"We Are Everywhere"

One timeless Deadhead saying is, “we are everywhere,” a phrase that not only makes the un-secret society universal, but also describes the tantalizing and elusive ways that the Grateful Dead phenomenon has been diffused into the larger culture. 

One striking recent example of this graced the cover of a recent flower catalog. Horticulturally-inclined fans were surprised and delighted when the cover of one of their spring garden catalogs bore the banner headline, “2012 AARS Winner ‘Sunshine Daydream’.” Inside the Jackson and Perkins catalog, there is no mention of Robert Hunter’s authorship of the phrase; the somewhat breathless prose only describes the rose, noting that this “stunning grandiflora is the first rose to win AARS honors from the House of Meilland in France.” (The online catalog description is here.)

Roses have always been central to the Dead’s iconography, beginning with Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse’s seminal image for the band’s appearance at the Avalon Ballroom in 1966, which adapted an illustration by Edward J. Sullivan for The Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayyam: a skeleton surrounded by roses. 

The pinnacle of that association was Mouse and Kelley’s timeless classic Blue Rose, their airbrush masterpiece for the band’s 1978 New Year’s show that also celebrated the closing of beloved San Francisco landmark Winterland Auditorium. That image depicted a holy grail for rose breeders, a blue rose; now the horticultural world has returned the favor, acknowledging the band with this tribute to Hunter’s lyrics for “Sugar Magnolia.”