When the Grateful Dead played its first live show Dec. 4, 1965, the band wasn’t exactly a newcomer to the music scene.
The group, including Jerry Garcia, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan and Bob Weir, had been playing for a few months already around the Bay Area under the name “The Warlocks."
Still, the informal concert in the winter of 1965, hosted by Ken Kesey — author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and the man behind the drug-fueled “Acid Test” parties — marked the formal beginning for one of the most influential counterculture bands in history.
A poster from that first concert, drawn in crayon and reading, "Can you pass the Acid Test?” sold for $37,500 at Heritage Auctions on Saturday night.
The story of how the early poster survived 60 years is nearly as out-of-this-world as the psychedelics enjoyed at the concert itself.
Two high school girls, now women in their 70s, were the poster's original owners. Speaking to the auction house using only their first names, younger sister Betsy said she had previously taken guitar lessons from Weir at a guitar shop in Palo Alto.
At the time, the band was still “The Warlocks.”
Betsy and her older sister, Kathy, went to see the band at a show in May 1965 and loved it.
"We were very disappointed when they changed their name," Kathy told Heritage. "We knew them as the Warlocks and didn't want them to change."
Soon after the name change during the lead-up to the now-famous Acid Test concert, the sisters drove to the “venue” but “couldn’t bring themselves to go in.”
According to the letter of provenance, ”Just as we were arriving, Ken Kesey's bus pulled up and a bunch of Merry Pranksters piled out and went inside. We were still in high school and too nervous to go in. Before leaving, my sister ran across the street and took down a hand-drawn poster to bring back with her, [as well as] another smaller one laying on the ground."
Instead of attending the landmark concert, they took two of the hand-drawn signs and left.
One of them is the one that sold Saturday at Heritage.
At some point in the time since, the poster ended up in the famed David Swartz Concert Poster Collection.
Swartz, an heir to the Timberland outdoor clothing brand, was profiled by the New York Times in 2017, which said his collection of more than 5,000 first-edition pieces was worth more than $10 million.
Grateful Dead posters have long been considered among the most coveted in the concert-poster collecting world, most notably the Skeleton & Roses poster, which has sold for as much as $145,200 in a CGC 9.8 grade.
Heritage, the largest seller of concert posters in the world, writes, “In conclusion, the phrase ‘a piece of rock 'n' roll history’ gets tremendously overused in today's collectors' world, but if it ever applied to a piece that Heritage has ever offered, this would have to be in our top five items.”
Will Stern is a reporter and editor for cllct, the premier company for collectible culture.