In their 30 years as a band, the Grateful Dead scored just one Top 40 hit with "Touch of Grey," and not a single Grammy nomination.
"We've had people come up to us, say, 'You guys are never gonna make it. You play too long. You play too loud,'" Kreutzmann recalled.
But through their decades together, they built a legion of followers -- "Deadheads," who started recording and sharing their concerts.
"You'd look from the stage and it looked like a forest of trees of microphones," Kreutzmann said of their fans recording their concerts.
Their record company advised against allowing fans to record, but the band refused, saying they weren't worried about piracy.
"It was the smartest thing we ever did," Kreutzmann said.
The Grateful Dead played more than 2,300 concerts and fans recorded most of them.
"Those cassettes went out all over the world," Hart said. "They were our archivists as well."
When Jerry Garcia died in 1995, the band broke up. They weren't sure they could find a way to carry on without their frontman.
The surviving members went off to start other projects and bands, but the Grateful Dead's spirit would always live on.
Weir said Garcia visits him in dreams from time to time, including recently.
"In the dream, Jerry comes to me and he says, 'Listen, I'm gonna invite a song in to meet you.
I want you to meet this song.' …
What that dream did was, it solidified in me the notion that, yes when we play the songs, they're living things," Weir said.
"They come and visit our world and they come through us."
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/grateful-dead-kennedy-center-honores-2024/?intcid=CNR-02-0623Surviving members of the Grateful Dead, Bobby Weir, Bill Kreutzmann, and Mickey Hart, revisit the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco.
Anthony Mason (CBS San Francisco)