Deadheads hope to “make America grateful again”

AN ARMY OF people in tie-dye descended on San Francisco. In the 1960s this would not have been remarkable. Young people thronged to the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood in those days, tripping on LSD and fashioning a performance of their own disillusionment with America. But on August 1st in Golden Gate Park many of the hippies were getting on in years. Several men sporting rainbows or funky hats leaned on canes. They were there to celebrate 60 years of the Grateful Dead, a band formed in San Francisco that came to epitomise the counterculture of the ’60s. “We’re Deadheads but we’re not crazy people,” explains Mary Kay Williams, who travelled with her husband Greg from Pennsylvania. Greg chimes in: it’s about “making America grateful again”.

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