A Most Unusual Archivist

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

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

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

(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?

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

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

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.