Each show is an event, a spectacle that draws meaning from itself as much as it does from the music.

"With all the kinds of people that come, old-timers and kids, it's a little hard to tell what makes them all have a valuable experience," Mr. Garcia said. "I used to wonder about it and worry. Suppose we're misleading all these people? But it's not really like that, I realized, because we're not selling a point of view. We stay away from advocating much at all, so people are left on their own to imagine who we are."

Though the core of the band -- Mr. Garcia and Bob Weir on guitars, Phil Lesh on bass, and Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann on percussion -- has been together since 1968, the loss of its pianist, Brent Mydland, to a drug overdose last year and the subsequent inclusion of Vince Welnick and Bruce Hornsby on keyboards have meant that the band has been changing its sound. Though it still does its standard two-set shows, with a long drum interlude, and though it still performs many of its classic songs -- playing without a set list, the band can do six nights without repeating itself -- it is developing a thicker and harder sound. Not that this has changed the audience's experience too much; the shows still feature people dancing in the aisles, performing a particularly arrhythmic dance that's specific to Grateful Dead shows.

"The band is basically a new band with the two new guys," Mr. Garcia said. "Those guys have to catch up with 25 years of stuff, and we have to learn to hear what their unique capabilities are. In the short run, it's a setback, but in the long run it's an advantage. The band is more solid now; it's lost some of its lightness but there's a little more rhythmic precision, which we could always use." Going Out Separately

Mr. Garcia has been busy recently, putting out two albums, including one, "The Jerry Garcia Band," (Arista) culled from a tour he did with his own band, featuring songs like "The Way You Do the Things You Do," "Dear Prudence" and "Tangled Up in Blue." Typically, the songs are completely remade, as much a comment on the tunes' potential as about the original version of the songs. The other album, "Jerry Garcia/David Grisman" (Acoustic Disc), is a series of acoustic pieces by Mr. Garcia and his old mandolinist friend, David Grisman.