By Paul Freeman

For The Daily News

You can’t kill the Dead.

Most of the ’60s San Francisco rock groups have long since succumbed to tragedy, nostalgia or obscurity. But one just keeps on truckin’.

As Deadheads dance in celebration of the Grateful Dead’s 50th anniversary, original band members Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann (joined by John Mayer, Jeff Chementi and Oteil Burbridge) have announced what promises to be one of 2016’s most in-demand tours. They’re calling it Dead and Company. More than 20 years after Jerry Garcia’s death, there’s no end in sight for the band’s impact.

Peter Richardson, who coordinates the American Studies program at San Francisco State, has written “No Simple Highway: A Cultural History of the Grateful Dead.” He tells The Daily News, “Why the durable success? I trace it back to their underlying values. Their music changed over time. Their organization changed over time. A lot of things changed. But their underlying values were remarkably stable.”

Richardson’s book views the indomitable band from a different perspective than the many other tomes on the Dead. He was teaching related material in his classes, which focus on utopian and dystopian aspects of California culture. So he began going to the Grateful Dead scholars’ caucuses. His interest piqued, Richardson read everything he could on the subject of the Dead.

“There was already a pretty good bookshelf on the Grateful Dead. But what I thought was still missing was more of a cultural history, written not for insiders, people who already knew a lot about the Dead, or dedicated fans, but rather for people who, like me, weren’t Deadheads, but would be fascinated by their project, not just the music, but this larger, cultural project that the Dead undertook. That’s what started me off on this writing project.”

Richard’s oldest brother was a Deadhead. “So in a way, I was kind of born into that world, a world that they helped shape. As a result, as an adult, I had to kind of come back and rediscover it. When you’re born into a particular place and period, you just think that’s the world, that’s it’s the universal, permanent reality. You realize, as you get older, the Bay Area, in the 1960s, was not a typical place and time. It has to be understood on its own terms. So that was part of my motivation for undertaking this project — the desire to understand better the world that I was born into.”

The atmosphere of 1960s San Francisco — eclectic music, the emergence of Rolling Stone magazine, the poster art, the drug experimentation, the Haight-Ashbury love-and-peace vibe — fed into the Dead’s consciousness.

Richardson, who’ll be appearing at Kepler’s in Menlo Park on Monday, says the band was seeking “a kind of transcendence, to get high through the music. In typical San Francisco fashion, they invited the audience into that experience, as well. It wasn’t just a matter of them up on the stage doing something. It was much more interactive and participatory than, say, what The Beatles were doing over at Candlestick Part in 1966.”

The Dead were, from the outset, devoted to community, in a way that The Beatles, Stones and Bob Dylan were not. Richardson believes that accounts, to a large extent, for the group’s enduring success.

“They built this community and then that community sustained them. That fan loyalty gave them a lot of creative freedom.

“They couldn’t live off of their album royalties, so their decision to tour was born of necessity. Even through creatively slack periods, they could still rumble on with their touring machine. But they decided to make touring not only part of their operation, but also part of their mythology. They started writing songs about the road, reenacting a big, important Beat theme. As with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, it was all about getting out on the road and having adventures. That got folded into songs like ‘Truckin’.’ They modeled that kind of wanderlust for their fans, who began following them on tour.”

The community grew. “Jerry liked to say, ‘We succeeded. Everywhere we go, there’s hippies.’ And that was part of the project. When the Grateful Dead came to town, you were getting a kind of traveling simulacrum of the 1960s San Francisco counterculture. And you were invited. You could join it. You could be a part of that community.”

Ironically, the Dead had their first Top 10 hit, “Touch of Grey,” in 1987, during the Ronald Reagan era.

Richardson says, “It was all about getting older and enduring and trying to live with a little grace in middle age. It wasn’t just about the survival of the band, but the survival of their whole community and project during the age of Reagan, when we had the drug war and things weren’t looking that good for hippies.”

Richardson says there has always been more to the Dead than what meets the eye. “You get fooled by this kind of California studied nonchalance — which you certainly see a lot on the Peninsula — where nobody wants to look like they’re trying very hard, but everybody is just like, underwater, stroking furiously. The Dead were like that.

“It’s a kind of California cultural aesthetic. Make it look easy. And the Dead were very good at that. If you take them at their word, you think it’s just a bunch of stoners, bumbling along, but, in fact, they were far from that. There was a lot of intelligence, humor and savvy. There was a lot of hard work, behind all of this. You don’t have that kind of success in the music business unless you know what you’re doing and are good at doing it. They get underrated a lot.”

With his book, Richardson wanted to show that the band deserves our attention. “A lot of people bought into the cartoon version of the Grateful Dead, the Cheech and Chong version of the Grateful Dead. But in fact, there was this rich music and art and history behind this project that is really interesting.”

The band paved the way for jam bands, free live recordings and reliance on touring. “Some people thought they were insane at the time, but they were very forward-thinking. They were the ultimate do-it-yourself. They invented every aspect of their music. Everything was done from scratch, essentially. A lot of people are trying to do that now, too.”

And the Dead are still doing it. In 2015, a handful of Grateful Dead concerts placed them among the year’s highest-grossing acts.

“The community is still very large, very connected, very motivated and interested,” Richardson says. “And the musicians are not ready to call it quits.”

Email Paul Freeman at paul@popcultureclassics.com.