In 1965, a band from San Francisco began a magical mystery tour, redefining the musical road trip. What does the Dead mean to so many seekers?
In the fall of 1985, I experienced the kind of autumn of which travel dreams and movie montages are made.
I discovered Impressionism at a major retrospective at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. A budding birder, I delighted in identifying all six heron species among the reeds in the Florida Everglades. I even caught Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, “Eroica,” performed by the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, sitting next to my mother, no less, in the stately Eastman Theater, the very auditorium where I’d graduated from McQuaid Jesuit High School five years prior.
Meanwhile, I also attended 13 Grateful Dead concerts, packed into 17 days, traveling up and down the seaboard as one small part of the band’s permanent pack. If it weren’t for the Dead, I wouldn’t have done any of that other stuff. How many other people could tell a similar story? Hundreds of thousands, at least, maybe millions. Because in the story of the American road trip, long and strange as it can be, there’s one musical phenomenon that has inspired more adventures than any other band, for 60 years now.
Simply put, the Grateful Dead taught me how to travel, and showed me the wonders of the road. And I’m far from alone.
“THERE’S A BAND OUT ON THE HIGHWAY”
Regardless of what you may think of the Grateful Dead’s ethereal, amorphous jams, bookending lyrics that evoke card games gone wrong, celestial skies, skeletons and roses, the “band beyond description” has without doubt defined an entire genre of travel. They enticed thousands of us onto the road by playing dozens of shows without ever repeating a setlist or, over many nights in a row, a single song.
“The bus came by, and I got on, that’s when it all began,” Bob Weir sings in “The Other One,” the first lyric he penned for the Dead. Weir’s words were inspired by Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and their culturally significant 1964 sojourn across America aboard the school bus “Furthur.” Weir had no idea at the time that he, Jerry Garcia and their comrades in a band that emerged from the San Francisco scene in 1965 would foment a unique cultural following among romantics desperate to dance and shake their bones in a cocoon spun of 1960s counterculture.
Our famously impassioned and peripatetic clan will celebrate the Dead’s 60th Anniversary on December 4, 2025, an opportunity to revel in memories made touring together as a psychedelic circus troupe on what I consider the greatest American road trip. For my own part, I crisscrossed America chasing the Dead, from Chula Vista, California, to Augusta, Maine, and Miami to Minneapolis. For a provincial kid from Western New York, traveling alongside the Grateful Dead engendered the insatiable cultural curiosity that fuels my modus operandi as a travel writer and photographer to this day.
The trip continues. In a few days from the moment of this writing, my partner and I will drive five hours from Sundance, Utah, to see Dead & Company at the Las Vegas Sphere. We’ll return to Park City on Sunday, a mere jaunt when compared to days spent hitchhiking or packed into my ’72 VW bus, truckin’ from Berkeley to Boston and back again. The bonds forged on tour are singular—or as Bart Wright, my friend since the ’80s, put it: “I loved the late-night departure from one show to an early arrival in the next town. We would always run into our fellow travelers in the strangest of places along the way.”
Bart started attending Dead shows in high school; however, I’m glad I didn’t discover the Dead until my early twenties. I was deeply drawn to ’60s culture growing up, hanging out with the step-van-traveling hippies at adjacent campsites when camping with my own family, not cutting my hair until high school, and hosting late-night listening sessions of Pink Floyd, Genesis and other prog rock bands.
Though I regret missing legendary Dead shows—Cornell ’77 and the 1980 Radio City run come to mind—I’m certain if I’d encountered the Dead tour scene in high school, I would’ve run away and joined the “fireworks, calliopes and clowns,” leaving other passions, like playing college hockey, far behind.
“PEOPLE JOINING HAND IN HAND, WHILE THE MUSIC PLAYS THE BAND”
Naturally, my inaugural show involved a road trip, specifically 280 miles from Rochester to the heart of the Adirondacks: Lake Placid on October 17, 1983, in the very arena where the U.S.A. hockey team defeated the Soviet Union 4–3 in the “Miracle on Ice” just three years before.
That night, the Olympic Center Ice Rink also produced a hat trick of miracles for me. When the band eased out of the “Space” jam into “The Wheel,” one giant skipping ring circled the entire mezzanine, a mesmerizing human chain visible through every entrance. I dashed out to join the merry orbit. The second miracle was less serendipitous, as the Dead, who never missed an opportunity to acknowledge a historical moment musically, played “I Need a Miracle” after “The Wheel.” The third and most significant miracle came after the show in the form of an invitation to join an amoebic hug puddle composed of about forty patchouli-scented folks festooned in tie-dyes, bells and hair.
I knew it was only a matter of time before the bus would come by, and I’d get on.
