Night of the Living Dead

June 27, 2015: the reunited members of The Grateful Dead begin their last run of shows. In Northern California, Uncut goes native with the Deadheads to celebrate the bands 50-year adventure, and explores the seismic impact they have made on hundreds of thousands of lives. How will the Dead sound without Jerry Garcia? What happens next? And how do you score some really good LSD? Shall we go, you and I/While we can?..."

- John Mulvey

THREE HOURS BEFORE The Grateful Dead begin their brief and poignant farewell tour in Santa Clara, California, a couple called Jeremy and Karen are setting up their stall of bespoke tie-dyed articles in the parking lot. As they arrange the $70 silk shirts and $10 bandannas, they are talking of their times on the road following the band; journeys that began in the ’70s for both of them, and which reached a sustained climax for Jeremy between 1987 and 1995, when he was present at every one of the Dead’s last 300-odd shows.

“It wasn’t just music,” he says now, looking like a cross between Jerry Garcia and John Goodman. “The term Utopia is very maligned in society, especially in this age. What we had wasn’t a working blueprint for Utopia, but it was an unfolding better way of living, away from the safety net of a society that acts as either a sieve or a meat grinder. It was a different way of doing things. It had all the regular trappings and problems of society, but it offered hope.”

A few hundred metres away, Santa Clara’s year-old Levi’s Stadium, normally home to the San Francisco 49ers, awaits today’s influx of 83,000 multifarious Deadheads. Lifers like Jeremy and Karen mingle with new young fans, and many middle-aged men and women whose love of the Dead has endured long after their own quests for Utopia have ended.Over the next two weekends, the four remaining core members of the Dead and their accomplices will play five Fare Thee Well shows, two here and three in Chicago, which will reportedly net $40m in ticket sales. Out in the parking lots, a more idiosyncratic brand of entrepreneurship is flourishing, even while cops patrol on golf buggies.