Ken Kesey's psychedelic Furthur bus returns to San Francisco after 60 years

Ken Kesey’s psychedelic school bus, Furthur, has returned to San Francisco after six decades as the centerpiece of the Forever Grateful/Golden Gate Park exhibition celebrating the city’s 1960s counterculture and the rise of the Grateful Dead. The show also features Jerry Garcia’s mint-condition BMW in its first public display, along with immersive art, music and historical installations. Kesey and his Merry Band of Pranksters drove Furthur across the country in 1964 on a marijuana- and LSD-fueled journey that helped popularize the psychedelic movement and was later chronicled in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Kesey’s acid-test gatherings helped shape the Grateful Dead, which emerged from San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury scene and became central to the 1967 Summer of Love. Organizers say the exhibition uses the artifacts to encourage connection through art, music and activism amid the city’s current economic inequality and broader political divisions; it will also support efforts to restore the deteriorating bus.