Dead Central

Archive Benefit Coming Up!

2011-10-11T15:11:00.000-07:00

The Archive is pleased to announce a special one-night only benefit and preview of the Grateful Dead Archive, from 7 to 10 pm on November 5, at Dead Central, the exhibit room for the Archive in UC Santa Cruz's beautiful new McHenry Library.

Guests will enjoy great food and wine, live music, and a tantalizing preview of the Archive's treasures, focused around the poster art of the Grateful Dead.

Famed poster artist Stanley Mouse is our guest of honor, and we are honored to have been able to commission him to fully realize his delightful sketch "Writing Music," now created as a beautiful painting commemorating this exhibit. Guests will receive a signed, numbered copy of the poster of that painting, along with a delightful 225-page keepsake book that will help you remember the exhibit.

Tickets are on sale here (or paste this URL in your browser and follow the steps: http://events.ucsc.edu/attics).

We hope to see you there!

A Most Unusual Archivist

2011-06-14T10:16:00.000-07:00

Usually this blog focuses on recent donations to the Archive, but the reprint of David Lemieux’s superb interview from Glide magazine (May 20) at Dead.net warrants mention here for several reasons. As anyone who reads David’s column or listens to his radio show knows, he is one of the most thoughtful, intelligent, and erudite of Deadheads—both a fan and a sharp-eyed (or eared) critic, and someone who leavens his enthusiasm and critical acumen with a healthy scholarly—and emotional—perspective.

That perspective, and the hard work that informs it, is one of the many fascinating facets of this interview. Every Deadhead who has marveled at the quality and caliber of a recent Road Trips or Vault recording will be interested to read what goes into each release.

And for professors or graduate students in archival studies interested in understanding how that profession’s training can inform other work, it is hard to imagine a more extraordinary job description for someone with an MLIS (David’s degree focused on film archiving, which was his first position with Grateful Dead Productions). Thanks to David for sharing his thoughts and describing his work.

Grateful Dead Archive Receives Vital Dick Latvala Materials

2011-04-27T11:27:00.000-07:00

The Grateful Dead Archive is honored to announce the final accrual for the Dick Latvala Collection, a vital affiliated collection in the larger Grateful Dead Archive. Personally delivered to UC Santa Cruz’s McHenry Library by Latvala’s son Rich, this generous gift completes the Latvala Collection with a number of important recordings, many in Dick’s inimitably hand-decorated boxes, along with a cache of files.

Scholars and fans will be pleased to note that Deadheads often illustrated their letters to Dick, just as they did their missives to the band. While the Archive generally does not accept gifts of equipment, there was no question about the significance of the Technics reel-to-reel recorder that accompanied the bequest: This is the machine that Dick used to create his incomparable collection of reels, now housed with the Grateful Dead Archive. In keeping with Dick’s commitment to sonic perfection, it was maintained scrupulously, and arrived in pristine condition, like it had just rolled off the assembly line—except for the gold-toned Steal-Your-Face sticker, prominently mounted on the front.

Best known as the namesake of the famed recording series Dick’s Picks, Latvala (1943-1999) became an avowed fan in 1966, first seeing the Dead perform at the fabled Trips Festival held in San Francisco’s Longshoreman’s Hall that January. A longtime taper who attended more than 300 shows, he went to work for the band later and eventually was named the first Vault Archivist, a role that finally allowed him to midwife the series of live recordings bearing his name and much beloved by Deadheads to this day.

His centrality to the scene and the contribution he made the Grateful Dead phenomenon were as outsized as his ebullient personality, and his unwavering drive to care for the band’s recorded legacy made him one of the two dedicatees of Dennis McNally’s authorized band history, A Long Strange Trip, along with Jerry Garcia. As McNally said in an interview, “there’s God and His chief disciple … the dual dedication is very heartfelt. Garcia gave me my chance … And Dick was his great follower.” The Archive is most grateful to Rich and his mother Carol for this gift.

Native Funk and Flash

2011-02-28T11:34:00.000-08:00

Alexandra Jacopetti. Native Funk & Flash: An Emerging Folk Art. With photographs by Jerry Wainwright. [San Francisco:] Scrimshaw Press, 1974. Softbound, 23 x 26 cm., 111 pp. Gift of Josh Alpert.

This delightful book was recently donated to the Grateful Dead Archive by a colleague who spotted it in a local used book store. It is a remarkable book, documenting a rich vein of the Haight-Ashbury counterculture that birthed the Grateful Dead and that they in turn did so much to nurture, shape, and carry on after the neighborhood’s demise. Its well-illustrated pages document textile art in the Haight-Ashbuy and throughout the broader hippie world in Northern California, focusing on embroidery, quilting, and clothing. Jacopetti’s story is an important entry in the literature on the Haight and its diaspora: married to well-known Haight habitué Roland, later Ben, Jacopetti, she documents an important feature and legacy of the Haight, clothing art.

Though not a memoir, Jacopetti recounts some of her own experience in the Haight, mentioning the Trips Festival, watching Bill Graham “get the Fillmore together” (7), and spending time at famed hippie commune Morningstar Ranch. And most of the artists and works featured in the book have Haight-Ashbury connections, some notably so, such as Alton Kelley, Patti Towle, Lynne Hughes, Tom Donahue, Mari Tepper, and Ben Van Meter.

But the book does not celebrate the Haight’s elite: in classic hippie fashion, it celebrates the democratic urge toward decorative dress, documenting the art of transforming mass-produced clothing like blue jeans through embroidery, beadwork, and patchwork, making them personal and expressive; and carrying that instinct through waves of learning, practice, and study, culminating in exquisite mastery. That is one of one of the most difficult aspects of the Haight-Ashbury milieu to convey, and this book captures and expresses that attitude, philosophy, and continuum, directly and indirectly, often within a single paragraph:

There aren’t any patterns in this book because the patterns are all within, languishing and longing, like dreams, for expression. Don’t be daunted by lack of skill or technique; there are scores of books and several friends who can teach you French knots or chain stitch and, God knows, we’ve lost a lot of other skills since Grandma’s day. Many of the pieces here are amateurish by her standards, but do heed the message from within, and try to break through the channel of these visual images. (12)

The author’s selection of images is equally measured, with some pieces startling in their sophistication and achievement, others whimsical, a few crudely delightful.

Jacopetti’s text is as important as the pictures. Her description of her participation in the Haight’s craft movement reveals a thoughtful, educated reflection on the ideals, philosophy, and worldview that defined so many of the themes of the 1960s. And she describes her own development as an embroidery artist, demonstrating her sophistication in weaving, textiles, and fabric, an illustration of another often-overlooked aspect of the Haight, which was an old-fashioned drive for excellence. She discusses textile art and fabric construction precisely, but they never undercut the broader hippie ethos; when she explains denim’s construction, it is to provide a way of understanding its qualities as cloth lend itself to embroidery, moving easily from the technical details of her craft to its hippie embodiment:

The white weft threads were just showing through the faded surface warps—that nice denim depth of blue-on-white is achieved in just that way. Embroidering a fantasy flower on Roland’s elbow was discovering a new dimension in an old favorite. Denim holds a needle without fraying and pulling. (7)

Jacopetti has enough of the prankster to leaven the seriousness with humor, and even those asides can be significant. Next to a full page photograph of a beautifully embroidered swath of denim featuring a man, flying in a plume of smoke rising from a joint in an ashtray, she writes:

All those people who took acid in the sixties are ten years older now. I remember wondering what would happen when we got older and began to form our own culture, infiltrating the old one by ingenious drug-crazed peace-and-love tactics. (21)

But fundamentally, what Jacopetti’s book reminds readers is the degree to which the Haight-Ashbury’s mosaic of beliefs and expressions did combine to form a worldview that has much to commend it, and whose achievement can be measured in so many of its arts, not only the music and poster art but also the singular, the perishable, the folk.

Cultural historians will find a wealth of useful detail in the book. She is quick to acknowledge the influence of the hippie trail, noting that hippies would buy clothes and crafts abroad for resale; shots of hippie street vendors note that “Some stuff has been brought back from travels across the borders and the seas, but much of it is home-grown” (91). But the importance of those travels and experiences she makes plain at the outset of the book, writing:

Many of us have hungered for a cultural identity strong enough to produce our own versions of the native costumes of Afghanistan or Guatemala, for a community life rich enough for us to need our own totems comparable to African or Native American masks and ritual objects. (5)

That quintessentially American contradiction, that emblematic expression of the Haight’s democratic, yet elite, worldview, is what confounds so many critics; it is the core of the challenge underlying so much of the difficulty of assessing the Haight and the lingering image it etched on the retina of American history and culture.

Historians have bemoaned the difficulties of studying the counterculture, in part for the lack of good archives and scholarly library collections. Books like Native Funk and Flash are a reminder that these resources do exist; and more importantly, that a topic like the counterculture requires historians to adapt their skills to assay a brief, small press publication with the same kind of open-minded acuity that Robert Darnton called for in his landmark cultural history, The Great Cat Massacre, where he famously remarked, “We constantly need to be shaken out of a false sense of familiarity with the past, to be administered doses of culture shock. There is no better way, I believe, than to wander through archives” (4). Scholars of the 1960s, the counterculture, and the Dead need to expand their notion of archives to include the ephemeral, the uncollected, the obscure, just as the hippies of the Haight celebrated their own exploration of those forgotten cultural byways.

This may seem like a lot to hang on a slender, pretty book. But how we treat such texts is a fundamental expression of the work of a scholar or archivist. Where critics only saw dilettantism or even a kill-your-parents nihilism in the Haight’s appreciation for lost or hidden wisdom, there is at heart a powerful intellectual core to that stance. One of the defining aspects of the Haight was the belief that everyone could contribute something artistic, something individual, to the stew; as Mickey Hart remembers:

What I remember best about the Haight was the incredible feeling of creativity. Everybody was an artist, whether they had a craft that our culture would recognize as 'art' or not. Everybody was high with the spirit of adventurous exploration; everybody was busy becoming new. (Drumming at the Edge of Magic, 133)

While the bands and the poster artists are the most obvious artistic legacies of the Haight, what participants also remember is the dazzling array of arts and crafts that defined that foggy little neighborhood adjoining Golden Gate Park and energized its participants into making community. Jacopetti’s book is one of the rare documents of that broader ethos, and the Archive is most grateful to our colleague and friend, Librarian Josh Alper, for making this gift.

Grateful Dead Archive Receives Dead-Related Sixties Novel Typescript

2010-11-18T11:57:00.000-08:00

(A note to readers: this blog posting repeats the first couple of paragraphs from our web page, but has a more extended discussion below. Thanks for reading!)

