The 12 cardboard boxes are found across the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County, past San Rafael, through a canyon, up the drive, at a house situated on an idyllic green hillside. Then: into the basement, past the meticulously organized antique-radio workshop, and down another set of stairs to the dirt-packed crawl space beneath.

Inside the boxes are some several hundred T-shirts, constituting both the vintage-fashion score of this or any year (but especially this one) and an incomparable historical collection. Spread across them, emblazoned in a quarter-century's worth of gaudy design trends, is the story of the Grateful Dead, Marin County's psychedelic cowboys and now mythological American legends.

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Upstairs, the bemused shirt owner watches as they unfold and bloom across the living room, like rainbow spores from cardboard seed pockets. Despite their age—the earliest of the shirts are more than 50 years old—they're in remarkable shape. “I don't ever remember wearing a Grateful Dead shirt,” Dan Healy says. Doing so would have gotten him laughed at by his co-workers. “We didn't really do that.”

Healy, now 73, has short white hair and looks like the semi-retired audio engineer he is in a neat button-down shirt and glasses. The old co-workers he's talking about happen to be the Grateful Dead's traveling sound crew, of which he was a legendary member. From 1967 to 1994, with a few breaks, Healy worked with the Dead—serving as primary sound engineer beginning in the early '70s.

For all the things the Dead are best known for today—improvisation, songwriting, even their role in engendering the transformation of American culture through psychedelics—it might be easy to overlook the fact that the band was also responsible for the virtual invention of modern live-concert sound. Much of that owes to the effort and obsession of Healy, who not only operated the soundboard but had a hand in innovations along nearly the entire signal chain that fed into and out of it. The importance of the T-shirt collection in his sub-basement isn't merely in the shirts but in their owner.

The shirts are the spoils from the band's official merchandising arm, as well as from promoters to commemorate specific concerts. Healy's collection includes some infamous parking-lot bootlegs, too, as well as a "Free Dan Healy" shirt with his face behind bars, made by the band after Healy's scuffle with the Bakersfield fuzz in 1978. (“They were out to get us that tour,” he says of the police.) Wherever the band played, Healy would politely take the swag and then get back to work. At tour's end, he would put them in a box, and when the box was full, he would move it to the basement of the Marin house he's owned since 1970.

Always treasured by Deadheads, originals have long since turned collectible, sometimes selling online for as much as $500. Improbably, though, the shirts have now risen into their own kind of high fashion, too. Emphasis, of course, on the high. Many of the shirts feature the Grateful Dead's logo—a skull with a 13-point lightning bolt shooting through the middle—which has become a red-white-and-blue symbol of American freedom all its own. The Stealie, as Deadheads call it (after the 1976 album on which it appeared, Steal Your Face), was created by LSD chemist and soundman Owsley Stanley and artist Bob Thomas. Now cherished by Instagram influencers, pop stars, baby boomers, underground noise musicians, and Walmart shoppers alike, it's an enduring signifier of the band's participatory psychedelic revolution.

Throughout his years with the band, Healy was well aware of the Dead's profoundly American adventure, but he was also surrounded by the day-to-day issues of keeping the strange mechanical bird in flight. A serious rock vet, he never really bought into the Dead's mythology—perhaps one reason he completely forgot about the boxes of shirts and never even wore them in the first place. He's not gruff about it, but neither is he nostalgic. “I've never been a very good look-back person,” Healy says.

His view of the revolution wasn't from the front row but the cockpit. As a veritable member of the band, his job was tending to the sound. The music, the gear, and the emerging new world were indistinguishable, a revolution that came with swag.

The stories slowly unfold along with the shirts, which track the band's three-decade rise from San Francisco's DIY counterculture, across festivals and college campuses and desiccated movie palaces, to theaters, arenas, sold-out football stadiums, and American legend.

Healy wasn't yet with the Dead when the band issued the first of its shirts, which featured mustachioed frontman Ron “Pigpen” McKernan. But the earliest pieces in his collection are nearly as old—and just as rare. Healy raises his eyebrows and smiles at a design from 1967 that's become infamous in the Dead's circles for the way it (perhaps intentionally) framed women's breasts. “The girls didn't like that one,” Healy recalls.

He first encountered the Dead when he caught them opening for his friends' band, Quicksilver Messenger Service, arriving at the Fillmore during an “Is there a doctor in the house?” moment. One of the Dead's amps had died, and Quicksilver guitarist John Cipollina volunteered his buddy to help. A lifelong sound geek who'd built a pirate radio station with friends in middle school in Humboldt County, Healy had lately been living on a houseboat docked a few berths from Quicksilver's and had earned a reputation for being able to troubleshoot sound systems on the fly.

