Fillmore again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.)