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Anyone familiar with the world of the Grateful Dead knows that one of the band’s most devoted and excitable fans was the late Bill Walton, the illustrious Hall of Fame NBA center who died in May 2024 at 71. During his life, Walton proudly boasted of having attended more than 800 Dead or Dead-related shows and could be seen in the front rows at many of them. But to get a sense of how tight he was with the band, how far back that connection went, and how much memorabilia he stashed away,...

Hours after the death of Phil Lesh, Phish opened the first night of their three-show Albany, New York run with a poignant rendition of “Box of Rain,” the bassist’s most enduring Grateful Dead song.

While the performance marked the first time that Phish has covered “Box of Rain,” guitarist Trey Anastasio previously played the American Beauty standout alongside Lesh at one of the Grateful Dead’s Fare Thee Well concerts in Chicago in 2015:

Earlier in the day, Anastasio penned a tribute to Lesh, who he’s shared the...

Phish’s Trey Anastasio, who performed alongside Phil Lesh at both the Grateful Dead’s Fare Thee Well shows and Phil and Friends concerts, paid tribute to the bassist Friday following Lesh’s death at the age of 84.

“I was deeply saddened to hear that my friend Phil Lesh passed away this morning,” Anastasio wrote on social media. “Phil was more than a revolutionary, groundbreaking bass player—he transformed how I thought about music as a teenager. I have countless memories of standing in awe, listening to his winding, eloquent...

Phil Lesh’s cause of death has become a topic of discussion following the sad news that the Grateful Dead founding member has passed away.

The longtime bassist for the legendary jam band was 84 years old.

News of Lesh’s passing was revealed on his official Instagram page on Friday afternoon.

Phil Lesh performs onstage at Headcount & Dayglo Present Phil Lesh And Very Special Friends At The Apollo Theater at The Apollo Theater on September 7, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Marc Millman/Getty Images for Dayglo Presents) A Sad Day For Deadheads

“Phil Lesh, bassist and founding member of The Grateful Dead, passed peacefully this morning,” read the statement.

“He was surrounded by his family and full of love. Phil brought immense joy to everyone around him and leaves behind a legacy of music and love. We request that you respect the Lesh family’s privacy at this time.

Two of the most successful specialty films of the year expand this weekend and a handful of others jump into an arthouse market that’s seen few new entrants in recent weeks as wide release piled on wide release.

Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City jumps from a blockbuster six-theater opening ($800k over three days) last weekend for Focus Features to 1,675 locations today. A24’s Past Lives by Celine Song, which debuted in early June on four screens, expands to 296. They’re joined by a documentary on epic cyclist Greg LeMond ahead of the Tour De France, and the first theatrical release by Wayward Entertainment, launched in late 2021 by former Revolution Studios CEO Vince Totino and former Orion Pictures President John Hegeman and focusing on genre titles.

Wayward is opening God Is A Bullet, directed and written by Nick Cassavetes, on 375 screens. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau stars as a detective whose ex-wife is...

Warner Bros.’ superhero film “The Flash” debuted atop the U.K. and Ireland box office with £4.2 million ($5.4 million), according to numbers released by Comscore.

In second place, in its third weekend, Sony’s “Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse” swung to £2.6 million for a total of £20.3 million. In third position in its fourth weekend, Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” earned £1.3 million and now has a splashy £22 million total.

Paramount’s “Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts” collected £1.1 million in fourth place in its second weekend for a total of £4.99 million. Elysian’s “Greatest Days” debuted in fifth position with £536,955.

There was one more debut in the top 10. AA Films U.K.’s “Adipurush,” the latest version of Indian mythological epic “Ramayana,” bowed in sixth position with £252,628.

There are two mid-week releases this week, on Wednesday, June 21. On the occasion of its 50th anniversary, Studiocanal is releasing the final cut of cult British horror...

Tom Leadon, the co-founder of Tom Petty’s early Seventies band Mudcrutch and the brother of original Eagles guitarist Bernie Leadon, died March 22 at the age of 70.

“It is with great sadness, but profound love and gratitude for his life, that the family of Tom Leadon (Thomas Joseph Leadon) of Nashville, Tennessee and Gainesville, Florida, announce his passing on March 22, 2023 peacefully of natural causes,” a post on Tom Petty’s official fan club said.

“Tom Leadon was my deepest guitar soul brother,” Mike Campbell wrote on Instagram. “We spent countless...

Among the many fellow travelers Jerry Garcia met on his musical journey was Bruce Hornsby. The singer, songwriter, and pianist had caught his first Dead show in 1973, at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Thirteen years later, he and his band the Range were opening for the Dead in Salinas, California, the same night the band’s “Touch of Grey” video was shot.

