The Grateful Dead: An Imperfect Symbol of the Hippie Movement

The emergence of the band, the Grateful Dead, took San Francisco by storm in the 1960s as the hippie counterculture movement increased in popularity in the United States. The Grateful Dead’s career spanned thirty years from 1965 to the passing of their lead singer, Jerry Garcia in 1995. My work will focus on the political and social context of the 1960s and 1970s because the time period was shaped by major political issues and events that influenced the ideologies of the various protest movements such the Free Speech Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and controversial topics such as the Hell’s Angels and LSD use. My work will use the Grateful Dead as a cultural artifact to reveal the complexities and contradictions of the hippie movement that highlight the underlying issues within the movement. I aim to expand on existing Grateful Dead historians' arguments that the Grateful Dead were not political by demonstrating the Grateful Dead’s contradicting reactions to American politics in the 1970s and 1960s. The Grateful Dead’s handling of politics in contrasting and confusing ways reveals some of the larger issues found in the hippie movement that prioritized a party atmosphere over advancing political goals. Furthermore, I argue that the hippie movement was not about political progress or change but about escaping the world. I will incorporate fan art, fan oral histories, band members’ documents such as diary entries and art, oral interviews of band members, magazine articles, newspaper articles, and political documents to convey my argument. By incorporating these sources, I seek to provide all perspectives of Deadhead phenomenon participants, band members, protestors, and political figures in explaining the issue of labeling the hippie movement as political. I will use the terms “Deadhead family” and “Deadheads” throughout my study to refer to the Grateful Dead’s fans, crew members, the band members, and the members’ families. By implementing the term Deadhead culture, I demonstrate the subculture that the Deadheads created in their adoption of hippie style and drug use at Grateful Dead concerts.