The hottest US concert ticket this summer is for a band whose only top-ten hit was released in 1987, and whose star frontman died 20 years ago.

When the Grateful Dead announced that its surviving members would play three concerts in Chicago in July to celebrate 50 years of music, a record half-million fans tried to buy tickets online.

More than 60,000 hippie-style, hand-decorated order envelopes showed up at the band’s ticket office in a beach town north of San Francisco. It was just like old times.

The Grateful Dead may be gone, but they’re not forgotten. The psychedelic jam band that was for decades America’s most successful touring act still commands legions of fans, known as Deadheads, who are among the most devoted in the history of rock and roll.

Their numbers include former US vice-president Al Gore, US Senator Patrick Leahy and NBA legend Bill Walton, who at last count had seen the band play 855 times.

The Grateful Dead formed in 1965, the house band for San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district and its hippie revolution. The group, composed of core members Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann and Ron McKernan, cut their teeth playing alongside Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin at the Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock.

They released 13 studio albums, spanning blues, country and rock, with some personnel changes. Drummer Mickey Hart joined in 1967, and McKernan died in 1973.

Their success however was never about the studio, but about the stage.

The band spent the better part of three decades on the road, transforming their brand of guitar-jamming psychedelic Americana into drawn-out virtuoso improvisations in shows that lasted three hours or longer.

Thousands of Deadheads followed them on tour, across the country and back again, in a travelling circus that felt like a nomadic time capsule from the Summer of Love.

“A little town cropped up, and there was a community there,” former Deadhead Roger Williams remembered. “People really looked forward to that, and plenty of people went, even if they didn’t have a ticket, just to hang out.”

The scene was the same, year after year, as the 1970s gave way to the 80s and 90s. Dancers spun to the music amid hippie tents as tie-dyed travellers bought, bartered and sold souvenirs, food and an array of recreational drugs. When the show was over, they packed their vans and went on to the next, often for months or years on end.

Alex Frankel, a San Francisco Bay area native who attended as many as 120 Grateful Dead shows between 1985 and 1995, said it was as much about the musical adventure as the cultural one that drew fans like him to follow the band, night after night.

‘Every show was different’

“Every show was different,” he told dpa . Fans traded bootlegged tapes of the concerts and obsessively logged set lists. The band had an enormous repertoire to draw from, and never played a song the same way twice. “They would surprise the audience a lot.”

It all ended abruptly on August 9, 1995, when Garcia, 53, died of a heart attack while in a drug rehab facility.

The next day, fans went into mourning for a man who had become a cult idol. San Francisco City Hall flew a tie-dyed Grateful Dead flag at half-mast. Thousands of Deadheads flocked to spontaneous gatherings in San Francisco, New York’s Central Park, and Washington DC's National Mall.

The band disintegrated soon after but left an enduring cultural legacy. Rolling Stone named the band to its list of the 100 most important artists of all time. Hippie-styled ice cream maker Ben &

Jerry’s still sell a flavour - Cherry Garcia - in tribute. San Francisco celebrates an annual ‘Jerry Day’ near where Garcia lived as a child.

Today, Deadheads from all over make pilgrimages to the band’s old communal house at 710 Ashbury Street, leaving stickers with Grateful Dead symbols on them in tribute.

Around the corner, at the Haight-Ashbury Music Centre, Christopher Scott Miller has come to work in a Grateful Dead T-shirt. On the wall, a signed Polaroid photo commemorates the day Garcia stopped in to rent a guitar.

Miller, 41, scored a ticket to one of two concerts the band added near San Francisco, a reunion not only for the surviving members of the band but for the Deadheads who followed them all those years.

He said he’s “tremendously sad” to have seen his last Dead show, but he said the band’s music, and its fans, will go on.

“There are so many even younger Deadheads out there,” Miller said. “I don’t think the Grateful Dead or the Deadheads will ever die out.”

The Grateful Dead’s last concerts will be held July 3, 4 and 5 at Soldier Field in Chicago, and broadcast live on the web, YouTube and in more than 250 US cinemas, as well as July 6 in cinemas in Europe.

- dpa