By OLGA R. RODRIGUEZ Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Ken Kesey’s school bus — once painted in bright, swirly colors and driven across the country on a psychedelic journey — is back in San Francisco after 60 years as the centerpiece of a new exhibition celebrating the legacy of the Grateful Dead, a band that rose from the city’s famed hippie movement.
“Forever Grateful/Golden Gate Park” opens Saturday and will also feature the Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia ‘s BMW, which remains in mint condition and has never been displayed publicly.
The two iconic artifacts will anchor an exhibition that immerses visitors in the colors, sounds and sights of the counterculture that flourished in San Francisco in the 1960s.
Kesey rode the bus dubbed “Furthur” during the cross-country trip by the late author and his Merry Band of Pranksters to expand human consciousness through art, music and mind-altering drugs.
“This invites people to communicate and connect around art, music, and activism,” said Kelly Harris, executive director of the Haight Street Art Center, which organized the exhibition. “In this day and age, when we need something to bridge community, we know that this space allows for that to happen and Furthur is the portal.”
A celebration of hippie love, activism
The exhibition aims to celebrate the city’s history of hippie love and activism at a time when San Francisco is grappling with widening economic inequality fueled by an AI-driven technology boom, and the nation confronts deepening political divisions and collective fatigue.
Formed in 1965, the Grateful Dead is synonymous with San Francisco and its counterculture. Members lived in a dirt-cheap Victorian in the Haight and later became a significant part of 1967’s Summer of Love.
And it all started with the bus.
Kesey bought the bus with the proceeds from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” In 1964, the writer and his friends drove it on a marijuana and LSD-fueled journey from coast to coast, helping introduce Americans to the emerging psychedelic scene.
That history-making road trip was later recounted in Tom Wolfe’s 1968 bestseller, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.”
Upon their return to California, Kesey, who as a student had been a guinea pig for government tests of the mind-altering drug, shared his experiences at a series of parties at his home in the hills above Stanford University that became known as the “acid tests.”
The parties featured a local bar band called The Warlocks, which turned into the Grateful Dead. The bus became a defining feature of the “acid tests” as Kesey and his friends took the parties on the road, mainly around the Bay Area.
“This entire exhibit, it’s a very layered story of the Grateful Dead and their influence, their phenomenon, and their impact on communities, on society, on people, and how their legacy still lives on,” said Renee de Cossio, director of exhibitions at the Haight Street Art Center.
Deadheads can recite why they fell in love with the music, how it happened and the moment it all clicked. They embrace something just as important as the music itself — the community that comes together at a Dead show.
Exhibit immerses visitors in counterculture
Visitors will be invited to record their first encounter with the counterculture — whether it was becoming a Deadhead, as the band’s fans are called, while Garcia was still alive, discovering the band after his death, or experiencing the Grateful Dead for the first time through the exhibition.
Actors with the Third Rail Projects, a New York-based experiential performance company, will guide visitors through part of the exhibit, including a dark tunnel full of mirrors that leads into booths where they will start conversations with the audience.
They will then lead small groups to experience a liquid light show, a 1960s art form that mixes liquids of different densities in watch glasses and projects colorful, shifting psychedelic patterns onto every space of a room, creating the sensation of being inside a giant, multicolor lava lamp.
“You might go with the people that you came with, or you might get packaged with a couple other folks that you didn’t know, and you’ll then unpack the experience with each other and have a conversation with a stranger that you wouldn’t have had otherwise,” said Edward Rice, associate managing director at Third Rail Projects.
The exhibit, which runs through Oct. 25, will also feature photographs from the band’s many concerts in Golden Gate Park and a screen-printing station where visitors can create their own art.
It will also help launch an effort to restore the now-dilapidated “Furthur” bus, which got its name after a typo on its destination sign. The bus was kept on the Kesey family farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, and was last seen in public at Woodstock in 1969.
“The focal point is the Furthur bus. And Furthur is a call to action. Never stop creating, never stop exploring, keep going further,” Harris said.