David Lennox concert recordings collection

For over 26 years, David Lennox collected live Grateful Dead concert recordings, garnering over 1000 hours of Grateful Dead music on nearly 200 VHS cassettes. Differing sharply from many other bands, the Grateful Dead encouraged fans to record their shows and share those recordings with other Grateful Dead fans--as long as no profit was made as a result of the sharing.

The Grateful Dead was an American psychedelia-influenced rock band formed in 1965 in San Francisco. The band was known for its unique and eclectic song writing style--which fused elements of rock, folk music, bluegrass, blues, country, and jazz--and for live performances of long modal jams. The Grateful Dead's career began under the name "The Warlocks" in Palo Alto, California, which was formed from the remnants of a Palo Alto jug band called "Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions." But as another band was already recording under the "Warlocks" name, the band had to change its name in order to get a recording contract. After meeting their new manager Rock Scully, they moved to the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco. Many bands from this area, such as Jefferson Airplane and Santana, went on to national fame, giving San Francisco an image as a center for the hippie counterculture of the era. Of these bands, the Grateful Dead had members with arguably the highest level of musicianship, including banjo and guitar player Jerry Garcia, blues musician Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, the classically trained Phil Lesh and drummer Bill Kreutzmann. Following Garcia's death in 1995, the remaining members formally decided to disband. Though some of them occasionally toured through the late 1990s under the name "The Other Ones," they mainly chose to pursue various solo projects, most notably Bob Weir's Ratdog and Phil Lesh and Friends. The remaining members occasionally got together under the pseudonym Crusader Rabbit Stealth Band during the late 1990s, infrequently playing unannounced shows. The mid-2002 fall tour of The Other Ones was so successful that the band decided the name was no longer appropriate. On February 14, 2003, they renamed themselves The Dead, reflecting the abbreviated form of the band name that fans had long used and keeping "Grateful" retired out of respect for Garcia.