August 1, 2026

by Isabella Gomez Sarmiento

This week, NPR Music reporter Isabella Gomez Sarmiento takes over the newsletter to help launch a special look at the legacy — and future — of a band and its followers who collectively rewrote the rules of music fandom.

Photo of NPR reporters Isabella Gomez Sarmiento (left) and Felix Contreras with the marionettes used in the Grateful Dead video for "Touch of Grey"

Deanne Fitzmaurice for NPR

Happy August, music enjoyers!

It’s Jerry Garcia’s birthday today, which is a big deal for the two Deadheads on the team here at NPR Music. Today kicks off the unofficial, week-long Grateful Dead holiday known as the Days Between: It spans from the date of Jerry’s birth (Aug. 1) to the anniversary of the day he died (Aug. 9).

This year’s Days Between is a little different — it’s the first one without Bob Weir, who spent the three decades since Jerry’s death passing the Grateful Dead tradition down to younger fans and musicians. It’s also the first summer in a very long time without an official Grateful Dead live experience.

But “official” has never been the limit of the Grateful Dead experience, whether you’re talking live recordings or t-shirts. As fans and as journalists, Felix Contreras and I knew that people would still be looking for ways to get together and listen to the Dead this summer, but also that there would be a lot of questions to answer. What does this moment mean for a community that has somehow managed to rebuild and reinvent itself again and again for 60-plus years? Who takes on the mantle now? If anyone does?

We decided to go out on the road and find out. (For journalism, of course!) The result is a series that launches today called Dead After Death: podcast episodes, digital features, photos and more chronicling this moment in the Grateful Dead’s history — and looking ahead to what comes next.

Our summer adventure took us to a bunch of different places. We took a Waymo to the house of a Grateful Dead historian (talk about a changing San Francisco), we drove down the Pacific Coast highway to a university library in Santa Cruz, where we visited the band’s official archive (OK, “official” in this case was pretty cool — that's us in the photo above, with the marionettes from the "Touch of Grey" video). I made friends at a Deadhead documentary screening in a Brooklyn bowling alley; Felix checked out a jam band festival in Maryland.

We also spent an afternoon in the middle of the redwood forest in Northern California, at a grassroots festival put on by the family of Phil Lesh. It was a musical celebration of the Grateful Dead’s songbook, with a performance by Phil’s son Grahame. The entire thing felt very DIY. There was a grassy field, a sea of picnic blankets and hundreds of Deadheads hanging out in the sun. The backstage area was a circle of blue Adirondack chairs under the trees and a cooler full of tie-dye popsicles. Felix and I were in heaven.

When the band went onstage, it sounded different than the original, of course. That’s kind of the beauty of the Grateful Dead: You can know every word and every note of a song, but when you’re hearing it live, you don’t know where it’s going to take you. Surrendering to that experience is incredibly humbling, but also euphoric — you have to be willing to be present in a totally different way. And the people in Monte Rio were up to the task.

I watched a 25-year-old who never saw an original member of the Dead perform, dancing her heart out next to an older woman who told me she saw Jerry live too many times to count. They were unintentionally in sync with one another. Without saying a single word, they smiled and twirled and clapped as one song transitioned into the next.

That was the first of many Grateful Dead tribute performances Felix and I witnessed over the summer. There are musicians playing the songs in every corner of the country, and there are people of all generations showing up to listen. The Grateful Dead’s songs were often long metaphors about the cycles of life and death, about making peace with this world before you head into the next one. But somehow, over the course of our summer reporting road trip, we realized maybe the one thing that will not die is the spirit of this music and the devotion it instills in anyone willing to lend their ears to it.

You can listen to that story, a travelogue of our summer tour, here.

If you’re not a Deadhead, worry not! Earlier this week, we talked to our colleague Robin Hilton, host of All Songs Considered and Dead skeptic, about how to learn to love the Grateful Dead. (He admitted afterwards that some of the songs we played during our conversation did move the needle for him.)

And if the only song you know is “Touch of Grey” (for better or worse), I did a deep dive with Ann Powers and Daoud Tyler-Ameen on NPR Music's subscription-only podcast about the history of that song … and the many meanings it’s taken on within the Dead community.

We’re going to keep publishing Dead After Death stories all week, so bookmark this page to follow along.

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