“NEVER HAD SUCH A GOOD TIME, IN MY LIFE BEFORE”
I attended 65 of the 72 scheduled Dead shows in ’85. The band may have set our itinerary, a series of concert dates announced on the Grateful Dead Hotline [(415) 457-6388], but coloring in the empty space from a kaleidoscope of open road adventures was up to us. And, oh, what escapades. For a tour rat, someone who laced together concerts stretching over multiple weeks, experiencing America added a healthy dose of folklore dialogue to debates about the best show openers (“Jack Straw”), first-set ending tunes (“The Music Never Stopped”), second-set openers (“China Cat Sunflower”), closers (“Sugar Magnolia–Sunshine Daydream”) and on and on and on.
Our, admittedly rare, non-Dead-related discussions focused on whether Columbus, Ohio, had better bagels than New York City, whether the Casper, Wyoming Safeway was the best natural food section between Berkeley and Boulder, and whether a Cape Cod sunrise surpassed a Ventura sunset. Little did I know at the time, but these cross-country quests would leave an indelible appreciation for places I’d never intended to be.
“STRANGERS STOPPING STRANGERS, JUST TO SAY HELLO”
Who knew how vibrantly the Kansas night sky unfurls when unimpaired by light pollution, or that small lakes dotted Nebraska? These prairie potholes provided skinny-dip respites from our AC-less VW buses as we caravanned from California to Alpine Valley, Wisconsin, in June 1985.
I first pasted Wisconsin into my scrapbook the previous summer when the steering box broke on my bus during my first lengthy Grateful Dead-related road trip. Suddenly marooned with my brother, John, and his girlfriend in a rural region, I chanced upon a dairy farmer who moonlighted as a VW mechanic. Aware we were short of cash, he offered to weld the steering box back together in exchange for our “pitching” out a winter’s worth of manure from his heifer barn, a task only too familiar to John and me, having spent summers on our grandparents’ Holstein farm. Dinner and a spirited game of Uno followed our much-needed showers that evening.
I dropped John off in Yellowstone and continued driving to Cripple Creek, Colorado, ostensibly to work as a singing waiter at the Palace Hotel. However, Red Rocks Amphitheater was my true beacon. Located in Morrison, Colorado, the sandstone-buttressed shrine would host the Dead in mid-June for three shows that, owing to fortuitous encounters with spiritual siblings I didn’t know I had, confirmed my sojourn on “The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion.)”
“THERE IS A ROAD, NO SIMPLE HIGHWAY”
That autumn, we shined our headlights from the cool Colorado rain all the way to Charlotte, North Carolina. En route, we caught Elton John’s “Farewell Tour” in Memphis and camped in the Appalachian Mountains of Tennessee. These two sylvan days chasing migrating warblers within the Southern hardwood forest left me with an ongoing fascination with the Great Smoky Mountains.
After Charlotte, we etched our own Appalachian Trail to Richmond and Worcester before watching the season’s first snowflakes settle on our tents in Augusta, Maine.
Driving to Hartford on I-95 the following day, Dead bassist Phil Lesh—himself!—pulled alongside and reprimanded us with his wagging finger for passing salsa and tortilla chips between our sputtering buses. Never mind the open Heineken nestled between his thighs.
Another friend, Stephan Quentzel, describes the alternate reality of the road like this:
“To get on the proverbial bus was to open yourself to an alternative, expanded, creative, celebratory adventure alone and with brethren; another way of doing existence.”
I met Stephan, a psychiatrist, through a mutual friend who, like Stephan, inexplicably graduated with honors from MIT while also attending scores of Dead shows nationwide. Of the myriad adventures I’ve shared with Stephan, one escapade stands out.
We’d planned to drive my VW bus for the fall ’85 tour, which launched in Hollywood, Florida. When the bus’s engine blew (again!), we adopted Plan B, borrowing his parents’ Gran Torino station wagon in New Jersey. Our departure day corresponded with Stephan’s brother Josh’s arrival from the University of Colorado to visit his parents for fall break. While Stephan waited outside Newark airport, I approached Josh, whom I’d never met, in the terminal and asked, “Would you like to drive to Florida, Josh?”
“Why, yes, I would,” he responded, glancing down at my bare feet, and off we went to Hollywood, Tampa, Atlanta, Columbia and Richmond before dispatching Josh to Dulles Airport, where he returned to Denver. Stephan and I continued north to Worcester, west to Rochester, and south to the final concerts in East Rutherford, New Jersey, about 20 minutes from his parents’ house. Stephan caught a train to Cambridge; I found a ride I no longer remember to Long Beach, California, where, five days later, the Dead would play again.
I traveled from Long Beach to Berkeley, and eventually the Pacific Northwest, where I reside today. Though (famously free) Dead bootlegs dominated the tape deck, I established a tradition I maintain today: playing Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue” when departing on a journey. Like Dylan, we drove my bus as “far as we could, abandoned it out west,” specifically Olympia, where, a few years later, my son, Taliesin Scien-Brae, was born, yet another miracle divined by Dead Tour’s compass rose.
I still wander so many roads today, driven by the desire I honed on Grateful Dead tours to find enlightenment in the strangest of places if I look at them right.
