It was already the third time I’d heard “Franklin’s Tower” that day, and I hadn’t even reached the festival gates. Strains of the 1975 Grateful Dead classic wafted over the hot, humid parking lot outside the Dead of Summer Music Festival last month at Hunter Park in Manchester. As I navigated a maze of Subarus, RVs and Volkswagen vans plastered with Dead stickers, my first thought was: This festival has abysmal sound.
Turning a corner, I stumbled upon the source of this anemic version of “Franklin’s Tower”: a middle-aged white dude with a mountain of dreadlocks playing a 12-string acoustic guitar. A few Deadheads redolent of patchouli and marijuana were listening as they hung out beside an old Westfalia camper van. A giant sticker across the back windshield read: “Are you kind?”
“Are you guys just watching this guy, like, play a set?” I asked the closest bystander, an older woman dragging a cooler behind her.
She gave me a perplexed but not unkind look.
“Yeah,” she replied. “We’re on the way to the grounds — Organ Fairchild is on at three in the jam tent.”
“Isn’t there an actual Grateful Dead tribute on right now?” I said, gesturing toward the gates. “At the festival?”
“Oh, yeah, probably.”
“I can hear one,” I said as a band inside the grounds kicked into some kind of jam. It sounded familiar.
“Is… Are they…?” I stammered. “They’re playing ‘Franklin’s Tower’ too, aren’t they?”
The woman pursed her lips, as if decoding the complexities of a challenging wine, then closed her eyes. After a moment, she smiled and nodded.
“I think so! Nice.”
I was perplexed. We were watching someone play Dead covers in the parking lot of a festival full of Dead cover bands.
“Yeah, but it’s the Dead,” my new friend said, as if that explained everything. “You get it. Trust me, you totally get it.”
In fact, I did not. But that’s precisely why I found myself at a Grateful Dead (tribute) festival on a sweltering Saturday in July.
Thirty years after Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead played their final concert, rock music’s first jam band is living a robust afterlife in Vermont and elsewhere. Like an unofficial and sprawling preservation society, a cottage industry of Grateful Dead tribute acts is flourishing across the country, playing faithful — or sometimes purposefully blasphemous — versions of the Dead’s signature improvisational sound.
According to the website Compass Rose, which tracks Dead cover bands in the U.S., there are more than 800 across the country, at least 15 of them in Vermont, where the per capita concentration is unusually dense.
Devotees say there are plenty of reasons this corner of the music world is thriving. Aging acolytes, the boomers who were the band’s first fans, haven’t lost their love of hearing the Dead’s music live. Unlike other 20th-century bands, the Dead have also attracted several new generations of fans who show equal ardor.
Given this eternally faithful fan base, playing in a Dead tribute band is a way for musicians to earn a paycheck. And club owners can count on Dead tribute nights to deliver the kind of large paying crowds that original music isn’t guaranteed to attract.
As a result, a Vermont Deadhead who is willing to travel can usually catch a Dead tribute band playing somewhere in the state just about every night of the week.
What is it about the Grateful Dead’s music — and/or about Vermont — that it can support such an evergreen scene?
At Burlington nightclubs, rural juke joints and festivals, Dead cover acts run the gamut, from those playing note-for-note re-creations of “Scarlet Begonias” and “Ripple” to all-instrumental groups to the likes of the Grateful Dread, a reggae tribute. Most are local, but touring Dead tributes such as Dark Star Orchestra and Joe Russo’s Almost Dead are frequent visitors as well.
As someone whose job is to monitor and document Vermont’s musical ecosystem, I’ve been fascinated and alarmed in equal measure by the outbreak of Dead tribute acts. What is it about the band’s music — or about Vermont — that it can support such an evergreen scene? Do Dead tribute bands help keep venues full and open? Or does the glut of them hinder original acts looking for stage time? Does it matter that you can still essentially see the Dead — albeit with John Mayer in the Garcia role — as Dead & Company, the band formed in 2015 by former members of the Grateful Dead?