“The dream was there, the model of sitting in your living room in front of the world's greatest stereo, smoking the fattest, biggest jay you can and listening to the most fabulous music over an incredible sound system, for each and every person at a concert.”

Healy fixed the recalcitrant amplifier but was still bothered by what he heard. “The P.A. sound was just so horrendous,” he recalls. “The balance was horrible. Whenever anybody was singing, the words were just completely garbled.” After the show, he politely challenged the Dead's Jerry Garcia over the state of the concert's sound, and Garcia politely challenged him to do better. Doing that required renting some new speakers, and to raise the necessary funds, Healy invoked what might be called hip economics.

“I sold pot and acid,” he says, laughing. “I didn't even really smoke yet, and I hadn't taken LSD yet, either. But my goal was to do the sound system, and I was pretty much willing to do almost anything short of horrible treachery to get it to happen. I don't really advocate that form of moneymaking, but it was a means to an end.”

Healy became obsessed with the Dead's sound. The LSD soon followed. Like the band, he had been seriously dedicated to his craft long before trying psychedelics, but the psychedelics pushed him further.

“I guess you would call it a hallucination or a dream or a bolt of lighting that hit me between the eyes or wherever,” he says. “But there was a moment when I flashed on what it was all supposed to sound like. And then it became a lifelong pursuit. I saw the whole, complete picture, the entire scope of exactly what it needed, what was missing. And so it was probably because of the psychedelics. Maybe LSD, maybe peyote, maybe mushrooms. It transformed it from a bunch of monkeys on typewriters to educated people making music.

“The dream was there, the model of sitting in your living room in front of the world's greatest stereo, smoking the fattest, biggest jay you can and listening to the most fabulous music over an incredible sound system, for each and every person at a concert. That was the model.”

Healy's collection is loaded with sartorial souvenirs from moments that can be tough to remember. One unusually worn-out piece was imported from London and commemorates the conclusion of the arduous two-month-long trek across the Continent that would be featured on the Europe '72 live album. "I Heard the Grateful Dead at the Lyceum '72," the shirt reads, though Healy recalls nothing about the shows. “We were so stoned on acid at the Lyceum,” he says. Perhaps celebrating the tour's end, perhaps draining their acid vials over the four nights before heading home. “The duty at that point was probably trying to stay upright,” he says. One would hardly know: The Lyceum shows would yield half the music on the triple live LP.

Two different shirts represent the Watkins Glen Summer Jam, the July 1973 mega-concert with the Dead, the Allman Brothers, and the Band; an estimated 600,000 fans; and an on-site pirate radio station—the largest festival of the original festival era. One shirt is the official model; the other, an early Dead bootleg shirt, features a homemade hippie approximation of the band's already legendary P.A. “They were probably drawing the Hard Truckers [speaker cabinets],” Healy says fondly.

For Healy and his wife, Patti, the Watkins Glen International racetrack—the site of one of this year's competing “Woodstock 50th-anniversary” festivals—was a serious battlefield. Healy mixed sound for all three bands, a rare pleasure, in addition to presiding over the public sound check the day before. “But we were stuck at the soundboard for basically 36 hours,” Healy says. “There was nowhere to go. I stayed awake. It was such a screaming-meemies scene that I had to stay on top of it. There's another reality in that the ultimate responsibility for the audience rests on the sound system. If 600,000 people are there and help is needed and the sound system goes off, the whole thing can run amok and people can die. It's very, very serious.”

In the early '70s, when bands their size were buying private jets, palatial estates, or fancy yachts, the Dead poured their earnings into their sound system. Engineers like Healy (as well as roadies and others) were voting members at all-band meetings. With original Dead sound guru Owsley Stanley's mantra of “as above, so below,” they yearned to make literally equal sonic experiences for the band and the most distant audience member. The so-called Wall of Sound they developed was unsustainable. The era peaked with the band announcing its retirement from the road at the end of 1974. Of the stash in the boxes, Healy's lone surviving shirt from the year is utilitarian gray with no artwork at all, reading simply "1974 Tour".

Several shirts and backstage passes, in startlingly unfaded shape, represent the Dead's appearance at Cornell University's Barton Hall in May 1977. A recording from that show routinely appears at the top of Deadhead favorites lists and was added to the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry—it finally received an official release in 2017. Healy remembers Cornell for the “computer freaks” that flocked to the soundboard.

