Thursday Oct 01, 2026
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
POWERHOUSE Arena
28 Adams Street (Corner of Adams & Water Street across from the Archway)
Brooklyn , NY
11201
About the Book.
Touch of Grey, or How the Grateful Dead Became Pop Stars draws on extensive archival research to tell the behind-the-scenes story of how one song fundamentally transformed the legacy of one of rock’s most iconic groups.
Touch of Grey, or How the Grateful Dead Became Pop Stars tells the story of how one song transformed the popular legacy of one of rock’s most iconic musical groups. John Brackett traces the history of the song “Touch of Grey,” beginning with songwriter Robert Hunter’s lyrical sketches and the Grateful Dead’s earliest live arrangements, culminating in the group’s popular renaissance following the release of “Touch of Grey” and the album In the Dark in the summer of 1987. Brackett details how particular recording technologies, notable musical characteristics, modes of attending and listening, and the mechanics of the contemporary music industry shaped this defining moment in the group’s career. Drawing on extensive archival research, Touch of Grey examines how the band and their label worked to produce a hit record, a dynamic music video, and an effective promotional campaign that would propel the Grateful Dead from a group with a devoted cult following to become a pop culture phenomenon.
About the Author.
John Brackett is a writer and music historian (PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). His previous books include Live Dead: The Grateful Dead, Live Recordings, and the Ideology of Liveness (Duke University Press, 2023) and John Zorn: Tradition and Transgression (Indiana University Press, 2008). He lives with his wife in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
About the Moderator
Nick Paumgarten is a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine and the author of the forthcoming memoir “The Intangibles: Friendship, Fatherhood, and the Love of the Game” (November 2026, Penguin Press). He has written intermittently about the Grateful Dead and its legacy, most notably in the 2012 New Yorker piece “Deadhead.”