Erik Kabik was 14 years old when he started to feel the pull of the Grateful Dead.

It was the summer of 1986, and he had gone to see the resurgent band play RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C. with Tom Petty and Bob Dylan. “Triple billing,” the Las Vegas-based photographer remembers. “It was a really cool show.”

But, for him, it would prove to be more than that. Kabik didn’t know it at the time, but that show would launch an obsession with the Grateful Dead that would come to define his life. Soon he was following the group on tour between college classes, selling burritos in parking lots and finding his way into the photo pit to train his lens on the band that inspired him.

Today, Kabik is a veteran rock photographer who’s shot everyone from Willie Nelson to the Wu-Tang Clan, and whose work has appeared in Rolling Stone and GQ. But his career started back in those Dead-head days, when he was just a kid in a tie-dye T-shirt, toting around a camera and dancing into the night.

In honor of the Grateful Dead’s 50th anniversary tour this year — with sold-out shows at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara June 27–28 and at Chicago’s Soldier Field July 3, 4, and 5 — we asked Kabik to dig through his archives and tell us the story of his time following the band on tour. He did us one better: He got film developed.

Here is a selection of images — including some never-before-seen photos — of his time with the Grateful Dead.

~ Sarah Feldberg