Great piece on the Dead and the Deadheads by Nick Paumgarten in the 11/26/12 issue of The New Yorker.
No two shows were the same, although many were similar. Even on good nights, they might stink it up for a stretch, and on bad ones they could suddenly catch fire—a trapdoor springs open. Then, there were the weird inimitable gigs, the yellow lobsters. Variation was built into the music. They played their parts as if they were inventing them on the spot, and sometimes they were. The music, even in the standard verse-chorus stretches, often had a limber, wobbly feel to it that struck many listeners as slovenly but others as sinuous and alive, open to possibility and surprise. It came across as music being made, rather than executed. “These guys have evolved a thing where each guy is playing a running line all the time,” David Crosby once said. “That’s electronic Dixieland.” The music critic Brent Wood has ascribed the sound of it to “the band’s emphasis on true polyphony, a texture heard only rarely in contemporary popular music. Seldom do rhythm guitar, keyboard or drum parts vary at the same time as the bass and lead guitar. . . . Still more infrequently are all six parts being improvised.” So you could attribute an aversion to the Dead to a failure of polyphonic appreciation. Or you could chalk it up to taste. “Our audience is like people who like licorice,” Jerry Garcia said. “Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice.
ANd he enhances it with a list of 13 favorite unreleased performances.