dblaney18 said:

That's really cool. Buddhists say that after chanting a mantra for a while, the differentiation between you and the mantra breaks down and the mantra begins to do you, instead of the other way around.

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Phychotron said:

you guys should read "a long strange trip" by dennis mcnally... it goes into depth about the naming incident... as it does with just about everything else you could think about...

here, i'll type it out
pg 100
The following week the Warlocks, or atleast Weir, Kreutzmann, Lesh and garcia, met to concider a problem. Phil Lesh had been thumbing through a record rack and came across a single put out by another group called the Warlocks, probably not the New York City band that featured Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Maureen Tucker (later this band would find a new monkier in the title of sadomasochistic novel and became the Velvet Underground), but moste likely a Texas band that included guitarist who would become known as ZZ Top. The san Franciscans decided they needed a new name, and they began to evaluate possibilites. Kreutzman lobbied for a black club band name, like the "Vikings" or the Crusaders." Garcia wanted to be whimsical and threw out "Mythical Ethical Icicle Tricicle." Weir suggested "His Own Sweet Advocates," his softened version of the term "devil's advocate." Finaly, on November 12, a cold gray windy day, the four of them gathered at Lesh's house on High Street. Garcia had smoked DMT before coming over, but the others were sober. Garcia and Lesh sat on the couch as Weir and Kreutzmann hovered behind them. They paged through a Barlett's, read a thousand possibilities, rejected them all. Then Garcia opend Phil's girlfriend Ruth's Funk and Wagnall's New Practial Standard Dictionary(1956), shook it open, and stabbed it with his finger. "Everything else on the page went blank," he later said, "diffused, just sorta oozed away, and there was GRATEFUL DEAD, bigblack letters edged all around in gold, man, blasting out at me, such a stunning combination." "hey, man. How about the Gratefu Dead?" Lesh began to jump up and down, shouting, "That's it! That's it!" Weir didn't like it, thinking it morbid. "It hed us back for years and years," he would say much later. As soon as he thought about it, even Garcia found it "kinda creepy." Hanging out at Swain's Music Store, Jerry asked Evie, a clerk there, how to spell "grateful." "however you spell it," she sniffed, "you'll never make it with that name."

Innocent as babes, they had connected with a motif that twined itself throughout human history. The definition in the dictionary referred specifically to the nineteenth-century musicologist Francis Child's term for a type of ballad. The grateful dead ballad or folktale concerns a hero who comes upon a corpse beingg refused a proper burial because it owes a debt. The hero resolves the debt and thus the corpse's destiny without expectation of reward, often with his last penny. Soon he meets a traveling companion who aids him in some impossible task, who, of course, turns out to be the spirit of the corpse he aided. This motif is found in almost every culture since the ancient Egyptians. Unknowingly, the Warlocks had plunked themselves into a universal cultural thread woven into the matrix of all human experience. The Term "grateful dead" is about karma, and asserts that acting from soul and the heart guarantees that righteousness will result. It is about honor, compassion, and keeping promises. It precedes and suggest "Cast thy bread upon the waters," and "No man is an island," and "what goes around comes around." The very fact of a good-time rock band selecting a name that involved death created a gap that automatically seperated the sheep from the goats. You had to be atleast a little bent just to appreciate it. It conufused some and appalled others--and what could be better for a rock band? It implied layers and layers of depth, unique amoung all rock band names in that era, and suggested that something very powerful indeed happened on High Street that day. In the end, they did not choose their name. It chose them.

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Thanks Phychotron, that was interesting. I wonder if there is someone out there who is such a big Deadhead that they went searching for a copy of that edition of that dictionary.

I also wonder what happened to the dictionary that Garcia chose the name from.