Grateful Dead

The Acid Tests crest in size at the three-day (January 21-23) Trips Festival at Longshoreman's Hall in San Francisco, where thousands of people experience Rimbaud's "systematic derangement of the senses." With their new soundman and backer, Owsley Stanley, the Dead settle for some months in Los Angeles to woodshed, then return home in June to find a thriving rock scene centered on Bill Graham's Fillmore Auditorium and Chet Helms' Avalon Ballroom. After an idyllic summer at a house called Olompali (in Novato) and a former summer camp in Lagunitas (both in Marin County), they settle in late September at 710 Ashbury St., in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. The Haight is an extension of the Acid Tests in which several thousand people are experimenting with music, art, theater, psychedelics, and freedom, to create a new sort of community, commonly called "hippie." For a while, it works, and the Dead are at the center of it all.