The Dead Archive receives donations every week, of every imaginable type: rare handbills and posters documenting the nooks and crannies of the Grateful Dead’s history, evocative and thoughtful letters detailing the Deadhead experience, as well as art, T-shirts, interviews, and more. From an archival perspective, the sheer dazzling variety and richness of these gifts is both a confirmation and a celebration of the mission of the Archive to document the Grateful Dead experience, and the community it still defines to this day.

The Archive’s commitment to curating these often unusual artifacts complements a broader, more conventional archival mandate: to collect and document the wider cultural arcs that infused and were in turn influenced by the Dead. That means ensuring that traditional archival voices and materials have a place as well, such as rare books and even author’s manuscripts.

One recent gift is Santa Cruz area novelist Trent Eglin’s “The Incredible Dog Act,” a 313-page typescript of an unpublished novel set in the tumult of the sixties in Southern California and the Bay Area. Although not focused on the Dead, they play a supporting role throughout, from dances at the Fillmore to lyric quotes that demonstrate the author’s deep understanding of the band, their oeuvre, and most importantly, the depth and complexity of their interconnections with the counterculture and the 1960s. Even the famed Skull and Roses poster serves as a critical background motif for one memorable scene.

Eglin’s dialogue is crisp and realistic, and his characters feel authentic, but what most impresses is the way he weaves the intellectual and political currents of the times into a tapestry that lets him play with a broad palette, illuminating themes from Heidegger and Nietzsche with lyric quotes from the Dead and the Airplane. Nor is this forced: Eglin handles his material gracefully, treating the erudition animating his characters with seriousness as well as playfulness, never veering into heavy-handedness, the achilles’ heel of stories with this much at stake. The seriousness is never far from the surface, however. When one character remonstrates with another, it begins lightly but dives deeply, quickly:

“You know,” she said, “when you middleclass white guys get all radicalized, it’s hard to tell which way you’re going to break … you’re just as likely to get hung up on astrology or Zen as you are to take up revolutionary politics … Aside from Marx, most western philosophy is just a weird attempt to convince you white folks that reality’s all in your heads. So when you guys ‘see the light’”—she traced the quotation marks in the air—“too many of you just radicalize the shit in your heads. You just rearrange your mental furniture and let Meher Baba or Gurdjieff move in, and nothing out there really changes.”

That theme is one of several that plays out through the novel, and Dead scholars will be quick to pick up on how many of these prefigure and parallel issues in Dead studies as well:

“When you so-called radical white cats want to test how it feels to have a problematic body, a body that makes you essentially visible for the first time, you let your hair grow and get your ears pierced. You go around in Indian drag, all tie-dye and beads. But the difference is that when the shit does hit the fan, you can still duck in for a quick crew cut and go work for Dow.”

For Dead scholars, Eglin’s novel represents a fascinating example of how the Dead can successfully infuse a story whose focus lies elsewhere; they are a part of the world that Eglin evokes, and his skill in interweaving elements of their art with so many other touchstones—his soundtrack to the sixties includes 87 songs, by both major names and minor, but all evoking the spirit of the times—is an important reminder that the Dead were only one of many voices that defined that era. Eglin’s deft handling of those broader interconnections neatly sidesteps the difficulties that other writers have encountered when addressing the Dead in a fictional context: too often, the phenomenon overwhelms the plot or characters, a complaint critics have often made of other novels that attempt to capture the Sixties in fiction. And while a shelf of novels attest to the appeal of the challenge, no critical consensus has identified the short list of successful titles.

Famed mythographer Joseph Campbell famously remarked that the Grateful Dead were the antidote to the atom bomb. One of Eglin’s memorable asides offers a tantalizing recasting of that notion:

“Once science had decided—-ages ago-—that the atom was the basic building block of the universe, it was just a matter of time before the professors provided the generals with the first atomic bomb. Presumably, had science back then sided with Thales instead of Democritus and concluded that the world wasn’t atoms but water, it would have been prudent to build an ark instead of a bomb-shelter.”

Perhaps the Dead phenomenon was that ark, preserving the ideals and issues of the sixties for succeeding generations to discover and experience and finally debate. Gifts of materials like Eglin’s fine typescript to the Archive allow it to serve as a way of grounding those debates, anchoring them in reality; for what is an archive if not an ark, preserving the means of perpetuating and understanding a precious, politicized, and still misunderstood past.

Postscript: we understand that Eglin is preparing his typescript for publication and we wish him the best of luck.

The First Tennessee Jed?

2010-11-01T14:08:00.000-07:00

Thanks to supporters James R. Skolnik and George Michalski, this rare postcard featuring 1940s radio star Johnny Thomas has been donated to the Grateful Dead Archive.

It advertises the character "Tennessee Jed Sloan," a fictional cowboy gunslinger who traveled the West with his trusted horse Smoky and his squirrel gun, fighting bad guys and outwitting their schemes. A popular serial, the show was sponsored by the Tip-Top Bread Company, and ran from 1945 through 1947. Fifteen programs are available today from The Old-Time Radio Catalog, and David Goldin has done a fine job cataloging the shows and their content here.

If Hunter was specifically drawing on this show as an antecedent for his song, it would be difficult to pin down exactly how: Hunter’s protagonist is much more of a sad-sack than Thomas’s (and later Don MacLaughlin’s) depiction of an eagle-eye marksman whose exploits over the show’s two years ended up with him as a White House special agent. (Indeed, one wonders whether this show served as a precedent for the 1960s television hit, The Wild West West.) David Dodd first pointed out the existence of this show in his Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics site, but did not suggest that it served as an actual antecedent or inspiration for Hunter.

Nor is that likely, given the difference in Hunter’s protagonist and the radio show hero. The lack of a direct influence does not make it irrelevant, however: indeed, for Dead scholars, this item illustrates how rich Hunter’s allusions are, documenting in particular how his reservoir of Western Americana runs both wide and deep, drawing from popular culture as well as literature and history.

The Archive is grateful to James Skolnik for helping to facilitate this donation, and to noted San Francisco musician and collector George Michalski for his generosity and sharp eyes in acquiring and donating this wonderful artifact.

Evolving Musical Traditions: Jesse McReynolds and the Grateful Dead

2010-10-28T09:03:00.000-07:00

In 1964, a young Jerry Garcia and his friend and later musical collaborator Sandy Rothman embarked on an extended road trip East, traveling to see their bluegrass heroes in the South, North, and Midwest. Scholars and fans tend to focus on their meeting with Bill Monroe, immortalized in a homemade recording that Jerry made of one of Monroe’s sets at Bean Blossom, but just as important to the young musicians was seeing brothers Jim and Jesse McReynolds, the already famed bluegrass duo from Dothan, Alabama.

Garcia’s path would stray far from the roots music he heard on that trip, but his heart remained close to that wellspring for the rest of his life, returning to it periodically to refresh and renew his eclectic muse. Some of the wonderful results of those periodic renewals can be heard in releases documenting his work with Old & In the Way in the 1970s, the Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band in the 1980s, and his later work with David Grisman (whom he also met on that 1964 trip) in the 1990s.

By then, of course, Garcia’s own contributions to music had been recognized, critically and collegially, and after his death, efforts like Pickin’ on the Grateful Dead made clear the ease with which his compositions could be reinterpreted from a bluegrass perspective. Now, 46 years after he met Garcia, Jesse McReynolds makes the definitive case for that with his new release, Songs of the Grateful Dead: A Tribute to Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter (Woodstock Records). It represents a remarkable achievement artistically, and for Dead scholars, it also demonstrates the degree to which the Dead’s artistic achievement is thoroughly and inextricably interwoven with the broader currents of American music.

“Jesse absorbed the gestures of Grateful Dead music, then crafted his interpretations,” Sandy Rothman explained. Each of the thirteen songs has its own flavor, its own feel; McReynolds let the songs breathe and find their own resonances with a first-rate band of players also steeped in the Dead’s ethos. Sharp-eared fans will be able to discern contributions from Sandy Rothman, who played with Garcia in the 1960s and again in the Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band with Stu Allen, another featured player, and David Nelson, longtime Garcia collaborator and founder of the New Riders of the Purple Sage as well as his own band.

But this is not an exercise in nostalgia. McReynolds didn’t take the easy way out, limiting his choices to obvious candidates like “Friend of the Devil” and other mainstays of the Dead’s acoustic catalog. To be sure, the disc features haunting versions of “Ripple” and “Stella Blue” and “Deep Elem Blues,” but tracks like “Alabama Getaway” and “Standing on the Moon” will surprise and delight jaded fans: McReynolds and his colleagues find hidden treasures in all of the songs they assay, and the results remain in memory long after the CD finishes.

The final touch is a new song, “Day by Day,” composed by McReynolds to words by Robert Hunter, who enthusiastically champions McReynolds’ effort: “Jesse’s singing voice is like a long-lost brother voice between Jerry Garcia and David Nelson,” Hunter observed, and open-eared listeners will agree. (Those who keep up with Hunter's online journal remember when he commented that he was writing lots of new lyrics but wouldn't say who they were for.) For fans, “Day by Day” means the CD is much more than a tribute; it is a statement that the Dead’s corpus is now a living part of the American musical heritage, growing with each interpretation and musician who delves into it.

For Deadheads accustomed to feeling that their musical tastes are decidedly less than mainstream, it is especially gratifying to have a musician of McReynolds’ stature make such a heartfelt statement of appreciation. McReynolds celebrated his sixty-third year in the music business in July of this year, looking back on a career that includes 45 years in the Grand Ol’ Opry, dozens of awards and Grammys, and “membership in any Hall of Fame that means anything to this music,” as Dennis McNally put it recently.

Perhaps the only sadness is the absence of Garcia’s voice and playing. As Hunter commented, “What a trio you’d all have made! The singing is steady and strong. Jerry would approve, I’m certain.” So do we.

The Eyes Have It: Harold Bell Wright’s novel The Eyes of the World

2010-08-20T10:16:00.000-07:00

Literary Deadheads may recall that David Dodd first wrote about Harold Bell Wright’s 1914 novel The Eyes of the World on his web site, The Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics, which preceded his fine book of the same topic (see p. 203 of that book for a print reference to Wright’s book and its offshoots). One interesting recent find in the Grateful Dead Archive is a splendid copy of that tome, inscribed to the band’s founding archivist Eileen Law by Deadheads Kim and Bob Hilton of Bar Harbor, Maine. (It is available now as a Google book and in a modern reprint edition.)

Bell’s book is interesting to Dead scholars for indirect, even oblique, reasons—but those reasons lead to themes that are in fact central to the scholarly study of the band as a cultural, historical, artistic phenomenon.

