The word deadhead' was made famous by the group of people that followed the music of the Grateful Dead around the country. The term actually entered the United States in the 1850's and means, a person using a free ticket to get into a show, ride a train, etc. The deadhead subculture was an offspring of the music of the Grateful Dead, that started in the mid to late sixties. This subculture is not unlike any other subculture in the United States in that there is a common bond between the members of the group, they feel a collective identity and they have there own set of norms and values. .
The deadhead phenomenon is a hard group to study simply because people did not begin to look at the group empirically until the mid to late eighties, so the subculture had already been in effect for nearly twenty years. It is hard to get a clear number in the amount of deadheads there actually are simply because they are all over the country and not every deadhead goes to every Grateful Dead concert and even if they did there would not be nearly enough seats in any concert venue to hold the amount of deadheads there actually are. The Grateful Dead organization distributes information to about 290,000 deadheads, but it is thought that there is more than that. In 1998 half of the deadheads that were in attendance during the Other Ones concerts, a band consisting of the remaining members of the Grateful Dead plus three more members, said that they do not receive any information from the Grateful Dead organization. So this tells us that there could be over half a million deadheads in the country today. (Adams 2000) These numbers tell us that this group is large enough to be considered a subculture in the United States today. The people that reside within the deadhead subculture range from many different ages, families, economic backgrounds, and have a wide Varity of educational backgrounds.