“In the mid-'70s, we were in the absolute throes of pure research and development,” he says. “The ideas were just flowing like water over Niagara Falls. It was a wonderful time for innovation.” Just as music fans could use the Dead to dive into the roots of American music or the vocabulary of improvisation, audio-heads could use the band as a gateway into sound. In much the way the Dead almost never repeated their set list, their sound system changed almost as frequently.

Many of the bootleg shirts in his collection reference another Healy-abetted innovation that continues to transform the live-music world. One such shirt features a long-haired skeleton in sunglasses and sneakers holding a stereo pair of microphones, wearing a T-shirt that reads "Make Tapes Not War." Another features Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry, aiming his weapon, the gun replaced, again, by stereo microphones. "Go Ahead Jerry," it's captioned, "Make My Day."

Healy didn't invent Grateful Dead-concert taping, which Dead freaks began doing on their own in the late '60s. But he was sympathetic to the tapers' cause. He recalls his own pre-hippie affinity for hauling his Crown 700 reel-to-reel to Marin County jazz clubs. By the late '70s, though, Dead tapers' microphones had become ubiquitous, sometimes blocking even Healy's view at the board. He remembers distraught first-time concertgoers showing up at the sound booth, complaining to him that tapers had overtaken their seats.

“I was eternally caught between the non-tapers and the tapers,” Healy says, a distinction that was noted not only by the audience but also by the band, which struggled to come up with an official policy. Always friendly with fans, Healy lobbied for the recordists. A compromise was reached, and the tapers were given their own section, positioned behind the soundboard, starting in late 1984. “So I got stuck with the tapers,” he says, laughing.

In creating such a policy, the Grateful Dead cemented their profoundly forward-thinking business model, powered by crowd-sourced recordings circulated via fan-mediated social networks. Going against long-held common sense—that “giving away” music inherently cripples record sales—the Dead proved the music business wildly wrong, piercing the Top 10 less than three years later with “Touch of Gray,” already a half-decade old on the Deadheads' invisible hit parade. By 1995, Metallica had copied the Dead's taping policy virtually word for word, and tapers' sections spread everywhere.

The rock milestones keep pouring out of the boxes. There's Englishtown '77, where over 100,000 saw the Dead on a New Jersey racetrack and a new generation of fans was minted. “Ah, yes, the Polish railway…,” Healy says, remembering the shipping containers that promoter John Scher used to line the site in order to prevent gate-crashers. And there's Egypt '78, where the Dead played at the foot of the Sphinx, and Healy wired up the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid of Giza for sound.

It was a long, strange working relationship. For Healy, the band's live sound achieved consistent just-exactly-perfection over the course of the 1980s, with his Ultra-Matrix tapes reaching studio levels. Acting like a producer, he'd spin the band's voices around a venue's speakers at peak moments, often to a dizzying three-dimensional effect.

“Certain members of the band didn't always like that,” he admits. Healy's treatments, though, remain some of the more far-out moments from less and less trippy times for the band, especially as Jerry Garcia battled heroin addiction. When the guitarist relapsed in the early '90s, Healy says, “I lost my friend. He went away.”

As the band struggled with Garcia's decline, Healy himself—faulted at times for mixing the band too much to his own taste—came into the cross fire, and he was dismissed in the spring of 1994. The last T-shirts were added to the boxes in the basement. A year and a half later, at a rehab facility in Marin County—not far from Healy's house—Jerry Garcia died of a heart attack. Though band members have continued to tour with one another, they retired the name Grateful Dead.

In recent years, fixing vintage radios in his basement workshop has taken over as Healy's profession. He'd started collecting them in the Haight era and continued, a relaxing parallel obsession that rendered him an ambassador to forgotten knowledge rather than someone perpetually on the hunt for the next cool thing.

When some maintenance needed to be done elsewhere in the basement, part of the house's side was removed, exposing the crawl space—and the long-forgotten boxes—to the sunlight.

He marvels at the changes in the industry since he parted ways with the Dead 25 years ago and at the magnitude of control possessed by modern live engineers. “When I started, live sound was completely random,” he says. “And I spent my life moving it away from the randomness and towards the specifics. If you heard the psychedelic dream version, then it was a lifelong trek.”

Jesse Jarnow is the author of "Heads: A Biography Of Psychedelic America" And Hosts "The Frow Show" on WFMU.

A version of this story appears in the Spring 2019 issue of GQ Style with the title “The Great Lost Dead Archive.”