The novel takes place largely in Southern California, focusing on an unlikely friendship between an older novelist and a young painter. The novelist is enormously successful but considers his work corrupt, debased because of its appeal to popular, prurient tastes; he cuts a Faustian figure in the book, constantly goading and chiding his young apprentice but leavening his mordancy with occasional flashes of calm meditation on the meaning of art and the role of the artist in society. It is a frank statement about the Romantic ideal of the purity of art, and the dangers of being seduced by mammon.

That frankness is what jars most—Bell’s six previous novels had been savaged by the critics (nor has his reputation improved with time), and The Eyes of the World reads like one long, tendentious response to those critics. (See the entry on Wright in Wikipedia for some of those critical dismissals, including particularly pointed—and mordantly funny—attacks singling out this book as his worst.) But the philosophy put forth in the book—of not pandering to popular, vulgar tastes, of honoring the muse as the only way to earn immortality—is at heart a classic expression of the Romantic, bohemian ideal that later defined the hippie milieu which birthed the Dead, and certainly describes their own attitude to their music. (Bell even opens the book with an epigram from Wordsworth.)

The title of the book is a phrase that the older novelist uses when admonishing the young painter: “the eyes of the world” here means the shallow, superficial, easily misled impressions of the public, not the deep, universal awareness that Hunter’s use of the phrase describes in his lyric. Still, the myriad interconnections between the book and the song make comparing them a revealing exercise. Students interested in how the Dead’s art fits into broader arcs in American cultural history will find Bell’s novel an intriguing, if didactic, expression of the debate over high and low culture at the turn of the century. And for those interested in exploring Hunter’s extraordinary mindscape, the way these themes find expression and perdure in a phrase whose literary function changed so dramatically over time is especially fascinating.

Altamont Revisited: Two Recent Views

2010-08-17T16:05:00.000-07:00

Both the Grateful Dead and the Rolling Stones were tarred by their association with Altamont, the notorious free concert held December 6, 1969, at the Altamont Speedway east of the San Francisco Bay. The accusations and counter-charges have swirled since that night, when a perfect storm of bad planning and other factors produced a concert that was a nightmare for many—and perhaps most—attendees.

Captured by the Maysles Brothers for their documentary Gimme Shelter, the Stones concert was marred by repeated brawls and clashes between the Hell’s Angels and audience members and even Marty Balin of the Jefferson Airplane, who played before the Stones. The violence culminated in the murder of Meredith Hunter, who allegedly flashed a gun and was quickly surrounded by Angels, beaten, and finally stabbed to death by Alan Pasarro, a member (or prospective member) of the Angels’ Oakland chapter. A trial ended in an acquittal.

The Dead did not play, but were blamed by many for suggesting the Angels serve as security and for encouraging the idea of a free concert generally. In the aftermath, the Dead picked up the Stones’ tour manager, Sam Cutler, and Robert Hunter wrote a brilliant lyric reflecting on the meaning of the event, “New Speedway Boogie,” which Garcia put to music and the band recorded for Workingman’s Dead.

Cutler’s recent biography, You Can’t Always Get What You Want, was just donated to the Dead Archive as part of Dennis McNally’s magnificent research archive and library; the warm inscription from Cutler (and McNally’s thoughtful marginalia) make this a prized book in the collection.

Rock fans and Dead scholars will find much of the book fascinating reading, and Cutler’s prose—and perspective—is thoughtful, and thought-provoking; it is a fine rock memoir, even if his own account of Altamont is not apt to change many minds. His view is vital, however, and he adds several twists on the story, including allegations of mob involvement that echo later developments in parts of the recording industry.

And in a genre in which ghost writers and vapidity are the norm, Cutler’s prose—which is his own—stands head and shoulders above most. He is a survivor, and his epigram—a poem he wrote in 1974—is a powerful statement about many of the themes he weaves together in his meditation on a career largely defined by his work first for the Stones, and then for the Dead:

Every day
We murder our dreams;
Then pick them up,
Dust them down,
Adjust their silly hats upon their heads,
Kiss them on the cheeks,
And tell them how glad we are
That they’re still alive.

Less useful, though prettier, is Let It Bleed: The Rolling Stones, Altamont, and the End of the Sixties, a glossy coffeetable book that documents Altamont and the tour that preceded it. Cowritten by a photographer on the tour, Ethan A. Russell, it credits eleven members of the tour with providing interviews, suggests that several had never spoken of the events until this book, and positions itself as the untold, and possibly final, word on the Altamont disaster.

The pictures make for a remarkable story, certainly, but the amount of text generated then and since on the concert, and the records of a full murder trial for Pasarro, mean that a thorough history of the event remains to be told.

Still, fans who have wondered about the events leading up to Altamont, and the nature of the rock touring industry on the cusp of radical change, will find much to engage them here.

Marketing and the Business of the Dead

2010-07-30T10:00:00.000-07:00

For a band whose Haight-Ashbury origins celebrated an aversion to capitalism, the Grateful Dead have emerged as a powerful example to a variety of business theorists, scholars, and academics. David Meerman Scott and Brian Halligan are the latest to delve into the band’s remarkable commercial success, condensing the thirty-year history of the Grateful Dead into a series of pithy lessons to guide managers through the rapidly shifting terrain of marketing today. Their book, Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead, provided them with a unique opportunity to truly combine their passions: as marketing professionals, business writers—and Deadheads.

Published by Wiley and just released, the book is getting good press, helped by the authors’ promotional tour—one that also allows them to catch a few summer shows by Furthur and the Rhythm Devils.

Scott and Halligan join a distinguished roster of scholars who have studied the band’s business model. Dr. Barry Barnes, a professor at Nova Southeastern University, is the most prolific and well known academic business scholar who has focused on the band, but a number of business scholars and analysts have long recognized the significance of how the band’s freewheeling marketing acumen and fanatically loyal customer base helped make the Dead one of the most unlikely economic powerhouses in an industry known for its fickle nature.

The lessons of that approach have not been lost on other Dead scholars, most of whom have had to address the stigma of the band’s countercultural origins and trappings. Unique among the welter of scholarly approaches to the Dead phenomenon, business theorists tend to ignore that stigma—the band’s success, and their maverick approach to courting that success, are sufficient to warrant the attention. To historians, that approach is refreshing because it foregrounds the band’s commercial success, making the point that the Dead’s artistic and commercial success are inextricably entwined; a professional band is, after all, an enterprise that is predicated—and depends—on both.

Their success also allowed the Dead to be generous, and their altruism was another lesson Scott and Halligan took to heart, donating a portion of their advance and earnings to support the Grateful Dead Archive at UC Santa Cruz. It is a wonderful acknowledgment of the old-fashioned ideals that informed the Dead phenomenon, and that now have taken root in its study. Scholars from a wide variety of disciplines will find Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead a thought-provoking and informative read.

Musicological Musings on the Grateful Dead: A New Blog

2010-07-16T11:36:00.000-07:00

Grateful Dead scholars know David Malvinni for his thoughtful, erudite analyses of “the Eleven,” “Terrapin Station,” and other songs; those who attended the landmark conference Unbroken Chain: The Grateful Dead in American Music, Culture and Memory heard him deliver one of his best analyses of a number of the broader themes that make Grateful Dead music so powerful, dense, alluring, and compelling.

Now Dr. Malvinni has launched a blog, “The Grateful Dead World,” that provides him with a forum for pursuing some of his ideas and sharing them with his colleagues. As he notes there, “The purpose of The Grateful Dead World is to help me get my thoughts out for a book I’m writing called A Touch of the Blues: A Musicological guide to the Grateful Dead.”

The idea for the blog emerged as he was preparing his paper for Unbroken Chain. Called “The Psychedelic Appropriation of the Blues,” his paper was well received and sparked a number of spirited discussions. Dead scholars will be delighted that Malvinni is sharing his work: as he explains, “My idea is that Deadheads, musicologists and anyone interested in the topic can interact with the material before publication.” Thanks to David for this contribution to the literature.

Voices of the Dead: Kearny Street Books’ The Storyteller Speaks Reviewed

2010-07-06T17:31:00.001-07:00

David Carter just published a fine review of a new Dead-related book, Rob Weiner and Gary McKinney’s edited anthology The Storyteller Speaks: Rare & Different Fictions of the Grateful Dead (Kearney Street Press, 2010), on the FilmFanaddict webzine (click here).

Carter praises the volume for its range and inclusiveness, grounding his assessment in his own appreciation for the band and scene (he caught a couple of shows in April of their last year.)

He joins a number of critics in praising the volume (for a sample, click here). Co-editor Weiner’s long-time interest in the ways that the scene and phenomenon can be depicted in fiction is amply reflected here, and the two editors have assembled a thought-provoking range of efforts.

Especially notable contributions from band lyricist Robert Hunter and Philip Baruth, author of The Millennium Shows (Albion, 1994), make the volume mandatory reading for Dead fans, and Dead scholars will be interested to see how many of their colleagues have been drawn to write fictional treatments of the phenomenon they study.

McKinney, author of the well-received mystery (featuring a Deadhead sheriff) Slipknot (Kearney Street Books, 2007), and Weiner, editor of Perspectives on the Grateful Dead (Greenwood, 1999), have achieved a commendable first with this volume—and made a fine contribution to the ever-burgeoning literature on the Dead phenomenon in the process.

Startling the Dead: The Art of Dennis Larkins

2010-06-25T15:57:00.000-07:00

A recent arrival at the Grateful Dead Archive is Startling Art: Revealing the Art of Dennis Larkins (La Luz de Jesus Press/Last Gasp, 2010). The gift of a supporter who is a fan of Larkins, the book documents the remarkable career of the artist whom Deadheads know as the man responsible for the famous posters of the Dead’s legendary runs at the Warfield and Radio City Music Hall in October 1980. Though not a Deadhead tome by any means, Startling Art does have some important Dead content, reproducing the Radio City Music Hall poster, the Downs at Santa Fe show (17 Oct. 1982), and the gatefold from Dead Set. What may most interest Dead fans and scholars, aside the from the fine overview of Larkins’ unique style and sensibility, are the book’s insights into Larkins’ oversized set pieces for the Dead’s stages, as well as for several other bands, most notably the Rolling Stones. Overall, the book demonstrates that Larkins’ work for the Dead is a vital part of his career and oeuvre that informs his broader vision and contribution as an artist.

