 2022 with the Dead’s engineer/programmer/musician Bob Bralove under their Dose Hermanos musical collaboration, which began in 1995.

“We consider ourselves the antidote to rigid, structured thinking,” Constanten told the Don’t Call Me Boring podcast. In early 2024, he also announced a new project with Allman Betts Band bassist Berry Duane Oakley called Live Dead & Brothers, an act that just toured this spring celebrating the music of both the Grateful Dead and The Allman Brothers Band.

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Keith and Donna Jean Godchaux: The Grateful Dead

Keith Godchaux’s wife, Donna Jean, introduced him to Jerry Garcia at a show in San Francisco in the early 70s, right when the band was in need of a keyboardist to replace Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, whose health wasn’t doing well at the time. He went on to “[lead] us into unknown regions and setting the stage for what many heads consider the peak years of the Grateful Dead. With Keith, we became the turbocharged turn-on-a-dime Grateful Dead that had only been hinted at before,” Phil Lesh wrote in Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead.

Ultimately, constant touring proved to be too tough on Keith — a pianist who’d never played rock’n’ roll before joining the group — and he and Donna (who’d also joined as a singer) parted ways with the Dead in 1979. The couple formed their own Heart of Gold Band shortly afterward, and they’d previously released their own album, 1975’s Keith and Donna, which they worked on while the Dead’s touring was paused.

Tragically, Keith — who’d suffered from depression and drug dependencies — was killed at the age of 32 in a car accident on July 23, 1980, cutting his output with their Heart of Gold Band short. Donna, who was raised in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, was a harmony singer in her teens at its revered Fame Studios, and sang on such iconic hits as Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds” and Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman.” After Keith’s death she married bassist David MacKay and returned to Alabama. “It’s my roots, my life, my love, and now my home,” she told Southern Living’s Biscuits & Jam. “Everything that I experienced in Muscle Shoals, I wouldn’t trade that for anything in the world.”

In 2007, she formed the Donna Jean Godchaux Band and has released a few albums with them, as well as solo efforts and other collaborations. She’s now 72.

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Brent Mydland

Though born in Munich in then-West Germany, keyboardist Brent Mydland grew up in a military family that landed in the Bay Area. He went on to become a local musician there, and he ultimately crossed paths with Bob Weir in LA during the late 70s.

Weir invited him to tour with his Bob Weir Band as well as with Bobby and the Midnites, and the Dead later brought Mydland onboard to replace Keith Godchaux. Mydland spent 11 years with the band, proving his creative talents on such songs as “Far From Me,” “Tons of Steel,” and “I Will Take You Home,” a lullaby he dedicated to his daughters. “He could take something and turn it into a fully scored, well-thought-out, harmonically structured masterpiece in about a minute and a half,” bandmate John Perry Barlow once said of his gifts.

Mydland died from drug-related causes on July 26, 1990, at the age of 37, shortly after the band wrapped up one of their tours.

Vince Welnick: The Grateful Dead

The last in the long line of the Grateful Dead’s “cursed” keyboardists, Vince Welnick also sang high harmonies for the group when he joined after Brent Mydland’s death in 1990. “He could go where others couldn’t,” Mickey Hart once said of Welnick’s true vocal ability. Prior to his Dead days, Welnick had been a band member in The Tubes and played with Todd Rundgren. After his Grateful run was over, Welnick went on to form and play with Missing Man Formation, and he also collaborated through the years with both Hart and Bob Weir. Welnick, who faced a decade-long battle with depression, died by suicide at the age of 55 on June 2, 2006.

John Perry Barlow

The Wyoming cattle rancher had been a songwriter with the band from 1971 through 1995, penning the lyrics for such tunes as “Estimated Prophet,” “The Music Never Stopped,” “Hell in a Bucket,” “Cassidy,” and more. The son of a Republican state legislator, Barlow dabbled in politics himself, and he also went on to found and serve as vice chairman for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that defends civil liberties in the digital world. His 2018 autobiography Mother American Night: My Life in Crazy Times, recounts the details of his unique life, from his days partying with Timothy Leary and Andy Warhol, to his friendship with John F. Kennedy, and how he went on to co-found the Freedom of the Press Foundation. The father of three died in his sleep on Feb. 7, 2018, at the age of 70.

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