One of the primary catalysts for what would become the Haight-Ashbury scene was novelist Ken Kesey and his group of fellow psychedelic explorers, the Merry Pranksters. After an epic cross-country bus trip, the Pranksters returned to Kesey’s place in the redwoods above Stanford and in the fall of 1965 the idea of the Acid Tests—public, multimedia parties featuring film, music, sound, and light—began to take shape. LSD-25 was still legal then, and the Acid Tests were designed not to harness but unleash the potential of the powerful hallucinogen. Kesey saw the Tests as a vehicle for literature to move beyond writing, where life itself became an expression of the lived intensity of art, epitomized by Neal Cassady, Kerouac’s original road partner. Cassady’s raps were a highlight of the Acid Tests, second only to the music provided by the Grateful Dead. For the Dead, the Tests showed how an artistic event could be a transformative community ritual, a sensory alembic that could redefine the idea of performance by making everyone an artist of the experience. The audience became participants, participants became cocreators, and everyone left transformed. 

The acid tests cemented the dead’s determination to pursue their vision. Years later, Garcia wrote that “I was oscillating at the time. I had originally been an art student and was wavering between one-man-one-work or being involved in something that was dynamic and ongoing ... I decided to go with what was dynamic and with what was more than one mind … namely the Grateful Dead.”

When a group of hippies named the Family Dog held the first adult rock dance in San Francisco at the Longshoremen’s Hall on October 16, 1965, more than a thousand colorfully dressed young people came out. It was a watershed moment for many, including Chet Helms, the future promoter of the Avalon Ballroom and sponsor of so many of the Haight’s rock posters. He saw the future that night, as did many attendees; it was an expression of the shared ethos that was about to birth the dancehall scene and blossom in the Haight-Ashbury.

Accompanying those dances were posters. Drawn by Wes Wilson, Alton Kelley, Stanley Mouse, Rick Griffin, and Victor Moscoso, who were nicknamed the Big Five, their work, along with dozens of others, defined a modern poster renaissance.

Rick Griffin / written by Gordon McClelland ; [editor, Carol Worby Holder ; photography, Bob Seidemann] 
Sex, rock & optical illusions / Victor Moscoso 
Mouse & Kelley / Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley
The art of rock : posters from Presley to Punk / Paul D. Grushkin ; artworks photographed by Jon Sievert 
The attics of our lives : posters & the art of the Grateful Dead Archive  / Nicholas G. Meriwether