I assumed there must’ve been a thread about this column, but couldn’t find it.
Wiki has a short page on the “grateful dead” trope, though: Grateful dead (folklore) - Wikipedia
From Wikipedia’s page on “List of band name etymologies”:
Grateful Dead — The name Grateful Dead was chosen from a dictionary. According to Phil Lesh, in his biography (pp. 62), “…Jer[ry Garcia] picked up an old Britannica World Language Dictionary…[and]…In that silvery elf-voice he said to me, ‘Hey, man, how about the Grateful Dead?’” The definition there was “the soul of a dead person, or his angel, showing gratitude to someone who, as an act of charity, arranged their burial.” According to Alan Trist, director of the Grateful Dead’s music publisher company Ice Nine, Garcia found the name in the Funk & Wagnalls Folklore Dictionary, when his finger landed on that phrase while playing a game of “dictionary”.[70] In the Garcia biography, Captain Trips, author Sandy Troy states that the band was smoking the psychedelic DMT at the time. The term “grateful dead” appears in folktales of a variety of cultures.
previously
On Grateful Dead folklore
I have no reason to doubt this story—I know it makes sense—but I could swear that, mumbly-mumble years ago, I saw the band name explained as being somehow an allusion to a passage in the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
Cecil made a Sugar Mag reference. My day has been made!