Sixty years ago today—December 4th, 1965—the Bay Area band formerly known as The Warlocks stepped onto the stage at Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters‘ first public Acid Test and performed under their new name, the Grateful Dead, for the very first time. This San Diego Acid Test wasn’t just another gig—it marked the moment the band publicly embraced the name and identity that would propel them into one of the most influential musical and cultural forces of the 20th century.

The band made its debut as The Warlocks on May 5th, 1965, playing for several months before discovering another group already held the name (The Velvet Underground famously ran into the same situation after calling themselves The Warlocks). According to legend, Jerry Garcia opened an old dictionary at random and landed on the phrase “grateful dead”—a folk motif describing a traveler who kindly buries a forsaken corpse and is later aided by its spirit. The band adopted it immediately.

“It was a truly weird moment,” Garcia later recalled. Phil Lesh famously told promoter Bill Graham, who hated the creepy new name, “I’m sorry. This is the decision we’ve made.”

Just weeks earlier, The Warlocks had been the house band at Kesey’s La Honda gatherings, chaotic communal parties where everyone was both performer and audience, and music flowed alongside early light shows, experimental film, and LSD-laced Kool-Aid. “When we fell in with the Acid Tests, we started having the most fun we had ever had,” Garcia said. The band’s improvisational spirit—rooted in responsive, real-time interplay with the crowd—was forged in these rooms where structure dissolved and possibility widened.

As Ken Babbs recalled, “Sometimes they played, sometimes we played, sometimes everything happened at once. There were no rules—and that was the point.”

That debut name-change performance coincided with Kesey’s second-ever Acid Test, an event that would become foundational to West Coast counterculture. Unlike typical concerts, Acid Tests were fluid, multimedia experiences with no paid performers; the audience was as essential as the band. The Dead would go on to play many of these gatherings, helping shape the psychedelic landscape of San Francisco just as the Bay Area became the epicenter of the 1960s cultural revolution.

Earlier this year, a hand-drawn poster advertising that very first public Acid Test—the same night the Dead debuted their name—went to auction. The poster, created by the Merry Pranksters, promoted the December 4th event that now stands as a touchstone moment in rock history. Beyond its visual rarity, the artifact marks the exact night the Dead stepped into the identity that would carry them through 30 years, 2,300+ shows, and one of the most passionate fan communities ever assembled.

Garcia later said his first LSD experiences in 1965 shaped his guiding philosophy: we are all one and united. That sense of community—onstage, in the crowd, and across generations—is the soul of the band’s legacy.

Jerry Garcia On The Acid Tests | Blank On Blank

As fans celebrate today’s 60th anniversary, the story continues to unfold. This weekend, The Chambers Project Gallery in Grass Valley, CA, opens a new Grateful Dead art exhibition highlighting early posters, photography, and visual storytelling from across the band’s evolution. Meanwhile, in San Diego, David Gans and Amelia Davis will host an exhibit dedicated to legendary rock photographer Jim Marshall‘s work capturing the early days of the Grateful Dead.

Sixty years later, the long, strange trip is still very much alive.