Lecturer Peter Richardson Discusses Connection Between Grateful Dead, Ronald Reagan

CONTRA COSTA TIMES -- “There’s all this concern in the Deadhead community, like ‘Is this over?’” says Peter Richardson, a Humanities teacher at San Francisco State and author of the book “No Simple Highway: A Cultural History of the Grateful Dead.” Meanwhile, the country’s cultural landscape had grown more hostile to a free-flowing band like the Dead, and no one person represented that better than the president. “Reagan had been a hippie baiter and kind of hippie puncher even as governor — He got a lot of mileage out of going after hippies as well as student activists on campus,” Richardson says.