Duffy Dreidiger:
I remember this hippie girl that I sat beside in social studies or history class in high school. She always stunk like campfire and patchouli and weed and she dropped out of school in grade nine to follow the Dead around. I was super anti-hippie when I was in high school. I was into punk and indie rock. When I was 19 or 20, I was dating this girl and her roommate was this flakey sort of hippie raver. I remember her putting American Beauty on when we were smoking weed and thinking, “Man, this is the Grateful Dead? This is actually pretty good.” She gave me the CD or I went out and got it the next day, and then basically from there I got all the albums.

It seems like Jerry Garcia is almost like a cartoon to people, especially the Deadheads. He was a real dude and he was a dark guy. I think people should have more respect for him. Whether you love it or hate it, they are the only band that did what they did. [Wendy Weir] wrote this book, In the Spirit, and it was her having psychic conversations with Jerry Garcia from beyond the grave. It was all this hippie spirituality, worshiping Jerry like the Deadhead god. That’s stupid because he was just a dude and a really great guitar player. He had a great voice.

Duffy Driediger is the lead-singer and a rhythm guitarist in the band Ladyhawk.

Craig Finn:
Growing up in the suburbs of Minneapolis, things like partying and smoking weed are omnipresent. With those two things, at least when I was growing up in the late ’80s, the Dead were a huge part of the experience. Just by osmosis you knew ten to 15 Dead songs, even if you didn’t care. Even if you actually actively didn’t like them, you knew “Fire on the Mountain” and “Friend of the Devil” and “Truckin’.” As I got older, like with most things classic rock oriented, the Dead certainly became something I revisited and enjoyed a ton. I think the idea that is really exciting, after getting burned out on punk rock and indie rock, is that they went up there with only a loose plan. It’s really kind of brave compared to most bands who try to recreate the record as best as they can. When I listen to them now I realize they had this idea that to be great some nights, you had to suck other nights. I think that’s really cool.

Craig Finn is the lead-singer and rhythm guitarist in the Hold Steady.

Reine Fiske:
The first time I heard the Dead was when I was watching the Antonioni film Zabriskie Point, and “Dark Star” is on there—it’s an epic recording. With the Dead you can hear American roots music all over the place and their jamming is also special, but it’s his guitar playing, really. That’s the thing. It never stops for him—it just goes on and on. What strikes me is that he’s dealing with the electric guitar as though it’s an acoustic guitar. He’s sort of using the acoustics of the actual body of the guitar with the way he hits the strings. If you hit the strings pretty hard you get the guitar singing, you know? So it’s a very vibrant sound, and his sense of melody is amazing—he’s like a gypsy guitar player. He’s like a Mexican gypsy guitar player in a way.

Reine Fiske is the guitarist in the Swedish rock band Dungen.

Bill Kreutzmann:
Garcia was playing in Palo Alto at a club called the Tangent on University Avenue. I would go there by myself. He had the jug band—Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions—and he was playing banjo in that. Bob Weir was playing guitar and Pigpen was playing washtub bass and I think [Robert] Hunter was playing something too, probably guitar. I sat there in the audience and I said, Man, I would follow this guy anywhere. And then not very long after that I got a phone call and it was him or Bobby and they said, “Do you want to play drums? We’re switching to electric.” I was always into rock music, but it was a switch for those guys. It was after Dylan changed and went electric. I was a drummer in Palo Alto. I just played with every band that I could get my hands on—when you first start you say yes to everything.

Early on, before it became impossible, [Garcia] would help people that were ODing on psychedelics. He would sit down and take the time to talk to them. Then it became, Holy shit there are not enough hours in the day to do that. That’s probably where that reputation got started, him being a guru or father figure or whatever. He was a really gentle, neat guy. He had the most loving eyes. He would look at you and you would feel nothing but love.

The reason I moved over here [to Hawaii] is that he and I had a pact that when the band stopped playing—when there was no more Grateful Dead—we would both buy places over here. I just kept the promise. The bands after he left, like the Other Ones, just weren’t the same. Great players, but they never did the songs quite like he did them.

I was living in Mendocino when my girlfriend called and said he died and I flipped. I went into shock. I knew he was trying to go clean at the Betty Ford Center, and he came back and something happened. When you do stuff like that to your body, all your organs get weak. His body was ready to go, doggonit. He had kicked a few other times. One time he had kicked and we were playing a show at the Shoreline Amphitheatre near Palo Alto, and he was really wired and it was like razorblades on your backbone. He played so great. He leaned over and said, “Billy, I’m so nervous.” And I was like, “You are playing your fucking ass off, shut up.” I was hoping he would stay like that, but unfortunately that drug pulls too strong.

I think if he had gotten himself clean again he probably would have stopped playing in the Grateful Dead because I don’t think he really liked the Grateful Dead at the end there. That’s my honest feeling. I think he was doing it for money, I didn’t feel he was doing it for the fun anymore, I don’t think any of us were. I think the last five years in that band were kind of wasted. You can’t capture the magic in a box, even if there weren’t drug problems with any of the band members and everybody was perfect. The art kind of leaves. The muse kind of pulls its energy out. My feeling was that he was always going to play with another band.

Bill Kreutzmann joined the Grateful Dead in their original incarnation as the Warlocks in 1964 and was a member of the Dead until the end in 1995. He also played drums on Jerry Garcia’s first solo album Garcia in 1972.