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Dead Heads

Dead Heads are fans of the band The Grateful Dead. They follow the band's tours, record their live shows, trade tapes of concerts, and scream "Rev It Up!" as an anthem to the band.

Many are devoted fans and have gone out of their way to see many of the several hour long shows the band produced.

At almost every Grateful Dead show, it was common to see fans openly recording the music for later enjoyment. This occured with the complete approval of the band, which is considered by many to be the first taper-friendly band. It is a matter of strict custom among deadheads that these recordings are freely shared and circulated with no money ever changing hands.

Deadheads have been known to purchase, or even 'steal', bootleg tapes from unscrupulous bootleggers who are illegally selling Grateful Dead music, and to copy them and distribute them for free - often at the same location as the bootlegger, in an attempt to stop the bootlegger from profiting. These recordings are sometimes called liberated bootlegs

Many deadheads now freely distribute digital recordings of the Grateful Dead's music, and there are several websites which provide and promote legal access lossless music, among the most notable are dead.net, etree.org, archive.org.

In Grateful Dead lore, the Dead Heads are actually a part of the band itself. New fans are always being born, and some of these fans will surely become fanatic enough appreciants of Grateful Dead's music to become deadheads themselves. Because of this it is taken as an article of faith by some that the band will 'live forever'.

"Dead-finitions"

There are numerous unrelated definitions of the term deadhead, favorite among deadheads are definitions such as:

"a person seeing a show for free"

"driving with an empty load" and "riding for free"

both of which stem from commercial practices:

• in theater, it is customary to distribute free any unsold tickets to avoid an 'empty house', a practice known as deadheading, the holders of these deadheadtickets are called deadheads.
• trucks, trains, buses, and planes, returning home without cargo or passengers is deadheading or, on a deadhead run, and the term also refers to a driver, pilot, or engineer riding free on the company's conveyance, to return home when not needed by the company at the remote location. This person is referred to as a deadhead as well.