Decanting the Dead: A Winemaker Reflects

2010-06-15T16:11:00.000-07:00

In the most recent issue of the wine industry magazine Color and Aroma, (www.colorandaroma.com) winemaker and vineyard manager Wes Hagen reveals how his experience as a Deadhead influences his work as a vintner. His feature article, “How Jerry Garcia (and the Dead) Influenced My Winemaking,” is a thoughtful and intriguing meditation on the role of art, improvisation, and music in his own craft, lessons he learned from seeing 52 shows himself. As he put it, “as I began to make an outline for this article, I was actually surprised how easily I could make connections between Jerry and my own ideas of wine, music, craft and doing something that makes people high and happy.” Thanks to David Gans for pointing this out to us.

http://www.colorandaroma.com/2010/05/20/how-jerry-garcia-and-the-dead-influenced-my-winemaking/

Making Music, Making Sausage: Recent Band Member Interviews

2010-06-10T11:26:00.000-07:00

Members of the Grateful Dead were always good with media, and a recent book, Sausage Factory: The College Crier's Infamous Interviews of the Freaks and the Famous (Inkwater, 2009), gathers interviews with Phil, Bobby, Mickey, and a number of others whose paths crossed the Dead's, from fellow travelers like Hunter S. Thompson to later collaborators like Joan Osborne, Warren Haynes, and Jimmy Herring. Editors T. Virgil Parker, Jessica Hopsicker, and Carri Anne Yager elicit often surprisingly candid and thoughtful responses from even these interview-jaded media veterans. Worthwhile reading for fans interested in how these musicians have continued to grow and evolve in a Jerry-less world.

Psychedelic Culture

2010-04-14T11:17:00.000-07:00

The new book Birth of a Psychedelic Culture: Conversations about Leary, the Harvard Experiments, Millbrook and the Sixties (Synergetic Press, 2010) has been reviewed as "an enchanted treasure chest, overflowing with insightful new dialogues, fascinating anecdotes, valuable historical accounts and other never-before-published material about the origins of modern psychedelic culture, by the people who helped to create it." The book is based on a series of conversations between Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert. Among the many personal commentators is Dr. Michael Kahn, Emeritus Professor of Psychology from UCSC.

Secret longings

2010-04-14T11:15:00.000-07:00

And while we all here at the Grateful Dead Archive really want to be rock stars, it turns out they want to be just like us. Who knew? Keith Richards in his soon-to-be released autobiography talks about his childhood reading habits, his drive to collect and share good books, and he confesses his hidden desire to be a librarian. Catch it all in the Times' preview of Richard's Life coming out from Little Brown in the fall and written in collaboration with James Fox.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article7086815.ece

On the scholarly front the phenomenon continues

2010-04-14T11:12:00.000-07:00

The Grateful Dead in Concert: Essays on Live Improvisation is now out from McFarland. Edited by Jim Tuedio, Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Stanislaus and Stan Spector, Philosophy Professor at Modesto Junior College, it includes twenty essays from major Dead scholars analyzing the "unique improvisational character of Grateful Dead music and its impact on appreciative fans." Writings by David Gans, Alan Trist, and our own soon-to-be Grateful Dead Archivist Nicholas Meriwether are included.

Marketing rockstars

2010-03-31T23:23:00.000-07:00

HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan and author David Meerman Scott are Deadheads and they're offering a live Webinar "Inbound Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead" on Thursday April 1, 2010 at 1:00 pm ET. Halligan and Scott believe that the Grateful Dead are the original inbound marketing rockstars who pioneered social media and marketing concepts that businesses in all industries use today on the web. Join them for discussion; to learn more go to: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/5797/The-Original-Inbound-Marketing-Rockstars-The-Grateful-Dead.aspx

HeadCount

2010-03-23T22:10:00.000-07:00

Bob Weir recently sat with interviewer David Fricke of Rolling Stone Magagzine to discuss HeadCount, the non partisan organization that works with musicians to facilitate participation in democracy, register voters, and make civic engagement part of the live music experience. Bob is a member of HeadCount's Board of Directors. In the first of the four part interview Bob talks about democracy and the personal politics of the Grateful Dead. The interview can be heard in four weekly installments on the HeadCount web site:http://www.headcount.org/blog/?p=4512.

Sam Cutler in paper and in Berkeley

2010-03-22T10:35:00.000-07:00

Sam Cutler's You Can't Always Get What You Want: My Life with the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead and Other Wonderful Reprobates is now out in paperback from Ecw Press. It's billed as an exhilarating, all-access rock memoir from the tour manager who did it all. He'll be speaking and signing copies
Tuesday, April 20th, 7:30p.m to 9:00p.m at Berkeley's University International House (2299 Piedmont Ave, Berkeley, CA. Tel. (510) 642-949.) This event is part of “Music Without Borders” series.

Welcome Billy to Santa Cruz!

2010-03-22T10:31:00.000-07:00

7 Walkers, with the legendary Bill Kreutzmann makes a stop on April 10th at Moe's Alley in Santa Cruz for a very special Saturday Night get down & Santa Cruz debut. The line-up also features bluesman and voodoo electronic pioneer Papa Mali, George Porter Jr., and Matt Hubbard. For more info on the venue, dates, and how to get tickets go to: http://www.moesalley.com/index.php

Patchwork River

2010-03-15T21:45:00.000-07:00

This spring expect to see and hear about a second special collaboration of Robert Hunter with Jim Lauderdale. "Patchwork River", their new CD on the Thirty Tigers label gets a preview in a recent posting by Dan Tackett in BluegrassJournal.com. (It has a very sweet quote by Lauderdale about working with Robert Hunter.)

Saint Misbehavin'

2010-03-15T21:42:00.000-07:00

Hold on to your rubber nose! Michelle Esrick's documentary on the life of Wavy Gravy is having a Sneak Preview and Special Event Sceeening on April 1st at the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland, CA. to benefit the film's release and Camp Winnarainbow.
For more information and to buy tickets on-line please go to Brown Paper Tickets: www.brownpapertickets.com/event/103242
For more info on the film http://www.rippleeffectfilms.com/wwwavy/index.php

Confessions

2010-03-15T21:40:00.000-07:00

Starburst Commander's recent and fun literary disclosure "Confessions of a Deadhead" is going to fit very nicely in between our copies of George Clooney's "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" and Sheldon Norbert's "Confessions of a Dope Dealer." To learn more about Starburst Commander's (aka Bob Drobatz) new book and his trips and travels with a magical band go to http://www.confessionsofadeadhead.com/Site/Confessions_of_a_Dead_Head.html

Crawdaddy mention

2010-02-15T13:58:00.000-08:00

UCSC's Grateful Dead Archive is again in the news. This time Crawdaddy is running an article in reference to the fabulous write up we had by Joshua Green in the March 2010 Atlantic. Here Angela Zimmerman talks about how we're inciting scholastic followers. Read it at: http://www.crawdaddy.com/index.php/2010/02/10/grateful-dead-archive-incites-scholastic-followings/

Uroborus

2010-02-15T13:56:00.000-08:00

Two new books out by rock critics have spawned reviews looking at that criticism and the role of critics. Corn Flakes with John Lennon: And Other Tales From a Rock 'n' Life (Rodale, 2009), by longtime Los Angeles Times pop music critic Robert Hilburn, and the anthology of writings by the late Robert Palmer, Blues and Chaos (edited by Anthony DeCurtis. Scribner, 2009), give intimate insight into the early writing and various approaches of these two authors, including their paths of inspiration and personal relationships with musicians. For a review of the reviewers see Jon Caramanica's "Writing and Rocking" in the Feb. 12th New York Times.

Something happening here, but we do know what it is.

2010-02-15T13:55:00.000-08:00

It's a new show at the new Museum of Performance & Design and it traces rock and roll in California's Bay Area from 1963 to 1973. They say it "envelopes visitors in a blaze of sight and sound." The exhibit includes instruments, posters, footage, and costumes from private and public collections, some of it from local musicians like Carlos Santana, Sly Stone, Dan Hicks, and Merl Saunders. And one can see Jerry's "Captain Trips" hat.
"Somethin's Happening Here" shows at the Veteran's Building 4th floor, 401 Van Ness. San Francisco, and runs through August 2010.

Not dark yet

2010-02-15T13:53:00.000-08:00

An article was recently forwarded to those of us interested in archiving visual material (http://tinyurl.com/yeambp9). It notes that an undeveloped roll of Ilford HP5 b&w film of a Bob Dylan concert taken 31 years ago has just been unearthed. Photographer Mark Estabrook checked with Ilford on how best to develop it and the outcome apparently is perfect-- the 37-year-old Bob looks good. Estabrook says it's a testament to the longevity of silver halide photography and he plans to bring out a new book soon. The film of Dylan was kept in a tin along with shots of the band Little Feat. (And Little Feat still looks good too: catch up with them at: http://www.littlefeat.net/)

Not fade away

2010-02-15T13:52:00.000-08:00

The wrecking ball takes out East Rutherford, New Jersey's Giant's Stadium this March. In its 38 years the Giants, the Jets, the Boss, the Pope, and the Grateful Dead all played the field. September 2nd, 1978 started it off for the band, and by their 12th show in August 1994 more than a million fans had seen them in the stadium. (Well, maybe some were repeat attendees.)

Smith and Smith in the Old Wierd America

2009-11-30T21:40:00.000-08:00

Getty Publications is announcing the release this coming January of "Harry Smith: The Avant Garde in the American Vernacular." Ethnomusicological archivist, filmmaker, painter, and alchemist Harry Smith's compilation "Anthology of American Folk Music" is considered the Rosetta Stone of American musical history. This new publication on Smith, his work, and his legacy, includes a collection of essays from authors such as Robert Cantwell and Griel Marcus, and contains "numerous illustrations of Smith's works and a selection of his letters and other primary sources." The book is edited by Andrew Perchuk and Rani Singh, both from the Getty Institute, where in 2001 the Institute sponsored the symposium of the same title. Singh is also director of the Harry Smith Archive in New York. (see http://www.harrysmitharchives.com).

And it gets even better. In celebration of her friendship with Harry Smith and the publication of this book, singer and poet Patti Smith will be speaking and performing at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles on January 28th.

Grateful Dead Caucus

2009-11-30T17:45:00.001-08:00

The thirteenth meeting of the Grateful Dead Caucus at the Southwest/Texas Popular & American Culture Association conference is planned for February 10-13th, 2010 in Albuquerque's Hyatt Regency Hotel.

The call for papers has already gone out, but with the final submission deadline set for December 15th. Expect exciting papers and panels on all aspects -- comparative, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary -- of the Grateful Dead Phenomenon to be presented. For more information on this upcoming gathering and to register for the conference see: http://www.swtxpca.org/

PAS Hall of Fame

2009-11-16T17:16:00.000-08:00

The Percussive Arts Society (www.pas.org) is the largest network of percussionists around the world. The Society publishes Percussive Notes, Percussion News, and the PAS Online Research Journal. Headquartered in Indianapolis, IN., the Society fosters growth in the art of drumming through workshops, concerts, and festivals. Its new museum "Rhythm! Discovery Center"will open this month on November 21st. Each year PAS inducts new members into its Hall of Fame. Induction is the highest honor given to individuals whose careers have had a significant impact on percussion performance, education and research. This month French percussionist Jacques Delecluse and Mickey Hart were celebrated as the newest PAS Hall of Fame inductees.

