Thousands of people gathered in San Francisco to say goodbye to Grateful Dead co-founder and guitarist Bob Weir on Saturday.<\/p>\n
That history-making road trip was later recounted in Tom Wolfe’s 1968 bestseller, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.”<\/p>\n
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.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Exhibit immerses visitors in counterculture<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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