When you look at the Grateful Dead’s vibrant subculture around the world, it’s as strong as ever. The culture revolves around the music and lifestyle of the band and its followers, affectionately known as Deadheads. The band's music is a time capsule that embodies peace, love, kindness, and adventure for everyone who wants in. From the early beginnings of Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir meeting at a music store in Palo Alto, California, in 1965 to the recent sixty-year celebration of the Grateful Dead’s music performed by Dead & Co.

Love Surrender Devotion by Jeff Tamarkin is a behind-the-scenes journey featuring exclusive interviews, presented in a definitive, hardcover 11x15-inch, 392-page book. It’s the perfect companion to Carlos Santana’s memoir, The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light. The artwork, photographs, and interviews are adorned throughout with inserts, personal art, and correspondences. It’s a must-have for the consummate Santana lover.

The dash on a gravestone represents that bittersweet span from birth to when we leave this plane of existence. What we leave behind becomes memories—and even those fade. We brush against immortality only when our contributions inspire people to remember. No one alive today heard Mozart perform a piano sonata, yet his sonatas are played every day. More than 230 years after his death, he lives on in his music.

Sometimes the joy is in the journey.

I’ve found a soothing balm of sound in this collaboration—an urban pulse with heart. Hunter and Feingold move between sketches and longer conversations, honoring the past with sly nods while keeping the feel decidedly present. The shortest pieces—little bursts of perfection—leave me wanting more. Now I want to see them live and watch that interplay up close.

That well-known lyric from the Grateful Dead song “Truckin’” was on my mind this weekend. “She” might refer to America’s most iconic band. “She” might be a Deadhead who was born before Jerry Garcia took his first breath – or a Deadhead who never heard a lick of Dead music until after Garcia died. “She” might be San Francisco, the city that reluctantly birthed the psychedelic movement and its most famous rock band in the tumultuous 60s. Or “she” could be that same city in its current incarnation, the city that welcomed Dead & Company with open arms for a 60th birthday celebration this past weekend.

A cavalcade of accomplished, like-minded musicians with connections to Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, and/or Lesh’s Terrapin Crossroads nightclub appeared in San Francisco on July 31 for The Heart of Town, a four-hour, all-killer-no-filler tribute to Garcia, “GD60,” and the spirit of San Francisco.

Mid-July, The String Cheese Incident made their institutional return to their home base in Colorado and played back-to-back solid shows to capacity crowds at the world-famous Red Rocks Amphitheatre. This year marked their 19th year to perform at the location many refer to as ‘the best venue on earth,’ delivering their forty-eighth and forty-ninth gigs respectively since their first performance in the sound sanctuary in 2000.

Tedeschi Trucks Band is as much a musical movement as they are a band. They are a large group of gifted musicians that travel around the country together as a family, bandmates and friends. The dozen musicians who make up this powerful force of musical joy are all well-seasoned road warriors. They spend countless hours and miles on the road, chasing the moonlight through the windshields of their homes on wheels to arrive at their next gig. With so many band members come many musical influences and musical ideas.

These days, it can often times be a daunting task for those of us who are fans under the ever expanding umbrella of the genre known as country music to sift through the seemingly endless mire of tired, overplayed & shallow subjects like red solo cups, truck tailgates and bikini clad girls on a river bank (usually while also holding red solo cups and sitting on truck tailgates).