The only way to get to the bottom of the mystery was to immerse myself in the history and culture of the Dead — something I’d avoided in all of my years living in Dead-loving Vermont — and to talk to Vermonters whose lives are intertwined with the band and its music.
There are a lot of them, from local musicians knighted by the surviving members of the band to a group that subjected a brewery audience to “Uncle John’s Band” on kazoo. Vermont’s Deadhead community is just as diverse, from former U.S. senator Patrick Leahy — who once took a call from president Bill Clinton at a Dead show — to everyday folks who try to see live Dead any chance they can, even if it’s in a festival parking lot.
‘Let It Grow’
To understand Deadheads, one first has to understand the Dead. Even in the sea of innovative artists that soundtracked the 1960s — the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan — the Grateful Dead were fiercely unique.
Like the winding jams that made them famous, the Dead evolved through several stylistic stages in their 30-year run. Originally called the Warlocks, guitarists Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir, bassist Phil Lesh, keyboardist Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, and drummer Bill Kreutzmann came out of the San Francisco Bay scene in 1965, melding folk, blues, and rock and roll with the improvisational spirit of a free-jazz act. Riding the counterculture wave, the Dead rose to fame as an early psychedelic phase coincided with a stint as the house band at Ken Kesey’s infamous Acid Tests parties in the late 1960s.
Next was the so-called “Pigpen era,” marked by a blues-rock sound that centered on keyboardist McKernan’s contributions. After McKernan’s death in 1973, the band moved into a more refined period of songwriting, channeling disco into its sound. The ’80s featured more synths and polish, as well as the group’s lone Top 40 hit, 1987’s “Touch of Grey.” Along the way, the likes of Mickey Hart, Brent Mydland, Donna Jean and Keith Godchaux, Vince Welnick, and lyricists Robert Hunter and John Perry Barlow joined or became rotating members of the band.
By the early ’90s, the Dead’s fan base was larger than ever, as younger enthusiasts joined the flock, pushing the band into bigger and bigger venues. Being a Deadhead never meant sitting at home listening to the band’s studio records. No, it was essential to be present as the music was made, to be part of the dedicated community at those live shows — or at least to listen to a bootleg concert tape if you couldn’t be there in person. The Dead freely allowed and even encouraged fans to record shows for decades, much to their record label’s chagrin.
The passion of the band’s fans was on display at two locally infamous Dead performances in Vermont. In July 1994, 60,000 Deadheads descended on the Franklin County Airport in Highgate to see the band. The following June, with Dylan as the opener, the band drew more than 100,000 fans who again swamped the northern Vermont town and clogged Interstate 89.
The latter show was especially chaotic, beset by thousands of gate-crashers. The band was on its last legs, as Garcia’s lifelong drug addiction and declining health took their toll. Eight weeks later, he died of a heart attack at 53.
Burlington radio DJ Charlie Frazier was at Highgate for both shows — he’s been a true believer almost from the beginning. Now 73, he discovered the Dead as a teenager in the late 1960s, drawn to the band in its bluesy “Pigpen era” by his own love of the blues. His fandom grew serious in college as the Dead dropped the classic albums Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty in 1970.
“We were all sitting around, hoping we wouldn’t get sent off to Vietnam,” Frazier recalled. The Dead, and the culture growing around the band, offered a respite. “You’d all meet up in Boston or Syracuse or wherever, and the tribe would get together for a few days of fun. And then you’d all disperse back to your day jobs and normal lives,” he said.
Frazier has seen the Dead and their assorted offshoots and side projects more than 300 times. A harmonica player and singer, he is also pretty sure he formed the first Grateful Dead tribute act in Vermont, a ’70s group called the Hill Road Band.
In 1991, he formed the band he still plays with, Blues for Breakfast, named after the popular WIZN radio program he launched the same year — the longest-running show in the station’s history. That band plays a large assortment of Dead tunes, but it doesn’t slavishly re-create shows from the past.
