Business & Culture

The Grateful Dead built an economy around themselves. Tape trading, fan-run parking lots, a famously open touring accounting model, and a merch operation that paid for a lot of the band’s life. They also sat inside (and shaped) a much larger cultural scene — the acid tests, the Deadheads as decentralized network, the connection to Silicon Valley through John Perry Barlow and the EFF. This archive covers the money, the community, the drug culture, the relationships inside the band, and the larger American scene the Dead were part of and partially responsible for.