710 Ashbury Street — The Grateful Dead House

710 Ashbury Street in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood was the communal house of the Grateful Dead from 1966 to 1968 — the address that became the band's headquarters, their rehearsal space, and a drop-in centre for the hippie community forming around them. Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, and Ron 'Pigpen' McKernan lived there alongside managers, girlfriends, and the extended family that always surrounded the Dead. The house became one of the emblematic addresses of the Summer of Love: reporters came to document it, fans came to orbit it, and on 2 October 1967 San Francisco police raided it, arresting most of the band on marijuana charges in an act of law enforcement that backfired spectacularly by generating enormous sympathetic press coverage.

The Dead's decision to base themselves in the Haight rather than pursue the conventional music industry path from Los Angeles was itself a statement. They were the house band of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters' Acid Tests, the sonic backdrop to a social experiment, and their music — extended, improvisational, rooted in jug band and bluegrass as much as rock — suited a context of collective experience rather than commercial performance. 710 Ashbury was where the logistics of that project were managed: the gear, the schedule, the communal finances, and the social gravity that kept the extended Dead family together.

The house at 710 Ashbury is a private residence in the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood and is not open to visitors. A small plaque acknowledges its significance. The building is a Victorian rowhouse typical of the neighbourhood and is externally little changed from the 1960s. The Haight-Ashbury district has gentrified considerably since the Summer of Love but retains its bohemian character and its tourist identity as the capital of 1960s counterculture. The intersection of Haight and Ashbury Streets is two blocks away.