“Man, I live in the Twilight Zone,” Jerry Garcia is reported to have said when the Grateful Dead got the offer to score the series reboot in 1985. The resulting soundtrack album, credited to the Dead and Merl Saunders, is a minor item in the group’s discography, including—along with such beloved anthems of the counterculture as “Can She Type?” and “The Misfortune Cookie: Suite”—Marius Constant’s original theme played in the style of “Space.”

Dead biographer Dennis McNally says Mickey Hart recorded some of the first season’s music in a hospital bed:

Very quickly, Mickey Hart took the lead for the Dead in the studio, and proved to have a gift for sound design. Just as they began, he went into the hospital for back surgery, and ordered that all the necessary equipment be set up in his room. At first Ram Rod vetoed this seeming insanity, but Mickey pleaded, “When I wake up, I want to go to work.” The Demerol he’d gotten for his surgery proved to be aesthetically stimulating, and he produced music for the first four episodes from bed.

You say the psychedelicized Twilight Zone theme (in the opening credits below) is not your “bag”? Friend, you’ll be begging for more Grateful Dead after you hear the nu-metal version the guy from Korn did for the series’ 2002 revival. It sucks ever so much!!!