The Grateful Dead Didn’t Leave 710 Ashbury—They Were Pushed Out

The Grateful Dead did not choose to leave 710 Ashbury Street. They were pushed out. A San Francisco police raid, a neighborhood overwhelmed by 100,000 people who were not supposed to be there, and a drug scene that had turned from acid to speed made staying impossible. The house that defined the band during the psychedelic peak was gone less than two years after they moved in.

The popular story is that the Dead drifted off to Marin because the Haight got commercial. The documentary record is harder than that. In October 1967, police hit 710 with reporters in tow and arrested Bob Weir and Pigpen McKernan. Four days later, the Diggers staged a mock funeral for the hippie movement on Haight Street. By March 1968, the band played one last farewell show on flatbed trucks — Viola Lee Blues, Smokestack Lightning, Turn On Your Love Light — and cleared out for Marin County. Jerry Garcia moved to Larkspur. The Summer of Love was over.

The Myth of Why They Left

The version that stuck in the rock press is that the Dead outgrew the Haight. The scene got too famous, the music got too ambitious, the band moved on to bigger stages. That version is not wrong, but it is not why they left 710. They left because the neighborhood around the house had become dangerous, the police had made the house itself a target, and the people the Dead had moved in next to in 1966 were mostly gone by the end of 1967 — replaced by a much harder crowd.

Bob Weir said it plainly. He called the Summer of Love “the death knell of what was happening.” Garcia, asked later why the culture and scene collapsed so fast, pointed to the paranoid political newsletters that began circulating and the police crackdowns that followed. The Diggers’ own bulletins described a neighborhood where women no longer felt safe after dark and violent dealers had displaced the earlier acid-based economy. The Dead did not leave a paradise. They left a neighborhood that had stopped being the one they moved to.

710 Ashbury: What It Actually Was

Before it became a rock landmark, 710 Ashbury was a three-story Victorian at the corner of Ashbury and Waller, three blocks from the intersection of Haight and Ashbury that every tourist was about to know by name. The band moved in during September 1966, taking the full house as a communal space — musicians upstairs, management and hangers-on downstairs, the kitchen functioning as a round-the-clock meeting room.

It was not a recording studio and it was not a venue. It was a home that happened to hold the entire Grateful Dead at the moment the band was becoming the musical center of the Haight. For roughly twelve months, 710 was the physical address where the psychedelic era got organized — rehearsals, meetings, daily decisions about shows, equipment, drugs, and the increasingly complicated question of what the band owed the neighborhood that had made them famous.

Monterey Pop and the Media Flood

The Dead played the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967. Monterey, more than any other single event, is what turned the Haight from a neighborhood scene into a national story. National magazines ran cover pieces. Television crews filmed the district. The number that kept getting repeated in the press — 100,000 young people arriving in San Francisco for the summer — was not far off. A neighborhood built for about 5,000 residents absorbed something like twenty times its population in a matter of weeks.

None of the infrastructure could take it. There was nowhere to sleep. Food kitchens run by the Diggers and by volunteers strained and failed. Public health collapsed, petty crime spiked, and the police, already predisposed to treat the Haight as an enemy, had an unlimited justification to raid on sight. The arrivals kept coming for weeks after it was obvious the scene could not hold them.

Speed Freaks Replace the Heads

The drug economy changed with the population. The Haight in 1966 had been an acid-and-cannabis neighborhood with Owsley Stanley producing LSD at a quality the rest of the country did not have access to. By late 1967 the drug of choice on the street had shifted to methamphetamine. Speed brought in a different kind of dealer, a different kind of customer, and a different kind of violence. The Diggers’ bulletins from that period are explicit about it: the neighborhood they had been trying to feed and hold together was being replaced by a harder one, and the original participants — the “heads” — were retreating or being pushed out.

The Dead lived in the middle of all of it. The police, the speed dealers, the runaway teenagers, the journalists, and the tourists all came through 710’s block. Every one of those groups had reasons to notice a famous rock band at a fixed address. None of those reasons were good for the band.

The October 1967 Raid

On October 2, 1967, San Francisco police raided 710 Ashbury. They brought reporters with them. The point of bringing the press was not subtle: the arrest was intended to be a public event. Bob Weir and Pigpen McKernan were taken in on marijuana charges, and photographs of the arrests ran in the next morning’s papers.

Pigpen, famously, did not use psychedelics and was not known for cannabis either — he drank. That the police hauled him out anyway, in front of cameras, told the band everything it needed to know about how 710 was going to be treated going forward. The raid was not really about the drugs. It was about signaling to the Haight that the police were done tolerating the scene, and that the most visible house on the block would be the first example.

The Diggers Bury the Hippie

Four days after the raid, on October 6, 1967, the Diggers staged what they called “The Death of the Hippie.” It was a mock funeral down Haight Street — a coffin, a procession, an open declaration that the thing the media had named was already over. The Diggers had been running free food, free stores, and free clinics in the neighborhood for more than a year. When they buried the hippie in public, it was not theater. It was a diagnosis.

For the Dead, the funeral clarified what the band had already started to feel. Staying at 710 meant continuing to serve as the unofficial house band of a scene that no longer existed on the terms that had made it worth living in. The decision to leave began, practically, in those weeks between the October raid and the end of the year.

March 3, 1968: The Farewell Show

On March 3, 1968, the Grateful Dead played a free show on the back of flatbed trucks parked in the middle of Haight Street. The performance is preserved on Archive.org as a soundboard recording. The setlist fragments that survive include Viola Lee Blues, Smokestack Lightning, and Turn On Your Love Light — all songs that belonged to the 710 era of the band, all songs the next year of the Dead would largely leave behind.

The show was not advertised as a farewell, but it functioned as one. The band played in the street, on the same block the Diggers had used for the hippie funeral five months earlier, and within a few weeks the Haight house was empty. It was an unusually public way for a band to move out. It also fit the neighborhood’s style — one more free concert, one more Digger-adjacent event, one more moment of the scene asserting itself before the people who had built it left.

What Leaving the Haight Made Them

The Dead’s move to Marin is usually described as the end of the psychedelic band and the beginning of the Americana band — the run that produced Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty in 1970. That is true as a musical description, but it understates the scale of the change. Leaving 710 also ended the band’s functional identity as a communal household. In Marin, the members lived in separate houses, in different towns, with different lives. Jerry Garcia’s move to Larkspur was the first of several relocations that scattered the band across the county. The group survived it, but the everyday togetherness of 710 did not.

It also accelerated the professionalization of the operation. At 710, the Dead were a San Francisco phenomenon. In Marin, with distance from the police and the tourist traffic, they became a national touring band — the touring-first, recording-second model that defined the rest of their career, all the way through the classic era and into the final years. The Haight had given them a sound and a reputation. Losing the Haight is what made them the Grateful Dead the rest of the country came to know.

Sources

• Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead (Broadway Books, 2002) — Wikipedia
• Blair Jackson, Garcia: An American Life (Viking, 1999) — Wikipedia
• Rock Scully, Living with the Dead: Twenty Years on the Bus with Garcia and the Grateful Dead (Little, Brown, 1996) — Wikipedia
• The Diggers — bulletins and free-store documentation — Diggers archive
• Grateful Dead, 3/3/1968 Haight Street free concert — Internet Archive
• Rolling Stone interview archives — contemporary coverage of the Summer of Love and aftermath