lic vans, tie-dyed T-shirts, earth-color denim, frenzied
dancing and open and unashamed drug use. The symbols, and the
realities, of Californian freak power surround the Grateful Dead like
knotted macrame.

The Grateful Dead and their thousands of Deadhead devotees are radical
Bohemians. This much is widely understood. Exactly what this implies
in the 1990s is rather more problematic.

The Grateful Dead are among the world's most popular and wealthy
entertainers: number 20, according to Forbes magazine, right between
M.C. Hammer and Sean Connery. In 1990, this jeans-clad group of
purported raffish outcasts earned seventeen million dollars. They have
been earning sums much along this line for quite some time now.

And while the Dead are not investment bankers or three-piece-suit tax
specialists--they are, in point of fact, hippie musicians--this money
has not been squandered in senseless Bohemian excess. The Dead have
been quietly active for many years, funding various worthy activities
in their extensive and widespread cultural community.

The Grateful Dead are not conventional players in the American power
establishment. They nevertheless are something of a force to be
reckoned with. They have a lot of money and a lot of friends in many
places, both likely and unlikely.

The Dead may be known for back-to-the-earth environmentalist rhetoric,
but this hardly makes them anti-technological Luddites. On the
contrary, like most rock musicians, the Grateful Dead have spent their
entire adult lives in the company of complex electronic equipment.
They have funds to burn on any sophisticated tool and toy that might
happen to catch their fancy. And their fancy is quite extensive.

The Deadhead community boasts any number of recording engineers,
lighting experts, rock video mavens, electronic technicians of all
descriptions. And the drift goes both ways. Steve Wozniak, Apple's
co-founder, used to throw rock festivals. Silicon Valley rocks out.

These are the 1990s, not the 1960s. Today, for a surprising number of
people all over America, the supposed dividing line between Bohemian
and technician simply no longer exists. People of this sort may have a
set of windchimes and a dog with a knotted kerchief 'round its neck,
but they're also quite likely to own a multimegabyte Macintosh running
MIDI synthesizer software and trippy fractal simulations. These days,
even Timothy Leary himself, prophet of LSD, does v