David Gans has a long history of making music, writing about music, and broadcasting music.

He recently added a new entry to his musical résumé, teaching “Psychedelia and Groove: The Music and Culture of the Grateful Dead,” a continuing studies course at Stanford University.

But what I proposed was a class that was going to be very, very loosely structured. And I said, “Here are six things that we will address in these six sessions, but they won’t be rigidly divided into these things, because everybody that I invite to talk about this with me will have expertise in all these areas.”

I said, “We’ll talk about the history, we’ll talk about songwriting, we’ll talk about improvisation, we’ll talk about the culture, the deadhead culture, and how the Grateful Dead impacted the music and the world around them. And we’ll talk about the Grateful Dead’s amazing way of interpreting music – it’s one of the most important things they did was take music from outside the Grateful Dead and make it their own.”

David regularly streams performances at https://www.youtube.com/@dgans.

Photo by Nancy Carbonaro