Jerry Garcia wasn’t political. But the Grateful Dead symbolized defiance in a deeply political moment

By Jim Newton, CalMatters

(Excerpted from “Here Beside the Rising Tide: Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead, and an American Awakening” by Jim Newton. Copyright © 2025. Available from Penguin Random House.)

It is frequently the case that cultural and political movements emerge, thrive for a while and then produce backlash.

Jim Crow can be seen as a response to the end of slavery, and civil rights to Jim Crow; the Moral Majority to Roe v. Wade; Donald Trump and “Make America Great Again” to Barack Obama and “Yes, We Can.” Sometimes the backlash is long in coming, while other times it arrives quickly. In the case of the American 1960s, the backlash came even before the movement understood itself, even before it knew what it was.

Over the course of one year, 1966, a new notion began to take s