I saw the Grateful Dead 17 times in 1994, catching shows along both coasts and in Las Vegas, where I didn’t yet live. It wasn’t one of the band’s peak years, but that hardly mattered. What did, as a bumper sticker dating back to the ’70s nicely nutshelled, was that “There is nothing like a Grateful Dead concert.” I came to that realization during my very first show, as the group unfurled a massive version of “Terrapin Station” that transported me to a sublime sonic space I’ve rarely found since.

This weekend, the band’s surviving members pay tribute to that legacy, performing three final, “Fare Thee Well” shows as The Dead at Chicago’s Soldier Field. Fans in Las Vegas can watch a simulcast at Brooklyn Bowl ($15 Friday, $20 Saturday and Sunday, $45 for all three), at four local movie theaters (Colonnade, Orleans, Village Square and Sam’s Town, $15-$18 per night) or on YouTube (youtube.com/dead50, $30 per night). If you’re not already familiar with the band’s history, here are five key things to know.

The setlist changed nightly. It’s not as unusual in rock music today, but when the Grateful Dead began performing in the mid-1960s, reshuffling songs and their order was more in the jazz tradition. Through the band’s three decades onstage, it meant you might see three shows in a row without a single number repeating. Mix in the band’s improvisational nature—a four-minute tune could stretch into a 20-minute excursion—and the anticipation of what might be in store as the lights went down was truly something.

You could revisit past shows, for free. What better way to spread the legend of an ever-shifting live show than by authorizing concert recording and setting the results loose for fans to collect and trade? (My guest-room closet is still filled with cassettes marked “GD.”) That show you saw last week? You can find it. The Cornell ’77 show you’ve read so much about? Hear for yourself. Historic dates—2/13/70, 8/27/72, 8/13/75—became stars in their own right, and listeners connected by sending tapes through the mail in the pre-Internet era.

The nine-fingered guitar player led the way. Sadly, the man most responsible for the Grateful Dead’s musical radiance won’t be onstage this weekend; Jerry Garcia, the band’s lead guitarist and co-lead vocalist, died 20 years ago next month. He took a background in bluegrass and the blues and brought it to a psychedelic place, where his spacey, know-it-anywhere tone and stick-to-your-brain phrasings set him apart both from “guitar gods” of his era and the jam players of today. For me, the band was at its best in 1968 and ’69, when Garcia and bassist Phil Lesh experimented on rock’s outer edges, but there are mountains of mammoth Jerry moments from ’73, ’77 and beyond, too.

The words came to the band from beyond. Robert Hunter, the Grateful Dead’s not-so-secret weapon, wrote the lyrics to most of Garcia’s tunes (rhythm guitarist/co-lead vocalist Bob Weir also paired with a wordsmith, John Perry Barlow). From the cryptic (from “The Eleven”: “No more time to tell how/This is the season of what”) to the sublime (from “Scarlet Begonias”: “From the other direction, she was calling my eye/It could be an illusion, but I might as well try”), Hunter elevated the band’s music with thoughtful sentiment, in the process earning the respect of rock-poet supreme Bob Dylan, who covered Hunter’s “Silvio” in 1988.

The crowd made the scene. Though old-school Deadheads sometimes denounced late-era fans who flooded in after the band’s “Touch of Grey” resurgence, I largely found the scene to be one of respect and positivity. Sure, for some, drugs seemed to be of greater priority than music, but most folks I met at my shows were there for the band and its songs. Long before today’s festival circuit made traveling for concerts a widespread notion, the Dead’s followers did it every chance they could, ever chasing that spine-tingling sensation I felt on my first trip to “Terrapin.”