Lest you forget that the Grateful Dead are one of California’s great natural phenomena — musical, cultural and even spiritual — witness this month’s celebration of all things Dead at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

The band’s successor Dead & Company thrilled a total of 180,000 over three concert days, celebrating 60 years of Dead music and counterculture in the city where Jerry Garcia and his mates started it all. San Francisco named a street after Garcia in his childhood neighborhood and declared a Jerry Garcia Day, while pedicabs blasted Dead classics at ecstatic volumes.

Beginning in the 1960s and continuing well into a new century, the Dead and their followers came to represent a relaxed brand of bohemianism, that reached beyond the bounds of consumerism, imitation or even descr

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