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

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

The surviving members – Bobby Weir, Bill Kreutzmann and Hart – told “CBS Mornings” that the honor goes not only to the band members, but also to their fans.

“They kept us going,” Weir said.

Grateful Dead forms

The band was 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 store in Palo Alto.

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

Kreutzmann remembered seeing Garcia and Weir playing at a club.

“I was completely blown away by Jerry’s ability to hold the audience in the palm of his hands. Jerry held the light for everyone,” he said. “That week he called me and said, ‘Hey, do you want to be in a band?’ I said, ‘Sure’.”

Kreutzmann later brought Hart into the band in 1967.

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

Garcia was also recruiting Phil Lesha classically trained musician to play bass. Lesh, one of the band’s founding members, died in October at the age of 84.

The Grateful Dead Legacy

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

“We’ve had people come up to us and say, ‘You’ll never make it. You play too long. You’re playing too loud,’” Kreutzmann remembers.

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

“You looked out from the stage and it looked like a forest of trees full of microphones,” Kreutzmann said of her fans recording her concerts.

Their record company discouraged fans from allowing recordings, but the band refused, saying that they were not afraid of piracy.

“It was the smartest thing we’ve ever done,” Kreutzmann said.

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

“Those tapes went all over the world,” Hart said. “They were also our archivists.”

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

“When Jerry left, that was the end of the Grateful Dead. Period. There is simply no way to replace a Jerry Garcia,” Kreutzmann said.

The surviving members went on to form other projects and bands, but the spirit of the Grateful Dead 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 says, ‘Listen, I’m inviting a song to get to know you. I want you to know this song.’ … What that dream did was cement in me the idea that the songs, when we play them, are living beings,” Weir said. “They come and visit our world and they come through us.”