"The Music Never Stopped": Naming Businesses as a Method for Memorializing the Legacy of the Grateful Dead

Memorialization on the visual landscape is a common method of celebrating the legacy of an event or person in an area’s history. In an effort to preserve the excitement and creativity associated with a musical phenomenon, it is commonplace to dedicate items on the landscape in a memoriam to their legacy. The Grateful Dead is a band that continues to define the ideals of the late 1960s San Francisco Sound through their creative freedom and inclination towards experimentation. Although the original lineup of the Grateful Dead is no longer intact, the spirit of the music they created and their psychedelic appeal has been preserved on the visual landscape. Through the naming of businesses after the band, hundreds of business owners in the United States have collectively worked to preserve the Grateful Dead’s legacy. In order to explore the memorialization of cultural phenomena, the ultimate goal of this study is to determine to what extent the Grateful Dead is memorialized on the landscape of the United States through business names and how this memorialization continues to define their lasting legacy as an iconic product of the San Francisco Sound.