They set up their community, worked in the vegetable gardens, wandered around nude, shared meals, built shacks and made music. Vanloads of people, mostly young, took him up on the offer. The ranch began in 1966 as a social experiment, when musician Lou Gottlieb declared his 30-acre property open to all. Alternative-living communities sprang up, including Morning Star Ranch, a counterculture commune near the apple orchards and redwood groves of Occidental and Sebastopol. ![]() Young people became disillusioned with what they felt was their parents’ soul-destroying, materialistic world, one more concerned with making war and martinis than living in peace and harmony. Meanwhile, a “back to the land” culture had been taking root throughout the country. The groovy Haight-Ashbury scene of just a year earlier was gone. Originally charged with felonies, most of the defendants pled guilty to misdemeanors and paid fines of $100 to $200, according to reports in the San Francisco Chronicle. Eleven people were busted, including Weir and McKernan. was raided by San Francisco police, who found a pound of marijuana. In October 1967, the band’s communal house at 710 Ashbury St. “Like any ecosystem, if it becomes over- populated, it stops being healthy.” “The Haight-Ashbury scene ended ingloriously because of over-population,” McNally wrote. “Suddenly, every bored high school kid in America was heading to the Haight,” wrote Dennis McNally, who later served as the band’s publicist, in his book, “A Long Strange Trip: The Inside Story of the Grateful Dead.” Nasty drugs such as heroin and speed began to appear. But when a Human Be-In event in early 1967 drew an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 people to Golden Gate Park, the secret was out. Colorful, mind-expanding art was everywhere. Jefferson Airplane members, Janis Joplin and Carlos Santana lived nearby. The burgeoning San Francisco rock scene, centered in Haight-Ashbury, was creative and supportive. Sometimes they called themselves Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, other times the Warlocks.īy 1966 they were the Grateful Dead and had established a base in San Francisco with a solidified lineup: Garcia, Bob Weir, Lesh, Kreutzmann and Ron “Pigpen” McKernan (keyboards, harmonica, vocals). “Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice.” The Dead began performing in 1965, with several members playing together as a jug band around Palo Alto, gigging at folk clubs and coffeehouses. “Our audience is like people who like licorice,” Garcia once famously said. The band’s musical and cultural caravan, as indulgent as it was transcendent, was not for everyone, but the joyful communal experience of the songs and the scene was electric to fans. Concert promoter Bill Graham once said, “They’re not the best at what they do, they’re the only ones that do what they do.” Its eclectic style blended rock, blues, folk, country, jazz, bluegrass and psychedelia into a unique whole, most memorably performed live with long chunks of musical improvisation. The Grateful Dead has become so much a part of the fabric of rock ’n’ roll that it’s easy to forget how revolutionary the group was. “It gave them a place in which to create for themselves a new way of communal living.” Fans of the late Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead mourn at an impromptu memorial at Central Park’s Strawberry Fields in New York, Aug. “The move gave the Dead a resting place in which to re-evaluate not just their music but also their whole lifestyle,” said Sam Cutler, who was the band’s tour manager in the early 1970s and later became their agent. It was a time of restorative reinvention, resulting in a fertile period of creativity, accessibility and commercial success. Saddled with debt and disillusioned by a deteriorating scene in Haight-Ashbury, the San Francisco neighborhood where the band members lived, they left a city that supported and loved them to head north across the Golden Gate Bridge and into the rolling hills of Marin and Sonoma. The Grateful Dead might have simply been a musical sidebar to the hippie-dippie 1960s instead of a cultural phenomenon, had it not been for a rejuvenating geographic shift the band made in 1968. ![]() It’s easy to believe the long, strange trip of the band would always lead the Dead to where it is now: an American institution. A fall tour with singer John Mayer could also be in the works, according to music industry sources. ![]() This summer, the “Core Four” surviving members - guitarist and vocalist Bob Weir, bassist Phil Lesh and drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann - along with Phish’s Trey Anastasio filling Garcia’s shoes, put aside years of squabbling to perform two concerts in late June at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara and three at Soldier Field in Chicago (the site of the band’s last show in July 1995).
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