#Grateful dead font dead set tv

But as Pitchfork contributor Jesse Jarnow notes in Heads, his wonderful history of American psychedelia, the Peacemaker’s motto was a perversion of the original. That line comes from “Ripple,” the sixth song on American Beauty, Grateful Dead’s fifth and greatest studio album. Filled with longhaired evangelicals who followed the band in hopes of drawing its listeners into a cultish Christian sect known as the 12 Tribes, the Peacemaker had two floors, a groovy paint job, and a faintly eerie slogan emblazoned on the back: “We know the way, we’ll bring you home.”

#Grateful dead font dead set tv

If you attended one of the Dead’s carnivalesque stadium shows in the late 1980s-when hippie nostalgia, spectacle-driven TV news coverage, and a bona fide MTV hit converged to make their crowds much larger than they’d ever been in the hippie era-you might have encountered the Peacemaker bus. Actual religious groups even attached themselves to the endless tours that provided this community with its gathering places. Consider the hours spent in contemplation of their famously lengthy jams, the lexicon of shibboleths and symbols that are inscrutable to the uninitiated, the seemingly prescribed style of dress, the reluctant messiah figure in Jerry Garcia. To an outsider, Grateful Dead fandom can look like a religious calling.