‘LSD? Been there, done that’: the Grateful Dead’s 60 years of drugs, epic noodling and obsessive fans

Forget Swifties. The Grateful Dead have the world’s most devoted following. As he heads for Britain, founder Bobby Weir talks Vegas spectaculars, bootleggers and life after Jerry Garcia

‘We didn’t want to be the cops,” says Bobby Weir, guitarist and founder member of the Grateful Dead, laughing as he describes his band’s legendarily lax attitude to people taping their concerts. Bootleggers were given their own area at gigs on the proviso their tapes were traded, not sold – an illustration of the band’s generosity of spirit. “It was an easy decision to make,” Weir says.

Decisions like those have ensured that, decades before today’s obsessional Swifties and K-pop stans, the Dead have cultivated one of music’s most passionate fandoms. They are surely the world’s best-documented band. This year, they’re marking their 60th anniversary with a 60-CD box set, just one of many gargantuan packages over the years. Their 2024 Friend of the Devils box set only covered a single month of live music (April 1978) yet it stretched to 19 CDs.