Iconic rock band the Grateful Dead was named a Kennedy Center honoree earlier this year, celebrating decades of their innovation and success.

“It’s a legacy thing for me and us, I think,” drummer Mickey Hart said of the honor.

The surviving members — Bobby Weir, Bill Kreutzmann and Hart — told “CBS Mornings” the honor is not just for the band members, but for their fans.

“They kept us goin,'” Weir said.

Grateful Dead forms

The band formed in the San Francisco Bay area in the mid 1960s. Weir was 16 when he first heard Jerry Garcia playing banjo outside a music shop in Palo Alto.

“It was New Year’s Eve, basically he invited us in. We had enough fun that evening that we decided it was too much fun to walk away from,” Weir said.

Kreutzmann recalled seeing Garcia and Weir play at a club.

“I was totally blown away by Jerry’s ability to hold the audience in his hands. Jerry held the light for everybody,” he said. “That week he called me and said, ‘Hey, you wanna be in a band?’ I said, ‘Sure.'”

Kreutzmann later brought Hart into the band in 1967.

“Bill invited me to play and sit in. When I heard the band, I go, ‘Whoa.’ We all got turned on to the Grateful Dead in different ways, but we really got turned on to it,” Hart said. “We got bit.”

Garcia also recruited Phil Lesh, a classically trained musician, to play bass. Lesh, one of the band’s original members, died in October at 84 years old.

Grateful Dead’s legacy

In their 30 years as a band, the Grateful Dead scored just one Top 40 hit with “Touch of Grey,” and not a single Grammy nomination.

“We’ve had people come up to us, say, ‘You guys are never gonna make it. You play too long. You play too loud,'” Kreutzmann recalled.

But through their decades together, they built a legion of followers known as “Deadheads,” who started recording and sharing their concerts.

“You’d look from the stage and it looked like a forest of trees of microphones,” Kreutzmann said of their fans recording their concerts.

Their record company advised against allowing fans to record, but the band refused, saying they weren’t worried about piracy.

“It was the smartest thing we ever did,” Kreutzmann said.

The Grateful Dead played more than 2,300 concerts and fans recorded most of them.

“Those cassettes went out all over the world,” Hart said. “They were our archivists as well.”

When Garcia died in 1995, the band broke up after 30 years together. They weren’t sure they could find a way to carry on without their frontman. 

“When Jerry left that was the end of the Grateful Dead. Period. There’s just no way that you can replace a Jerry Garcia,” Kreutzmann said.

The surviving members went off to start other projects and bands, but the Grateful Dead’s spirit would always live on. Weir said Garcia visits him in dreams from time to time, including recently.

“In the dream, Jerry comes to me and he says, ‘Listen, I’m gonna invite a song in to meet you. I want you to meet this song.’ … What that dream did was, it solidified in me the notion that, yes when we play the songs, they’re living things,” Weir said. “They come and visit our world and they come through us.”

Anthony Mason

Anthony Mason is a senior culture and senior national correspondent for CBS News. He has been a frequent contributor to “CBS Sunday Morning.”