“To me, too many bands are imitating the Dead and not interpreting them,” Frazier said. “To each their own, but it seems like they’re missing the point. I’m not sure Jerry would get why a band was re-creating note-for-note shows from a fucking tour in 1976 where he was probably off his head on heroin.”
“Deadheads were never really in love with the band per se. They were in love with the music.” Dennis McNally
Garcia didn’t always “get it,” according to the Grateful Dead’s longtime publicist and friend Dennis McNally.
“When it comes to the tribute acts, I don’t think Jerry really grasped the why of it all,” McNally, the author of A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead, said recently by phone from San Francisco. “I heard him say on occasion, ‘Geez, why don’t you just play your own music?'”
“I have, on a number of occasions, had just as good a time at tribute shows as I did at actual Dead shows,” McNally countered. “That’s because the Dead, and particularly Jerry, saw the audience as part of them. Everybody in the room was in the Grateful Dead, from the tapers to the guy in the back selling hot dogs. It was a wholly unique relationship with their audience. And that’s why there are 800 or whatever Dead cover bands, because everybody wants to be part of a community like that.”
He added, “Deadheads were never really in love with the band per se. They were in love with the music. And that music has now become a genre of its own. The songs are hymns, as endemic to fans as the hymns they sang in church growing up.”
‘Playing in the Band’
To understand the phenomenon that is the Grateful Dead tribute scene, one must visit their various houses of worship. Thus I found myself at a downtown Burlington bar late on a Tuesday night in June, caffeinated beverage in hand, watching an anthropologically fascinating scene unfold.
Elizabeth “Muff” Parsons-Reinhardt drifted across the dimly lit nightclub, her billowing white clothes and long, silver hair catching streaks of purple from the stage lights. I did a slight double take as I noticed the college-age women in fresh tie-dye shirts who beamed at the 67-year-old and followed in her wake, courtiers to the queen. Muff told me later that she calls them her “littles” — a cadre of younger Deadheads to whom she’s become something of a jam-band den mother.
She flashed a 1,000-watt grin at a group of thirtysomething dudes. “Heyyyyy, Muff!” one called back. Then she waved toward several gray-haired men in tie-dye shirts, a few with long ponytails popping out of baseball caps. These were her people, fellow disciples in the Church of the Grateful Dead.
Muff and her 78-year-old husband, Paul Reinhardt, had come to Einstein’s Tap House to see Dobbs’ Dead, a local Grateful Dead tribute act they used to catch around the corner at Nectar’s. But that club, a temple to the Dead on Main Street, had closed earlier that month after nearly 50 years. The musical and social scene that called Nectar’s home had had to migrate, but Deadheads have always been ready to travel.
Nectar’s will forever be associated with another famous jam band, Phish. In the mid- to late 1980s, the club helped launch the Burlington quartet, widely regarded as the Dead’s spiritual, if not precisely musical, heir. But in Vermont’s Deadhead ecosystem, most long, strange trips have passed through Nectar’s at some point. Notably that includes the Vermont guitarist who leads the fundamentalist branch of local Deadheads.
Zach Nugent, 36, started listening to the Dead as a child in Royalton — his second-grade graduation card featured the band’s iconic dancing bears. He got his first electric guitar at age 12. By 17 he had formed his first Dead tribute band, Dead Man’s Hand, with his driver’s ed instructor.
In 2010, Nugent formed a second tribute band, Cats Under the Stars, focused on the music of the Jerry Garcia Band, a side project Garcia started in the 1970s. In 2011, the Cats began a weekly Tuesday residency at Nectar’s.
In 2013, the night was rebranded as a proper Grateful Dead tribute called Dead Set. Nugent and Alex Budney, then Nectar’s general manager, originally envisioned the evening as an open jam for local musicians who wanted to play Dead tunes. They put couches and lamps on the stage to create a welcoming environment.
“The first night totally sold out, and the band was on fire, so it immediately became a show instead of a jam,” Nugent recalled. “At set break, they were pulling the sofas off the stage, and we realized, Oh, OK. This is a concert, actually, and we’re a band.”