Who Shot Rock & Roll

2009-11-10T12:51:00.000-08:00

Henry Diltz's 1985 close up shot of a laughing Tina Turner just lights up the Brooklyn Museum's new show Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History 1955 to the Present. Touting this as the first major exhibit on rock & roll "to put photographers in the foreground" the Museum also proclaims that these "images communicate the social and cultural transformations that rock fostered since the 1950s." The exhibition runs through January 31st, and there is an excellent companion catalog written by Gail Buckland and published by Knopf that illustrates over 200 photographs from the show.

Best junk ever

2009-11-10T12:49:00.000-08:00

So you think we've found some odd items in the Grateful Dead Archive? Well, as marvelous as some of our realia is, we really cannot compete with the posters of Jackie O in the buff found in the archive of Andy Warhol. We were recently reading about what archivists in the Andy Warhol Museum have uncovered: shopping bags stuffed with well... stuff, thirty silver-white wigs, 4,000 audio recordings, and then there are the "Time Capsules" filled with the detritus of Andy's daily events and adventures. To find out more it's really fun to visit: http://www.warhol.org/collections/archives.html

A Kleinrock/ Barlow connection

2009-11-10T12:47:00.000-08:00

UCLA Professor Leonard Kleinrock is known as one of the "fathers" of the Internet. Now his original computer the "Interface Message Processor" along with other artifacts will be part of UCLA's Kleinrock Internet Museum and Reading Room. The museum commemorates the first computer message sent out 40 years ago in October 1969. To mark the event Kleinrock was interviewed by Patt Morrison of the Los Angeles Times. http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-oe-morrison-use24-2009oct24,0,3095224.story
Kleinrock talks about that first message, e-mail, and what the Internet has begotten. As regards privacy concerns in cyberspace, Kleinrock says he is relaxed about it because none is left. He takes the advice of John Perry Barlow ..."the only way to have privacy is to expose it all and then you have nothing to hide."

New York Historical Society party

2009-10-22T12:22:00.000-07:00

Last night's benefit fundraiser for the upcoming exhibit of Grateful Dead Archive material at the New York Historical Society was a big success. Loads of people attended and lots of music happened. Read more and see some early photos of the event at:
http://rismedia.com/2009-10-22/real-estate-leaders-jam-with-grateful-dead%E2%80%99s-bob-weir-and-phil-lesh-at-benefit-for-band%E2%80%99s-archive-exhibition-at-new-york-historical-society/

Mouse full circle

2009-10-19T20:14:00.000-07:00

Currently showing at the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art is: The Evolution of Stanley Mouse: Full Circle.
Mouse is of course, responsible for many of the most iconic imagery affiliated with the Grateful Dead and his album covers and posters for other bands such as the Beatles are legendary. To see more of his fine art, rock art, and monster art go to his web site at http://www.mousestudios.com/rockart_rock.htmAnd make sure to see his exhibit at MarinMOCA; it's up through November 1st and is free to the public.

Live from New York it's ....

2009-10-19T20:04:00.000-07:00

The intersection of Fifth Ave and West 34th Street in New York City has never looked so good. Check out this tie-dye on one of the seven wonders of the modern world:

http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=empire+state+building+tie+dye&m=text

Tie Dye Sky

2009-10-18T23:56:00.000-07:00

Tie dye will soar more than a quarter mile into the atmosphere above the heart of Manhattan as New York celebrates the Grateful Dead. The Empire State Building is being colorfully lit in honor of band member's appearances this coming week in the Big Apple. Bob Weir & RatDog will be at the Grand Ballroom on the 19th and 20th and at the Beacon Theatre from the 22nd to the 24th.
Both Bob Weir and Phil Lesh are making guest appearances at the New York Historical Society's benefit for the exhibition: The Grateful Dead: Now Playing at the New York Historical Society. This exhibit will premier material from UCSC's Grateful Dead Archive in Spring 2010. See more about this exhibition in the "News" section of our web page: www.gratefuldeadarchive.org.

Most popular music in the land

2009-10-18T20:53:00.000-07:00

It seems like there are an awful lot of "forty year old" events to commemorate this year -- events that reflected social conflict and contention and often put a spotlight on the difference between generations. Forty years ago Apollo 11 landed on the moon and the Stonewall riots took place in New York; there was Woodstock and then Altamont; the My Lai massacre and the march on Washington against the Vietnam War. The last public performance of the Beatles took place on the roof of Apple Records in 1969, and John & Yoko got married that year and the bed-ins for peace happened.
Now in 2009 Paul Taylor and Richard Morin at the Pew Research Center in a Social & Demographic Trends Report have released the results of a study, which documents that there are still big differences between younger and older adults in their values, use of technology, work ethic, and respect and tolerance for others. (79% of Americans say there is a major difference in the point of view of younger and older adults.) There is, however, one area where the generation gap does not seem to be apparent: music. And surprise, two thirds of respondents to the Pew survey say they most often listen to rock music, placing it ahead of six other genres. For every age group below 65 rock is at the top of the charts. Taylor and Morin compare these results to a 1966 national survey where rock and roll was by far the most unpopular music in the county, and 44% of adults said they disliked it.
The entire report is released at the Pew Research Center's site, and it is quite revealing to see which performers sustain popularity. (The Grateful Dead really hold their own.) See: http://pewsocialtrends.org/pubs/739/woodstock-gentler-generation-gap-music-by-age

Toni Brown

2009-10-07T12:24:00.000-07:00

Relix: The Book - Music for the Mind has just been released in paperback from Backbeat. Compiled by Toni Brown with Lee Abraham, it's a compilation and commentary on the first 27 years of Relix Magazine. It's got a foreword by Jorma Kaukonen and an afterword by Dennis McNally. The publisher is saying the book is "much more than an anthology, it is an event." Find more about it at www.ToniBrownBand.com.

Relix founder Toni Brown gives a great interview on deadheadland.com. She talks about the history of the magazine, interviewing band members, and coming to write the Relix story.

Grateful Dead Scrapbook

2009-10-07T09:43:00.000-07:00

Ben Fong-Torres speaks tonight at 7:30 pm about the Grateful Dead Scrapbook at one of our favorite places:
Booksmith (http://www.booksmith.com/)
1644 Haight St.
San Francisco

Here's the info:
Grateful Dead fans are legendary for their Dead-ication to the band and its enduring legacy of freewheeling musical exploration. Grateful Dead Scrapbook collects rare removable memorabilia and evocative images culled from the Grateful Dead Archives at the University of California, Santa Cruz, including never-before-published photos, flyers, fan letters, and other ephemera. To accompany the eye-popping visuals, renowned journalist Ben Fong-Torres draws on his personal knowledge of the San Francisco music scene in a rich text that conveys the Grateful Dead's story in a fresh way, centering each chapter on a pivotal song that encapsulates a certain era of the group's songwriting, performance, and community. An attractive slipcase and an audio CD round out the book's beautiful design, delivering a richly illustrated volume as colorful as the band itself.

Ben Fong-Torres is the author of Becoming Almost Famous: My Back Pages in Music, Writing, and Life, The Doors, Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to Twenty Years of Rock and Roll, and Hickory Wind: The Life and Times of Graham Parsons, among other books. He began writing for Rolling Stone with its 8th issue in 1968, and his writing has been published in numerous other magazines. He contributed the main biography of Jerry Garcia for People Magazine's tribute issue on the occasion of the singer's death in 1995. Ben lives in San Francisco.

So Grateful

2009-10-06T22:08:00.000-07:00

Culture wars? Yes, they are still going on. Just examine the criticism being directed at our receipt of a federal grant given to support the Grateful Dead Archive. It's not surprising that those at FutureOfCapitalism and Club for Growth can't understand the value of anything beyond "their canon." But editors blogging in the Chronicle of Higher Education? Come on.

Past, present and future, the Grateful Dead continues to be a dynamic presence and a lightning rod for significant shifts in culture. We're excited by (and so grateful for) opportunities the IMLS grant gives us to create and blaze the trail for popular archives that provide virtual accessibility and incorporate the power of the Internet and social networking tools.

And don't forget, the 2008 winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics said: "It won’t all happen immediately. But in the long run, we are all the Grateful Dead."

Stuff of Life

2009-09-14T19:07:00.000-07:00

Every archivist has a bit of the archeologist in her. As we delve through the Grateful Dead Archive coming across important artifacts so apparently are California State Archeologists at the Olompali State Historical Park. Located north of San Francisco the park was originally settled by the Miwok Indians, but in the mid to late 60s it was the site of a hippie commune. And it was home to the Grateful Dead in 1966. The stuff that is being excavated and cataloged by archeologists in the historic park includes sneakers and red plastic Monopoly hotel pieces (and what about macramé and roach clips and beads???) The July-August issue (Vol. 62, No.4) of Archaeology Magazine is running the article "Digging in the Age of Aquarius" about the site. It quotes state archaeologist E. Breck Parkman saying that these artifacts will enable the interpretation of "a period of political turbulence, generational conflicts, and cultural experimentation that shaped modern America."

Channeling the Dead

2009-09-10T22:26:00.000-07:00

Two great Dead tribute bands can be seen and heard locally. Coming on Saturday Sept. 12 are The China Cats playing at Don Quixote's International Music Hall in Felton. And the Dark Star Orchestra will be at Santa Cruz's Rio Theatre on Thursday October 8th. For more info see: http://www.myspace.com/thechinacats and http://www.darkstarorchestra.net/NEWSITE/HTML/dso.php

Game Play

2009-09-10T22:18:00.000-07:00

Gameing is big business, and the aesthetics and theory of games is now firmly footed in academia. At UCSC a class "Video Games As Visual Culture" is being offered and a student can major in Computer Game Design. Two new board games are appealing to us bookish types here in the Library's Grateful Dead Archive. Coming soon will be GRATEFUL DEAD-OLOPY, a creation from Discovery Bay Games, the Washington State company that produced "Garage Band: The Game." According to Craig Olson, Discovery Bay Games' CEO, Bob Weir has been directly involved with developing the game's content. Beyond DEAD-OLOPY there is also "Liebrary" a bluff game surrounding the opening lines in books. ..."A screaming comes across the sky."

