The Bust That Made the First Issue of Rolling Stone

The Victorian ahead on your right, at seven ten Ashbury Street, was the Grateful Dead's communal home from nineteen sixty six to nineteen sixty eight, through the exact stretch of the Summer of Love that made Haight Ashbury famous nationwide.

On October second, nineteen sixty seven, narcotics officers raided the house on a cannabis charge. Guitarist Bob Weir and keyboardist Ron McKernan, known to everyone as Pigpen, were arrested along with several friends of the band who happened to be there, and both were fined about five weeks later. Jerry Garcia, who also lived in the house, was not home that day and was not charged.

The raid became one of the band's defining early stories partly because of who covered it. A brand new music magazine called Rolling Stone had just published its first issue, and a reporter writing about the bust could not resist noting, almost in passing, that Pigpen kept a sizable collection of firearms inside the house, a detail that made the band's laid back, communal image look a little more complicated than the posters suggested.

The house is privately owned today, an ordinary San Francisco Victorian with no plaque out front, though fans still find their way to the sidewalk to photograph it.

So the quiet building you are passing was once a flashpoint in the earliest days of a magazine that would go on to define how the country covered rock music, a drug raid at a hippie commune turned into one of its very first stories.