Dead Set immediately became an institution, a weekly conclave that drew Deadheads such as the Reinhardts from all over the state and beyond to hear Nugent, his band and special guests faithfully re-create the Dead’s music.
“We called it going to church,” Muff told me. “Nectar’s was our cathedral.”
Nugent’s success with Dead Set led to a 2016 invitation from original Jerry Garcia Band keyboardist Melvin Seals to join Seals’ band JGB, made up of Garcia’s bandmates from his solo project.
“I shook the hand that shook the hand,” Nugent said, paraphrasing the 1974 Grateful Dead song “U.S. Blues.” “Melvin vouched for me, and Jerry vouched for Melvin, so I was in the circle now that I grew up reading and studying about.”
Soon, he was sharing stages with Grateful Dead bassist Lesh, asking songwriting questions of Weir and playing some of Garcia’s own custom guitars. And Nugent’s band, rechristened Dead Set, now tours nationally.
Perhaps because he’s been baptized by Seals, Nugent doesn’t take liberties with the Dead’s songs.
“Some people want to hear a fresh take, and I totally get that,” he said. “But what’s important to me is delivering an experience for people who want to reconnect to something from their past, a show or a time that was important to them.”
Not everyone views the Dead’s songs as gospel. Take Pen Hits, a local band that dresses up in black suits like the Blues Brothers while exclusively playing Pigpen songs from the Dead’s catalog. Another Vermont band, Organized Dead, tosses out the lyrics and channels the Dead through a Hammond B-3 organ. Nonlocal hybrids such as Steely Dead — that’d be the Dead and Steely Dan — and even Grateful for Biggie, a mashup with the late rap god the Notorious B.I.G., are known to pop up on Vermont stages.
Nugent’s frequent collaborator Josh Dobbs, who took over the Tuesday night residency at Nectar’s in 2019 with Dobbs’ Dead, has no compunction about getting weird with the band’s songs. If Nugent is a fundamentalist, the 38-year-old Dobbs is a Unitarian Universalist, at the progressive end of the Dead spectrum.
“I didn’t grow up listening to the Grateful Dead,” Dobbs told me before taking the stage at Einstein’s. “If you really want to sound like the Dead, you need to listen to their influences,” he explained. “But … we grew up with bands like Medeski Martin & Wood and Phish. Jerry grew up with different records in his blood. So when I pull from my soul to improvise, it’s very different than what the Dead would pull from.”
That approach was on display when Dobbs’ Dead opened the show at Einstein’s with a sprawling rendition of “The Music Never Stopped” from the Dead’s 1975 studio album Blues for Allah. The dance floor filled up with dancing Deadheads, looking for all the world like a tent revival as the sermon begins — if someone had dosed the sacramental wine.
“They’re a band beyond description,” singer Jessica Leone belted out, as Dobbs’ crew waded into the jam. “Like Jehovah’s favorite choir / people joining hand in hand / while the music played the band / Lord, they’re setting us on fire.”
The song is a Dead staple, but the audience didn’t recognize it at first. Dobbs’ Dead waded in with a sort of spacey, folk-rock intro, sounding closer to the exploratory indie of, say, Wilco. At other times, the quintet pushed into funk, hard rock, psych-rock, and even hints of jazz and bluegrass.
Fans such as the Reinhardts say they particularly love Dobbs’ for this feature — they enjoy trying to guess which of their favorite songs is being mutated.
“When something is familiar, then unfamiliar, once you figure it out, you get a shot of serotonin,” Dobbs said later. “Dissonance, then consonance. Tension and release. This music has been around longer than any of us, and the audience knows it so well. So when you’re in the middle of a huge jam and they realize what song it is, they just go nuts.”
Through the mass of undulating bodies, Muff danced her way across the floor to where her husband sat in a chair, grinning up at her. The couple attended hundreds of Grateful Dead shows in their younger days and now rarely miss a Dead tribute.
