(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Fri 29 August 2025 22:00, UK
The Grateful Dead are a jam band renowned for their musical ability and improvisational skills, and that’s a fact.
But if only the band were that easy to define, as thanks to their on and off stage antics, they’re a group who have more mystery surrounding them than any other act.
It’s this mystery that leads to the creation of some stories on which you can never quite put your finger. The validity of so many of the twisted tales and folklore that the band find themselves in the middle of remains indecipherable. From Donna Jean falling asleep and waking up on stage, the band getting high in Al Gore’s house, or Jerry Garcia eating a cake that was laced with 800 hits of LSD, reading about the Grateful Dead is just as entertaining as listening to them.
Because of all of these out-of-this-universe stories that traipse steadily behind the jam band like a drugged-up shadow, the idea that one of their old tour buses resides rusted in a car park in Dallas feels pretty believable. That’s exactly what Rick Fairless would have you believe. The owner of Strokers, Dallas, which already has a lot going for it as a bar, restaurant, tattoo parlour and auto repair shop, Fairless also owns the bus parked in the car park, which was said to be one of the old tour buses of the legends, Grateful Dead, from the years 1967 to 1985.
“Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and a lot of the big boys back in the day had partied in that bus with the Grateful Dead,” said Fairless when discussing the bus, rumoured to be called Sugar Magnolia, that he proudly displays outside Strokers. It’s filled with concert posters, stickers, and a haphazard array of everything hippy that you would expect from such a period.
People frequently go to look around the bus and try to soak in the history of it. In doing so, they try to imagine the plethora of people who must have come on and off, the drugs passed around, the music played, and the ideas shared. This is surely the closest we can come to an actual magic bus, isn’t it? The Who can eat their heart out!
(Credit: Alamy)
The myth around Sugar Magnolia is definitely part of its charm, but it’s hard to say how much of it actually holds up. The story of the bus’s past was shared with Faithless by Butch Patrick, best known for playing Eddie on The Munsters. Patrick attested that the bus was used to carry the band’s sound equipment from place to place, and when that sound equipment was unloaded, the band and their friends would pile into the bus to party.
“She was the sound bus,” said Patrick, “The caboose, number five in a caravan and unofficially the party bus where the guys relaxed with their friends after the show”.
Potentially popping the mythologising bubble, however, is Grateful Dead’s publicist and biographer, Dennis McNally. When asked about the bus, he dispelled the tall tales, saying that while the Grateful Dead liked to party, they wouldn’t have done it on that bus, as they would never have used a bus to transport all of their sound equipment. He added that a lot of fans of the band bought school buses so that they could follow the band around, and that it might have belonged to one of these instead.
“Deadheads bought school buses and followed the band around. The Grateful Dead did not. I can flatly tell you that in the early ’80s when I became part of the tour, the equipment was carried by an 18-wheeler, and the band travelled by charter jet,” claimed McNally, adding, “The idea that the equipment would be travelling around in a bus is somebody’s fantasy. A bus is not a good way to haul equipment. It’s not stable, it’s not built to carry a heavy load. They used trucks.”
Who was Sugar Magnolia, and what was her sweet purpose? Chalk this one under “unsolved Grateful Dead mysteries”. If you want to inspect the scene, it’s parked just outside of Dallas, Texas, for all and sundry.
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