On a fall morning in 1969, Courtenay Pollock was strolling down a bucolic country road in northern California when a slightly offbeat farmhouse caught his eye.
Before he knew it, his feet were leading him up the driveway.
“It looked like freaks lived there,” Pollock recalled with a laugh from his home on the Sunshine Coast in British Columbia, Canada. “And so I went up to introduce myself.”
He banged on the front door and a cute girl with a nose ring answered, immediately inviting him in. “Roll yourself a joint, I’ll get some coffee going,” she offered.
The Englishman obliged. He’d just wrapped up an idyllic summer living in a small commune on a 500-acre farm in Vermont, choosing to trade the looming bitter cold for a more temperate winter on the West Coast — and he never could have imagined that, in less than 24 hours after walking through that door, his life would change forever.
Because he had just wandered into the Grateful Dead house.
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