BFF

2009-08-21T16:38:00.000-07:00

We know that the Grateful Dead circle encompasses a great variety of close attachments and fond acquaintances (think Al and Tipper Gore, Bill Walton and Phil Jackson, Patrick Leahy and Nancy Pelosi.) But somehow one of the sweetest friendships seems to have been between Mickey Hart and Walter Cronkite. Since Cronkite's death several very intimate stories have been told about their 22 years of being "dear, dear friends." Mickey tells the story in Leah Garchik's San Francisco Chronicle column of July 31 about Walter playing drums at his place. "And I invited him to see the Grateful Dead, and we kind of fell in love around all those exciting things. It was such a trust; he was such a treasure." Cronkite apparently "loved marching bands, Sousa and Dixieland, and he loved the Grateful Dead."

Beautiful and strange

2009-08-21T16:33:00.000-07:00

Sometimes one learns about life from memorial tributes. In reading Joseph O'Connor's recounting of the life and kindness of Pultizer Prize winner Frank McCourt in the Irish Sunday Independent of July 26th, the following is revealed. McCourt, a fabulous and generous storyteller, had at one stage of his life followed the Grateful Dead mixing with the "hippies and beatniks" whom he found "beautiful and strange." He thought he had the makings of a novel.

Orchestral Tribute

2009-08-06T12:08:00.000-07:00

"At the point where popular culture and classical art converge, the songs of the Grateful Dead make an excellent place to explore," says Lee Johnson. Johnson is a professor of Music at LeGrange College in Georgia and composer-in-residence at this season's Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music. His Dead Symphony No.6 is to be performed this Sunday. Johnson in an interview with Stacey Vreeken discusses the band's mystique, the Dead Community, and the influence the Grateful Dead's music has had upon his own work. The interview "Dead On" appears in the Santa Cruz Sentinel's August 6th issue. http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/localnews/ci_13002428

The Los Angeles Times also carries an article this week on the Festival's orchestral tribute to the Grateful Dead. Written by Chloe Veltman, "Paying tribute to the Grateful Dead in symphony" can be found at: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-et-dead-symphony5-2009aug05,0,4366990.story

Farewell Friend of the Devil

2009-08-01T20:42:00.000-07:00

Friend to the Grateful Dead, John Dawson died on July 21st in Mexico. Some very good words are said about him on the New Riders site:
http://www.nrpsmusic.com/

Happy Birthday Jerry!

2009-08-01T20:05:00.000-07:00

This whole week the city of Santa Cruz celebrates the music of the Grateful Dead, and pays tribute to Jerry. Weekend Santa Cruz is running a story "The Dead Keep Truckin in Santa Cruz" which highlights all the activities. Catch it online at:
http://weekendsantacruz.com/2009/07/30/the-dead-keep-truckin-in-santa-cruz/
And for further info see Dead Centric Events at
http://weekendsantacruz.com/2009/07/30/dead-centric-events/

Keep Santa Cruz Weird and Lively

2009-08-01T20:03:00.000-07:00

Maestra Marin Alsop was featured this morning on NPR in an interview with Scott Simon discussing this season's Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music. Events starts today in Santa Cruz, a place Ms. Alsop fondly calls quaint and quirky. Lee Johnson's Dead Symphony No. 6 gets a grand send off on August 9th as part of the festivities. For a short history of the festival read Marin Alsop's article at the NPR site:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111389366

40 Years after Max Yasgur's Dairy Farm

2009-07-16T13:27:00.000-07:00

In celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock festival an abundance of events and a flood of products are expected. First there is the expanded and remastered Michael Wadleigh documentary Woodstock: 3 days of Peace and Music, now out on Blu-ray, which includes an interview with Martin Scorsese. Rhino is releasing a six-CD box set, Woodstock 40 Years On: Back to Yasgur's Farm, with previously unreleased recordings. On August 14th the History channel is premiering a rockumentary, Woodstock: Now & Then, and there is even an upcoming comedy film from Ang Lee Taking Woodstock. Beyond the media, several books are also expected. Festival producer Michael Lang has two books out. One's a memoir, The Road to Woodstock (Ecco, 2009), and the other is a deluxe limited edition put out by Genesis Publications entitled the Woodstock Experience. Mike Evans and Paul Kingsbury's Woodstock: Three Days That Rocked the World (Sterling, 2009) also tells the tale of what went on from August 15-18th, 1969. Some of it is summarized as "three days of mud and electric shocks." Mickey is quoted as saying "It was the worst we ever played" and Bobby just remembers the "great blue spark about the size of a baseball" that lifted him off his feet. Even amidst all the myth making the zeitgeist can be cruel.

Dead Like

2009-07-16T13:14:00.000-07:00

The hard look at the recording industry that one sees in Steve Knopper's Appetite for Self Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age, published earlier this year by Free Press, continues with Greg Kot's Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music (Scribner, 2009). Readers will find commentary on the major labels but also predictions on the future activities of bands and the use of music to sell concert tickets rather than recordings. Kot quotes Wilco's Jeff Tweedy: "In some weird way everything will be like the Grateful Dead."

Masters of Percussion

2009-07-16T13:12:00.000-07:00

Tabla maestro Zakir Hussain, who has collaborated many times with Mickey Hart, has given a very personal interview to Arminta Wallace published in the Irish Times (see http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2009/0615/1224248842569.html)
He talks about the global musical journey that he has taken from Mumbai to California. It's a journey that continues through performances with the Masters of Percussion, bringing Indian percussion to a wider world. He says, "worthwhile musical collaboration is always marked by this exchange of energy."

Home Before Daylight

2009-07-16T13:09:00.000-07:00

We're still breathlessly awaiting the acting credits to appear for the upcoming film Home Before Daylight: My Life on the Road With the Grateful Dead. Adapted from Steve Parish's 2003 biography, the film's announced production team should prove stellar with Parish and Michael Grais as producers, direction by Allan Arkush, and music coordination by Bob Weir. Grais, who is also writing the screenplay, previously produced the Jerry Lee Lewis music bio Great Balls of Fire. Parish's book co-written with journalist Joe Layden (St. Martin's Press, 2003) got terrific reviews for its intimate first person narrative about music and friendship.

David Nelson Band

2009-06-26T12:35:00.000-07:00

Moe's Alley here in Santa Cruz again hosts a great band. The David Nelson Band plays tonight at 9:00 pm. Go to www.moesalley.com for more details. Nelson (who we all know from his musical collaborations with Jerry and New Riders of the Purple Sage), will be joined by Barry Sless, Mookie Siegel, Pete Sears and John Molo.

American Artifact

2009-06-03T16:48:00.000-07:00

Filmmaker and TV producer Merle Becker will release her new documentary American Artifact: The Rise of American Rock Poster Art this month. Chronicling the history and the rise of the art form, this film includes interviews with artists including, Mouse, Victor Moscoso, Tara McPherson, Frank Kozik, and with other collectors and musicians. Becker, the founder of the independent film company Freakfilms, Inc. will premiere her new work in California, but it's being shown all over the country and will come out on DVD in August. For more info see: www.americanartifactmovie.com/

Rock Art

2009-06-03T12:33:00.000-07:00

Loads of exhibits this summer are documenting the extraordinary influence of the American rock poster. Here's info on some of them:
The Denver Art Museum hosts an exhibit "Psychedelic Experience: Rock Posters from the San Francisco Bay Area, 1966-71" with 300 posters by artists who were inspired "by the sensory overload of the dance hall environment."

The annual Rock Art By the Bay event, sponsored by the Rock Poster Society, happens this year on Saturday June 20th at Fort Mason in San Francisco. A large line up of artists is scheduled to appear including Stanley Mouse. They'll be signing, discussing, and selling their work. See www.fortmason.org/features/2008/06/feature08.shtml

Rock the Streets. The Rise of American Rock Poster Art: Ron Donovan and Chuck Sperry of The Firehouse Kustom Rockart Company will be exhibited through August 4th at Ogilvy (111 Sutter St. in San Francisco.)

Fillmore again

2009-05-31T11:47:00.000-07:00

Earlier (see our blog entry of Sept. 24th,2008), we noted that the documentary Fillmore: The Last Days was soon to come out on DVD. Rhino has just released it and it has immediately gotten a nice write up by Mike Hale in the NY Times, see "Bill Graham, Unleashed" May 29th.

That Music Instinct

2009-05-30T14:37:00.000-07:00

Daniel Levitin, professor of psychology and behavioral neuroscience and music at McGill University is hosting a new two hour documentary on the science of music: The Music Instinct: Science and Song. It airs on PBS on June 24th and investigates music's "fundamental physical structure, its biological, emotional, and psychological impact, its brain altering and healing powers, and its role in human evolution."
Levitin is the author of The World in Six Songs (Dutton 2008) and This Is Your Brain On Music (Dutton Penguin 2006). According to Levitin "evolution may have selected individuals who were able to use nonviolent means like dance and music to settle disputes, and songs also serve as memory aides and as records of our lives and legends."
Before hitting academia Levitin worked as a session musician, a commercial recording engineer, a live sound engineer, and a record producer for, among many bands, the Grateful Dead.

Attics of My Life

2009-05-30T14:34:00.000-07:00

As archivists we are always so indebted to those folk out there who have the instinct and the eye to save ephemeral items of seemingly little value, and later to gift what has become an important "collection" to libraries, historical societies, and museums. Currently on display in Berkeley's Veterans Memorial building is a Berkeley Historical Society exhibit Up Against the Wall-- a visual array of posters from such a collection. The late Michael Rossman, a Bay area political activist collected approximately 25,000 posters documenting concerts, rallies, political campaigns, and other social causes and movements from 1965 to 1974. His friend Lincoln Cushing, a librarian, arranged for 39 of these to be seen in this exhibit, including a 1966 handbill from a May 14th Veterans Memorial Hall dance with the Grateful Dead. The exhibit runs through September 26th.

Not Fade Away

2009-05-30T14:32:00.000-07:00

Now that The Dead tour is over, all the reviews have come in and it looks like everyone, including the band had a good old time. One aspect that critics seem astonished by is the youth of the attendees. (Although this doesn't seem surprising to us given that a Spring Quarter class "Music of the Grateful Dead" taught here at UCSC has enrollment of over 400!) We did enjoy the May 11th review by August Brown and Jeff Weiss in the LA Times. They reviewed the Los Angeles Forum show and quoted 13 year old Emma Cleveland from Ridgecrest CA. whose entire family had driven over 150 miles to attend the concert; "The Dead's music keeps people feeling alive and happy. It's amazing music; every time you hear it, it puts you in a good mood."

Substrate: Poems

2009-05-11T15:23:00.000-07:00

Another greatly admired poet and Deadhead is Jim Powell. His long awaited new collection of poems Substrate: Poems is now offered from Pantheon Books. Powell is the author of many books on lyric poetry and translation from Classical Greek and Latin, and he was a MacArthur Fellow in 1993 for poetry.

