Grateful Dead bus on exhibit in San Francisco

Furthur is back.

The psychedelic-painted school bus that carried Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters across America in 1964 has returned to San Francisco nearly six decades after becoming part of the city’s counterculture mythology.

The bus is now the centerpiece of “Forever Grateful/Golden Gate Park,” a new exhibition celebrating the Grateful Dead and the psychedelic culture that surrounded the band.

For San Francisco, Furthur is more than an old vehicle.

It is a physical piece of a time when music, art, experimentation and new ideas about consciousness were colliding across the city.

The bus helped carry that spirit from place to place, turning a cross-country road trip into one of the defining stories of the psychedelic era.

Kesey bought the school bus with money he earned from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and set out with the Merry Pranksters in 1964.

Their journey became famous through Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” which chronicled the group’s mix of music, costumes, performance and psychedelic experimentation.

Cannabis and LSD were part of the culture surrounding the Pranksters and the Acid Tests, where Kesey and his friends pushed the idea that changing perception could open people to different ways of experiencing the world.

The Grateful Dead emerged from that same San Francisco scene.

The band, originally known as the Warlocks, became closely tied to Kesey’s Acid Tests, where music and psychedelic visual effects transformed ordinary gatherings into immersive experiences.

Over time, the Dead’s concerts became known for something beyond the music itself: a sense of community among the people who showed up.

That psychedelic curiosity has continued to evolve.

Ayahuasca, a DMT-containing brew with deep Indigenous ceremonial traditions in the Amazon, is associated with intense visions and shifts in perception.

5-MeO-DMT, sometimes called “toad” or “bufo,” is another powerful psychedelic associated with experiences that can dramatically alter a person’s sense of self.

Neither belongs to the specific history of Furthur, but both are part of the broader modern conversation around altered consciousness and the desire to experience reality differently.

The exhibition brings some of that sensory world back to life.

Visitors will move through mirrors and darkness before entering a liquid-light show, where colored patterns shift across the room.

Photographs from Grateful Dead performances in Golden Gate Park will be displayed alongside psychedelic artwork, and visitors can create their own screen prints.

Jerry Garcia’s BMW will also be shown publicly for the first time.

But Furthur is the main attraction, and its return marks the beginning of another chapter.

The bus has spent years deteriorating on the Kesey family farm in Oregon and will now help launch an effort to restore it.

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