They clasped hands, Muff leaning down to smile at Paul, dancing in their way, as the band sang “It’s a rainbow full of sound.” They were in new environs, navigating the latest change to their grateful little world, but, as their beloved band promised, the music has never stopped.
‘Built to Last’
The crowd was particularly blissed out on a recent Wednesday night at Zenbarn. I’d driven 45 minutes down I-89 to the restaurant and venue in Waterbury Center, curious if the scene would differ from the Burlington Dead shows I’d dropped in on. Dark Star Project, another local Dead tribute act, ran through a version of “Sugaree,” twin guitars chiming with just the right mix of Garcia’s and Weir’s tones.
It was as authentic a Dead experience as I could have hoped for, a more fundamentalist take than Dobbs’ crew. A group of grinning and largely very stoned fans moved in a variety of wiggly styles that adhered to the creed “Dance like no one is watching.”
Off to the side in the back, a woman watched over a table with clothing, crystals and other Grateful Dead-adjacent knickknacks for sale — a mini version of Shakedown Street, the infamous parking lot market at Grateful Dead concerts where everything from grilled cheese to cocaine could be found.
Nearer to the front, a pair of microphones loomed above the stage lights and moving bodies. I’d seen the same at Einstein’s — a lovely, anachronistic practice from the past, when dedicated fans would tape entire live performances, huddled over their recording equipment like free-range audio engineers while the hippies and freaks spun out around them.
The tribute scene in Vermont has its own fans dedicated to recording the live music, not unlike old Irish monks trying to preserve history during the Dark Ages. I approached the bite-size tapers section, where I met Dave Kemp, a familiar sight at any live show in Burlington — he and his mics are usually out three nights a week. The Burlington resident, who is 52 and works for a local marketing agency, got into the Dead when he was in middle school in the ’90s, which inspired a passion for taping live shows of local jam bands near his home in Pennsylvania. Many years later, when he moved to Burlington and encountered the Queen City’s vibrant music scene, he dusted off his mics.
“I have a degree in American studies,” Kemp said. “One of the things I thought I might do is become an archivist. I didn’t pursue that, but I’m doing it in my way now.”
He said he’s uploaded about 430 shows to the Vermont Tapers Collective online archive. Many of those are of local bands playing original music, but Kemp has also recorded a ton of Grateful Dead tribute acts.
“The scene gets people out and into clubs,” he said. “It’s easy for the bar, it draws people, and it’s easy for the musicians. As long as kids are turning 18 and discovering weed, I think they’ll continue getting into the Dead. Tribute acts certainly help that process.”
The Grateful Dead are not the only group getting the tribute treatment in Vermont. Sublime, Talking Heads, Phish, Ween, Led Zeppelin, Prince and No Doubt all have dedicated local bands re-creating their music.
Meanwhile, Dead tribute bands count among their number Local Strangers, Kind Buds, Shred Is Dead, Dead Sessions, Our Lighting Too, Folks Up in Treetops and more. One may have formed while you were reading that sentence. Especially since Nectar’s closed, Blues for Breakfast’s Frazier said, there are not enough places for this glut of bands to play: “We’re sort of stepping all over each other.”
The Skinny Pancake, a crêpe restaurant with a location on the Burlington waterfront, is one venue that has discovered the upside of booking tribute acts. It recently started hosting a weekly Dead series called Dancin’ in the Streets with a rotating cast of cover bands.
“There’s no parallel to this scene,” Skinny Pancake CEO Benjy Adler said. “We haven’t hosted a lot of music lately, but we had 100 people immediately in the door on the first night of the series.”
Adler noted the difficulty of making the numbers work when he books live music: The cost of insurance is rising. Younger audiences drink less, which cuts into alcohol sales. Throw in the sheer unpredictability of the market, and it’s a risk to feature live music when it’s not always clear how many customers will show up, especially for original music.
“The Dead scene is kind of magically free from most of those problems,” Adler said. “They show up, and they bring their own ecosystem.”