True Legacy

2009-05-11T15:22:00.000-07:00

One other note about Peter Conners. In response to Ben Ratcliff's article on the Dead in the April 12th issue of the NY Times, Conners has written a reply that made the Times Letter section on 4/26. He notes "The article should also be a reminder to Deadheads that fetishizing artifact over experience threatens the values of spontaneity and creative possibility that super charged every Dead show. Let's use the live recordings as a way to perpetuate the celebratory rituals of music, dance and unity that are the Dead's (and Deadheads') true legacy."

Growing Up Dead

2009-05-11T15:15:00.000-07:00

Poet Peter Conners who claims he was born in a small town called America, has just published his memoir with Da Capo Press: Growing Up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead, which chronicles ten years of his life from a suburban Rochester teenager through 1995 as a serious Deadhead. Conners is known for his prose poetry collection Of Whiskey and Winter (White Pines Press, 2007), his well regarded novella Emily Ate the Wind (Marick Press, 2008), and as being founding co-editor of Double Room: A Journal of Prose Poetry and Flash Fiction. His new book is being touted as part memoir, part social history, and for (as noted in Publishers Weekly) "offering a perspective often missing from other Dead chronicles."

Conners is currently on tour himself giving readings from the book and doing interviews. In June he is scheduled for several events: on the 3rd David Gans will interview him for "The Grateful Dead Hour" (www.gdhour.com), and this conversation will be continued from the 10th to the 24th on "The Well" (www.well.com); Conners will also be at Books Inc. on June 4th (601 Van Ness in San Francisco.)

Deadheads and Licklider

2009-05-05T17:40:00.000-07:00

Another older book still being reviewed is Patrice Flichy's The Internet Imaginaire. (MIT Press, 2007), an introduction to the history of the Internet. Book reviewer Paul E. Ceruzzi admits to being a Deadhead and a heavy user of the concerts available via the Internet Archive. He therefore holds particular interest in Flichy’s chapter 3 which "discusses communities of people who had been excluded from traditional access to computers, among them the fans of the Grateful Dead rock band who traded information on the San Francisco Bay area network, the Well” and to imagining if Deadheads were as important to the creation of the Internet as the visionary computer scientist J.C. R. Licklider. Ceruzzi's review can be found in the March 2009 issue of ISIS, published by the History of Science Society.

Deep Time

2009-05-05T17:37:00.000-07:00

Wai Chee Dimock's book Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time received lots of praise and some criticism when it came out in 2006 from Princeton University Press. It's still being reviewed and it continues to be controversial. A recent review by Paul Giles can be found in the Dec. 2008, Vol. 69, No.4 issue of Modern Language Quarterly. As Ms. Dimock's publisher notes, she reads "American literature as a subset of world literature. Inspired by an unorthodox archive--ranging from epic traditions in Akkadian and Sanskrit to folk art, paintings by Veronese and Tiepolo, and the music of the Grateful Dead-- Dimock constructs a long history of the world, a history she calls "deep time." Giles says the book "is testimony to the often brilliant critical practice that functions through cross-referencing and juxtaposition, illuminating distant and proximate, high culture and low culture, in the light of each other. " No wonder Blues for Allah is an inspiration for Dimock.

Dead reckoning

2009-04-30T22:28:00.000-07:00

Close on the heels of the NY Times ranking of favorite Dead shows, now John Swansburg has posted on Slate (4/29/09) his very own humorously sardonic guide to Deadheadedness. Find yourself in Dead Reckoning: What Your Favorite Grateful Dead Song Says About You (http://www.slate.com/id/2217149/)
Hmmm... my favorite song? Not telling.

CA. Capital rocks

2009-04-29T10:34:00.000-07:00

The same building that once housed the Oasis Ballroom is soon to become a popular new destination for music fans. The Sacramento Rock and Radio Museum with help from the Tucker Media Group will open in June celebrating 40 years of rock music, rock radio, and rock art. The space will be filled with posters, handbills, and memorabilia of performers like B.B. King, Jimi Hendrix, the Ramones, the Rolling Stones, and Nirvana who played local venues. On display will be the poster for the March 11th, 1968 Grateful Dead and Cream show at the Sacramento Memorial Auditorium.

Destiny's children

2009-04-29T10:32:00.000-07:00

The visit on April 13th of members of The Dead with President Obama in the White House got lots of great press coverage. The Washington Post, NBC, and other media groups mentioned the many prominent Deadheads amongst the President's senior advisors, who btw all attended the Verizon Center's show in Washington the following night. Special note was made of the Oval Office's decor that included a bouquet of scarlet begonias. Mickey Hart-- as reported in Leah Garchik's SF Chronicle column-- said, "Obama is the reason we were together. We got together over the benefits we put on for him. So in a way, he's become part of our destiny now."

Robert Hunter and Bob Dylan together through life

2009-04-20T13:46:00.000-07:00

The press is aflame regarding Bob Dylan's soon to be released new album Together Through Life. In a recent five-part interview with music critic Bill Flanagan Dylan talks about song writing, songwriters, and reveals that (nine) of the songs on the album were co-written with Robert Hunter. What more perfect confluence of poetical writing on love and pain could there be? All parts of the interview are now all available on the official Dylan site www.bobdylan.com/

The Dead Live On and On

2009-04-20T13:41:00.000-07:00

Ben Ratliff in an amazing three page color, illustrated article appearing in the April 12th Sunday issue of the NY Times entitled "Bring Out Your Dead" discusses the five different levels of how fans talk about the Grateful Dead. There are those who discuss the band's commercially released albums, those that get into the period or eras, and those that focus on the band's best night, or on particular songs from particular performances. Ratliff then gets to "thinner air" where he says discussion goes to audience vs. soundboard tapes, the mixing bias of engineers, and onward into what he calls "the darkness of obsession." But truly mesmerizing are the online comments from fans that, in response to the article, have voted for their greatest shows and submitted their photos. It's an extraordinary outpouring; find it at "The Dead Live On." nytimes.com/music.

On the bus

2009-04-20T13:38:00.000-07:00

Periodically the San Francisco Chronicle re-runs some of Herb Caen's old columns. A really good one appeared in the April 2nd, 2009 issue. (Catch it at SFGate.com.) Originally from February 5, 1967, Caen retells lounging at the corner of Fifth and Mish when Further pulls up and Ken Kesey flashing his American flagged front tooth, invites him to climb aboard. (BTW rumor has it that Santa Cruz dentist Dr. Richard J. Smith dentally did the tooth decoration.)

Cabrillo Music Festival: Sugar Magnolia

2009-04-20T13:37:00.000-07:00

This season's Cabrillo Music Festival of Contemporary Music -- American's preeminent contemporary music festival, which makes its home right here in Santa Cruz, CA.-- opens with the theme of One World. And one extraordinary highlight will be a special benefit concert "Sugar Magnolia: An Orchestral Tribute to the Grateful Dead" featuring Lee Johnson's Dead Symphony No.6. The concert along with a post concert Q & A with the composer and authors Dennis McNally and David Gans, is on the special day of August 9th. The festival is conducted and directed by Maestra Marin Alsop and runs from August 2nd to the 16th. UCSC will be offering Grateful Dead Archive events during the same week so stay tuned for more information.

The Dead Endures

2009-04-20T13:13:00.000-07:00

For anyone who likes statistics (and we know Deadheads do!!) the article "A Grateful Dead Analysis: The Relationship Between Concert and Listening Behavior" will be like numerical manna. Written by Marko A. Rodriquez, Vadas Gintautas and Alberto Pepe, the article appears in First Monday: the Peer Reviewed Journal of the Internet Vol. 14, No. 1 January 5, 2009. It presents an analysis of the Grateful Dead's concert behavior and exposes a relationship between the concert song patterns from 1972 to 1995 and the last.fm listening statistics of the band's songs from August 2005 to October 2007. It's a scientific inquiry with technical evidence that will have enduring appeal for nerdheads.

Ancient Practice, Modern Sound

2009-03-24T11:20:00.000-07:00

Mickey's long involvement with the Gyuto Monks was featured this morning (March 24th) as part of a story on NRP's Morning Edition. Mickey, as producer has used modern techniques to recreate the oldest chants of the monks. For the full story Gyuto Monks: Ancient Practice, Modern Sound go to: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102234687

Ebook of the Dead

2009-03-24T11:10:00.000-07:00

Touch of Grey, the newest creation by Jay Blakesberg featuring more than 400 of his photographs has just been released by Mosaic Legends as an interactive e-book. Find it on the App section of the iTunes store. It also includes an introduction by Blakesberg and an essay by Jambase.com editor Aaron Kayce. For more about the visual mosaic production see: http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Mosaic-Legends-957070.html

Free for the taking or giving

2009-03-24T11:08:00.000-07:00

Some of you might remember the Free Frame of Reference, the Free Bakery, and the Trip Without a Ticket, the free stores set up by the Diggers during the challenging times of the late 1960s. There in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhoods of San Francisco free exchange of material goods would be made, meals shared, and often the Grateful Dead provided free entertainment. Well, in these new economic hard times free stores are starting up again. Some are close by Wall Street. (Maybe some one might even stage a revival of the happening "Death of Money Parade"???)
The March 16th issue of the London Guardian carries an article on Manhattan's Free Store. The two artists who launched it say, "It's a certain time in history in this country when people really need to help each other out."

Candid Counter Culture Comedy

2009-03-24T11:04:00.000-07:00

Everyone loves the Dead even Tom Davis, writing and performing partner of (soon to be Senator?) Al Franken. In Davis' new memoir Thirty-Nine Years of Short-Term Memory Loss: The Early Days of SNL From Someone Who Was There (Grove Press, 2009) he talks about coming of age in the 60s, the Grateful Dead, sex, early SNL, drugs, and of course comedy.

Mills Music Gala 2009

2009-02-20T17:55:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow --February 21st-- with a gala concert, Mills College (our good friends just over the hill in Oakland) celebrates the reopening of its historic concert hall and 80 years of impressive music. Mills is where Phil Lesh and Steve Reich were students, and this is the hall where John Cage and Lou Harrison performed. (btw, UCSC holds Lou Harrison's archive.)
We wish our colleagues a wonderful MILLS MUSIC FESTIVAL 2009. For info on opening night: http://www.mills.edu/musicfestival/

Congratulations Mickey!

2009-02-08T21:46:00.000-08:00

Great news, it's just been announced tonight.... Mickey Hart, Zakir Hussain, Sikiru Adepoju, and Giovanni Hidalgo of the Global Drum Project are the winners of the Grammy for Best Contemporary World Music Album. Congratulations!!

