Why Grateful Dead are among state’s greatest natural treasures

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

- JAMES RAINEY

AUTHOR Jim Newton and Trixie Garcia celebrate the naming of a San Francisco street after her father.

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 description, especially for nonadherents. “We're like licorice,” Garcia famously said. “Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice.”

There couldn't have been a better occasion to usher in a book about the ur-orchestra of a particular brand of California freedom — Jim Newton's “Here Beside the Rising Tide: Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead and An American Awakening.”