In the days before electronic ticket sales, Grateful Dead fans would mail in ticket requests with money-filled envelopes that they decorated with colorful Deadhead iconography, in hopes that a more artistic envelope would give them a better chance of being selected for a high-demand ticket. This year, for their farewell tour, the band decided to rekindle its mail-in tradition, and were shocked to receive such a massive amount of envelopes, 20,000 of which were decorated with groovy skeletons, rainbow guitars and psychedelic faces swapping eyes with earth globes. Pictures of those envelopes, as well photographs of the Grateful Dead by photographer Peter Simon, are on display at the Stinson Beach Library through Oct. 2. Over 70,000 envelopes in total were sent to the famed P.O. Box 456 in Stinson Beach over a three-day period to request tickets for the “Fare Thee Well” shows in early July. “No one expected to receive the amount of mail we received,” said Frankie Accardi-Peri, who oversaw a team of workers to collect the mail. With far more requests than tickets available, the team was tasked with returning around $81 million of the $90 million total money orders received from fans. Accompanying the photos in the library is a timeline of music history in Stinson Beach, where many musical acts including the Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin lived in the 1970s. The timeline was drafted by local writer Peter Asmus, who transcribed oral recollections recorded from past musicians and their groupies. “This was the spiritual home for so many musicians,” said Susan Banta, who helped curate the exhibit. “That’s really why we focus on the dead. Their history in this town was so long.”
Dead art in Stinson Beach
