The Grateful Dead spent decades years taking audiences on daring adventures through the sonic unknown, but in 1985 the counterculture figureheads took an unlikely detour off Shakedown Street, hurtled through the depths of Space, and wound up at the controls of a new yet familiar astral realm—a realm called… The Twilight Zone.
It’s true—when CBS rebooted the popular science fiction series in 1985 more than two decades after its initial run, executive producer Philip DeGuere recruited Merl Saunders to help create the music for the show. Saunders, well known for his work with Jerry Garcia in the 1970s, recruited Garcia and the rest of the Dead to help give the new Twilight Zone an appropriately trippy score.
As the Grateful Dead’s Mickey Hart recently wrote in a social media post about this oft-forgotten piece of Dead history, “Merl Saunders was responsible for writing and completing the soundtrack and getting the Grateful Dead to perform on some of it. I was responsible for capturing sound effects and creating sounds for the score.” A 2024 post about the project from Hart’s social media explains, “This was all done with major help from Bob Bralove, working together at Mickey’s ranch. Bob was a synthesizer guru working for some of the biggest acts at the time, eventually touring with the Grateful Dead. Everyone was really interested in the project, but after a while it became increasingly difficult to get the whole band to contribute and eventually it was just Mickey making music for the show.”
The Twilight Zone (1985) – Main Title – The Grateful Dead & Merl Saunders
Selections from score of the ’80s Twilight Zone reboot, which ran from 1985–1989, were later released as a soundtrack album in 1998. Detailed musician information is not provided with the CD release of the music, though DeadDisc.com notes that the musicians primarily involved in the recordings were Merl Saunders and the six members of the Grateful Dead at that point when it was recorded: Jerry Garcia, Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, Phil Lesh, Brent Mydland, and Bob Weir. Plus, to add a bit of Twilight Zone “wait, really?” factor to this fun piece of Grateful Dead trivia, the album second track—the suite from “Nightcrawlers”—also features prominent contributions from Huey Lewis on harmonica.
The album’s liner notes included a dedication to both Jerry Garcia and original The Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling, “two men who have gone beyond The Twilight Zone far too soon.”
Click below to view the full track listing from The Twilight Zone (Volume 1) by Merl Saunders and the Grateful Dead. Scroll down to listen to the “Nightcrawlers” theme featuring Huey Lewis.
Mickey Hart and Bob Weir are preparing to get back in action for the upcoming 2025 Dead & Company residency at Las Vegas, NV’s Sphere beginning on March 20th. Find a full list of upcoming Dead & Company Dead Forever 2025 Sphere dates and ticketing details here.
Grateful Dead & Merl Saunders w/ Huey Lewis – The Twilight Zone Vol. 1 (1998) – “Nightcrawlers”
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