Standing on a riser set up for television cameras, I watched as hundreds of people became thousands, and then 25,000 more, at San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza for “Homecoming: Celebrating the Life of Bob Weir.”
And I thought back to one of the first times I saw the Grateful Dead. There were thousands there, too. It was in January 1967, in Golden Gate Park, and it was the Human Be-In, the opening act to the social drama known forever as the Summer of Love.
We who lived in the Bay Area knew, at least a year before, that something was happening here, and we knew what it was. It was change, and it was taking place on college campuses, on the streets, in the Haight-Ashbury, with its Victorian homes and…