LOS ANGELES -- Gary Dubofsky was born the year the Grateful Dead started touring and was 16 before he heard Jerry Garcia and the band in person for the first time. That still left enough time for the landscape architect from suburban Chicago to attend 320 shows in 35 states and collect 2,800 concert tapes.


Such was the dedication of the colorful Deadhead subculture -- from all ages and social groups -- that followed the band around the country, kept alive the peace and love spirit of the 1960s and turned Dead concerts into happy and lucrative reunions.


"After a while," said Dubofsky, 30, "it became more important to see the shows to see my friends versus the actual musical content. But the music was always there."


The music came to an end Wednesday when Garcia, the Grateful Dead's lead guitarist and central figure, died, leaving the Deadheads going down the road feeling bad, to paraphrase one of the group's songs.


"All I can say is that I drove to work, and I was crying," said Mark Parnell, 43, part-owner of The Black, a novelty and smoke shop in the Ocean Beach district of San Diego, California. "He was one of the representatives of my generation. There are very few of them left."


Old hippies and the children of old hippies, mainstream lawyers and stockbrokers stoking the fire of youth, high schoolers discovering the laid-back life for the first time and other true believers who somehow managed to keep paying $50 or more for a ticket kept the phenomenon of the Grateful Dead's tours alive long after the band broke away from its roots in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.


In Los Angeles, fans assembled through the day Wednesday at the Griffith Park merry-go-round for a candlelight vigil. Radio stations aired tributes.


Music stores reported a run on Dead records, and a head shop reported selling out its large supply of Dead memorabilia by noon.


On the fabled corner of Haight and Ashbury, where a Ben and Jerry's ice cream store carries Cherry Garcia -- a flavor named for the band leader -- teary-eyed fans placed flowers and lit candles. On a field in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, swaying mourners -- some in tie-dye, some in suits -- gathered under sunny skies and a bagpiper played "Amazing Grace." Candlelight tributes were planned Wednesday night there and in other cities.


News of Garcia's death also shot through the intricate web of cyberspace, where the band has a high profile. So many Wall Street professionals called up the news on Bloomberg news service terminals that the system froze briefly around noon. On the Prodigy on-line service and at The Well in Sausalito, California, the on-line home for many Deadheads, admiration and shock was evident.


"Thanks, man," wrote one Well user. Another said that Dead shows were the happiest times of her life, happier than trips to Disneyland, "a place where people gathered with big smiles on their faces ... happy down to their souls."


Garcia and the Dead were a disheveled and unkempt bunch, wearing ragged jeans, headbands and beards. Still, by the time of his death, Garcia's designs -- seemingly the product of drug-induced fits of fancy -- were featured on $23 silk ties. His sensibilities and drawings were featured in high-priced Jerry Garcia suites at the Hotel Triton in San Francisco and the Beverly Prescott Hotel in Beverly Hills, California.


For many, the itinerant fans who have been following the band from city to city were a cultural remnant of the 1960s, reeking of carefree sex and casual drug-use. Those are the hard-core Deadheads, who continued to sell T-shirts, bootleg concert tapes, overpriced tofu burgers and more than a small amount of drugs to finance their obsession.


"Suddenly, when you were there, you didn't feel like there was any war," said Anny Maurer, 27, a Los Angeles bartender who has seen the Dead 20 times since 1988. "There was no pestilence, no anger, no difference between human beings. We were all there for the same reason -- to show how much love and joy we have inside our hearts."


A posting on one of the popular Internet Usenet newsgroups devoted to the Dead summed up the feelings of many. "A very, very sad day for all of us," it said. "I must say that I feel right now the same way I felt when my dad died. But I came into my office and saw my 6-month-old son waking up from his nap with a sleepy smile in his eyes and knew that I had to try to teach him some of the things that Jerry and the rest have tried to teach me over the years."


The Grateful Dead got its name from the dictionary in -- what else? -- "a truly weird moment."


Jerry Garcia formed a band in 1964 with Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzman, Ron "Pigpen" McKernan and Phil Lesh. He called it the Warlocks, not knowing there was already another band by that name. They had to find a new name, and Garcia said that in their search, they turned to a dictionary at Lesh's house.


"He had a big Oxford dictionary. I opened it up and the first thing I saw was the grateful dead," Garcia once told Rolling Stone magazine. "It said that on the page and it was so astonishing. It was truly weird, a truly weird moment."


A grateful dead is a traditional British folk ballad in which a human helps the ghost of someone who has died recently find peace.


"They're about karma, which is apt," said Dennis McNally, the band's longtime publicist and historian. -- Associated Press