But the competition for stages is a growing cause of frustration for some local artists who perform their own music.
“I think tribute acts in general are sort of offensive, honestly,” said Kevin Bloom, 31, the artist behind Burlington psych-rock act the Dead Shakers — decidedly not a Grateful Dead cover band. Their 2024 album So I Guess I Keep Making Albums Until I Die? even featured a song titled “Jerry Garcia’s Corpse, Adorned With Plastic Flowers, Is On Sale Now!”
“If I see another fucking Taylor Swift DJ night, I’ll scream. And I’d rather go to a federal prison than see a Radiohead/Phish combo,” Bloom said. “Steely Dead? Come on, man. Shoot me.”
Bloom is actually a lifelong Dead fan — they said their parents played “Dark Star,” one of the band’s rambling, psychedelic pieces, when the musician was a baby. But Bloom sees the tribute scene as a crass distortion of the band’s legacy.
“I think Jerry is very misunderstood,” they said. “I truly don’t think he would give a fuck if someone was playing his guitar or learning his songs note by note.”
Other musicians see room for both tributes and original music. Guitarist Lara Cwass, 27, plays her own songs with Lara Cwass Band but also plays with Local Strangers and occasionally sits in with Dobbs’ Dead.
“I love having an open and diverse platform for improvisation, and the Dead is exactly that,” she said. “I’d love to play more original music in this city, but it’s hard sometimes,” she continued. “Covers just tend to bring out the audience. It’s easier to fill the room.”
Dobbs’ Dead vocalist Leone also fronts All Night Boogie Band, an original blues and R&B outfit she cofounded in 2021. The band released the well-received album Angel of the Airwaves in 2023 and has established itself as a local favorite, known for a rollicking live show and Leone’s ferocious pipes.
“Playing original music is so special and vulnerable and scary,” Leone, 24, said. “Singing covers is much less stressful. Boogie Band is my child: It means everything, and that brings a lot of tension, musically, that is probably good.
“But at the same time, it’s nice to let go of the vulnerability and engage with the Dead’s music. Being part of keeping their music alive is a really special feeling to me.”
‘Eyes of the World’
Muff Parsons-Reinhardt was back on the dance floor at Einstein’s, her arms raised to the sky and eyes closed tightly, her face blank as she gave herself over to the music. Joe Agnello‘s fuzzed-out guitar solo in the middle of “New Speedway Boogie” soared, sonically closer to something Dean Ween or Graham Coxon might summon from a guitar rather than Weir or Garcia, but Muff and the faithful were enraptured.
“We have a saying,The family that Deads together stays together. And it’s true.” Elizabeth “Muff” Parsons-Reinhardt
The music of the Grateful Dead has been at the center of her life since she and her brothers saw them at the Boston Music Hall in 1976. It was June 9, Muff said, a date she’ll never forget. Her brothers agreed to take her that night, provided she stayed home the following night to record the show, which was being broadcast on FM radio.
“We have a saying,” she said after the show: “The family that Deads together stays together. And it’s true.”
Indeed, her nephew Tim Parsons was dancing beside her at Einstein’s. Parsons is the codirector of Ampersand, a vocal chamber ensemble that performs music from the 16th century. Like his aunt, he’s an avowed Deadhead. He sees parallels between composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the Dead.
“There are obvious differences between how classical music is performed pretty meticulously and in the way improvisation is key to the Dead,” Parsons said. “But the Dead’s music is bigger than the band in a way. Their songs are their own Great American Songbook and will carry on in time, even after anyone who ever saw Jerry play them is long gone.”
“Nobody wants to see the Dead’s music being played in a dark, stuffy auditorium … 200 years from now.” Josh Dobbs
Dobbs also sees similarities in how artists and audiences have kept the music of classical composers and the Dead alive.
“We know Beethoven used to be played much faster than it is now,” he pointed out. “Wagner concerts were parties with barbecues and beers, the 19th-century version of a Phish show.”
Innovation, he said, is the unifying thread.
