The Grateful Dead expanded rock’s horizons with long jams and fierce improvisation, but they also turned their communal aesthetic into a way of life. The band—Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Ron McKernan, Phil Lesh, and Bill Kreutzmann—emerged from the same psychedelic San Francisco milieu that birthed Jefferson Airplane and Moby Grape, and the group’s shared house near the corner of Haight and Ashbury during 1967’s Summer of Love became a focal point for the scene. But the Dead would acquire a devoted cult all their own, one that transcended both the geography and the era. From the beginning, they were renowned for their thick stew of influences—rock, jazz, bluegrass, country, experimental composition—and skill at in-the-moment creation. Their live prowess put them on the map first, but the Dead revealed themselves as songwriters of the first order in their second decade. A pair of albums in 1970, Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, focused on acoustic guitars and rustic Americana and featured many of the band’s best-known songs, like “Casey Jones,” “Uncle John’s Band,” “Truckin’,” and “Sugar Magnolia.” Europe ’72 beautifully extended those songwriting ideas into an expansive live setting. As the ’70s wore on, the Dead’s music grew jazzier and lighter, with albums like 1975’s Blues for Allah and songs like “Franklin’s Tower” touching on the sound of jazz fusion; later in the decade, they’d experiment with progressive rock (1977’s Terrapin Station) and even disco (1978’s Shakedown Street). “Touch of Grey,” from 1987’s In the Dark, became an unlikely mainstream hit, broadening the band’s audience for the final decade of their run. Singer and lead guitarist Garcia’s death in 1995 brought a close to the initial iteration of the band, but the Dead’s seemingly bottomless vault of live music (and various post-Garcia offshoots) lives on.