Trippy tatts

2009-02-08T18:41:00.000-08:00

In a fun article in the Feb. 6-8 USA Weekend Magazine, Luke Walton's upper right arm is shown proudly displaying four dancing skeletons. Walton, of the LA Lakers, gets the "G for Grateful Dead" in the NBA Tattoos, from A to Z article. All four skeletons balance basketballs and represent Luke and his three brothers-- it's a multi-generational family thing.

American Beauty Project

2009-02-08T18:38:00.000-08:00

Lincoln Center's American Songbook Series recently featured an evening devoted to the lyrics and music of the Grateful Dead. The American Beauty Project, an ensemble of nine musicians, performed pieces with introductions made by Larry Campbell. (Campbell these days often plays with Phil Lesh. To read Blair Jackson's interview with Larry Campbell go to http://www.dead.net/features/interviews.) The evening at Lincoln Center gets a good write up by Stephen Holden in the January 19th issue of the New York Times.

SWTXPCA 2009 Conference: Dead Lessons

2009-02-01T20:42:00.000-08:00

The 30th annual meeting of the Southwest Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Association is being held this month (Feb. 25-28th) in Albuquerque. Focus sessions on the Grateful Dead have been prominent in previous conferences and this year fourteen are being offered. Speakers are coming from all over the U.S. and include deeply involved scholars such as Nicholas Meriwether, Rebecca Adams and David Gans. This year in a special session devoted to "Dead Lessons: The Grateful Dead Organizational Model" Michael Grabsheid of U.Mass, Amherst and Sandy Sohcot of the Rex Foundation will present, as will UCSC's University Librarian Ginny Steel. Ginny's talk will delve into UCSC's Grateful Dead Archive and is appropriately entitled: "By the Waterside I Will Rest My Bones." For more on the Association, the conference, and to get a complete program go to http://www.swtxpca.org

Peter Rowan

2009-01-09T18:13:00.000-08:00

The Peter Rowan Bluegrass Band plays locally at Don Quixote's in Felton this Saturday (Jan.16th.) See www.donquixotesmusic.info for details. Rowan with band mates just played last month's Rex Foundation 25th Anniversary bash, and in the 70s was part of Old & In the Way with David Grisman, Jerry, Vassar Clements, etc.

Bill Kreutzmann in Santa Cruz

2009-01-01T23:24:00.000-08:00

Bill Kreutzmann, with Oteil Burbridge and Scott Muawski will play Moe’s Alley here in Santa Cruz (1536 Commercial Way) on Thursday February 12, 2009. Tickets are on sale now: www.moesalley.com.

Two books revisit late 1960s culture

2009-01-01T23:16:00.000-08:00

Popular culture readers will find two new books just out as darkly fascinating. Both weave rock with political and social history, both specifically make reference to the Grateful Dead.
Peter Doggett’s There’s a Riot Going On: Revolutionaries, Rock Stars, and the Rise and Fall of the ‘60s (Canongate, 2008) looks at the period of 1965-72 when music “fueled the revolutionary movement with anthems and iconic imagery,” and the stars were asked to respond to, endorse and defend (sometimes reluctantly or defiantly) political action. Steve Morse in a Boston Globe review of Nov. 7, 2008 finds this book “brilliant,” “ambitious,” and “wrenching”.
Journalist Mikal Gilmore (whose pieces frequent Rolling Stone) has just published Stories Done: Writings on the 1960s and Its Discontents (Free Press, 2008), a collection of essays examining the lives of several of the era’s cultural figures. Often visionary, these figures may be publically engaging though personally tragic. As noted in a NY Times review of Dec. 30th, Gilmore has a “keen sense of the dark undertow of the American dream.”

Jamband psychology

2009-01-01T23:14:00.000-08:00

Research on jamband subculture and psychology continues to be a topic of interest and the Grateful Dead of course, continues to be cited. Pamela M. Hunt has just authored an article, “From Festies to Tourrats…,” on this topic. It appears in the December 2008 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly (Vol. 71, No.4). Additionally, in his new book Tribes: We Need You To Lead Us (Portfolio, 2008) Seth Godin credits the Grateful Dead as helping us to understand how people become connected to one another, how shared passion is inspired, and how groups can effect lasting and substantive change.

Yipee Rosalie!

2008-12-05T00:12:00.000-08:00

Mickey is in good company. Our very good friend Rosalie Sorrels has also been nominated this year for a Grammy. Rosalie's Strangers in Another Country (on Red House Records) is up for Best Traditional Folk Album! It's Rosalie's special tribute to Utah Philips. (see:http://www.redhouserecords.com/214.html.)
Special Collections holds the Rosalie Sorrels Papers documenting her life as songwriter, musician, performer, and peace activist.

Grammy good news

2008-12-04T23:56:00.000-08:00

First, congratulations to Mickey Hart, Zakir Hussain, Sikiru Adepoju and Giovanni Hidalgo. Their Global Drum Project (on Shout Factory) has just been nominated for a Grammy for Best Contemporary World Music Album!

This week also marks the opening of the long awaited Grammy Museum. It's located on Olympic Blvd & Figueroa in Downtown LIVE L.A. And like the town and the industry, it's really big: 30,000 SF with four floors of exhibit space for displays of artifacts, instruments, photos, room for film screenings, and lots of interactive exhibits. There is the promise that exhibits will capture the "legacy of recorded music and reveal the many ways in which it intertwines with social and cultural history." See www.grammymuseum.org for lots more.

Traveling on a High Frequency

2008-12-04T23:42:00.000-08:00

"The Grateful Dead is where it all started for me," says Jay Blakesberg about his launch as a rock photographer. His new book Traveling On A High Frequency: Jay Blakesberg Photographs 1978-2008 is a retrospective look at performers and performances, lavishly illustrated with works from his photographic archive. It's just out from Rock Out Books. Blakesberg, a San Francisco based artist is also known for his Between the Dark and Light: The Grateful Dead Photography of Jay Blakesberg (Backbeat Books, 2004.)

Best buttons

2008-11-02T12:52:00.000-08:00

Steven Heller gives honorable mention to Deadheads for Obama in 2008, in his Nov.1, 2008 article in the New York Times The Best Buttons of 2008, In One Man’s Opinion.
In the opinion of another however, as much as we really like it Deadheads for Obama should come in a very close second for best political swag right behind Shephard Fairey’s Obama Hope button.

Passing

2008-11-02T12:47:00.000-08:00

The passing of two close collaborators of the Grateful Dead was noted this last week. Please see LA Times obituaries on keyboardist Merl Saunders and on lawyer Hal Kant, respectively at:
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-saunders27-2008oct27,0,5811025.story

and http://www.newsday.com/services/newspaper/printedition/monday/news/ny-kant275899735oct27,0,7099644.story

Slide Ranch tribute

2008-10-21T15:21:00.000-07:00

Slide Ranch, a non-profit teaching farm, just paid tribute to the Grateful Dead for their long time influence and involvement in its programs, and presented Bob Weir with its Silver Trowel Award. Located in a historic dairy in the Marin Headlands of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Slide Ranch offers programs to children on the value of healthy foods, environmental awareness and appreciating the sustainable use of natural resources.

Reunited and it feels so good

2008-10-21T15:11:00.000-07:00

The Grateful Dead reunited on October 13th at Penn State University before a crowd of grateful and devoted Deadheads and Barackheads alike. The “Change Rocks” concert was the second time band members played to raise awareness for Senator Obama and the upcoming election, but the concert at the Bryce Jordan Center marks the first time the Dead have been united in four years. In speaking of friendship (to Leah Garchik of the SF Chronicle in September) Mickey Hart has said the Grateful Dead is “build on true love” and should they possibly tour together again they would be “embarking on the next step of our long strange trip for the right reasons.”
To read a transcript of Obama’s videotaped message shown between sets at the Change Rocks concert, which BTW is laced with references to several Dead songs, see: http://www.dead.net/features/news/change-rocks-setlist

Gleason's rock classics on DVD

2008-10-19T17:53:00.000-07:00

Late this summer Eagle Vision released two additional TV programs, originally produced by S.F. Chronicle’s jazz and rock critic Ralph J. Gleason and aired on PBS, on DVD. Go Ride the Music and West Pole closely follows Gleason’s A Night at the Family Dog, which came out last year on DVD. The Dead are featured in all three. In A Night at the Family Dog (one hour recorded in 1970 in Chet Helm’s ballroom) Pig Pen is caught singing Hard to Handle and the band goes into China Cat Sunflower and I Know You Rider. Santana and the Jefferson Airplane also perform.

In the newer (almost 5 hour) two disc set Jerry has a cameo appearance alongside with Quicksilver, David Crosby, and the Jefferson Airplane. On West Pole, the band does New Potato Caboose, and the Sons of Champlin, the Steve Miller Band, and others appear. All three programs are evocative of early 1970s San Francisco. Michael Parrish reviewed Gleason’s A Night at the Family Dog in the Dec. 2007-Jan. 2008 issue of Dirty Linen. He found the DVD release to do “an excellent job of conveying the sights and sounds of an era that is often discussed but rarely portrayed as clearly and vividly as it is here.”

The Music Plays the Band

2008-09-24T21:42:00.000-07:00

Jeffery Pepper Rodgers interviews Bob Weir in a revealing article "The Music Plays the Band" in the August 2008 Acoustic Guitar (Vol.19, No. 2,p.52-59.) Bob talks about the guitar, singing, playing, writing, and the dynamics of a band. "I've always viewed writing and playing as being a storyteller."

Fillmore: The Last Days Revived

2008-09-24T20:41:00.000-07:00

When the neighborhood around the original Fillmore Auditorium became too rough, Bill Graham took over the lease of the Carousel Ballroom in downtown San Francisco, which had been run for the previous eight months by the Dead, along with a couple of other prominent San Francisco partners (like the Airplane). Renamed the Fillmore West, the beautiful second-floor ballroom served as the counterpart to Graham's famed Fillmore East in New York City, closing on July 4th, 1971. Before it closed that summer Bill Graham put on a five-day concert send-off that was filmed and released the next year as the documentary Fillmore: The Last Days. Memorable too was the 3 LP box set with concert highlights (Grateful Dead's Casey Jones and Johnny B. Goode, and contributions from Quicksilver, Santana, Hot Tuna...) and the special packaging that included the closing week's poster, a used ticket, and a booklet with a listing of all Fillmore West shows.

The 1972 documentary (105 mins) is now coming out on DVD in November, but if you want to see it sooner it will be shown at the Mill Valley Film Festival, Throckmorton Theatre on October 3rd.