“Nobody wants to see the Dead’s music being played in a dark, stuffy auditorium while people fall asleep 200 years from now,” he said. “At a certain point, things just get sterile, and you have to reinvent it.”
Perhaps at the beginning of my deep dive into all things Grateful Dead, I would have rolled my eyes at the comparison between the band and classical icons. But by now I seemed to have drank the Kool-Aid, metaphorically speaking.
None of the passions in my life — listening to my favorite band, watching my soccer team or hiking a favorite trail — had shown me such a cross-generational, easygoing and quick-to-love community. It’s like a cult that doesn’t have any rules, doesn’t care if you understand it, doesn’t pressure anyone to believe what they believe but will welcome you with open arms every time you show up to “get on the bus,” as Deadheads like to call joining in.
“Their music is going to live on forever,” Muff said to me. “I really, truly believe that. Whether it’s Bobby [Weir] and John Mayer playing at the Sphere in Vegas or Blues for Breakfast at a club in Burlington, the magic is the same.”
“I’ll take a killer night of Dead music at Moogs in Morrisville any night of the week, man.” Charlie Frazier
Frazier went a step further. He said he often prefers local acts to the ones Deadheads can see and hear in Vegas.
“When I see Jessica Leone or Lara Cwass … up onstage playing Dead songs and making them their own, it just feels great to see these young musicians being influenced by the Dead but interpreting it in wildly different ways.”
“Call me crazy,” he said with a shrug, “but I think I’d rather see that than a Vegas revue. Yeah. I’ll take a killer night of Dead music at Moogs in Morrisville any night of the week, man. Because the Dead we have here is as good as anywhere in the world.”
Dead Ringers:
A Tribute Band Pop Quiz
As of this printing, there are more than 800 Grateful Dead tribute bands playing in the U.S. alone. Given the Dead’s global appeal, that number surely climbs into the thousands worldwide. The original band’s name and those of its assorted offshoots — Furthur, RatDog, Dead & Company, etc. — lend themselves to almost unlimited punny possibilities when naming tribute acts. Below are several real Grateful Dead tributes and a few others that we made up. Can you tell them apart?
- American Booty Band: Albany’s most funked-up Dead tribute
- The Grateful Teds: A Boston-area acoustic Dead tribute
- The Jerryatrics: A graying Dead tribute from Eugene, Ore.
- Medieval Dead: A lute-forward Grateful Dead tribute
- Dad & Company: A dad-rock Dead cover band
- I’m Not Dead Yet: Even Brits love the Dead
- Another Truckin’ Tribute Band: What a long, strange trip
- Garcia Later: Jerry’s gone but not forgotten
- The Grateful Ed Sheeran Project: A hybrid no one asked for
- The Gratest Story Ever Told: Retelling the tale of an American legend
- Jer Bear Stare: A Care Bears-inspired furries tribute
- Jerry Bear Week: Always grateful in Provincetown, Mass.
- Uncle Jawn’s Band: A true Philly special
- Eat, Drink and Be Jerry: Upbeat Dead covers from Springfield, Ill.
- Ripple Threat: Tuscaloosa, Ala.’s favorite Dead trio
- Completely Dead: Chicagoland’s most thorough Dead tribute
- Althea Tomorrow: A thuper-fun tribute from Theattle
- The ‘Pen Is Mightier: An ode to Ron “Pigpen” McKernan
- Jerry Duty: Music that melts in your head
- Hateful Shred: Jerry would’ve played metal if he had 10 fingers
Answers: True: 2, 3, 5, 8, 10, 13, 16, 19. False: 1, 4, 6, 7, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18, 20.
— Dan Bolles, Chris Farnsworth & John James
The original print version of this article was headlined “Dead-icated | It’s been 30 years since the Grateful Dead’s demise. But for fans and tribute bands in Vermont, the music never stopped.”
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Letters to the Editor (8/13/25)
Soundbites: Deep Cuts From Covering Vermont’s Grateful Dead Scene
This article appears in Aug 6-12, 2025.
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