How To Bring Back The Dead.

The SF Hall of Flowers in Golden Gate Park is a small venue, but they're packing a lot of memories into it with the "Forever Gateful" exhibit. I can't claim to be a Deadhead, but I am a fan of cultural phenomenon and I don't think any other band has forged as intimate a relationship with its fans for as many years as the Grateful Dead.

Hey, not bad ChatGPT!

I would've come just to see the bus. It's such a rolling piece of cultural history. Ken Kesey. The Merry Pranksters. The Acid Tests. Its destination scroll reads: FURTHUR. The last great hurrah for this psychedelic clubhouse on wheels was a coast-to-coast road trip to Woodstock in 1969. It then spent over 50 years in a swamp on Ken Kesey's farm in Oregon. And it looks it.

Floor projection.

This was Jerry Garcia's first BMW that he bought when he hit it big in the early 1970s. He stayed faithful to the car brand for the rest of his life.

Wavy Gravy's jumpsuits.

This simple idea was done well. You enter the phone booth and pick up the receiver, you then have a menu of real-life participants from the decades-long journey of the Dead. I listened to a woman recount how when she was 16 years old her mother, 35, said she wanted to experience a Grateful Dead concert. The daughter hooked her up, and the mom went on to become one of the most legendary die-hard fans in the Grateful Dead nation.

The Dead actually designated an area at concerts where people could record the performance and make cassette copies. With the Dead's improvisational style no two performances of a song were the same. And the hand-to-hand distribution of the cassettes helped fuel the band's popularity.

I have to go back to try the "Immersive Experience" they had behind a velvet curtain. They were waiting until they had enough people, and I didn't want to sit around. I don't know exactly what the experience would be, but I knew I wasn't drinking any orange juice. :)

Shakedown Street.