Later, Hornsby, who had once played in a Dead cover band, sat in with the band. In 1990, after Brent Mydland died, it seemed only...

The Grateful Dead’s craziest video — a 1987 clip for In the Dark track “Hell in a Bucket” — begins in a smoky bar. Bikers greet each other, embracing and clinging to their cold beers while flaunting their bicep tattoos. A woman shoves a dude playing an F-14 Tomcat pinball machine in the corner, knocking him to the ground.

Is that a flannelled Jerry Garcia? What’s he doing here? He isolates himself from the rowdy drinkers, strumming his beloved Tiger in his shades until the camera shifts and introduces us to a dazzling Bob Weir.

To say the Grateful Dead had a terrible Nineties would be an understatement. Keyboardist Brent Mydland died of an overdose in 1990, followed by Jerry Garcia’s fatal heart attack five years later after years of abusing his own body. The years in-between challenged the band like few eras had before. But they still rallied and made the best of a shaky situation, and one of those periods was the band’s summer 1991 tour.

By then, the Dead had incorporated not one but two replacements for Mydland: former Tubes keyboardist Vince Welnick and,...

Tony Sokol Nov 21, 2018

The Grateful Dead documentary Long Strange Trip is the band's memento mori.

Death is fun. As long as we remember nothing about us will be remembered in the eternity. Death is also very accommodating, if we don't stop for it, it stops for us. It's an immortal uber driver that doesn't care about a rating because there is only one destination. Long Strange Trip, the Grateful Dead documentary that first arrived on Amazon Prime and is now available on Blu-ray, rides shotgun with death on the tour bus. Casey Jones hasn't even glanced at the speedometer.

The Grateful Dead wasn't just a band, it was a family. Some deaths weren't fun, and there is little gratitude for taking away key players. Pigpen McKernan died in 1973 at the age of 27, Brent Mydland's gruesome death, and Garcia’s death from a heart attack at age 53 in 1995. Long Strange Trip,...

Long Strange Trip (Amazon Video)

I was stoked have scored a ticket for the limited-run (one week) theatrical screening of the new Grateful Dead documentary at IFC Cinema in the West Village. A four-hour love fest for Deadheads young and old, and more importantly for those music fans and the curious who just never got "it" and what it means to be a Deadhead. Expertly handled by director Amir Bar-Lev, there is so much to mine here that I can't imagine how much was left on the cutting room floor. (Props to executive producer Martin Scorsese, too.) Jerry's Frankenstein story frames the movie in a way that initially seems odd but by the end of the film makes perfect sense. After all, like the Monster, the band was "assembled" by the various parts (members, friends, fans, staff) that comprised it. Messy, joyous entropy in action; seemingly random, but actually spiritually...

Someone had to make the call, and as it often did, it fell to Jerry Garcia. It was July 1995, and the Grateful Dead were about to play the Deer Creek Music Center, outside Indianapolis, when an anonymous caller phoned the venue with a message: He was going to kill the Dead’s iconic frontman. The caller had concluded that his daughter had run off with someone associated with the Dead and he was planning to take Garcia out during the show to exact revenge. It was bad enough that Garcia...

Bikers, blow and Belushi: As usual when the Grateful Dead took Manhattan, the band’s five-night stand at the Palladium in April 1977 had them all. Hells Angels rode their hogs right into the dressing rooms, brandishing a knife and demanding they play “Truckin.” John Belushi, in his Saturday Night Live heyday, popped into a dressing room to share some weed. Onstage, though, something different took place in those shows. Dating back to their earliest performances a decade before, the Dead could be loose, sharp, undisciplined, sloppy, fierce – sometimes all during the same night.

The Who and the Grateful Dead first shared a bill at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, and later crossed paths at Woodstock, A Day on the Green and other massive concerts. It wasn't until March 28th, 1981 – when both groups wrapped up their European tours on the German TV show Rockpalast – that a jam session finally broke out. Midway through the Dead's second set, they brought out Pete Townshend for "Not Fade Away," "Wharf Rat" and Chuck Berry's "Around and Around." As you can see from this video, it was fantastically unrehearsed.

A two-and-a-half hour never-before-scene Grateful Dead show from 1989 will arrive at more than 550 theaters on April 19. Part of the second annual Grateful Dead Meet-Up At The Movies, the concert dates back to July 18, 1989 and was recorded at Alpine Valley Music Theatre the night after the Dead’s legendary Downhill from Here performance in East Troy, Wisconsin. Video: Grateful Dead's Bob Weir Jams With Members of The National Featuring Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Brent Mydland, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart, the set list included several fan favorites including “Jack

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