“When Jerry left, that was the end of the Grateful Dead. Period. There’s just no way that you can replace Jerry Garcia”: The Grateful Dead on Jerry Garcia’s lasting impact on their legacy – and how they felt the band couldn’t go on without him

The late Jerry Garcia played a key role in cementing the Grateful Dead’s legacy as the behemoth it is today, serving as the principal songwriter, lead guitarist, and multi-instrumentalist. His influence was so profound that the rest of the band doubted whether the group could continue without him after his passing in 1995.

“I didn’t think it would [go on], because when Jerry left, that was the end of the Grateful Dead. Period,” drummer Bill Kreutzmann tells CBS Mornings. “There’s just no way that you can replace Jerry Garcia.

He continues, “There’s great, wonderful players out there that can sit in, but Jerry had this thing. He took over the whole stage. He had everybody’s attention. He had all the musicians’ attention, and we followed him very closely. He would hold the rhythm down, sometimes a lot. It was a way of not ever getting lost when he was on stage.”

The band did indeed disband a few month’s after Garcia death. However, since then, there have been a number of reunions by the surviving members and combinations of different musicians – and guitarist Bob Weir insists that Garcia still very much serves as a source of inspiration, even visiting him in his dreams.

“I had a dream not long ago. In the dream, Jerry comes to me and he says, ‘Listen, I’m going to invite a song in to meet you,’” he explains. “‘I want you to meet this song,’ and then he goes and does that.”

He continues, “[The dream] solidified in me the notion that, yes, these characters that we evoke when we sing the songs, and these lines that we play, they’re living things. They come and visit our world and they come through us.”

Earlier this month, the Grateful Dead received this year’s Kennedy Center Honors alongside Bonnie Raitt, Francis Ford Coppola, and Arturo Sandoval.